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Sunday, February 20, 2022

College Meltdown 2.0

College Meltdown 2.0 is distinctly different than the College Meltdown that started in 2010.

The first wave of the College Meltdown (2010-2021) resulted in a slow and steady drop in overall US college enrollment, with dramatic losses among for-profit colleges and community colleges. Corinthian Colleges, ITT Educational Services, and Education Management Corporation were three large for-profit chains to close. Small private liberal arts schools and regional universities also experienced losses. More folks were moving into the growing educated underclass.

Elements of College Meltdown 2.0 include publicly held corporations. Click on the image to see the chart (Source: Seeking Alpha)

College Meltdown 2.0 comes as the Coronavirus becomes more manageable. However US fascism continues to advance, student loan debt is slowly approaching $2 trillion, and the 2026 enrollment cliff is just a few years away. This new wave includes remnants of for-profit colleges like National American University, Stratford University, South University, the Art Institutes, University of Phoenix (owned by Apollo Global Management), Career Education Corporation (aka Perdoceo), and DeVry University (owned by Cogswell Education) as well as national accreditor ACICS.

The largest element of College Meltdown 2.0 is federal student loan debt, which appears to be rising to an unsustainable level--as it hamstrings the lives of millions of families. When mandatory student loan payments resume (scheduled for May 1), long-term default rates may range from 30 and 50 percent. It also appears that at least $500 billion of the Federal Student Aid (FSA) student loan portfolio will be unrecoverable.

College Meltdown 2.0 also involves online program managers (OPMs) that service elite schools (2U), regional universities (Academic Partnerships), and subprime robocolleges (Zovio-University of Arizona Global and Graham Holdings-Kaplan-Purdue University Global).

Student loan servicers and private student loan companies (Maximus, Navient, Sallie Mae, Nelnet), publishers and other edtech enterprises (EducationDynamics, Chegg, Barnes & Noble Education, Coursera, and Guild Education) are implicated or at least entangled in the mess. Higher education accreditors and student loan asset-backed securities (SLABS) are also worth monitoring.

Friday, September 5, 2025

LAVC Media Arts Faculty Stripped of Administrative Roles Amid Fraud Scandal (LACCD Whistleblower)

Faculty members in the Los Angeles Valley College (LAVC) Media Arts Department implicated in decades of fraud and misconduct have been removed from administrative positions, though they remain in teaching roles.

Over the summer, longtime department head Eric Swelstad, who had led Media Arts since 2008, was replaced as chair by Chad Sustin, a full-time professor of Cinema and Media Arts. The change followed a notification from the LACCD Whistleblower Movement to new Chancellor Alberto J. Roman, alleging that Swelstad falsely claimed membership in the Writers Guild of America – West for more than 20 years and used this misrepresentation in official LACCD promotional materials.

Sustin, a tenured faculty member since 2016 and a former Technicolor post-producer, now leads the department.

The reshuffling comes amid years of internal turmoil. In 2022, full-time cinema professor Arantxa Rodriguez resigned and was replaced by Jonathan Burnett as assistant professor. Rodriguez had previously been implicated in department infighting and, alongside Swelstad, was named as a co-defendant in a 2008 case alleging failure to provide advertised technical training and education. Burnett’s hiring bypassed longtime adjunct and former grant director Dan Watanabe.

Watanabe previously administered several Media Arts training grants, the last of which—ICT & Digital Media, LA RDSN—was reported as fraudulent in 2016. The 2013 grant proposal promised courses such as The Business of Entertainment, Advanced Digital Editing, Photoshop, and After Effects. Yet once funding was approved, The Business of Entertainment and Advanced Digital Editing were archived by LAVC’s Academic Curriculum Committee and Senate. Photoshop and After Effects were offered only minimally, with After Effects disappearing after 2015 and Photoshop shifting to online-only by 2017.

Students reported the suspected fraud to the State of California in 2016, prompting a review of the grant. Renewal applications submitted by Watanabe in 2018 and 2021 were both denied.

Grant Record (Denied Renewal, 2018):

Project Title: ICT & Digital Media – LA RDSN (Renewal)
Funding Agency: CCCCO EWD
Grant Amount: $165,000
Funding Period: Oct. 1, 2018 – June 30, 2019
Project Director: Dan Watanabe
Description: Proposed renewal of the Deputy Sector Navigator grant under the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, focused on curriculum development and alignment with universities and K–12 schools.

https://services.laccd.edu/districtsite/Accreditation/lavc/Standard%20IVA/IVA1-02_Grants_History.pdf

Despite this, Watanabe (who was also passed over for a full-time position at Los Angeles Pierce College) remains an adjunct faculty member slated to teach Cinema 111, Developing Movies – a field he reportedly last worked in twenty years ago. Arantxa Rodriguez and Eric Swelstad have both been scheduled to teach Fall 2025. Despite falsifying his credentials as a member of the Writer's Guild of America – West, and implying he was a Primetime Emmy Winner (he in fact was the director of a movie that received a local Los Angeles Emmy in the 1990s), he is slated to teach Cinema 101 and screenwriting core class Media Arts 129. Rodriguez will a remote History of Film Class.

