Daily Debriefing
The London School of Business and Finance introduced a program late last month that allows users to earn an M.B.A. exclusively through a Facebook application, The New York Times reported. The application currently has over 30,000 active users. Aaron Etingen, founder of the London School of Business and Finance, said he expects 500,000 prospective students to test the program free of charge within the next year, according to The Times. Students pay for separate modules, which total about $23,000 the same cost as the school's campus-based and other distance-learning M.B.A. degrees. Courses on the Facebook application are divided into 10 modules, each of which contains a video lecture, a Facebook discussion, documents, study materials and tests, The Times reported.
For-profit colleges take on large numbers of students from underrepresented minorities while only graduating a small fraction these of students, a study released on Tuesday by Education Trust said. The report which is largely based on data from other studies conducted on higher education corporations reveals that for-profit institutions charge high costs of attendance, while only 22 percent of freshmen seeking bachelor's degrees at the institutions graduate within six years. The out-of-pocket cost to students at these institutions many of whom are minority and low-income students is often higher than for those enrolled in private colleges because private institutions usually provide institutional grants to help lower costs for their low-income students. The study found that nearly half of students at for-profit schools take out private loans to pay for tuition, and the median debt related to a bachelor's degree from these institutions is $31,910 almost twice as much as it is from a private, nonprofit college and nearly four times more than it is from a public university. Loan default rates among for-profit students are about twice as high as those of students at nonprofit institutions. According to the release, these for-profit colleges are targeting the most vulnerable Americans and burdening them with debt they cannot handle.
