Student in SCC’s Adult Education Program in Casey County featured in 2004 Adult Ed. Progress Report

Four college professors from Namibia visit SCC

'60 Minutes' Report on For-Profit Higher Education May Increase Scrutiny of the Industry, Observers Say

Congressional Proposal Would Tax Some Tuition Benefits and Shrink Other College Tax Breaks

Somerset Commonwealth Journal
January 31 , 2005

Student in SCC’s Adult Education Program in Casey County featured in 2004 Adult Ed. Progress Report

Rhonda Godbey, a student in the Somerset Community College Adult Learning Center in Casey County, was featured in the Kentucky Adult Education 2004 Progress Report.

Under the title, “Success Story: Rhonda Godbey, Casey County Ex-factory Worker Assembling New Career As Teacher.”

The 2004 Progress Report said that Godbey had worked at the Osh-Kosh B’Gosh children’s clothing factory in Liberty, Kentucky, for sixteen years. She had never worked anywhere else. In 2003, the factory closed.

According to the article, Godbey realized that finding a decent job with only a high school diploma was going to be difficult.

“So, I went down to the Casey County Adult Learning Center,” Godbey told the reporter. “I really can’t explain how great they were. They were good for moral support too. I appreciate them so much.”

Godbey said that the staff at the Casey County Adult Learning Center put her through a six-month refresher course in math, English and computer skills. Then they guided her toward post-secondary education and “gave me the hand-holding I needed to think differently about my future.”

Now, Godbey is a full-time student at Somerset Community College. She is pursuing her dream of becoming a schoolteacher.

“Mom and Dad had always wanted me to be a teacher,” Godbey said. “It may take me a while, but I’ll get there. Without the people at the Adult Learning Center, I doubt seriously I’d have gone on to college.”

Somerset Community College was awarded the Adult Education Grant for Casey County in 2002. Over the past three years, the program has met its enrollment goals and earned additional money to provide more assistance to adults in Casey County.

In 2003, the Casey County Learning Center moved into new quarters at 690 Wallace Wilkinson Blvd. just south of downtown Liberty near the nursing home.
The Casey County Adult Learning Center helps adults upgrade their reading and math skills. The Center also helps adults obtain their General Equivalency Diploma (GED). GED testing is free.

The Somerset Community College Office of Community and Economic Development operates the programs. Joyce Flynn, Assistant Director of Community & Economic Development, directs the Adult Education program grants administered by Somerset Community College. SCC also operates the Adult Learning Center in McCreary County. Mickey LaFavers is the Casey County Adult Learning coordinator. Call the Casey Co. Adult Learning Center at 606-787-4732. Other staff members include April Russell, who has recently taken a full-time job as Assessment Director for SCC; Jackie Card; Connie Kimbrel, and Tim Downey.

Flynn said that the Center also offered Workplace Essential Skills training for employers who want to upgrade the work skills of their employees. However, Flynn added that employees who wanted to improve their skills could do it on their own by coming to the Center.

“The College has done an outstanding job,” said Donna Potter, the Department of Adult Education’s consultant for Region 2. “Joyce and her staff have taken both programs and made them a success.”

“The SCC folks have been wonderful,” said Potter. “They have also met their goals for adult literacy, but they are planning to expand that program next year. They really have done an outstanding job.”

Flynn gives credit for the Casey County Adult Learning Center’s success to the people of Casey County and to the Casey County staff. “The community really bought into our program,” Flynn said. “People really have been very supportive and I can’t say enough good things about our wonderful staff.”

Somerset Commonwealth-Journal
January 31, 2005

Four college professors from Namibia visit SCC

Four faculty members in the Hospitality and Tourism Department at Namibia Polytechnic Institute, Helmi Hitula, Shiru Muhoho, Hendriena Shiyandja, and Joe Lewis, the dean of the Namibian Polytechnic Institute’s Hospitality Program, stopped in Somerset on Thursday, Jan. 20, to visit with Somerset Community College Hospitality Program instructor Gayle Borders and to learn about SCC programs.

The visitors are currently on a world tour visiting community college Hospitality Programs in many parts of the world. Their tour of the U.S.A. started with visits to Southeast Community College in Cumberland, KY, and to SCC. Next, the African teachers will head to Orlando, Florida, to visit a community college there. Then, their itinerary calls for a visit to Rhode Island and, finally, their last stop in the United States will be to Hawaii.

“I think it was an honor to be included in their tour of our countries best Hospitality Programs,” said Borders. “I knew we had a quality program and I’m happy to learn that other people feel the same way.”

The four African professors arrived in Lexington after a 20-hour airplane trip. At the airport, Paul Pratt, the dean of community and economic development at Southeast Community College, picked them up and took them home to Cumberland.

Thursday, the four were still suffering the affects of jet lag, but they seemed to enjoy their visit with Borders and a tour of the facilities on the SCC Somerset Campus North. They ate lunch in the new cafeteria located in the Harold Rogers Student Commons and were very impressed with SCC.

