November 29, 2011

CareerMotivations today announces it’s free assessment service for students and career changers.   We provide a best in class validated assessment that helps prospective students determine career paths & college degrees which best fit their personal interests & motivations.  Combining a proven, reliable, fully validated assessment with the US Govt’s O’net, BLS & CIP code data allows us to provide an in-depth snapshot into one’s personal interests & motivations aligned with Career Path’s and associated College Degree programs.   Most agree that those who make well informed educational decisions are more likely to be students with higher retention, graduation & placement rates.
It’s about outcomes, we strive to ensure a Win – Win relationship between the student and the college.  Often students do not understand their motivations and therefore enroll in a path that leads to a lack of interest & boredom; when that occurs, the commitment vanishes and ultimately they drop out.  Since colleges are looking to improve outcomes and students are looking for guidance as to what’s right for them, CareerMotivations assessment provides that.
For Students: If you are a student or a working professional who is pursuing or advancing a degree, CareerMotivation’s online assessment can help you choose a specific degree that will lead you to your desired career path based on your personal motivations and interests. Selecting the right career path along with the associated degree program is an important step in reaching your future career planning, goals & success. Your personal career assessment will reveal your skills, interests, learning styles and motivation. The results are mapped to career & degree information which can be used as your guide for career development.
Solutions for Colleges: Colleges can offer the assessment to their prospective students  allowing both the student and the admissions reps to make a more informed decision.  We can map your college’s specific degree programs to the results allowing both admissions & prospective students to see which of your schools programs they are best suited for.  When you reach out to prospective students you can establish a value proposition and a trusted relationship with them & their families. The assessment when offered by your school will reinforce the importance of the decision they are looking to make and show them that you have their best interest in mind. What better way to establish a relationship of trust than by offering them a Free Career Assessment- one that helps them identify which career & educational path’s are available at your college is right for them. Advertising a Free Career Motivations assessment can also help attract new students, yield significant return with your recirc’s and reduce acquisition costs of students. Think of the relationship you establish with the prospective student and family when your admissions representative sits down with them to go over their results and helps them plan for their future and achieve their goals & desires.

Solutions for Call Center & Lead providers:

Lead providers can utilize a private labeled or co-branded version of the CareerMotivations assessment to increase lead generation volume and reduce the cost of prospect acquisition.  The registration can be customized to collect the data fields you require prior to users being able to take the assessment.  The registrations can be posted directly to your lead management system or dialer.  CareerMotivations believes the value of a lead who has taken an assessment is significantly higher than a lead alone.

About

CareerMotivations is an educational services company that specializes in providing interactive assessment solutions to secondary, post-secondary institutions and individuals. By capitalizing on proven techniques to determine a person’s educational and career motivations, we help identify mutually beneficial relationships between a student and their desired education and career path.

For more information on CareerMotivations services please visit www.careermotivations.com

Press Contact:

http://www.careermotivations.com/students/contact-us/

or email us at info (@) ffventures.com

Address:
14 Vervalen Street
Closter, New Jersey 07624

Phone: 201-564-7651
Fax: 201-215-0751

New article from the Chronicle:

Hollywood is a town built on illusions, and the Los Angeles Recording School sits at its center, a stone’s throw from the big-name studios its graduates dream of working for.

The for-profit college, which has trained thousands of students to be recording engineers, says it placed more than 70 percent of its recent graduates in jobs related to their degrees. But a new class-action lawsuit says those numbers are a fantasy designed to dupe prospective students and its accreditor, the Accrediting Council for Continuing Education and Training.

According to the suit, which was filed by a pair of former students last year, the college used “deceptive tactics and tricks” to make its placement rates appear higher than they were. It counted sales jobs at Apple and the Guitar Center as “creative positions” and offered gift cards to students who signed forms stating they were self-employed. It required its graduates to get business cards, then gave the cards to its accreditor as evidence the students were working.

“They were telling the public that they had a placement rate of 70 percent, but they had ways of getting around that,” said Sarah Woolston, a graduate and former career-services employee at the college.

The college, which is now in the process of closing, is fighting the lawsuit and denies any wrongdoing. In a statement, it said it “stands proudly behind the education it offers and remains focused on inspiring students with the experience and knowledge that they need to pursue a career in the entertainment industry.”

