A few days ago, one of my friends sends me a link to one episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver about student debt. Although the title is student debt, I feel like it was more like criticism to those for-profit universities with really high tuition rate and poor education. I was quite surprised about the for-profit school since I feel Americans don’t concern about education that much, especially for those lower income families. They can always make a living as long as they want to work. Education is not the only option. China has such a for-profit university as well, as I mentioned in the first post, but the definition of poverty in China is way lower than it is here. Those farmer families can only earn 100 bucks a month, their lives are so terrible that investing huge amount of money in such universities becomes a reasonable choice. On the other hand, higher education in the US is much more common, even students’ grade is not good enough to apply to better university, community college can also provide cheap and decent education, which is certainly a much better choice than those for-profit universities.
But I was wrong, according to the data provided in that show, 13% students would like to take out a student loan to pay the high tuition, about 4 to 5 times more than the tuition of community college to get into these schools. Then the question is when for-profit schools have been reported for poor education quality, why does student choose to spend so much money to get into these schools instead of community college?
After researching this question, I found that community school wasn’t such an ideal option either. For instance, the ratio of students who finish their 4-year program was much lower than that of for-profit universities, people even claim that their scheduling system and student services are worse than for-profit, but the article I read doesn’t provide any evidence for this statement. However, it still presents a good explanation for this difference. The author points out one likely reason community college completion rates are so low is that their heavily subsidized prices – they get tens of billions of dollars in direct government subsidies every year, which makes these colleges need not respond very effectively to student needs since much of their funding is detached from students. On the flip side, for-profit schools are much more student-centered and have a much stronger incentive to provide better services.
Another data about the popularity of for-profit schools compare to community colleges also somehow prove that for-profit schools can truly provide better educational resources. Between 1990 and 2010, for-profit colleges saw much faster enrollment growth than community colleges; 179 percent compared to 44 percent. This data collected from such a long period of time. If for-profit schools are really so terrible that its education is almost like a scam, the public should have been informed. Instead, the steady and fast growth rate shows that they are still not a bad option.
Then I tried to research about poverty. For people who live in poverty, attending college is a reasonable investment, while it’s hard to believe that so many teenagers don’t even have enough money to pay for their education in a developed country. The first thing I found was that the poverty rate in the U.S is not a small percentage, 16.3% of woman and 13.8% of a man, and their wage also seems to be pretty low. For a family with 3 members, the poverty threshold is about 19000 annual income, which is only a third of the average salary of a Penn State graduate. Although I didn’t grow up here, I have almost no idea what the life quality of 19000 dollars per year is like, but the huge difference between the income of a well-educated teenager and a poor family is enough to attract people invest a large amount of money in education.
After investigating the for-profit schools, I suddenly realized that public education is not just a problem in China. Oftentimes people only focus on those best universities since they stand for the best people and the best technology in a country, but neglect the need of equally huge amount of people in the bottom of the society. Many people still believe that education can help capable young people to jump into a higher social class, but the percentage of such people are always small. Most people still need to stay in the bottom for a few more generations, so in this case, a more affordable and useful higher education would largely improve their lives.
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