Friday Fragments

Last year the president of Bloomfield College, Marcheta Evans, issued a public distress call on behalf of Bloomfield. She let the world know that Bloomfield’s financial survival as an independent institution was unlikely and that the college would be looking at options.

It was gutsy. That’s not how colleges in dire straits typically behave. A distress signal carries the risk of becoming self-fulfilling if students and talented employees take it as a cue to leave. The temptation to hide bad news out of hope for a savior or a stroke of luck is real.

This week brought the formal announcement of Bloomfield’s merger with Montclair State University. It will survive as a college within the larger university. And the state of New Jersey has put up some funds to help Bloomfield make it to the merger date.

Honestly, I’m impressed. Kudos to President Evans for stepping up. While I don’t wish for college closures generally, I hope that colleges in similar straits look to her example. It’s lovely when taking the high road actually works.

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I’ll admit being torn on Terry Vaughan III and Nicole Blunt’s call for the federal government to stop providing financial aid to students at for-profit universities.

Vaughan and Blunt correctly note that for-profits typically leave students in greater debt than public options would have, and that the quality of their degrees has been spotty. One could also add that by definition, for-profits treat students as means to ends. They’re literally “for” profit.

Still, it feels both unwieldy and late.

That’s because the neat distinction between nonprofit and for-profit is much fuzzier than it used to be. Many nonprofit colleges have for-profit wings, whether in the noncredit side or in master’s degrees that are largely cash cows. On the undergraduate teaching side, OPMs have infiltrated many nonprofits, trading on their reputations to make money. (To be fair, they were allowed in; leadership at those colleges has been complicit, if not enthusiastic.) While enrollment at the Phoenixes of the world isn’t what it once was, a surprising amount of enrollment at nominally nonprofit institutions—even public ones—is through OPMs.

When I worked at a for-profit back in the late ’90s and early 2000s, the leadership there used to claim that the only difference between what they did and what many public colleges did was that they paid taxes. That was a bit disingenuous—it was a publicly traded company with earnings targets to hit—but it’s true that nearly everyone who taught there had also taught at more traditional places, and that we put in just as much effort there as anywhere else.

I’ll counter with two suggestions, one for each side of the political aisle.

For the right, I agree that degrees or programs with terrible track records of saddling students with unpayable debts should be first warned and then excluded from aid eligibility. That’s true whether the institution hosting the program is for-profit, nonprofit or public. I’d even include graduate programs. We can argue about definitions, time frames and the details of engineering, but conceptually, the rule of “first, do no harm” should apply regardless of tax status.

For the left, the really obvious way to squeeze out bad programs without getting embroiled in unwinnable lawsuits is to fund the public options well enough that they become tough to beat. Public austerity created space that for-profits rushed to fill, whether through imitation or infiltration. It's time we recognize that the austerity experiment has been a colossal failure. Instead, give public colleges and universities the funding—reliable operating funding—they need to be terrific. That would still leave space for private institutions that could do things the publics couldn’t or wouldn’t, such as religiously affiliated colleges or colleges with unique niches. The worst abusers won’t last long. Make the public options sustainably great, and you won’t need to crack down on much; students will do that for you.

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The Girl has inherited her father’s speed-writing gene. Last Friday I woke up to a couple of text messages offering a detailed track-by-track critique of the new Taylor Swift album, including phrases like “chromatic harmonies” and “descending chorus.” The album had been released at midnight.

I listened to a few songs, and as near as I could tell, TG was spot on. She usually is.

I predict some very happy faculty in the English department at UMD over the next few years.