The allegations against the Los Angeles Recording School come as a growing number of for-profit colleges face lawsuits and investigations into their job-placement practices.

This month, Career Education Corporation, one of the largest for-profit providers, told investors that it had found “improper placement determinations” at some of its health-education and art-and-design colleges.

Click on the following link for the remainder of the article:

http://chronicle.com/article/Career-Colleges-Are-Accused-of/129754/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Last week we spent some time on the phone with a well-known industry short fund.  We discussed the industry as a whole, as well as specific issues facing the industry which were behind their premise that shorting the industry was a good play for the next few years. Topics such as gainful employment, new compensation rules, default rates and the power of non-profit brands extending into the online education were the main points.  Gainful employment in conjunction with 90/10 is in our opinion a biased illogical political move to hinder the growth of one industry segment for profit schools to the benefit of another nonprofit schools.  If the rule is sound & logical, why wouldn’t it

be industry wide, the answer is clear, it’s not a well thought out rule.  If the traditional colleges had to live within gainful employment you would see far fewer lawyers, doctors, economists, political scientists (maybe that’s a good thing) philosophers, literary scholars, teachers, artists, theorists etc.  Who’s going to fill the entry level positions?  Aren’t they stepping stones?  We guess they will be filled by graduates of traditional colleges with English, Liberal Arts & Art history degrees whose $200,000+ education clearly provided them with such a solid and relevant foundation.  Default rates, well they need to be managed, schools need to ensure that the engagement & value their student receive from the education provided them is compelling.  We need to utilize assessment to make sure students enter program they have real interest and a likelihood of success in.  And we need to screen for and provide the remedial assistance necessary for students to be able to be successful in their education.  Will the industry be able to manage them successfully, YES.  As for the value of brands, this is a topic which has been discussed for many years.

We all know a brand is valuable.  We all know having a brand is a huge advantage and can significantly reduce the marketing costs of student recruitment.  But the big caveat is “can”.  Most traditional colleges significantly lack the admissions infrastructure and wiliness to adapt as necessary to be competitive to succeed in the fast paced world of online  education.  The partnerships between traditional colleges and for profit enterprises have proven that they can work and achieve fast growth, but those are still few in number.  The real questions is when will we see an influx of these partnerships, and how much of an effect will they have on the for-profit EDU industry>

Education Sector has created such a measure, the “borrowing to credential ratio.”For each college, we have taken newly available U.S. Department of Education data showing the total amount of money borrowed by undergraduates and divided that sum by the total number of degrees awarded.

The results are revealing:

• Nationwide, the overall borrowing to credential ratio has risen sharply in recent years.

• Certain segments of the higher education industry—in particular, for-profitcolleges—are racking up far more student debt per degree than others.

• State policies matter a great deal, with seemingly similar public university systems achieving widely varying results for students.

• Among elite colleges and universities, some are making good on their pledgeto help low- and middle-income students graduate without major financialburdens while others are riding a wave of student debt to fame and fortune.

Keep in mind that this formula does not take into account the enrollment growth and thus lack of time for those new students to graduate, thus in many of the for profits case their number are artificially high as if they added 5000-35000 new students their numbers are significantly elevated due to their newness and do not reflect actuals.  This is a decent indicator for those schools with consistent flat enrollments

but not for those with rapidly changing enrollments.  Thus, those schools with declining enrollments may show better that actual results while those with enrollment growth will show higher inaccurate debt amounts.

 click here to viewreport: http://www.educationsector.org/sites/default/files/publications/Debt%20to%20Degree%20CYCT_RELEASE.pdf

ForProfitEdu.com is pleased to announce a Special opportunity for a Free trial of the CareerMotivations Assessment for its Members.  This opportunity is open to the first 10 Colleges that inquire and get started.  CareerMotivations is a fully validated assessment (University of Minnesota did the validation study) and over 7,000,000++ have taken the assessment.  In essence a person takes the assessment and it tells them which career paths (US govt. data Onet) they are most motivated to enjoy & succeed in.  It provides them with their learning styles, motivational qualities & which corresponding degree programs (available at your colleges) are a best match for them based on Govt. CIP code (Classification of Instructional Programs). It also provides the most recent Government data as to the career description, the employment outlook for that career path, related career paths, as well as salary information.

