Want grad rates for a master’s program? Good luck.

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Note: This week's newsletter comes from my colleague Sarah Butrymowicz. A story she and Meredith Kolodner wrote last week, co-published in The New York Times, reported on the ways for-profit colleges and universities are working to increase enrollment in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Today, Sarah shares insights on the particular problems of graduate students at some of these institutions. -Delece

By Sarah Butrymowicz

Last week, Meredith Kolodner and I wrote about Shawn Cooper, an Air Force veteran who owes more than $100,000 in student loans for a doctoral program he wasn’t able to complete at Capella University. He says the school dragged out his dissertation process while he racked up more and more debt and that he was eventually kicked out of his program, despite having a 4.0 GPA.

Joe Peiffer has heard many similar stories. His law firm, Peiffer Wolf Carr Kane and Conway, filed a lawsuit against Capella in 2018, alleging that the school had misled prospective students about how long it would take to complete their doctorates. Peiffer believes that the vast majority of Capella doctoral students never graduate, but he can’t prove it, because the school has refused to release completion data to him.

Unlike at the undergraduate level, completion rates for master’s or doctoral degree programs aren’t collected and reported in any standardized way. People who are looking for programs often only have the schools’ word to go by when trying to gauge how successful former students have been – if the school reports that information at all.

Yet each year about 3 million students enroll in graduate programs nationwide, and graduate student loans now account for about 40 percent of all federal student loans issued annually.

Hundreds of colleges and universities across the country enroll more graduate students than undergraduates, according to federal data. At Capella, nearly three-quarters of students – more than 27,000 – were in graduate programs in the fall of 2018.

Strategic Education officials declined to comment on Peiffer’s allegation that they refused to share completion data, citing pending litigation. They also did not respond a request to provide us with data. They described the lawsuit as “without merit” and noted that of the majority of claims had been dismissed.

Several of the companies that we wrote about last week with dubious undergraduate track records also have substantial numbers of master’s degree and doctoral students. Strayer University, also owned by Strategic, had nearly 11,000 graduate students across all its campuses in 2018. Ashford University had more than 6,000. (Ashford reports a 53 percent graduation rate for its most recent master’s degree cohort, down from a high of 66 percent nearly a decade ago.)

Federal information about student success in these programs is sparse. That’s likely at least partly because the federal government began, in the early 1990s, collecting graduation rates only for student-athletes, according to Oliver Schak, research director at The Institute for College Access and Success. The government later expanded that to collecting data on first-time, full-time undergraduates. In 2017, it began publishing outcomes for all undergraduate students.

“Grad programs just were never included in that partially because the original purpose had to do with a group of undergraduate students,” Schak said. Completion information for graduate programs could shine a helpful light on disparities and barriers to finishing degrees, he added.

Recently, the Department of Education has begun to publish some graduate student outcomes online – if you know where to look for them. Graduate programs are included in a downloadable spreadsheet that details median debt and earnings one year after graduation.

The department frequently defends its track record on oversight by pointing to the increased amount of consumer information that it has released, including this data. Critics say, though, that the department has simultaneously reduced or removed other disclosure requirements. And the graduate-student data isn’t available in the same consumer-friendly format that general undergraduate information is.

“Right now, this information is buried on a department website,” said Michael Itzkowitz, a senior fellow at the center-left think tank Third Way. “If [the department] were to believe in a full transparency regime, you would think that you would want to get this key-outcomes information directly in the hands of students.”

Should the Department of Education make an effort to count graduate students’ outcomes in its evaluation of for-profit colleges? How could it help ensure students don’t leave these programs without their degree yet deeply in debt? Email or tweet me your thoughts.

*Correction: In last week's newsletter on Hispanic-serving institutions and the CARES Act, an HSI I mentioned is Texas A&M University-San Antonio (not Texas A&M College-San Antonio).

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Want grad rates for a master’s program? Good luck.

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