Taxpayers cover tuition at California’s for-profit schools. The results? Low-wage, high-turnover jobs

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Kiana Munoz didn’t have much time. She had a baby to care for and needed to earn money after just graduating from high school. When she saw that Premiere Career College, a for-profit school in Los Angeles County, promoted its ability to help her get a job as a medical assistant, she enrolled.

But after graduating, she couldn’t find work. She said she spent months searching for a job at doctors’ offices, but eventually gave up and started working at Sears instead. More than six years later, she said she still owes the college more than $5,500.

In 2022, California spent nearly $61 million of taxpayer dollars from the federal Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act to support job training, typically for low-income and unemployed adults, according to the most recent data available. It’s one of the largest job training programs in California — designed by the federal government to prepare students for high-quality jobs .

The reality is far different.

Most adults who receive job training assistance get a tuition subsidy — over the past six years about half of those subsidy recipients went to private for-profit colleges — yet some of the most popular programs were for medical or nursing assistants, whose graduates earned less than $30,000 in the year after graduation, according to student outcome data collected by the state’s Employment Development Department.

Trucking is the only training program that’s more popular, statewide. While it pays higher wages, the working conditions are so grueling that most new drivers quit within the first year.

“These jobs are a concern,” said Abby Snay, deputy secretary at the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency. “We need to do better as a system in advising people.”

An attorney for for-profit Premiere Career College, Robert Orr, said the school would not comment in response to CalMatters’ questions about Munoz’s experience and how the school prepares students for careers.

For years, state leaders have tried to limit for-profit schools , and the state attorney general’s office has an explicit warning to prospective students on its website:

“The for-profit college and career training industry is not part of the public school system; they operate schools to maximize profits for their investors….Students have complained about aggressive recruiting practices, misleading graduation and employment rates, and illegal debt collection practices—their complaints suggest that many graduates can’t get jobs or afford to repay their loans. If you are not careful, enrolling in a for-profit school may leave you under a mountain of debt, but not help you get a job.”

While California’s labor agency tracks employment rates for graduates who use job training subsidies, it doesn’t gather specifics about where they are working or whether they are working in the industry for which they trained.

“There’s very little quality control,” said state Sen. Richard Roth , a Democrat from Riverside. “We spend so much money and we absolutely have no evaluation process in place to evaluate the use of the money.”

In 2022, the Legislature passed his bill asking subsidiaries of the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency to collect better outcome data for students who received state job training subsidies. In an April hearing , Jennifer Sturdy, who oversees evaluations with the workforce development agency, said those changes would cost more than $25 million and will go into effect only if the governor agrees to fund them in next year’s budget.

Why students prefer for-profit schools

Munoz’s medical assistant program at Premiere Career College was designed to get her a job at a doctor’s office. Along with classes, the school offers resume and interview preparation, and promises to refer students to potential jobs. “Secure a career as an entry-level medical assistant performing a variety of front-office administrative duties,” the website says, before listing other possible careers for graduates, such as phlebotomy.

That’s the primary benefit of many for-profit job training programs, according to interviews with officials at eight local workforce agencies: These programs are short, easy to access, and prioritize employment.

But Munoz struggled to get the job she trained for. After graduating, she said, she spoke with a staff member at the college’s career counseling department repeatedly, and that the counselor referred her to a number of job openings, but they all required fluency in Spanish. “I had let her know, like numerous times, that I was not bilingual,” said Munoz, referring to her counselor. She went to about 10 interviews, she said, only to be rejected each time because she doesn’t speak Spanish.

Today, the roughly six-month program at Premiere Career College costs just over $3,600 for tuition , plus roughly $3,000 for books and other fees, but tuition has varied widely each year, according to the school’s annual catalogs, which are submitted to the state. When Munoz was a student, the cheapest medical assistant program charged more than $10,000 , including tuition and fees — more than half of which she said she still owes.

In retrospect, Munoz wishes she had attended community college, which charges no tuition for low-income students.

Another way students can receive free tuition, even at a for-profit school, is if the taxpayers pick up the tab. At job centers, career counselors provide such tuition money for adults who are low-income or unemployed. Since summer 2020, the job centers run by the Los Angeles County Department of Economic Opportunity have paid tuition for 13 students to attend Premiere Career College, according to department data.

The Los Angeles department can refer students only to schools that meet its own requirements. Their training programs must be relatively short, typically less than six months, and the schools must individually track the wages and employment outcomes of any student referred by a workforce agency. “A lot of the colleges don’t want to go through the process, or it doesn’t align well with their semester or quarterly system,” said Irene Pelayo, a department program manager.

Ultimately, students decide which institution to attend, among those that meet the requirements. She said the job centers typically see clients who prefer short-term programs and those that promise a job right after graduation.

Turnover, low wages plague popular career paths

From 2018 through 2023, the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency oversaw training for as many as 12,700 people, more than a quarter of whom attended for-profit trucking schools, according to the state’s data.

Trucking programs offer a “big bang at the end,” said Pelayo, referring to the starting wage of graduates. A “perceived big bang,” she clarified.