The tool is customized for each school/system, CareerMotivations enters all of the schools specific programs (CIP codes) and the school tells us what questions to ask on the registration (this becomes a valuable lead).  Then the user takes the assessment and when completed they can see the matches to each of the school’s programs as well as all of the government descriptions around each of them.   The report data is incredibly easy to understand yet detailed and the relationship & trust the admissions representative can have with the potential student and family is unmatched.   In essence, it provides a new low cost means of generating interested students, a strong bond and value created with admissions and a greater likelihood the student enrolls in the correct program (thus more likely to graduate), not to mention it shows the world that the school cares about each student individually and makes efforts to help the student make wise choices with accurate information.

Additional benefits over time include the ability to identify specific motivational traits & learning styles which tend to align with students who graduate as well as those students who drop.  Once these are identified, schools can utilize this information on intake to determine the appropriate degree path for the student and which ones may need additional attention from student management to help them graduate.

Schools thus far, have been interested in adding this to their website for increased inquiry generation, utilization in recirculation email campaigns to regenerate students from old leads and in social media & TV advertising to increase return on their advertising.

If you are interested in the Free Trial please contact us: http://www.careermotivations.com/contact-us/

CareerMotivations and ForprofitEDu are non related entities, if your firm has a special offer for the 5000+ member of forprofitedu.com group please contact us

ForProfitEDU would like to extend an exclusive invitation to you to attend The Capital Roundtable’s conference on Private Equity Investing in Education Companies, being held on Thursday, July 21 in New York City.

As a partner, we have the privilege to put your name on our VIP list, allowing you to register for a special rate of $995 — $400 off the standard registration price.

This day-long conference is being chaired by Daniel Black, Managing Partner at Wicks Group of Companies, and features 20 experts.

For registration or inquiries, just call Shaina Mardinly at 212-832-7333 ext. 0, or email her at smardinly@capitalroundtable.com.  Please be sure to mention our name.

For more details, click here:

http://www.capitalroundtablemail.com/masterclass/Capital-Roundtable-Private-Equity-Education-Conference-2011.html?&tag=forprofitedu
I hope to see you on July 21 for what promises to be a great day.

P.S. Since we expect this conference to attract a strong attendance, please register as soon as possible to reserve your seat.

Yesterday the Obama Administration released final regulations requiring career college programs to better prepare students for “gainful employment” or risk losing access to Federal student aid.  Or at least thats how they put it…  Bottom line is that they eased a few caveats of the previous reg’s providing colleges with extended time for implementation, some flexibility on income data sources, interest only or income based payments, and minor changes to debt to income metric.

While this is at least a bit more manageable than the previous reg’s most believe it’s still harmful to many constituents in the lower income and minority segments.  Hopefully this will be a sign and more thought will go into future revisions.

link to the rules on ed.gov: http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/gainful-employment-regulations

Over the last few years there have been tremendous amount of conversations over the need for and value of lead scoring.  While companies such as targus have secured  nice subscription based revenue models by charging for lead scoring service many don’t find them as necessary.  In the beginning vendors dismissed the value and accuracy of lead scoring as clearly they dented the “valid lead” pile.  Arguments ensued as to how you can say the lead is not valid when the data is accurate and the person initiated the action of requesting info from the schools.  Others claimed it was the equivalent of profiling and thus prevented equal access.

With the gainful employment regulations pending many more schools looked into it as they felt compelled to target a higher level (financially) demographic for fear the other could not afford an education.  Once again leave it to the Govt. to create rules that negatively effect those who need it the most… but I digress…

The results of the 2011 EDU survey showed that only 8.3%  considered lead scoring extremely valuable and 22.6% found it valuable.  Which means 70% don’t see much value or importance in it, especially for 2011.  While I am sure that targus folk will differ and many may be in arms regarding this post, we are simply reporting what the schools and industry responded in the 2011 EDU advertising and marketing survey!

The Huffington post recently posted a strikingly negative article about Kaplan.  Link to article is below.  The industry is clearly headline material for tv, print and online articles all unfortunately negative, why cant the industry get some positive press?  Any of us who have actually been to a graduation at a forprofit school can attest to the lives that have been changed as well as the appreciation from the families and friends.   

At Kaplan University, ‘Guerilla Registration’ Leaves Students Deep In Debt

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/22/kaplan-university-guerilla-registration_n_799741.html?page=1