Fraud and Adjunct Training

For Profit universities are increasingly coming under fire for having deceived their students about the university's ability to place them in careers related to their field of study.  If you do this and you're Corinthian University, or more topically, Heald Business College in California's Bay Area, the government steps in and shuts you down.  It's fraud.

Also on the increase is the traditional university's reliance on the For Profit university's model, which they call "The Business Model".  It seems to me that the Business Model makes NPO universities vulnerable to the same kinds of litigation brought against the For Profit University.  Read that sentence again, it's the heart of this thing.

For instance, I have a Ph.D..   Getting my Ph.D. took a lot of time and money.  I did it because I was assured by everyone in my program that getting a job as a tenure track professor was extremely likely given that 2010 would mark the beginning of baby boomer retirement.  I have no qualms saying that I sacrificed for the Ph.D. in order to get a tenure track job as a professor:  everyone involved in my training knew this, and no one raised issues with that plan.

But getting a job as a tenure track professor is NOT assured because of the adjunct problem which these same universities propagate.  So, if nursing students at Corinthian can sue that university for not getting jobs as nurses, why can't I sue my alma mater for having taken my money to train me for a field where there are no job openings.  I assume that people with master's degrees are operating under the idea that they could get tenure track positions in community colleges.  I trained under the assumption that I would get a tenure track job at the university level.  In both cases, we've been lied to.  That's fraud.

What makes matters worse is that Corinthian could say, "well, we don't control the nursing industry," which I'm sure they did say (it didn't work or else they'd still be open), but our alma maters cannot say the same thing.  They are the education industry and thus are directly linked to the employment crisis.  They're telling us that they're training us to be faculty, but they're actually training us to be adjuncts.

Perhaps someone should call the department of Education and make the complaint.

Here's the website:

http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/oig/misused/index.html

As per usual, our FB group is:  https://www.facebook.com/groups/ClevelandStateUniversity/