The article at The Huffington Post titled “At Kaplan University, ‘Guerilla Registration’ Leaves Students Deep In Debt” hit a nerve. The premise of the article is that many at the mentioned private University used less than honest tactics to either enroll students or keep students enrolled. Worst, student’s diplomas and/or transcripts were held hostage for phantom owed fees.
This should not be surprising. Since Ronald Reagan professed that ”Government is the problem”, the government began the march to privatization. This was done under the premise that privatization would increase efficiencies and would somehow be less expensive. As an engineer well-schooled in math I always considered that statement one of the most deceiving lies of the politicians.
To believe that privatization is less expensive one must believe the mathematical impossibility that the cost of a service or product alone is greater than the cost of the service or product plus profit plus taxes. It makes no sense.
It is true that government bureaucracy can be very inefficient and needs to be fixed. You do not however fix it by passing a government bureaucracy to a private corporate bureaucracy that has the additional responsibility of making a profit for its shareholders. You fix it by concentrating on fixing government.
A private company’s ultimate fiduciary responsibility is to its shareholder. The government product/service becomes nothing but a commodity to extract a profit. The government product/service is the means by which the corporations usurp corporate welfare.
In Iraq & Afghanistan private corporations charge on the order of $30.00 or more per meal as they hire foreign workers to serve our troops and buy foreign food at all substantial discounts. Private corporations pay some American private soldiers and workers six figures & foreign workers a pittance as they charge taxpayers several times a soldier’s salary per employee. Hiring our capable soldiers to take care of our own is less expensive and does not become a corporate welfare catalyst.
A private school pays low wages to teachers which translate into poor education as they take over 25% of all federal student assistant dollars. Outcomes from private universities are poor relative to public institutions.
Ultimately in order to maximize corporate profits the taxpayer receiving the product/services from the private company will always be short changed. Some functions in society should always be maintained either government run or at best non-profit. There is absolutely no way that the privatization of education, wars, health insurance, and other social services that require no innovation can be successful because in order to maintain profits the private companies only option is to short change the taxpayer.
When our friends on the Right continue to decry the evils of big government they conveniently forget that the greatness of our country is that we are a government by and of the people. The Corporation is for and by the shareholder. It is for this reason that it is critical that the right balance is maintained between the Government, The Corporation, and the Individual with an absolute bias to the individual.
The drive to the privatization of everything will ultimately result in; the continued pilfering of the middle class, those who least can afford to be robbed. Privatization of rightful government services is nothing but corporate welfare, a transfer of the middle class’s wealth to the top two percent.
My Book: As I See It: Class Warfare The Only Resort To Right Wing Doom
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At Kaplan University, ‘Guerilla Registration’ Leaves Students Deep In Debt Chris Kirkham
kirkham@huffingtonpost.com | HuffPost Reporting | First Posted: 12-22-10 08:35 AMArlen Castillo had just begun an online associate’s degree program at Kaplan University when a family emergency forced a change of plans. Her mother in Florida learned she needed extensive surgery that entailed months of recuperation. Only two weeks into her first term, Castillo promptly withdrew to lend her mother support.
As Castillo recalls, a Kaplan academic advisor told her she could simply fill out a withdrawal form and incur no additional expenses beyond the registration fees she had already paid. But a year and a half later, in 2006, collections agents began hounding her, she says, demanding that she pay some $10,000 in supposedly overdue tuition charges. Despite having attended only two online sessions, Castillo had remained officially enrolled at Kaplan for nearly a year after her withdrawal.
Far from an aberration, Castillo’s experience typifies the results of a practice known informally inside Kaplan as "guerilla registration": academic advisors have long enrolled students in classes they never take, without their consent and sometimes even after they have sought to withdraw from the university, in order to maximize the company’s revenues, according to interviews with former employees.Managers at Kaplan–the highly profitable educational arm of the Washington Post Co.– have for years pressured academic advisors to use this method to boost enrollment numbers, the former employees said, offering accounts consistent with dozens of complaints filed by former students with the Florida Attorney General’s Office and reviewed by The Huffington Post.
Guerilla registration has been part of a concerted effort by the university to keep students enrolled as long as possible in order to harvest more of the federal financial aid dollars that make up nearly all of the company’s higher education revenues, according to former Kaplan academic advisor Sheldon Cobbler, who described the practice in detail.Most advisors had access to a company database that allowed them to view students’ e-mail correspondence without their knowledge, said Cobbler, who worked at Kaplan’s Fort Lauderdale, Fla., corporate office from 2007 through July of this year. The advisors routinely searched through students’ e-mails to look up their user names and passwords for Kaplan’s enrollment system, and then they used that inform
ation to sign in using multiple student identities, enrolling them in classes they never intended to join, he said.
"The company didn’t want students to withdraw," Cobbler said. "They wanted them to stay in class by any means."Kaplan denied claims that it has engaged in so-called guerilla registration, branding as "false" and a "complete mischaracterization" allegations that it has signed students up for classes without their knowledge.
"No one in this company has ever been asked, advised or permitted to be an impostor in terms of e-mail messages or student accounts," said Kaplan spokesman Mark Harrad. "That’s just not acceptable."
Kaplan declined requests for interviews with senior company executives.
Guerilla registration would appear to constitute criminal fraud, said a senior official with the Department of Education, who spoke on condition he not be identified in response to The Huffington Post’s description of the practice. The official–who did not confirm the use of the method, but merely characterized its legality– said it could also trigger criminal penalties under the Federal False Claims Act, which bars the submission of improper claims for government funds
At Kaplan University, ‘Guerilla Registration’ Leaves Students Deep In Debt