I Saw Behind the Facade of a Profit College
Why one should tread carefully with non-traditional education.
You might wonder, “Wait. Aren’t all colleges for profit?”
After all, people have long joked that Harvard is a large hedge fund with a small college attached to it. One can easily see this argument.
Here’s the difference. Yes, many colleges and universities are under pressure to bring in more revenue. My spouse is a university professor and I hear about this pressure all the time. But there’s a major distinction: revenue is typically used by universities to fund programs and hire staff. There’s also political pressure to reduce tuition for students.
Meanwhile, with for-profit colleges, decisions are left up to investors rather than educators. This has far reaching consequences for students — as I learned firsthand. I’m sharing this story to give you caution with your own education, and that of your children and grandchildren.
How it all started
In the mid-2000s, I was in a weird place in my life. I hated college and wanted to try something different. I’d initially been a computer engineering major and felt like I could see my whole life mapped out in front of me.
Mom heard a radio advertisement for The Art Institute of Tampa. It advertised an alternative career path for people just like me.
We went in for a tour and were shown the beautiful corridors of the small campus. We walked down the hallways listening to our guide, Joe, who was a handsome and slickly dressed man in a suit.
In one room, I saw students in a graphic design class, as the teacher demonstrated his rendering of the face of Tom Hanks. In another class, I saw students painting on easels quietly as a teacher sat upfront with a pencil in hand.
That’s when I felt doubt. Yes, I’ve always been creative, but I have terrible hand dexterity. It’s so bad that my parents made me practice my handwriting for hours because it was so illegible.
I turned to our tour guide and said, “What if you aren’t good at art?”
Joe beamed a smile and said, “Oh, you don’t have to be!”
I never forgot that phrase. Although part of me wants to resent him for saying that, I realize he was just following orders. He was a 26–year-old trying to make his sales numbers. But it was misleading at best.
The other red flag: all the office employees were business majors rather than education majors. This wasn’t an accident. The Art Institutes had been purchased by Goldman Sachs only a few years prior. Their mission for profit became far more unfiltered.
And how can a school maximize profits? It’s simple math.
High tuition.
Promise high salary to prospects to increase enrollment.
Have minimal barriers to entry.
I said to Joe, “So there’s no art test or anything?”
He said, “Nope! You don’t need to be good at art.”
That struck me as odd and I thought, “No art test to go to an art school? You don’t even need a portfolio?”
He then sold my mom and me on how everything would be taught. He said, “You’ll leave this school primed for a great salary and a fun career in a creative industry.”
He even showed up this professional clipboard with a printout showing projected salaries for each major.
This was the original sin — and one that eventually came back to haunt them in court. The printout was projected salaries for students who actually got in-industry jobs. The data didn’t include every graduate. It’s important to remember that every person he showed this to was someone with hopes and dreams. They were pinning those dreams on this school.
The other cracks started to appear
Three months later, I was in the program. I’d bought into the idea of Interactive Media Design as a major. We had a mandatory art class where we learned to sketch and paint. It was immediately clear that 75% of the class had no business being in this college— myself included.
For example, they had us draw a pyramid in our first week. It was a simple exercise with a simple object. They hung up a picture of an Egyptian pyramid at the front of the class and asked us to draw it with our various sketching pencils.
Most drawings resembled abstract art. It was just sad. There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t wonder, “Should I really be here? I don’t get the sense that I, or many of these kids, have any morsel of talent.”
I came to know a classmate, Jake. He sat next to me and had equitably pitiful art skills. I learned his father died three years prior in a construction accident. The company had settled and given he and his mother a $110,000 payout.
And $60,000 of it went to this education. His story in particular still makes my blood boil. He was doomed and had no place in this program. He’d have been better off in a trade school.
I ended up leaving after two semesters, knowing my future was bleak in this field. But so many more classmates went through this program. As I left, I knew many of them would end up in huge debt, and stuck in jobs they could have gotten without this education.
There was other weird practices too that showed the school’s profit motive. For example, you couldn’t transfer a class between art institutes if you got a C, which was clearly an attempt to claw more class revenue out of students. The school store had the most exorbitant prices I’ve ever seen on supplies, even by university standards. A small box of pencils was over $10 (this was in 2005). You don’t even want to know the book prices.
Yes, some teachers were fantastic. One was a comic book artist who could instantly draw any superhero you called out, using his black marker on the whiteboard.
Other teachers were wholly unprofessional. They’d been hastily hired to get the program moving and generating revenue. The most egregious was an English teacher. He infamously asked a Colombia-American student if she sold cocaine— in front of the class, on our first day. This was his attempt at humor. He treated class like a stand-up comedy class instead of teaching us how to write.
It was little things like this that poked their heads out. I’m glad I left.
Karma came knocking
Years later, The Art Institutes faced a badly-needed crackdown by the government, but only after the lawsuits piled up. They’d spit out tons of students into the private sector with huge student loan debt and no skills to match them to jobs.
Since then, The Art Institutes have shuttered many of their campuses and dissolved many of their loans (but not nearly enough). The Art Institute of Tampa was acquired by another entity and rebranded.
Other for-profit lawsuits are still going to this day too. In December 2019, the University of Phoenix was forced to pay a $191 million settlement for deceptive advertising claims. They’d claimed they had job inroads with huge companies.
If you get a degree from a school that lets anyone in, that doesn’t change what happens after graduation. You’ll still be put into a competitive system that has you competing with people from more reputable institutions. The quality of your work will be put on full-display. If it isn’t great, you’ll in trouble.
There are surely reputable for-profit programs, that can help people develop skills. But it’s critical to do your research and vet programs out fully. Private for-profit programs tend to be much more expensive than public institutions.
Red flags are anything that appears to be enticing the masses to apply. I did an MBA eventually, and one of the biggest red flags was an ad showing “No GMAT required!”
These ads are seen by HR professionals, recruiters, managers, and the public at large. Is that really the diploma you want on your resume?
Universities should have a healthy level of idealism, aspiration, and meaning that they provide to students.
Yes, institutions should manage their finances and meet budget requirements. But I struggle to see a scenario where a school should be explicitly for profit. Goldman Sachs should be the last company involved in your diploma.
Having barriers to entry signals quality both to students and employers. If you aren’t great at test-taking, go into vocational programs. Trades need employees more than ever and you’ll be almost assured of having a job and decent pay at that.
And please, please tread carefully with for-profit colleges. Many of them don’t care as much as they say they do. If they did, there wouldn’t be so many lawsuits.
I'm a former financial analyst turned writer out of sunny Tampa, Florida. I began writing eight years ago on the side and fell in love with the craft. My goal is to provide non-fiction story-driven content to help us live better and maximize our potential. My content has many anecdotes and stories from my own life. This is intentional. I do this to show how these topics have impacted my daily living, and to share some vulnerability and mistakes I've made, and also to avoid being too preachy. I have skin in the game as much as you do in learning about these topics. I try to anchor my content in credible sourcing. Online writing has become too much of a free-for-all that lacks credibility, so I lean on the halls of academia, and on science that stands up to scrutiny. My goal is to have an ongoing relationship with my readers, to respect your time, and make my content worth revisiting. I'd also like to see a world where people are kinder and more empathetic towards each other. Writing is my small effort to help in that fight. Outside of writing, I live a fairly regular life, spending time with my spouse Laura, exercising, listening to podcasts, eating good food.