For-profit colleges have failed us before. Keep Arizona College of Nursing out. | Opinion

(Editor's Note: Damia Causey is the spouse of Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist James E. Causey. James Causey was not involved in the selection or editing of this piece.)

We’ve seen this picture before, and it’s not pretty. For-profit colleges like Everest and ITT Tech descended on Milwaukee before and during the Great Recession. While their executives were paid exorbitant salaries, and their stockholders realized outsized returns, the students they recruited from Milwaukee’s poorest neighborhoods were left jobless with broken dreams, credits that didn’t transfer, useless degrees, and huge debts.

Now, a new for-profit college, the Arizona College of Nursing, or AZCN, hopes to start business in Milwaukee. City leaders should recall the proverb: “Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

AZCN's stakeholders are investors and executives, not students or taxpayers. The leadership team is dominated not by educators or healthcare professionals but by businessmen.

Their business practices, like other for-profit "colleges," is to spend big on marketing and sales, spend little on instruction and counseling, and, most important, to vacuum up dollars from the federal government’s financial aid system. Of course, financial aid is intended to help students from impoverished families get degrees or certificates leading to jobs, not to enrich executives.

For-profit colleges have poor track record of success

For-profit colleges have a history of targeting students of color and military veterans with little experience in higher education. Research, including a study by a committee of the U.S. Senate, shows that “students who opt for for-profit schools over similarly selective public colleges borrow more, default at a higher rate, and have lower likelihood of employment."

Damia Causey has seen this first-hand. Now an MATC nursing student, she previously attended a for-profit college. “These schools are attractive to Black single mothers mired in minimum wage jobs because of their accelerated programs,” she reports. “They appeal to students’ desire to get through quickly, but they don’t tell you that their credits don’t transfer and that no one will hire you.”

A decade ago, when Everest College was pursuing a Milwaukee location, a coalition of community leaders opposed it because it had a long history of swindling students and paid $7 million to settle a lawsuit over its fraudulent practices.

Unfortunately, city officials and the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce didn’t listen. A year and a half later Everest went belly up with an abysmal job placement rate of 5%, leaving almost 1,000 students in a lurch. Lateesha Love, a young, single mother who attended Milwaukee’s Everest campus recalled, “Everest sold us a dream, but delivered a nightmare. It was a waste of time I did not have. It set me back. I wish I had never enrolled.”

Not surprisingly, AZCN is subject to a lawsuit similar to the one Everest lost. Students in Dallas have accused AZCN of fraud only four years after the campus opened. Their claims are familiar: students were overcharged for courses, not informed that their credits wouldn’t transfer, and discouraged from completing their studies successfully.

Like other for-profit colleges, AZCN has a high student-loan default rate of 21%. That’s not surprising given its extremely high tuition of $28,000 to $37,000 a year, which doesn’t include books, scrubs, supplies, transportation, room, board, or other costs of attendance. Nationally, for-profits enroll 10% of college students but account for 50% of all student loan defaults.

Another problem: in order to be licensed, nursing students must serve under supervision in hospitals or clinics. Milwaukee currently has a range of public and private colleges that are challenged to find enough clinical placements for their nursing students. All of the AZCN clinical sites included the warning that “This agency intends to offer clinical placement(s) to the extent that we have capacity at the time of the request….”

Equally disturbing 18 of the 29 clinical sites that the AZCN lists are located outside the city. Several are not even in Milwaukee County. We know from our experience and because of the spatial mismatch sited by urban scholars that low-income, students of color, the students the AZCN targets, are likely to lack access to reliable transportation. Clinicals in Pewaukee, Janesville, and Oconomowoc might as well be on Mars. With practices such as these, it is no wonder that the AZCN has a 60% drop-out rate.

Milwaukee nurse groups oppose Arizona College of Nursing

This is why local branches the National Black Nurses Association and National Association of Hispanic Nurses have joined other organizations to oppose AZCN: allowing it to operate in Milwaukee would cannibalize existing clinical placements and undermine the capacity of current nursing colleges to serve students.

AZCN lobbyists will claim that Wisconsin’s shortage of nurses is the reason they should open. Now, the nursing shortage is real. However, experiences in Milwaukee and cities around the nation indicate that for-profit colleges do nothing to solve that shortage.

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Milwaukee city government will be considering this soon. They should listen to Ms. Causey, whose experience was shared by thousands of other Milwaukee for-profit college students: “Attending a for-profit college changed the trajectory of my life in a terrible way. It was a total waste of time, money and effort.”

Allowing businesses like AZCN into our community adversely impacts the welfare of our citizens. This picture is clear: leaders have a responsibility to keep Arizona College of Nursing out of Milwaukee.

Edna Hudson-Kizey is president of the Milwaukee Chapter of the National Black Nurses Association. Connie Smith is president of the Wisconsin Federation of Nurses & Healthcare Professionals Local 5000.