Perdido 03

Perdido 03

Monday, August 23, 2010

Kaplan Crooks

The Washington Post is owned by Kaplan Test Prep.

Kaplan Test Prep is a for-profit education management organization
that runs standardized test preparation programs and undergraduate and graduate programs both online and at traditional campuses.

Kaplan Test Prep, like many for-profit education management organizations, is run by crooks.

Don't believe me?

Officials from the Government Accountability Office conducted an investigation of 15 for-profit schools around the country, including two owned by Kaplan, and found “fraud and engagement in deceptive or otherwise questionable behavior" at all the schools.

Specifically here is what investigators found at one Kaplan campus in Florida:

At one college, later identified in congressional testimony as Kaplan College's Pembroke Pines campus, the investigation identified two scenarios where prospective students, who were working undercover for the GAO, were faced with “fraud and engagement in deceptive or otherwise questionable behavior” when inquiring about an associate degree in criminal justice.

In the first scenario reported by the GAO:

* The Kaplan admissions representative falsely stated that the college was accredited by the same agency that accredits Harvard University and the University of Florida.
* A test proctor sat in the room while the applicant took a test and coached her through it.
* The applicant was not allowed to speak to a financial aid representative until after she enrolled.
* The applicant had to sign an agreement to pay $50 a month to the college while enrolled.
* The admissions representative said the applicant should switch from criminal justice to the medical assistant certificate because she could make up to $68,000 a year. But, the GAO said 90 percent of medical assistants make less than $40,000 a year.
* When asked about paying back student loans, the Kaplan representative allegedly told the applicant: “You gotta look at it … I owe $85,000 to the University of Florida. Will I pay it back? Probably not …. I look at life as tomorrow’s never promised …. Education is an investment, you’re going to get paid back tenfold, no matter what.”

In the second scenario, the GAO red-flagged these tactics:

* Two Kaplan representatives refused to answer the applicant’s questions about financial aid, but they debated with him about his commitment level for 30 minutes.
* After first saying the criminal justice program would take 18 months to complete, the representative changed that to two years. The representative then said that student loans would fully cover the program’s cost. Yet, the GAO noted that the applicant would need to take out both federal student loans and private loans to finish the program in less than three years.
* The representative told the applicant that repaying the student loans would not be an issue once he got his new job.
* “Hard sell” marketing techniques were used, such as becoming argumentative, calling the applicant afraid and scolding the applicant for not wanting to take out loans.

The full GAO report can be read here, but the above highlights, showing that Kaplan college employees are no better than sleazy car salesmen looking to make a bottom line sale no matter what and willing to lie, cheat, and berate customers to sign on the dotted line (as they say in Glengarry Glen Ross, "ALWAYS BE CLOSING!!!"), get the point across quite well.

Kaplan, with more than 66,000 students around the U.S., received $211 million in Pell grants during the 2009-2010 school year.

Add in the amount of student loan money Kaplan hands out to students (for-profit colleges received $20 billion in student loans last year) and you realize that there is an awful lot of money the people running these schools are stealing from both students and taxpayers.

And they are stealing it. The USDOE released data last week showing that for-profit colleges have disturbingly low repayment rates for the student loans - especially at Kaplan schools:

Adding new fuel to the growing controversy over regulating for-profit colleges, the Department of Education on Friday released data on student-loan repayment rates at the nation’s colleges and universities, listing the institutions by name.

Although the department issued no analysis or comparison of repayment rates by sector, outside advocacy groups that analyzed the data found that in 2009, repayment rates were 54 percent at public colleges and universities, 56 percent at private nonprofit institutions, and 36 percent at for-profit colleges.

“I think it’s notable that the for-profits are the only type of school where the majority of students are unable to repay their loans,” said Debbie Frankle Cochrane, program director at the Institute for College Access and Success, which has called for tighter regulation of for-profit institutions.

At some for-profit colleges, the repayment rates were startlingly low. For example, 33 of the 86 Corinthian Colleges’ Everest locations had repayment rates of less than 20 percent — and at several, the rates were less than 10 percent.

