<p>Many for-profit colleges do not make their students' job-placement or program-completion rates readily available, or give out numbers for those rates that are inflated, according to a report released on Wednesday by the National Consumer Law Center. </p>
<p>Nancy Broff, general counsel for the Career College Association, which represents many companies in the for-profit higher-education sector, disputed those findings. She said the numbers reported by for-profit colleges are not necessarily any different from those reported by public institutions. </p>
<p>"Every criticism they make applies equally to all sectors" of higher education, she said. "It is misleading to put out a report like this that focuses solely on the for-profit sector." </p>
<p>The report, "Making the Numbers Count: Why Proprietary-School Performance Data Doesn't Add Up and What Can Be Done About It," is based in part on an investigation in which an employee of the nonprofit law center posed as a prospective student and visited five for-profit colleges. At each institution, the employee asked for program-completion and job-placement rates during an interview with an admissions counselor. </p>
<p>The report says that the counselors "by and large" evaded questions about completion rates, and that job-placement rates were "equally difficult to obtain." </p>
<p>The employee visited a Boston-area campus of five institutions: the University of Phoenix, which is owned by the Apollo Group; ITT Technical Institute, run by ITT Educational Services Inc.; Katharine Gibbs College, run by the Career Education Corporation; the New England Institute of Art, owned by the Education Management Corporation; and the Bryman Institute, operated by Corinthian Colleges Inc. The companies that run the five institutions make up about 74 percent of the industry, the report says. </p>
<p>Ms. Broff said that because there is no federally required methodology for reporting job-placement rates, it can be difficult to come up with a way to compute such numbers. Other factors complicate the reporting of job-placement numbers, she said. She noted, for example, that many students are employed when they enroll at for-profit colleges. The admissions counselors provided as much information as they could, given the data they had, she said. </p>
<p>The law center's report says that the Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics does not require any type of institution to report job-placement rates. Moreover, of the licensing agencies in 10 states that the center reviewed for the report, only 8 required colleges to report annual job-placement data, and none published that information anywhere. </p>
<p>Accreditation agencies that the law center reviewed, chosen because they accredit the five companies that were the focus of the report, also did not publish such data and relied on the institutions to do so. </p>
<p>"Enforcement by states, the federal government, and accreditation agencies is dismal," the report says of the completion and placement rates. </p>
<p>The report's authors also found that, based on 2002 data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the Apollo Group had a graduation rate from four-year programs of only 7 percent at the 14 institutions that submitted data. That rate, the report says, is based on the number of students who enrolled in 1997, minus the number who left for "acceptable reasons" like military or Peace Corps service, divided by the number who completed within five years. </p>
<p>The other four companies that the center studied had completion rates for their four-year programs ranging from 31 percent to 59 percent, according to the report. </p>
<p>Ms. Broff said that many Apollo campuses are less than six years old and therefore do not yet report placement data. Depending on how the law center computed the numbers, she said, the campuses' graduation rates may appear much worse than they are. Moreover, she said, the rates of all of the institutions that are part of the five companies are not much different from some colleges in Massachusetts, for example. "We don't stack up badly," she said. </p>
<p>Background articles from The Chronicle:</p>