In immigrant neighborhoods, college recruiters went door-to-door or approached people in shopping malls, promoting the benefits of a business school education and offering an unexpected incentive: payment for enrollment.
“Money, money, money,” said Stefan Lespizanu, a former recruiter for Oxford Business College. “Everybody was saying, ‘Hey, push the money.”
The opportunity quickly spread through Facebook groups and word of mouth, with entire families signing up. This helped transform a vocational school with only 41 students above a Chinese restaurant into a for-profit powerhouse. Oxford Business College, which is not affiliated with the nearby elite school, now has multiple campuses and over 8,000 students. According to company records, this transformation has made millions of dollars for its owners.
Years of free-market changes to British higher education have created opportunities for for-profit schools like Oxford Business College. Through opaque partnership deals with publicly funded universities, schools can offer undergraduate degrees and access the British government’s student aid. Some are marketed as ways to get an easy degree and quick money, in the form of about $16,000 a year in government loans for living expenses.
“Join a university without any qualification and get up to 18,500 pounds,” reads one advertisement on Facebook, listing no school, only a phone number and the money figure, which is about $23,000. Dozens of similarly anonymous posts appear on Facebook groups for Eastern Europeans in Britain.
“Do you want to study at the easiest university in U. K.?” asks another ad. “Do you need additional income?”
Higher-education experts say that partnerships between publicly funded universities and for-profit schools like Oxford Business College can prepare older students and those in underserved areas for better careers. Oxford Business College offers two-day-a-week schedules to working students and others who take nontraditional paths to higher education. Some students said the college offered opportunities that they otherwise would not have, and a national student survey showed strong approval ratings.
Many of the partnerships are new, and it is difficult to determine whether they help students land higher-paying jobs after graduation. The data, in general, is murky.
What is clear is that schools are making money in a fast-growing corner of the world-renowned British university system with little oversight. Regulators say the system is vulnerable to exploitation.
Oxford Business College has at least three partnership deals with accredited, publicly funded universities. Every new student admitted under these deals means tuition money for both the college and its publicly funded partner.
That created huge incentives to enroll students, former recruiters and interviewers recalled. Recruiters, known as “sales executives,” said they were paid based on how many students they enrolled. Some students who struggled to speak English were admitted, according…
2023-06-05 02:00:17
Source from www.nytimes.com