20181209.0430

On 5 December 2018, Liz Teitz's "Brightwood College Closure Leaves Students Scrambling" appeared in the online San Antonio Express-News. The article opens with a focus on a single student affected, detailing her initial response to the closure, before expanding to treat the national and San Antonio closures of the Education Corporation of America properties. Information about the corporation, including its loss of accreditation, follows before a return to the focal student, whose comments laud her direct classroom experience but bemoan the administrative and financial situation in which she has been left.
I've noted before, elsewhere if not in this webspace, that one of my few remaining links to academe is through a for-profit college where I continue to teach. It is not the first for-profit college at which I've taught, so it's not the first situation I've been in that I worry I'll end up out of work for something like happened to Brightwood. (Indeed, one of the for-profit schools at which I've taught has folded since I left it. The one where I work now seems to be on more stable footing for the moment; at the least, its accreditation is in order and appears to be secure, though a regular reaccreditation review is in progress at present.) I am concerned that some concern for short-term shareholder value will take precedence over what students need to succeed, that some reviewer with an axe to grind or a prejudice in place will seek out things that would be overlooked at other schools and, in so doing screw over students making the most of what may be their last chance and faculty who do what they can to help them do so.
For while it is the case that there are students who act as though they've paid for an A and there are faculty who phone in their work and hand-wave students through who ought not to pass (as if there are not such at traditional colleges!), it is also the case, and more often, that the people in the classrooms at for-profit colleges are there to do the work of teaching and learning. The students want to know more (if not always about every subject being taught), and the faculty want to teach them (if perhaps not always comfortably within prescribed assignment sequences). And I have long asserted that the students at for-profit schools are not less intelligent, less deserving of rigor and challenge, or less capable than those at more traditional institutions. My experience has been that they are not, but rather that the reverse is true.
So when a system of schools like Brightwood shuts down, even if for cause, my thought is not that some greedy fucker is getting his or her just deserts, but that there are students whose lives have been upended yet again and that there are faculty who whose ability to feed themselves and their families has been imperiled or undone. My thought is that I might well be next. And it is not a comforting thought.