GI Bill benefits exploited by for-profit and online colleges

(Update: Someone writing from the University of Phoenix's corporate parent attempted to post an anonymous comment. Scroll to the end for details) I knew that the multibillion dollar for-profit college industry had some ethical failings (see "ACICS accreditation and for-profit education: What's at stake"), but this takes the cake. According to Frontline's "Educating Sergeant Pantzke" (scroll down to see the video), the ways in which for-profit and mostly online colleges such as Westwood, University of Phoenix, Kaplan University, Gibbs College, DeVry University, Ashford University, and Art Institutes are exploiting military vets are absolutely shameful -- and motivated by a desire to scoop up billions in generous GI Bill benefits for veterans. The vets have served their country, and want to use the educational benefit to get a solid  education and a good job following their service. However, the online degrees provide questionable educational value and Frontline found that hiring managers look down on them. In other words, it's a scam -- and taxpayers are paying for it. A few low points in the report:

• An Army vet who attended Gibbs College (owned by Career Education Corporation) to study computer animation was promised that the college had connections had connections with the biggest Hollywood studios, including Pixar. The student claims Gibbs never provided proper computer animation training. He blew his GI Bill benefit (which you can apparently only spend on one institution) and took out tens of thousands of dollars in private student loans before realizing his education was useless. His conclusion: "Honestly, I'll regret going to college for the rest of my life."

• Another combat veteran, Sergeant Pantzke (pictured) wanted to study photography and was sucked in by the Art Institute's pitch. He was accepted as soon as he filled out the school's online form to inquire about the online bachelor's program. Despite having PTSD, he was promised full support to help him with his studies, which he never received (according to Daniel Golden, an investigative journalist who interviewed him for Bloomberg, "He had preserved a string of e-mails between himself and officials at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, and included in those e-mails were several in which he had asked for help. He had asked for face-to-face tutoring; he had asked for simplified homework assignments. And they had told him that they wouldn't make those accommodations for him"). The school took $70,000 of his GI Bill money, then flunked him.
• At these rates, soldiers are paying more for their education than a single year's tuition at Harvard Business School. Why are the for-profit, mostly online colleges schools so expensive? According to BusinessWeek, "American Military University, [University of] Phoenix, and closely held Grantham charge $250 a credit, or $750 a course, which allows them to receive the maximum reimbursed by U.S. taxpayers without service members having to pay any out-of-pocket tuition." By comparison, "Publicly funded community colleges offer classes on military bases for as little as $50 a credit."
• Golden also recounted the tale of an unnamed for-profit college (turns out it's Ashford University) that sent a female recruiter to the Wounded Warriors barracks in Camp Lejeune in North Carolina to sign up brain-injured Marines.
• Ashford University (remember them?) has 9,000 current or ex-military students, and uses vets for recruiting. Two former recruiters spoke on-screen to Frontline and said they can help establish a rapport with prospective students and convince them to enroll.
• Westwood College recruiters lie about job prospects to potential students: On one recording of a phone conversation provided to Frontline, the recruiter told a prospect "Right out of the box you have the ability to make between $72 and $82 thousand dollars."
• How much do University of Phoenix and other graduates of for-profit colleges really make? The answer, according to survey data from PayScale cited by Frontline, is military graduates earn 12-15% less at for-profit colleges compared to military graduates of public state schools. The salary levels shown on screen look to be in the $30,000 to $45,000 range.
• Ted Daywalt of VetJobs was even more blunt about the prospects for graduates of for-profit schools, and said online degrees have a poor reputation in industry. The Navy vet said he talked with 30 HR managers and asked if they were presented with two job candidate with similar work backgrounds, but one graduated from an online school, and one from a well-known "brick and mortar school," which would they choose? All of the HR managers would choose the brick and mortar school, he said.
• The for-profits have done a skillful job of gaming online search results and Web pages that curious vets might look at. For instance, GIBill.com only directs students to for-profit colleges. I looked them up on the site -- the choices are American Military University (owned by American Public Education, Inc.), Strayer University (owned by Strayer Education, Inc.), Ultimate Medical Academy Online, Grantham University, Virginia College (owned by Education Corporation of America), Walden University (owned by Laureate Education), Kaplan University (operated by Iowa College Acquisition Corporation, which is owned by Kaplan Inc., which is in turn owned by the Washington Post), DeVry University (owned by DeVry Inc.), University of Phoenix (owned by Apollo Group), Ashford University (owned by Bridgeport Education), Capella University (owned by Capella Education Co.), Westwood College (owned by Alta Colleges), Art Institutes (owned by Education Management Corporation), and Full Sail University.
• According to the Veterans Administration, graduation rates at private for-profits stand at 28%, half the rate for public colleges.
• Even if students realize their mistake and try to leave the online and for-profit programs for a public brick-and-mortar school, they won't be able to start their GI benefits at a new school. Even worse, the credits don't always transfer, either because there is no comparable coursework at the state school or community college, or the for-profit school is nationally accredited (see my post on regional accreditation vs national accreditation).    

