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How can I get research experience outside the college setting?

How do I report a college?

  • I apologize for the length (and any typos). Please read in its entirety. I recently graduated from the Los Angeles Film School. It is a nationally accredited for-profit school that awards Associate Degrees. The total cost (including living expenses and money taken out for my thesis film) was $84,000. Before anyone lectures me on how dumb that was, I didn't know it then. I was just a high school graduate with the dream of someday becoming a production designer. After doing research (too late, I know) I discovered how useless this degree I paid so much for was. As a kid I was always told, if you go to college, you'll be successful. Neither one of my parents graduated, so no one told me the importance of accreditation, let alone the difference between regional and national accreditation. I have now enrolled myself into a local community college to begin pursuing an Art History Degree. That way, even if I am not successful in the film industry, I will at least have a regionally accredited degree, and can hopefully teach. Teaching is something I'm also interested in. My question here today involves holding this school accountable. It is not their fault by any means that I did not do my research. Just like I found all of this information after the fact, I could have found it before. The only reason I started doing research, however, was because of the school's questionable coursework and structure. The teachers are supposed to be industry professionals, but all of them are graduates of the school, and have at most worked in entry level positions on Discovery Health Channel reenactments. A select few (thankfully the Production Design teachers) were very successful in the 80s and late 90s. Most of the teachers are just there to collect a check until their next big break. In fact, my Producing teacher left mid-class to go produce some indie film he had been working on for five years. Don't get me started on the Financial Aid and Business Office Departments. My entire time there I only received one on time check, and two months after graduation I discovered, by chance, that I had $800 just sitting there. The general education courses are also a joke. They are partnered with Full Sail, so we take them through their site. I am not even kidding when I say you can pass them without even doing the readings. They can't possibly be college level. I would like to know who should I report this to? Don't get my wrong, despite everything I've stated, I still had a good time. I made life-long friends, met my husband, and left knowing a great deal about not just Production Design, but film making as a whole. There are a few bad apples there that spoil the bunch, and I would like to be involved in fixing them. The school is only 12 years old. No school is perfect after 12 years. I believe if I can get enough people to actually care about the school, maybe 30 years from now it could be up there with the rest of the film schools. A few of the teachers there really do care. The rest are just looking for something to do until the next job comes in, and as a student you can absolutely tell the difference. If I had to pay $89,000 for this degree, I'm going to make sure that somewhere down the line this piece of paper actually means something. I have tried setting up an alumni group, but I have only gotten one other student interested. I thought I had two, but the other student went on a rampage demanding we create a petition, sue the school, and get our money back. That is a bit extreme. I'm not trying to do that. I am just trying to make sure that the LAFS students after me get a better experience. USC, UCLA, and NYU became those schools because of the students that that went there and gave back. This is me trying to give back. I just need to know where to start. Thank you. P.S. I notice there are a lot of for-profit schools that get away with subpar education. How is it that they are still open?

  • Answer:

    President Obama and Sen. Tom Harkin been trying to do something about scam schools. The easiest way to shut them down would be to make them ineligible for federal financial aid. Unfortunately the schools are able to pay lobbyists to be sure that Congress doesn't enact any meaningful rules. You can start reading about it by using the link below. However, this is a continuing problem and you can learn much more by doing additional reading. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/10/us/politics/for-profit-college-rules-scaled-back-after-lobbying.html?pagewanted=all

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There's a lot to address here. Your basic question is where you should go to report the school. The problem is that "report" implies that they have broken a law, violated a contract, misrepresented themselves, or in some other way have acted dishonestly. I suspect that you will have serious difficulty proving them to have been dishonest. As a proprietary school, they operate for a profit, so they have done nothing wrong in charging you exorbitant fees. It's their choice. You have correctly evaluated the "accreditation" situation, so you already know that it is a waste of time to try to report them to the accrediting agency. As long as they are acting within that agency's guidelines, there will be nothing to "report." You might consider complaining to the state attorney general, but again, your complaint would have to be based on the school's having violated a state law. So here comes the bottom line: You really are better off forgetting about the whole business. Your analysis of what happened, why you made your mistakes, and where you went wrong is absolutely correct. You were a victim of inexperience and a lack of information. You didn't do anything wrong. But there is no evidence in your description of the events which indicates that the school did anything wrong either. (One suggestion: You might look over the materials they gave you before you enrolled to see if there are any promises about your getting a job with your degree. While they were probably smart enough to promise absolutely nothing, they may have slipped up there, and you can nail them for failing to get you a job. Of course, any job they get for you meets the standard, so that, too, may not work.) Your question includes complaints about the quality of the instruction. I have taught at two major universities and two smaller colleges over a 40 year career, and I can absolutely testify that there is always a wide range of talent, dedication, and enthusiasm on the part of the members of any teaching staff. No matter where you go, some of the faculty will be super terrific, and others will be duds. It's the nature of life. My recommendation is that you put the experience behind you, expensive though it was, and concentrate on looking ahead. Unless you want to pour more money down the drain by hiring lawyers in a frantic (and probably unsuccessful) effort to sue the school, or unless you want to spend countless hours researching ways you can undermine their operation by reporting them to supervisory organizations (like state boards of education) and probably end up getting ignored anyway, your time is much better spent concentrating on future endeavors. You deserved better, and I am sorry to hear of your bad experience, but you're about to become a poster child for "throwing good money after bad," and I think you have had enough misery from this experience.

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