At the headquarters of the University of Phoenix, the nation’s largest for-profit education company, the repayment rate was 44 percent, compared with 38 percent at DeVry and 27 percent at Kaplan University, a unit of the Washington Post Company.

So Kaplan schools have been caught engaging in fraudulent and "deceptive or otherwise questionable behavior" by government investigators and government data shows that only 27% of Kaplan students can afford to pay back their loans.

They are lying to and manipulating vulnerable people to get them to sign up for classes, then don't care whether people can actually pay back the loans they take out to attend their schools.

Here is how one former admissions officer at Kaplan University described the school and how they "rip off" students in 2007:


I was a Financial Aid Officer at Kaplan University which is owned by the Washington Post(1). My employment was for over a year and I quit to work at a new job. I am not angry at Kaplan yet I am disappointed. The school offers a very expensive education, aggressive enrollment process and a questionable quality of education. They don't seem motivated to educate. They are motivated to make money.

The cost of tuition goes up every year. The price hike usually takes place toward the middle of the year. I believe it is currently 305 a credit hour. This means a 90 credit associate degree costs 27,450 plus fees. A 180 credit bachelors degree costs 54,900. The equivalent ONLINE bachelors degree at the University of Florida is 18,240 plus fees.(1) There are more reputable sources of education available at a much lower cost.

P.S. you will not be eligible for any state scholarships at Kaplan unless you live in Iowa.

The Kaplan admissions telephone sales force is staffed is extremely aggressive. They sit in cubicles and try call 150 people a day or 750 calls a week. They try to get more than 3 students to enroll every month. Once they get a possible student on the line, they will do everything they can to get you to enroll. The telemarketing techniques they use can be very convincing. For example, I have seen people enroll who do not have computer access, don't know how to read or have a mental handicap. Reputable colleges have students calling them not the other way around.

By the way, once you enroll the admissions officers won't talk to you. So don't think they are your friends. You are their paycheck.

Will 55,000 buy you a quality education? Maybe. First, you have to graduate. When I left, the school was running into trouble with retention rates. This may explain why some of their staff are reporting a delay in paycheck payments. I can find graduation rates for other Universities on the web but Kaplan's is mysteriously missing. Perhaps this is a by product of enrolling anyone who will answer the telephone. As for the quality of education, a quick Kaplan search on Rip Off Report will show an extensive list of past Kaplan University students and they are not happy. Receiving a 55,000 education should make them happy.


Indeed, it should.

Yet that would mean that students are actually graduating from the schools and getting jobs with the degrees they received that help them pay off their loans.

Clearly that is NOT happening.

You would think the Washington Post, owned by Kaplan, would be embarrassed by these facts and might actually hold themselves and their company accountable (as they delight in holding D.C. teachers accountable), but you would be wrong.

Instead the Kaplan Test Prep Post attacked Democrats in Washington who have sought to regulate the for-profit college industry and make sure that schools are not stealing from students and taxpayers.

Here's what the crooks at the Post wrote:

THE OBAMA administration is considering rules that could sharply limit the availability of for-profit colleges to American students. The government is right to fashion reasonable regulation to discourage fraud or misleading practices, but it would be wrong to impose rules that remove an option that is especially useful for poor and working students.

Readers should know that we have a conflict of interest regarding this subject. The Washington Post Co., which owns the Post newspaper and washingtonpost.com, also owns Kaplan University and other for-profit schools of higher education that, according to company officials, could be harmed by the proposed regulations.

But our feelings about career colleges, as the for-profits are often called, are consistent with our editorial policy on education more broadly: that is, the more options available to parents and students, the better. Particularly among some Democrats, that's not always the prevailing view. But for the most part it has been the philosophy of the Obama administration, which is why an effort to narrow choice in this area would be inconsistent as well as misguided.

...

In a speech on higher education in Texas this month, President Obama noted that getting more Americans into -- and successfully out of -- college is an economic imperative. "It's an economic issue when the unemployment rate for folks who've never gone to college is almost double what it is for those who have gone to college," Mr. Obama said. "Education is an economic issue when nearly eight in 10 new jobs will require workforce training or a higher education by the end of this decade." But the president noted that in college completion the United States has been "slipping. In a single generation, we've fallen from first place to 12th place in college graduation rates for young adults." He vowed to reverse that trend.

