[infinite monkey]

It's not weird news, and to me it's not surprising or earth-shattering news, but I thought it worth posting and couldn't find a "Just News" thread and didn't want to make one.

Graduates of For-profits lag behind their peers in earnings and employment, study finds.

http://chronicle.com/article/Graduat...&utm_medium=en

For-profit colleges do a good job of retaining students in their first year and getting them to finish, but over time these students also tend to fare worse than similar students at community colleges and public and private nonprofit institutions, according to a new study.

Six years after they enter college, students from for-profit institutions are employed at lower rates and earn less than their peers, according to a study by three scholars from Harvard University.

While other studies have noted that for-profit colleges often enroll large numbers of underserved students and that they produce higher rates of retention than nonprofit colleges, the authors of this report sought to make apples-to-apples comparisons between for-profit and nonprofit institutions. They compared students who attended for-profit colleges with those who had similar characteristics but attended community colleges or other public or private nonprofit institutions.

The higher retention percentages at for-profit colleges were attributable to lower rates of remediation at these institutions, the authors wrote. Despite their relative success during college, the students attending for-profit institutions had higher default rates when they left.

For example, among students in the data set who had racked up between $5,000 and $10,000 in cumulative student-loan debt by 2009, 26 percent of those from for-profit colleges had defaulted, while 10 percent of those from community colleges and 7 percent of those from nonprofits had done so. As the level of debt increased to $20,000, the discrepancies grew wider: The default rate among for-profit-college students was 16 percent, compared with 3 percent for community-college students and 2 percent for those from four-year colleges.

But the high default rates create increased costs to taxpayers, they continued. "The challenge is to rein in the agile predators while not stifling the innovation of these nimble critters."

Nimble critters.