Salon.com > For-profit colleges

Don’t share that infographic spam

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 12:45:00 +0000

Won’t you share my infographic, please?

The pitch always seems so friendly and flattering. Someone out there on the Web has noticed that you are interested in a particular topic. It could be the digital divide, or climate change, or Elon Musk, or even the Oxford Comma. It could be pinned to the news of the day or something that you might have blogged about five years ago. It could seem completely random.

But the pitch itself rarely varies. "Allison" or "Alexandra" or "Tony" represents a team of designers and researchers that has created an "infographic" that they'd love to "share" with you. Score!

The online university of spam

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 12:45:00 +0000

My journey into the sleazy heart of for-profit college Web marketing began with a weird email. It ended with a huge waste of taxpayer money.

The subject header: "Link Removal Request." The sender: "Janelle Goodman," who billed herself as "a representative" of the "compliance team" at an outfit called BachelorsDegreeOnline.

Goodman wanted me to remove a link from my site, which she identified as keilarowski.com/get-almost-any-book-for-free-100-kosher-sites, to her site, BachelorsDegreeOnline.com. She politely informed me that the request was part of a "process" in which BachelorsDegreeOnline was "looking to clean up some of our content and our backlink profile to ensure that we are in full compliance with Google's recently updated Webmaster Guidelines."

"We thank you for your time and are available to answer any questions about this process you may have," wrote Goodman.

Since I had no connection whatsoever to the "keilarowski.com" site and I have never linked to BachelorsDegreeOnline, I wrote back to Goodman and expressed my befuddlement.

University of Phoenix to phase out 115 campuses

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 14:05:00 +0000

The University of Phoenix, the largest for-profit university in the U.S., is shuttering 115 of its campuses and 90 learning centers. Much like the recent closing of nine for-profit Kaplan Higher Education campuses, the UoP news signals a decline in the for-profit sector after months of damning reports of low graduation rates, predatory recruiting tactics and stratospheric default rates on student loans.

The New York Times reported:

As the negative publicity about for-profits mounted — including many charges that the schools enrolled students who had almost no chance of succeeding, to get their federal student aid — both Kaplan and the University of Phoenix announced new programs, offering some form of free trial, to ensure that they enrolled only students who had a reasonable likelihood of success. Those programs cut substantially into their enrollment numbers.