President Obama has made it clear that he is no fan of for-profit colleges. His Education Department has pursued regulations and enforcement that have put some out of business. And when talk show host Ellen DeGeneres surprised a happy viewer with a $25,000 scholarship to private-sector University of Phoenix as a Mother’s Day giveaway, the internet went crazy. How dare Ellen, who stands for progressive values, “shill” for a college that tries to make money?
The government’s own statistics show that two-year, for-profit colleges do a better job of getting students into cap and gowns than their public and non-profit counterparts do. But that doesn’t keep critics of the industry, which operates schools offering certificates in message therapy and motorcycle maintenance as well as four-year degrees in accounting and computer programming, from howling about their existence.
Despite the breathless rhetoric surrounding the industry, for-profit Berkeley College has continued to expand, including a partnership with the German college Fresenius University. In April, Fresenius opened a study center at Berkeley’s building in midtown Manhattan. Last year 240 Fresenius students traveled from Germany to study -- mainly business and fashion -- at Berkeley. One of the draws is that Berkeley’s building on 41st Street is one block from the garment district, the iconic main branch of the New York Public Library and other Manhattan landmarks. Berkeley has about 8,300 students enrolled at campuses in New York and New Jersey and online.
Americans may recognize the Fresenius name not as a university but as a medical facility. The company operates more than 3,400 kidney dialysis centers in the U.S. and around the world. What began as Carl Remigius Fresenius’ chemical laboratory in 1848 and later became a training ground for chemical engineers is now a for-profit university that bears the family name with campuses across Germany.
When he came to New York for the opening, Ludwig Fresenius, the great-great-grandson of the founder and the honorary president of the university, noted that Fresenius had been around for 170 years. “You don’t survive that long by offering bullshit,” he noted in the school’s catalog.
Like Fresenius, the focus at Berkeley, which began as a secretarial school for young ladies in 1931, is getting the university credential that will lead to employment in the business world. There are no trendy majors. No students protesting about micro-aggressions or safe spaces. No sit-ins at the dean’s office. Its top majors include criminal justice, accounting and health management.
“Our students are focused on business and their studies, says Kevin Luing, the chairman of Berkeley, and a member of the family that has owned the college since 1965. “They say, ‘I’m here to learn and get a job.’”
You can see why people enroll, especially those with no other choices. You don’t have to write an essay or two or three and you don’t need recommendation letters. The school relies on a high school transcript or diploma, SAT scores or the results of their own placement test. It’s designed for students who need flexibility to take classes days, nights, weekends and online. More than half the student body is black and Hispanic, 58% are age 23 and above and 68% are female. Its ads feature a typical student: a 30-something Hispanic mom juggling work, family and classes.
The student chosen for the Ellen show’s scholarship at the University of Phoenix was a wife and mother who never finished college. “Courtney's husband has been working 70-hour weeks, and her father has foregone retirement because he has kidney disease and can't afford medical treatment, so she wants to go back to school to help support her family,” according to the show.
Tuition is steep at the private-sector schools compared with community colleges or many state universities. Berkeley, which is based in Bergen County, N.J., charges about $24,000 in annual tuition and fees. The local community college charges $5,400 and the four-year state university in the county charges about $14,000. Government-run colleges in New York are even less expensive.
Berkeley’s direct competition in New York is the City University of New York, which operates 11 four-year programs and seven two-year community colleges. CUNY’s graduation rate for two-year programs was 16.1% within three years of starting in 2010. That’s lower than the federal government’s figure of 19.5% for men and women at all public two-year institutions. And it’s far below the government’s figure of 62.8% at for-profit colleges, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics.
“The key is the outcome,” says Michael Smith, Berkeley’s president. “We can’t lower our standards but we have to take students where they are. It’s about building skills.”
African-American males who started at a two-year, public institution in 2010 had a 10.7% chance of graduating in three years. Nearly half– 49.4 % - of the black males enrolled in two-year, for-profit colleges during that period went on to graduate within three years, according to the government’s statistics. For-profits, which usually have a non-selective admissions policy, fare worse overall than public and non-profit schools in four-year graduation rates.
In the U.S., the trade unions lead the charge against the private-sector colleges such as Berkeley, where the faculty is not unionized. The emphasis is on pointing out how much debt many students take on at for-profit colleges when they should be pushing for “free” university degrees as promoted by Bernie Sanders. “Higher Ed Not Debt,” one of the groups pushing DeGeneres to end her relationship with Phoenix, lists the AFL-CIO, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) among its list of left-wing “campaign partners.”
The Professional Staff Congress, the union that represents CUNY’s 25,000 employees, voted last week to authorize a strike for higher wages. The CUNY union is affiliated with the AFT and the AFL-CIO. The AFT is so virulently opposed to private education that it fights to block private schools in poverty-stricken areas of Africa and Asia where government-run schooling may not even exist.
To police schools that accept students using federal aid, the Department of Education demands that Berkeley and other colleges in the private sector post ‘’gainful employment” statistics for their graduates. No such demand, however, is made of New York University, a private, non-profit college, where the list price for tuition and fees is just over $48,000. Washington is not playing Mother Hen for NYU graduates with majors in “Gender and Sexuality Studies” or “German Literature and Culture,” no matter how much debt they rack up.
