Every year, the for-profit college industry educates millions of students in the United States. Their student populations tend to skew towards low-income and at-risk demographics, and for a simple reason: federal student aid. Most of these students qualify for Title IV funding, including Pell Grants and Federal Stafford loans, which have become a steady source of income for these schools. For-profit colleges and universities receive close to $33 billion per year in federal student aid—almost a quarter of the total student aid issued by the government.
Terrifically inflated tuition costs, coupled with predatory, revenue-driven admission tactics and poor program performance at these schools has lead many students to take on thousands of dollars of debt without any hope of being able to pay it off once they graduate. This is not a new discovery, though it is a timely issue (see the New York Times front page article from last week). Lawsuits are being filed, and court battles are unfolding in the press. Obama’s “gainful employment" rule, designed to protect students from the predatory practices of these schools, has come under fire. People are talking about it, but no one is doing anything interesting with the hard data. (One bad chart as the exception).
A lot of the focus on for-profit colleges is around their un-ethical practices. I’ve seen it all firsthand, at over 60 campuses in 17 states, and it’s unsettling. However, I want to take a bit of a different angle on it.
Often the promise of federal aid is the tipping point in a student’s decision to enroll in a for-profit college. Many already receive other federal entitlements (welfare, medicaid, SNAP) and don’t always understand that a Stafford loan has to be paid back—or that it won’t cover the full cost of tuition. I want to look at several factors to determine whether the federal government’s continued relationship with for-profit colleges is sinking low-income students further into poverty. (My big question: What do I need to prove this? Can it be proved or is it all correlation? Would I be more likely to have good data for a smaller question, like, Are you more likely to go bankrupt with a degree from a for-profit college than with no degree at all? Help me wrangle my ambitions if they're too large, please.)
I want to collect information on low-income students from the federal government, including how many receive title IV funding, how many attend for-profit schools, average salary expectations for fields taught at for-profit colleges, federal loan default rates, bankruptcy rates among low-income individuals who hold a degree/certificate, and other factors (TBD, still trying to figure out what all I would need to know). I also want to pull down information from the colleges, including number of students receiving federal aid, median debt upon graduation, program placement rates, expected salary, etc.).
I’ve identified what seem to be the 11 largest parent corporations of for-profit schools (University of Phoenix, DeVry, Kaplan, ITT Tech, Corinthian Colleges, Career Education Corp., Bridgeport Education, Premier Education Group, Education Management Corp., and American Commercial College) and am in the process of determining how much data they have available online. They are required by law to publish certain statistics (program placement rates, median debt upon graduation, tuition cost, etc.) though many of them are in PDF format. This means I’d need to know more about scraping data as well as how to pull data from PDF forms into a database or spreadsheet. The info from the federal government will be easy to attain (thank you, data.gov/bls.gov!) though figuring out what all I need from them will be a trick.
Most of these big corporations are private companies, and so getting FTC filings is impossible. A few, however, are publicly traded. Hopefully some of their data will be useful.
I envision this project as a combination of clear data visualizations coupled with a written piece describing my findings. I’m also currently working on a video piece about the same topic (which includes interviews with current and former students and admissions reps), and would love to integrate motion graphics of the charts/data viz into that as well. But I’ll start with the charts.
One would hope this could be published at ProPublica, since education is their jam. Honestly, I'd be happy with anything.