There's more in the Frontline documentary, which you can watch below. It's only about 20 minutes long. I also urge you to watch Frontline's "College Inc." and read some of the other blog posts I've written about the University of Phoenix, online math classes, and distance education, which are listed below the video (scroll down to the bottom of the page).

Watch the full episode. See more FRONTLINE.

Update: Someone attempted to leave a comment on the site stating the Frontline report is "misleading" and claiming that certain for-profit colleges "like University of Phoenix" are different, specifically when it comes to transferring credits.  However, there are some notable examples of schools that do not accept UoP transfer credits ("CIT does not accept courses from the University of Phoenix", "the University of Phoenix is not an accredited institution"). The author was anonymous, but when I checked out my web logs, what did I see? It turned out that the comment was left by someone from UoP's corporate parent, Apollo Group (see screenshot below, which shows the origin of the comment).

I don't mind if executives from for-profit schools leave comments on my blog, but they must clearly identify their association -- or the comment will be rejected and I will expose the incident. It's happened before, as this bizarre attempt at astroturfing or ridiculing UoP students (apparently by another UoP employee) shows.
      

For further reading about online education and for-profit colleges, I would suggest the following posts:

• For-profit schools take a hit from Frontline
• SNL's "University of Westfield" ad: The reputation of online degrees takes another hit
• What's the value of a University of Phoenix degree? 
• Online education: A teacher speaks
• My online math class: Convenience gets an 'A,' but at what cost?
• Distance education at Harvard: I'm not convinced 
• More distance education commentary from Harry Lewis, ClueHQ, and yours truly
• MBA math review

WorldTV

One of the more interesting class projects I took part in during my last semester at MIT was the final deliverable for MAS 571 ("Social TV: Creating New Connected Media Experiences"). The project was called WorldTV, and with my team (Jungmoo Park, MBA '11, and Giacomo Summa, MSMS '11), we created a pretty slick video demonstration of the proposed software UI. The video was shown at the MAS 571 demo day at the Media Lab (you can watch it below) and we wrote an accompanying concept paper that we are in the process of preparing for an IEEE CCNC workshop. In the following post, I'll describe not only what WorldTV is, but its genus and some of the reaction we've received so far.

WorldTV is a television app and accompanying mobile app for browsing user-generated video from one's social circle, as well as event video produced by strangers that tie into one's news and cultural interests. Instead of using traditional browsing methods -- scrolling through channels or searching for videos -- the proposed service uses a 3D globe as a navigational tool. WorldTV is aimed at people with global networks, which might include people with friends, relatives, and colleagues from other countries; people who spend a fair amount of time travelling; or people who are interested in news or culture in other countries.

The concept had great appeal to the entire team, not only because of our backgrounds (Giacomo is from Italy, Jungmoo is from Korea, and I spent most of the 1990s living overseas) but also because all of us have observed the exponential growth of user-generated video and realize its power and appeal to ordinary people. In 2006, I wrote about the potential of geotagged, time-stamped online photos to give insights into local events. I expanded the idea to include tweets and user-generated video in a proposal for my Linked Data Ventures class called PPP (PixPeoplePlaces). When I began the Social TV class, I took the PPP concept even further with user-generated video, emphasizing the social aspect of plotting event video on a local map (this was the basis of my first assignment for Social TV -- you can see the poster here).

I envisioned all of these ideas as Web apps displayed on a computer monitor. For one of the early poster sessions for the Social TV class, Giacomo independently came up with a different approach. He asked, why not use a full-sized television screen to display a map of the entire earth with hot spots that reflected breaking hard news events that might be captured by amateur shooters? (This happened as anti-authoritarian demonstrations were breaking out across the Middle East in early 2011). Instead of being a "Lean Forward" experience (something that requires user input or interaction, such as a video game) this would be a "Lean Back" experience, in which the viewer could sit on the couch and take in the video. Giacomo also considered how video could be differentiated on the global map with different sized or colored markers, and how "likes", social networks, or newspaper articles could determine what appeared on the screen. He called it "WorldTV".

There was clearly some overlap between our ideas, and we decided to team up for the final project. We expanded the concept to include not only video from breaking news in other countries, but also cultural events (festivals, parades) and entertainment (sports, performances, etc.). The social filter would not only display streaming/recent videos from one's social circle, but could also reflect the collective interests of the social circle.

An additional requirement for the final project was a business model. I had already been thinking about using phone and laptop cameras as a way for ordinary people to access amateur expertise all over the globe, for a price. Examples of amateur expertise might be a power user demonstrating how to use a new gadget, advice on registering a company in a certain state by an experienced business owner, practicing foreign language conversation with a native speaker, etc. I dubbed the scheme Real Time Requests. (RTR). A live auction and reputation system would determine prices paid by people seeking expertise, and match them up with sellers. We decided to fold it into the proposal. The idea was then debuted at another MAS 571 poster session in April:

Jungmoo, who had a background as a professional television reporter for a Korean broadcaster, was intrigued by our poster session presentation and joined the team. Our next task was to take the concept and make a demo to show at demo day at the MIT Media Lab in the last week of class in May. For the final deliverable, we didn't have the skills to produce a working prototype. However, we did have the skills to produce a software mockup and accompanying video demo.

