Learning for Earning

At 18, Anne DeNapoli was a discouraged liberal arts student at Nassau Community College on Long Island. "I really felt that I was accomplishing nothing," she recalls. "I was learning things, but nothing that I could use in the future." She dropped out of college to enroll in Katharine Gibbs School, which promised her secretarial skills that would enable her to get a job immediately after graduation.

Her decision has become increasingly common. As a result, while many liberal arts colleges languish or go out of business for lack of students and money--at least 300,000 college openings for next fall are still vacant--vocational schools are booming. Among the chief beneficiaries are the nation's 9,000 "proprietary" schools, so called because they make profits for their owners. In ten years, they have grown to about 1,000,000 students, about 10% of the U.S. population enrolled in higher education. Their business now totals an estimated $2 billion a year.

Proprietary schools train students for a wide range of careers--from fashion modeling to computer programming to flying. One school outside Philadelphia teaches students how to tell male from female chicks, a skill needed by commercial poultry producers; four others, in Las Vegas, train card dealers. All share a businesslike outlook: compared with standard college programs, the proprietary schools' training courses are short (often less than a year) and tuition is cheap (about $1.50 per classroom hour as against the colleges' $4 or more). Explains J.S. Olins, vice president of the Bryman School: "We're not interested in education for education's sake but in education for employment's sake."

The Bryman School, headquartered in West Los Angeles, trains medical assistants at 14 locations across the country. Students are assigned only one book: a fat loose-leaf notebook that is supposed to contain all the knowledge the profession requires. As techniques change, new pages are inserted. Says President John Krebs: "We boil out all the nonessentials. We teach only those things that help a person get and keep a good job." Bryman places about 85% of its graduates in jobs and recently became the first proprietary school to have programs accredited by the American Medical Association.

Until recently, such endorsements were almost unheard of. Most educators held proprietary schools in low esteem because of all too frequent abuses--ads promised high salaries but training was often inadequate. Three years ago, Senator Walter Mondale called such unprincipled schools "the last legalized con game in America." Even today, 18 states have no laws regulating the schools. The proprietary-school industry itself has set up voluntary accrediting boards, but many schools have ignored them because they can fill their classes without accreditation.

The Federal Trade Commission has been cracking down, however. Last May, it issued guidelines to keep proprietary-school advertising honest, and it has taken specific action against eleven schools in the past year. Among other things, it required the Pat Quinlan Model and Finishing School of St. Louis to stop implying that its training qualified graduates as stewardesses (most airlines train their own) and ordered Chicago's LaSalle Extension University to advertise the fact that its law degree would not qualify students for a bar exam.

Aside from curbing abuses, the reform efforts have shown that the industry includes many good schools. In recent years, several universities, such as the University of Minnesota and Southern Illinois University, have begun accepting transfer students from approved proprietary schools. Nine states presently permit them to confer "associate" degrees. Now, Congress has authorized grants for financially poor students who enroll in accredited proprietary schools under the Higher Education Act it passed in June.

For both the schools and their students, an impressive degree is less important than job placement. New York's highly rated RCA Institutes, owned by RCA Corporation, operates three shifts a day training TV and electronics technicians in a former warehouse and places 79% of the graduates. Half of RCA's nontenured faculty lack college degrees, but nearly all have job experience. Such a practical approach attracts students like Angelo Miranda, 24, who briefly considered going to college, then decided, "What I'm really after is money." His bench mate, Robert Sandberg, 19, a dropout from the City University of New York, agrees: "As a technician, you can still get rich." Katharine Gibbs, which graduates 2,000 secretaries a year from five East Coast sites, requires relentless drill in typing, shorthand and other office skills ("It's the most brutal school in the world," says one recent graduate), but it places almost all of its graduates in jobs.

No Frills. The better proprietary schools claim that their new respectability in the academic world is well earned. "We're much more responsive to change than most public colleges," says Bryman's President Krebs. "Things it takes public education three years to do we can do in three months." Three enterprising Philadelphia lawyers, for example, decided that lawyers could use assistants trained in the rudiments of the law, quickly set up a school and graduated their first class in July 1970. Since then twelve community colleges have founded similar programs.

Well-managed schools net 7% to 10% of annual revenues--a fact not lost on American businessmen. In recent years, such corporate giants as CBS, Bell & Howell and ITT have eagerly bought up schools. But the most interesting effect of the proprietary schools may be their influence on the hard-pressed colleges, which see increasing merit in the schools' cost-conscious approach--full-time teachers (up to 25 hours a week instead of ten), rented buildings and leased equipment instead of handsome campuses, no summer vacations and no frills. As one proprietary-school administrator puts it, "If a kid wants a gym, we send him to the Y."

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