I Stand Before You Today to Apologize: Nauseatingly Excellent Kaplan Ad

Saw the following (during SNL I think) and just about
fell out of my chair:



Maybe I made my nightcap stiffer than usual but this ad quite made me want to leap up and enroll at Kaplan University. Of course it occurs now that the ad is not so much a compelling argument for Kaplan University (whatever the hell that is, although the Washington Post is now more Kaplan than it is Washington Post, I know) as it is a compelling potshot at higher education generally.

The system does fail far too many. In particular the traditional system almost unswervingly fails to help the marginal students appearing in growing numbers in its classrooms. I''m increasingly concerned that students who would in fact find surer, less costly paths to economic well being through, say, the trades are increasingly coming to see a bachelor's degree as the only legitimate means to success. And while we need now more than ever before anyone capable of getting a bachelor's degree and putting it to productive use to do so, we're setting both growing numbers of degree seekers and the system itself up for failure by taking all comers and by holding a bachelor's degree up as the one and only path to socioeconomic well being.

Some quotes of note:
"It's time to learn how you learn so we can teach you better." Hear hear, although if we've not yet learned how students learn, it's surely not for a lack of lots and lots of brilliant folks' tirelessness to that end, and it's surely no trivial matter to learn.

"It's time a university adapted to you rather than you adapting to it." This makes me a bit queasy. First, in my experience this is just as likely as anything to mean that Kaplan has lowered its expectation about preparedness down to where its students find themselves rather than expecting its students to exhibit any given level of preparation. Singling Kaplan out here is unfair - its happening all around. And the problem is not an absence of admissions standards (I'm all for open enrollment), it's the pressure that open enrollment, especially together with the profit motive, puts on the expectations of admitted students. I fear the Kaplans are not only taking on the unready/unwilling/unable, they and those they admit are oblivious to the fact.

Community colleges are in crisis because in keeping with their missions they take all comers, and they do an astonishingly poor job graduating their students. Kaplan and the rest of the for-profits are on the whole offering much better retention and graduation rates. My great fear and strong suspicion, though, is that for-profits like Kaplan are solving this problem by lowering their expectations of student accomplishment until most students can manage to graduate. Expecting less ==> graduating more. It needn't be willful.

This one is good too, although the pandering is more covert and cloying:



"What if you could get your degree -- to develop your talent -- no matter who you are or where you are." This just infuriates me. I know I've squandered some (all?) of my bleeding heart educator cred on this issue, but the college that gets you your degree no matter who you are or, implicitly, what measure of wherewithal you present, gets you nothing. Say it with me: ability matters; ability varies widely; ability is largely determined before birth. I'm no more pleased about it than you, but I'm certain that to made headway in education we must come to terms with this unjust reality.

Let's educate everyone who is capable of benefiting. Let's educate them whether they yet know they want to be educated or not. Let's educate them whether they can afford it, let's educate them whether they've used drugs or been in prison, irrespective of track records and errant pasts. And if some accident of their birth - where or to whom they were born, their lot in life - stands to inhibit then let's work tirelessly to overcome. But lets once and for all stop pretending, for our sakes and for those wronged in so doing, that everyone is capable of benefiting from a college education.