Reportedly the new full-time faculty in the department have started working to reverse the damage. Fall 2025 schedule includes Media Arts 112, Creative Sound Design Workshop.

Thursday, July 1, 2021

The Growth of "RoboColleges" and "Robostudents"

In a previous Higher Education Inquirer article, I presented frightening full-time faculty numbers at some large online universities which I call "robocolleges." Full-time faculty at these robocolleges, in fact, are nearly nonexistent. Bear in mind that all of them are regionally accredited, the highest level of institutional accreditation, and the list includes well-known public university systems as well as for-profit ones.

Robocolleges have de-skilled instruction by paying teams of workers, some qualified and some not, to write content, while computer programs perform instructional and management tasks. Learning management systems with automated instruction programs are known by different names and their mechanisms are proprietary. As professor jobs are deskilled, tasks can be farmed out at reduced costs.

Besides the human content creators who may be given instructional titles, other staff members at robocolleges are paid to communicate with students regarding their progress. The assumption is that managing work this way significantly reduces costs, and it does, at least in the short and medium terms. However, instructional costs are frequently replaced by marketing and advertising expenses to pitch the schools to prospective students and their families. Companies like EducationDynamics and Guild Education have filled the niche of promoting robocolleges to workers at a reduced cost but their overall impact is minimal.

Meanwhile, companies like Chegg profit from this form of learning, helping students game the system in greater numbers, in essence creating robostudents.

The business model in higher education for reducing labor power and faculty costs is not reserved to for-profit colleges. Community colleges also rely on a small number of full-time faculty and armies of low-wage contingent labor.

In some cases, colleges and universities, including many brand name schools, utilize outside companies, online program managers (OPMs), to run their online programs, with OPMs like 2U taking up as much as 60 percent of the revenues. OPMs can perform a variety of jobs, but are best known for their work in enrollment and retention. Prospective students may believe they are talking to representatives of a particular university when in fact they are talking to someone from an outside source. Noodle has disrupted the OPM model by selling their services ala carte, but only time will tell whether it has an impact, or whether schools will merely find less costly outsourced servicers.

Outsourcing higher education has been a reality in US higher education for decades. And automation is also part of education, as it should, when it performs menial tasks, such as taking roll and doing preliminary work to determine student cheating. It's likely that more schools will become more robotic in nature to reduce organizational expenses. But what are the long-term consequences with long-term student outcomes, when automation is used to perform higher level tasks, and when outsourced individuals act in the name of brand name colleges?

To get a small glimpse of this robocollege phenomenon, these schools cumulatively have about 3000 full-time instructors for more than a half-million students.

American Intercontinental University: 51 full-time instructors for about 8,700 students.

American Public University System has 345 F/T instructors for more than 50,000 students.

Aspen University has 34 F/T instructors for about 9,500 students.

Capella University: 216 F/T for about 38,000 students.

Colorado State University Global: 34 F/T instructors for 12,000 students.

Colorado Technical University: 59 F/T instructors for 26,000 students.
Devry University online: 53 F/T instructors for about 17,000 students.

Grand Canyon University has 461 F/T instructors for 103,000 students.*
Liberty University: 1072 F/T for more than 85,000 students.*
Purdue University Global: 346 F/T instructors for 38,000 students.

South University: 0 F/T instructors for more than 6000 students.

Southern New Hampshire University: 164 F/T for 104,000 students.

University of Arizona Global Campus: 194 F/T instructors for about 35,000 students.
University of Maryland Global: 193 F/T instructors for 60,000 students.

University of Phoenix: 127 F/T instructors for 96,000 students.

Walden University: 206 F/T for more than 50,000 students.

*Most of these full-time instructors are faculty at the physical campuses.

Thursday, October 10, 2024

University of Phoenix: Training Folks For Robowork

The Higher Education Inquirer has published a number of articles on robocolleges, robostudents, and robowork, noting that the University of Phoenix has been a pioneer in the evolution of making humans more machine-like (or in science fiction terms, cyborgs). This is an evolution that spans more than a century, with Frederick Taylor and his Scientific Management of Work and Clayton Christensen's Theory of Disruptive Innovation.

More recently, we have posted articles on artificial intelligence and the dehumanization of society, including futuristic work by renowned sociologist Randall Collins.

The University of Phoenix, in the present, has taken another step in this profit-making dehumanization process, formal online customer service training for the international workforce. According to the University of Phoenix, customer service is in high demand globally, and UoPX offers a convenient series of professional development trainings for making human skills more efficient. It's not known how many humans are involved in teaching or content creation. What we do know is that the University of Phoenix relies on little human labor, with an average student-teacher ratio of 110 to one.

What are your thoughts on this training program? And how does type of online education and tech work bode for humans and humanity?

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