Fact: For-profit schools cost more than community colleges. Fact: For-profit students borrow more and default more than students from public colleges. Fact: All this explains why I ended up at the strip club in Detroit.
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So I’m at Cobra’s the Grind, eyes-avoiding-buttocks, walking up dimly lit stairs to meet the manager. Steve is big, he started as a bouncer. He lays his gun down next to us as we talk. He had different life plans after graduating high school in 2006.
STEVE: Not this. I mean, I don’t mind it now but I didn’t think I’d be here. I thought I would’ve been in a shop, turning a wrench.
He wanted to work on cars. So he got a diploma in automotive technology at Lincoln College of Technology in Indianapolis. It’s part of a big for-profit chain. The program was about a year, roughly 25 thousand dollars, not including housing. A degree from community college would’ve cost less than ten grand.
STEVE: My mom was actually talking to me about it, but I wouldn’t listen, I was stubborn. Whoever takes their mom’s advice, until you f*** up? I regret it.
He didn’t find a car job, but he did rack up 30 thousand dollars in federal loans.
GREGORY: Hey guys, safety glasses!
Victor Gregory taught Steve’s auto class back at Dearborn High School. He teaches community college too. The cost of for-profits worries him, enough that he’s actually banned some recruiters from visiting his class.
GREGORY: I do not want my students going out in the field and becoming balled and chained to a bank. And having to park the whole idea of having a better life, just so they can pay their debts.
The for-profit sector of higher education is so broad, it’s hard to generalize about results. But take Universal Technical Institute outside Chicago. The median cost of its 15 month auto tech program is 30 thousand dollars. Tom Riggs is UTI’s senior vice president of operations. He says compared to community colleges, their graduation rates…
RIGGS: Are drastically better. We graduate in the high 60%, sometimes 70% of our students who start graduate. If you look at community college programs and certificate programs a lot of their numbers are in the low 20s.
Some students are drawn to short intense training. They get hands their hands on metal, and then they can start earning money
RIGGS: There are students out there who four year university isn’t the right thing for them and they have tremendous talent and passion around the things that we do and we are the right place for them.
Now, public colleges benefit from public support. But David Deming, at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, says for-profits do too. Their revenues come overwhelmingly from student financial aid.
DEMING: For-profit schools are not allowed to take any more than 90% of their total revenue from federal financial aid. That’s the maximum and quite a few schools are relatively close to the maximum.
Still, it’s not hard to find career college grads who are employed and paying back those taxpayer dollars. I just went down the street to Suburban Chevrolet which is a dealership in Ann Arbor. And I met Andrew Marihugh who went to UTI.
MARIHUGH: I was told it was one of the best in the country.
He’s repaying 25 thousand in loans from his training there.
MARIHUGH: It was worth it. I think it was worth it. There’s a lot of people that went to school there and there’s a lot of them that didn’t know how to even change oil.
Marihugh is now an oil change technician, that’s the most entry level position here. But he’ll work his way up. And in ten years, he’ll have worked off his debt. For Changing Gears, I’m Kate Davidson.