The team got to work. I created a simple WorldTV television UI using HTML and CSS, built the maps with Google Earth, and mocked up a mobile UX on an iPhone "remote". Giacomo wrote the script and starred in the video. Jungmoo took the raw video and graphics and used his professional editing skills to create a really slick video demo, which is shown below:



We presented the video and an accompanying slideshow on the business model last month at the Media Lab. Our Media Lab instructors, Marie-José Montpetit and Henry Holtzman, invited a group of industry pros from major cable and national broadcasters (including NBC and WGBH) to watch all six student presentations. After seeing our team present, one of the NBC visitors was interested in the idea of "shared experiences." Giacomo explained that user-generated video around sporting events and concerts could populate the global view, depending on how one's filters were set up. This prompted another executive, who I believed was from HBO, to question the legality of using amateur concert video. I responded that copyright law was decades behind the technological and social reality, but she was skeptical. I then said that there would always be artists who want to exercise strong control over this content, but there were also many artists who recognized the value of fan content to generate additional interest or loyalty, and in my opinion, the latter group would have a competitive advantage. But as I thought about it later, it was clear that addressing the entertainment industry's copyright concerns would be a huge issue, regardless of how outdated the laws are.

Our team also heard from Henry, who thought the Real Time Requests business model was really a separate concept that did not match WorldTV. We agreed. Jungmoo and Giacomo had actually raised the same concern in our planning discussions, but I felt we needed a business model that did not involve standard subscriptions. Henry noted that a subscription might actually work for some people.

So what's next for WorldTV? All members of the team have graduated, and none of the industry visitors seemed interested in taking it further. We hope, however, that if our paper is accepted to the IEEE CCNC '12 conference, it might get some traction. In the draft that we are now preparing, I outlined the "Future Work" required to make WorldTV a reality:

The next steps for WorldTV would be to create a working prototype using Google Earth, YouTube and Facebook APIs, the Android or iPhone SDKs, and other existing software and hardware components. Besides using the prototype to evaluate functionality and performance, ordinary users in the target audience (people having global networks) could also test the system with an eye toward determining which features and use cases hold the most promise. When the product is ready for wider distribution, identifying suitable “TV App” platforms and partnerships could take place. In the long run, creating a scalable architecture with its own API and opening up WorldTV to outside developers (much like Facebook and Twitter have done) would help unleash the greatest potential of the platform. This would require significant investments, but in the long run would help realize innovations for the next age of television.

If the paper is published, I will share a link on this space. In addition, if anyone is interested in learning more or helping to develop the idea, my contact information can be found here.

More posts about my MIT experience:

• Infinite Corridor Walthrough
• A curriculum for learning computer programming in WoW
• My MIT center of gravity shifts to digital media
• The challenges of creating a mobile educational app based on Linked Data
• MIT Sloan Fellows program: Soft vs Hard
• Goodbye, Vietnam
• First day of the spring semester ...
• Linked Data revisited: What I learned, what we created, and what's next
• Social TV poster #1: PeoplePixPlaces
• MIT Sloan Fellows: One semester down, two to go

Why new data visualizations fail to catch on

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Eric Hill, a buddy of mine from my old Industry Standard days, sent me a link to a RWW article about a cool new iPad application from Bloom Studio that comes up with an interesting way of visualizing a digital music collection. The app is called Planetary, and here's what it looks like:


Planetary (voiceover) from Bloom Studio, Inc. on Vimeo.

I was impressed with what they've done, but I am afraid it won't go far in the marketplace. At one time I had so much hope for data visualizations changing the way we browse and understand information -- in fact, Eric and I spent a lot of time discussing how Industry Standard site content (news and prediction market data) could be presented in new and potentially useful ways. But in the past several years, after checking out dozens of new interfaces and data visualization schemes, I've come to the conclusion that most will never catch on.

It's not the fault of the designers, but rather the limitations of audiences. For many consumers, simple formats (e.g., longitudinal line graphs, like the inset image of the US$/Euro exchange rate over the past three months) and plain ol' headlines are all they need. I think part of the problem is grokking a new visualization requires new mental models. In my opinion, most people simply aren't willing to expend the effort, especially considering the huge amounts of information out there and limited time that people have to consume it. I've seen so many interesting, creative visualizations out there but most never make it in the marketplace. Planetary is cool, but is a solar system/galactic metaphor for browsing music inherently better than an alphabetically ordered list of artists/albums/songs?

See also:

• Google Visualization API
• Wordle text visualization: Cool, but not killer
• A music fan's data-driven dedications