...

But it's difficult to imagine achieving Mr. Obama's goal of 8 million more college graduates by 2020 if the for-profit sector is severely constricted. According to the Career College Association, as of 2006-07 about 9 per cent of the nation's 25 million college students were attending tax-paying schools such as Kaplan or Strayer University, and the number has been growing rapidly. It's been growing because for-profit schools have been adept at meeting the needs of working students who want to advance their careers but can afford to study only part-time and, often, online.

The government has an important role to play in helping to ensure that these students aren't taken advantage of. A recent Government Accountability Office video revealed repugnant instances of misleading and high-pressure recruiting, including by Kaplan employees. It's also reasonable to discourage students from paying for courses that promise but fail to deliver improved career prospects, which is why statistics on repayment of government loans are relevant.

Given that only 27% of Kaplan students can actually PAY BACK their loans, I think it is reasonable to assume that Kaplan schools are failing to deliver improved career prospects and instead are stealing millions of dollars from both students (many of whom do NOT belong in college without remediation and other academic services, as we learned from the former Kaplan admissions officer at Rip Off Report) and taxpayers.

Also, given the sleazy sales tactics and telemarketing scams, Kaplan uses to sign up any prospective student who can hold a pen, it is reasonable to assume Kaplan are not actually meeting the needs of working students but the needs of themselves and their investors.

As for helping students who can only go to school part-time, how about expanding state and city community colleges, which charge a fraction of the tuition that the for-profits charge, rather than provide taxpayer largesse in the form of Pell grants and student loans for the crooks in the for-profit industry?

Ah, but doing that would hurt the bottom line of the for-profit industry and the Wall Street investors who back them (including Goldman Sachs.)

So instead we get self-serving jive from the Kaplan Test Prep Post editors decrying new accountability rules that will force for-profit schools to show that students are graduating with useful degrees that expand their career opportunities and pay them enough to be able to pay back their students loans.

They don't say what kind of accountability measures they would support, only just that

If the data released Friday are used without further refinement, the effect will be to deprive many working students of their best option for higher education -- and to worsen the national problem that Mr. Obama has dedicated himself to solving.

So in other words, pay lip service to accountability and regulation of the for-profits, but DO NOT actually do anything to hold for-profits accountable.

Given how the same editors at the Post (and some of the columnists they have on staff, like Jay Matthews) delight in calling for new accountability measures for teachers but do NOT want to similarly be held accountable, I would have to say that not only are the editors at the Kaplan Test Prep Post crooks, they are also HYPOCRITICAL and SANCTIMONIOUS crooks.

4 comments:

  1. keep up on this... Strayer president McDonnell dumped 4.2 million in Strayer stock 2 weeks before the doe report (on a Fri., stock started dropping following Monday: textbook case of insider trading...)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Harsh. I teach for Kaplan in in spite of the capitalistic agenda, I actually try to teach every day.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Kaplan Cheats low-income minority students. Read more at www.dailycensored.com by danny weil. You'll see he backs up just everything said above here. Kaplan are the bottom feeders and should be stopped

    ReplyDelete
  4. I go to Kaplan and find the education Im getting great so far. The rates are high (371 per credit hour) but the professors are great and expect a lot from students. The quality of material is great, I wasnt expecting much, but text books and lessons were better than expected.

    I think you have some who make it there goal to push you into something, but my admissions rep was awesome. She answered and called me back every time I needed her AND even sent me a hand written note wishing me well in my schooling. Online schools have to be marketed because well... theyre online, you cant go down the street and sign up, at least in my area.

    Im not trying to take up for Kaplan as much as state what Ive observed ove rthe time Ive been there. My professors are great, my advisor doesnt hassle me or push me and in fact I even filled out my own FAFSA and MPN without being guided or "told" what to put. These reps are human and if they get an idiot on the phone they will take advantage of you.

    UOP and Liberty University were jokes and to this day call me and my family and send me emails trying to sell me clothing! I have nothing but good things to say about Kaplan and I hate to hear about these practices, but this doesnt get me down too much.

    ReplyDelete