There are lots and lots of higher education scams where schools lure in students with vague promises of great careers ahead of them if they pay the tuition and get the degree offered. Often, the students wind up with some dubious coursework or training followed by a fruitless job search. It can be financially ruinous.

In today’s Martin Center article, Peter Wood blows the whistle on a particularly egregious case involving the Los Angeles Film School.

He writes:

Most of the school’s students qualified for federal student loans: money that can be spent only to pay tuition at educational institutions that meet certain criteria. This is to prevent students from being fleeced at degree mills. The government determines whether a school is a degree mill by the percentage of students who graduate and get a well-paying job in their field of study. The Los Angeles Film School has an abundance of attractive programs, from “Animation: Environment and Character Design” to “Audio Production” and “Film Cinematography.” A bachelor’s degree in one of these costs about $80,000.

Okay, so what’s the problem? Students are led to believe that many grads land good jobs in the film business, but the way the school gives that impression is by creating temporary jobs and hiring grads for them.

This scam is just one instance of a far wider problem. As Wood explains,

My real interest in the Los Angeles Film School is that it is a microcosm of contemporary higher education. Its grift may be more obvious and the naiveté of its students more painful to behold, but these are differences of degree not kind. Inflating job-placement rates is a predatory practice most often associated with for-profit schools, but that may well be because so little attention is paid to the others. No one expects philosophy or English majors to segue easily into the job market, and the current surfeit of computer-science graduates is excused by the time lag between an industry boom and the years it takes to gain the relevant credential.

Higher education buyers would be much more careful if it weren’t for the folly of federal financial aid. That’s the root of the problem.