Washington Monthly - September/October 2024 - 58

ever do too well for themselves, the difference between their
salary and a middling income will be siphoned off to pay for
the massive loan (and its interest). Vegas, who's on such a
plan, usually makes so little money that his monthly payments
are set at zero; now that he's having a good year, he'll
likely pay a few hundred dollars a month in 2025. He's looking
to buy a small home, but he's been rejected by almost every
bank he's applied to, and still lives in a rented apartment.
Accreditors tend to stand
idly by, imposing standards
on programs' faculty,
curriculum, and assessment,
but never on costs. The head
of the largest counseling
accreditor told me, " It's the
institution's prerogative
to set tuition and fees. "
Of course, as Vegas has experienced, when considering
a loan application for a house, a car, or almost any large purchase,
creditors usually require you to put some money down
and show some likelihood of being able to pay it off someday.
That's not the case for master's programs. If you were
to go to a sports car dealership and ask for a $189,000 car
loan with 0 percent down and an income of under $57,000 a
year-precisely the deal Northwestern offered Vegas-you'd
be laughed out of the building (and be safe from crippling
debt). Unlike the car dealer or the mortgage lender, Northwestern
doesn't care if you pay back your loans. They've
already got the money.
W
hen prospective students seek out resources to help
them compare programs, they often find rankings
that either prize prestige, not outcomes, like U.S.
News's social work rankings, or worse, search-engine-optimized
consumer guides that use irrelevant undergraduate or
university-wide data to `rank` master's degrees, like Psychology.org's
counseling program rankings. The Wall Street Journal
has an interactive that shows average debts and incomes
two years after graduation across programs, but it's behind
a paywall.
Overwhelmed-or perhaps underwhelmed-prospective
students often resort to asking for information from
schools directly.
And that's when the salespeople intervene.
" I signed up as someone who was interested and wanted
more information about the program, " Sofia-who
58 September/October 2024
requested that we use only her first name-told me of her
experience in the summer of 2019. " And the next day I got a
recruitment call. "
According to Sofia, her recruitment agent was relentless,
calling her almost daily and remembering every detail
he heard. " He name-dropped some of my professors, " she
said. " He remembered my pets' names. "
She expressed to him that the program seemed too expensive,
with a tuition (not including housing or any other
costs) of between $133,824 and $190,440, depending on the
track. But the recruitment agent countered, selling her on
the " incredible power of being able to say that you went to
Northwestern. "
This " incredible power, " as Sofia recalls him saying, is
not recognized by the market. Northwestern's median earnings
five years after graduation, $56,897, are markedly lower
than the median master's program in this category: $63,675.
That recruitment agent worked for 2U, a private, forprofit
online education program management company
which also runs the online infrastructure that Northwestern's
master's program uses-software that, one alum told
me, she felt was constantly having " technological glitches "
and felt " clunky and old. " Though 2U's exact compensation
from Northwestern isn't publicly disclosed, the company's
standard deals with universities in 2019 involved keeping
60 percent or more of tuition revenues. (More recently, 2U
has reduced its standard revenue-sharing fee for degree programs
to 35 percent.)
If each student paid around $67,000 in tuition each
year, annual revenues would be in the neighborhood of $20
million, much of which would be taken off the top by 2U.
The company-which is currently undergoing a financial
restructuring-has faced criticism for this model in the past.
A 2021 Wall Street Journal exposé skewered the University of
Southern California's master's of social work program, which
used 2U to recruit thousands of students, leading to a sincedismissed
lawsuit against both 2U and USC. Last fall, the USC
School of Social Work dropped its affiliation with 2U-paying
them $40 million to sever the deal-and announced that it
would run all its online master's programs in-house. But if the
university will save money with that move, it seems not yet
to have passed on the savings to students. The list price of its
MSW online program remains about the same. That program
ranks last in our social work rankings.
Yet USC's program is still financially far less ruinous for
its graduates than Northwestern's. The median debt as a percentage
of income for graduates of USC's MSW program, 175
percent, pales in comparison to Northwestern counseling's
270 percent. As one former core faculty of the Northwestern
program told me, the remaining tuition dollars that the
university keeps-after 2U takes its cut-hardly seemed to
be spent on the master's program itself, which appears to
involve only 13 total faculty and administrators. Of course,
there's no shortage of things to spend money on at Northwestern,
both inside and outside of the Family Institute,
Washington Monthly - September/October 2024

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