While experienced truckers can earn more than $100,000 a year, the career falls short in other ways. To gain the necessary experience, most graduates must first go into long-haul trucking, where they work 80-100 hours a week carrying goods across the country. They spend weeks on the road, away from friends and family, and in some cases, they end up earning less than minimum wage, according to a 2023 report from the UC Berkeley Labor Center. As a result, the report said, long-haul trucking has “extraordinary levels of turnover.” Some companies have to hire an entirely new workforce every year.

“In terms of quality of training and first employment, this is like throwing workers into the deep end of the pool,” the report said.

Medical or nursing assistant is the second-most popular program, even though, as various government and academic research attests, the professions offer low wages and poor retention .

“Medical assistants don’t make very much,” said Tammy Vant Hul, dean of the school of nursing at Riverside City College. She said the community college doesn’t offer any medical assisting programs. The closest is a program to become a certified nursing assistant, which enables graduates to work in hospitals, where they take vital signs and help patients get dressed, or to become home health aides. These jobs are in high demand .

Vant Hul said Riverside City College began offering certificates for nursing assistants in 2018, after professors saw students attending private for-profit schools.

“Students were going to private programs and paying $3,000 for something they can get here for free,” she said. “The quality was poor.”

Last year the state awarded the community college a $1.4 million grant to expand its training for certified nursing assistants. Still, Vant Hul said, becoming a certified nursing assistant is not a “good stopping point” for a career. The certificate is useful, she said, mostly because it’s a prerequisite for becoming a licensed vocational nurse.

Community colleges are ‘changing the way we do things’

For years, Gov. Gavin Newsom and other state leaders have pushed a new agenda for job training programs — one that prioritizes what he calls “good-paying, long-lasting, and fulfilling careers.”

Snay, with the state Labor and Workforce Development Agency, acknowledged that its most popular careers rarely meet the governor’s recent directives. As one solution, she pointed to “ high road training partnerships ,” which are designed to use public money to get people into jobs that provide family-sustaining wages, benefits, opportunities for promotion, and a way for workers to express their voice, such as a union . Some of these partnerships help adults become electricians or state employees, while another trains certified nursing assistants. So far, the results of the “high road” initiative are mixed .

The governor is also pushing workforce agencies to collaborate more closely with colleges and universities. For years, the state has invested millions to boost enrollment at community colleges, often with the explicit goal of steering students away from expensive, for-profit schools and toward cheaper public options.

Learn more about legislators mentioned in this story.

“We’ve always felt there’s competition with these for-profit schools,” said Assemblymember Kevin McCarty , a Sacramento Democrat, in a hearing in March. He pressed community college leaders on what they’re doing to compete, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic decimated college enrollment rates .

“We’re changing the way we do things,” answered Wrenna Finche, a vice chancellor with the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office. She said community colleges are trying to offer more night and weekend classes, shorter semesters, and new enrollment practices that don’t require students to wait until the beginning of a semester to start a class.

Some community colleges choose not to compete with for-profits because the training doesn’t lead to what they consider high-quality jobs. The Los Angeles Community College District doesn’t offer any trucking courses, for example, though it does offer a certificate in truck maintenance, which pays better, said James Lancaster, the district’s vice chancellor of workforce and economic development. With each new major, he said, the district must prove to the state that the outcome is a job that’s “high skill, high wage, high demand.”

“It’s difficult to show that we should use state apportionment dollars to get somebody a minimum-wage job,” he said. “…For-profits can do whatever they want. They’re not guided by ethics.”

Job training data — or the lack of it

Around 10 years ago, when he was first elected to represent Riverside in the state Senate, Roth visited a regional workforce agency. “I was looking not only at the number of training dollars and the number of training programs, but also what the product was,” he said. He wanted to know what percentage of people got jobs and what their career progression was. “I couldn’t find anything like that.”

The law he wrote, if funded, would require state agencies to collect data about whether publicly funded students are employed in the careers they trained for. It would also gather data after the first year of employment, so that researchers could evaluate how publicly funded job programs affect a person’s long-term career trajectory.

A new interactive website also aims to improve data collection about job training results — but the site is far from ready. The state is still “modernizing” it, Sturdy, with California’s labor agency, told Roth in the hearing. She said the website currently includes only a subset of the state’s job training data.

For Roth, it all boils down to data — or the lack of it. “What gets measured gets done,” he said. “We have a definite lack of measurement activity going on with respect to these workforce training programs.”

He said he’s worried that publicly funded job training programs are preparing people for positions that don’t exist, or are misleading them about their potential wages after graduation.

After working in retail, Munoz found a front-office job at a doctor’s office, but it didn’t require her degree or pay her much more than minimum wage. She decided to go back to school to become a social worker.

“These schools are taking your money,” she said, “then you have to start all over if it doesn’t work out.”

Adam Echelman covers California’s community colleges in partnership with Open Campus, a nonprofit newsroom focused on higher education.

Financial support for this story was provided by the Smidt Foundation and the James Irvine Foundation.