The University of Phoenix makes another cameo in the NYT today
The long, front-page story is about the proliferation of for-profit trade schools. Many of them recruit students agressively with rosy promises of future employment — and leave them with crippling debt from student loans. At the same time, they get a huge portion of their income from the federal government.
If that reminds you of the University of Phoenix, it’s because that’s how it operates, too. From the Times:
The Apollo Group — which owns the for-profit University of Phoenix — derived 86 percent of its revenue from federal student aid last fiscal year […]. Two years earlier, it was 69 percent.
Emphasis added. The University of Phoenix has been the subject of a couple of exposés in the Times in the past. The company agreed to a settlement including attorney’s fees of nearly $80 million under a false claims act suit last year — on top of a total of more than $15 million in fines levied by the U.S. Department of Education in the last ten years.
A major Times story on the school’s scuzzy practices is here.
Reason, the libertarian magazine, did a more favorable look at the school’s operations in 2008. The article was written before the nation’s economic meltdown later that year; the writer’s aperçu that the U of P offers “offers the educational equivalent of a subprime mortgage” would be amusing if it weren’t so tragic. It’s available here.
7:51 PM
PHXations, Thursday, January 28
Overheard in Borders. Our cast is a man and a woman, both fiftyish:
Man: Hon?
Woman: Mmmm?
Man: They got a book here about the iPod. [O’Reilly’s The Missing Manual
Woman: Really?
Man: Let’s get it and read it and then we can decide if we’ll get one.
Woman: Okay
[ Exeunt, pursued by a bear. ]
The Democratic Diva writes about a recent talk by ASU prez Michael Crow. One passage:
He clicked on a graph of state funding of ASU per student since 1990. Back then the state contributed roughly $11K per student. Today it’s around $5K.
Sounds like it’s time to introduce a bill to put the Ten Commandments on the state capitol.
The Arizona Cardinals’ Kurt Warner holds a press conference conference tomorrow. Most papers quote his agent saying that Warner will announce “whether” he will retire; this Chicago Tribune report says he will.
Warner, 38, is expected to retire after 12 seasons, including the past five with the Cardinals. A friend who talked with Warner after the Cardinals lost to the New Orleans Saints in the playoffs said “it sounded like he was done.”
2:25 PM
Arizona: C- in education
A report by the group that publishes Education Week magazine has rated the 50 states and Washington D.C. on education. Arizona comes in 46th—and dropped three places since the last report.
According to the Republic, however, there is some good news:
The good news is that for the second year in a row, Arizona earned an A- for the quality of its learning goals, tests and accountability. It is 18th in the nation with that grade, although last year it was eighth.
OK, so the good news isn’t really good. The bad news?
The bad news is the state lags in all other categories. In the “chance for success category,” Arizona sank from 42nd in the nation to 45th, although its grade was the same, C-.
7:00 AM