One year after leaders of for-profit colleges unveiled plans for a voluntary code of conduct for their industry, not one additional college has joined the group beyond the original 16 college companies, and its promised “student protection Web site, establishing useful resources for students,” is nowhere to be found.
The Foundation for Educational Success, which is coordinating the code of conduct, is a successor to the Coalition for Educational Success, an organization that was active in the heated political fight against the Obama administration’s proposed new regulations covering for-profit colleges, including the “gainful employment” rule now being contested in federal court.
A political consultant hired by the foundation to manage the operation of the code, officially the “Standards of Responsible Conduct and Transparency,” says a five-member Board of Advisers and its chief enforcement officer continue their progress in establishing the foundation as a working organization.
But one of those board members, Elizabeth M. Morgan, reached by The Chronicle this week, said she had been told “we’re kind of not active anymore.” She is chief education adviser to America’s Promise Alliance, an organization that works to reduce the high-school dropout rate.
Ms. Morgan was one of three board members who took part in a news conference last fall at the National Press Club where the code was unveiled. Another board member who participated in the Press Club event and called the code “ahead of the curve,” the Harvard University education professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, sent word via an assistant that she was unavailable for comment.
The third, former Gov. Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, did not respond to repeated inquiries seeking comment. Neither did the two other board members, Thomas H. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey and chairman of the 9/11 Commission, and Jonathan F. Fanton, a former head of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Patrick C. Lynch, a former Rhode Island attorney general hired by the foundation to evaluate member colleges’ adherence to the code, also did not respond to requests for comment over several weeks. He had suggested that the code could obviate the need for tighter regulations now being considered by attorneys general in many states.
Penny Lee, the political consultant who is managing director of the foundation, said in a series of e-mail exchanges that the foundation had established itself in January as a nonprofit corporation based in Washington, D.C. She said the initial member companies were developing programs to meet the code, including the keystone of the standards, a 21-day free trial period for newly enrolled students. Members have a year to come into compliance. The code calls for members to provide an independent audit of their adherence to the standards, which Mr. Lynch would then review.
“We expect the audit processes to begin this spring,” Ms. Lee wrote in an e-mail message.
‘Still Under Design’
Ms. Lee is also president of Venn Strategies Inc., a Washington-based lobbying and public-relations firm, and worked for Mr. Rendell when he was governor. She said the foundation, which is now solely financed by its members, pays Venn for her services.
The student-protection Web site “is still under design,” Ms. Lee said. As for the foundation’s goal of attracting backing beyond its own members to help establish its independence, she said, “We are still in conversations with other outside entities.”
When it began, the foundation said its members represented about 17 percent of all enrollments in the for-profit-college sector. Members included two of the industry’s largest companies, the Career Education Corporation and Kaplan Higher Education.
Kaplan was already offering students the chance to opt out of courses after five weeks without being obligated to pay tuition when it signed onto the standards, and it will continue that policy, said a spokesman, Ken Brown. “We’d like to see more colleges and universities, from every sector of higher education, join us in committing to standards such as these,” he added in an interview this week.
Beginning in November, Career Education will convert its five-week orientation course—for which the company does not charge tuition if students fail or withdraw—into a 21-day trial program for a new undergraduates.
A spokesman for the company said the move did not represent a backing away from the longer trial period. Rather, said the spokesman, Mark Spencer, Career Education was expanding the trial period’s availability from only online students with no transfer credits to “all undergraduate students who are new to the university.” He also said that since most dropouts occur in the first few weeks of classes, 21 days is “an ample trial period.”
After the initial news conference, the foundation’s organizers campaigned for several months in a quest to enlist additional members, including an October 2011 event in Denver aimed at for-profit colleges that featured the New York Times columnist Joe Nocera as a keynote speaker, but no others have joined.
Backers of another voluntary code, designed specifically for regionally accredited for-profit colleges, have had no better luck in finding additional signatories, said Dario A. Cortes, president of Berkeley College and a prime backer of the code, called the Accord. He said he was sorry that more colleges hadn’t signed on but said the Accord was valuable because colleges that did, including Strayer University and American Public University, were already making more information about the cost of their programs and the qualifications of their faculty easier to find on their Web sites.
When the foundation’s code was announced, U.S. Sen. Richard J. Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois who has been a vocal critic of for-profit colleges’ aggressive recruiting, offered mild praise for the effort as a good “first step” by some colleges toward reform—an endorsement the foundation still cites on its Web site.
A year on, Mr. Durbin, whose state is home to the headquarters of Kaplan and Career Education, said he is disappointed by the lack of progress. In a written statement to The Chronicle, he said: “Very little, if anything, has been accomplished with this voluntary code of conduct because the industry has not been willing to make the most basic reforms.”