Namibia is a country located in South East Africa just north of South Africa. The nation has only been independent since 1990. Their tourism industry is centered on the wild animals, which make their home there. Some of the animals are elephants, rhinos, lions and giraffe. Today, many people from around the world are visiting Namibia to take safaris to see and photograph the wild animals in the country’s many wildlife preserves.

Namibia is about half the size of Alaska. It is a hot, dry country with the Namib Desert on the east and the Kalahari Desert in the west. Only about one percent of the country is suitable for farming. The median age of the population is only 18.

Of the four visitors, one was an Afrikaner (Caucasian descendents of early Dutch settlers), two were members of the nation’s majority tribe, the Ovambo, and one was an immigrant from Kenya.

The Owambo, mainly involved in agriculture and cattle farming, make up more 50 per cent of the Namibia's population. The Owambo is actually a collection of various tribes with a common culture and origin who moved to this region from East Africa. Today the various groups live in southern Angola and another eight in the northern Namibia, with the largest tribe called the Kwanyama.
They are also known as traders, and shopping complexes, stalls and cuca shops are found all over their region. The women are involved in intricate artwork and crafting like dressmaking, pottery, basketry and woodcarving. Like in many African cultures, the women are also traditionally responsible for cultivating the land and raising children. Many Owambos now work on mines or have moved to cities, however, the majority take pride in their heritage and identity and continue to maintain their kraals (a village consisting of traditional houses and a fence around it as protection).
The teachers were impressed by the SCC Hospitality Program and spent a good bit of time discussing it with Borders before they took a tour of the two new buildings on the SCC Somerset Campus North.

The Namibian were particularly impressed with the modern technology used to educate students at SCC. They found it hard to believe that a small college like SCC could have things like the three-dimensional computer programs that are used in the Computer Assisted Design classroom or the computer assisted tooling machines and lasers used in teaching machine tool technology.

“We have nothing like this in our country,” Lewis said. “In fact, our president, would probably be willing to purchase equipment like this from his own pocket, just so we could begin teaching it.”

According to Lewis, Namibia has very little manufacturing capability.

The Chronicle of Higher Education
January 31, 2005

'60 Minutes' Report on For-Profit Higher Education May Increase Scrutiny of the Industry, Observers Say

Observers of the for-profit higher-education industry anticipate some political fallout in the wake of the much-anticipated 60 Minutes report on the industry that was shown on Sunday night.

"It's going to cause them some grief," said David W. Breneman, dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia.

Although the segment on the CBS News program did not uncover new allegations of wrongdoing, its portrayal of aggressive and misleading admissions tactics employed at a number of colleges owned by Career Education Corporation could and should raise questions about how those institutions are regulated, he said.

The segment, which focused primarily on colleges owned by Career Education, included interviews with three former students of one of the company's Brooks College campuses in California, who said the college's admissions officers misled them about the kinds of jobs they could expect to claim as graduates of a fashion program. The students said they were stuck paying off thousands of dollars in loans for a worthless education and had received none of the job-placement help that they were promised when they enrolled.

Later, a 60 Minutes producer shown, via a hidden camera, being interviewed for admission at a campus of Sanford-Brown College, another institution owned by Career Education. The producer is admitted to the college, which trains students for jobs in health care, even though she tells the admissions counselor that she had bad grades in high school and "was kind of a stoner" and "has a problem with blood."

In another part of the segment, an admissions counselor at a Katherine Gibbs college is shown providing false information about the graduation rates for the college to the producer.

The segment also included an interview with three former admissions counselors from Brooks who said that their job was no different from selling cars, and that their only objective was to get students to enroll, no matter how qualified they were. The counselors' views were supported by an interview with a former Career Education executive, responsible for helping graduates get jobs, who said the corporate culture at the company was "all about the numbers" and getting students enrolled so that the company could profit from the students' federal grants and federally subsidized loans.

Career Education officials did not appear on camera but provided 60 Minutes with a written statement that was shown during the report saying it would "investigate the situations cited in your report."

Mr. Breneman, the education dean at Virginia, said the 60 Minutes report highlights problems of accountability. The federal government and the public rely on accreditors and state agencies to monitor colleges' practices and those organizations "should be held accountable if they have certified an entity engaged in dubious behavior" he said. "If there's a breakdown in the system," he added, this is where it appears to be.

The segment included an appearance by Nicholas J. Glakas, president of the Career College Association, which is preparing an aggressive public-relations campaign in response to the broadcast. "This is not an industrywide problem," he said.

Sean Gallagher, an analyst with the consulting company Eduventures Inc. in Boston, said that because the segment was "not balanced" and lacked adequate context, it might not be as damaging to the industry as a whole as many had been fearing.

But he acknowledged that the admissions tactics shown in the broadcast could be problematic for the Career Education Corporation. "I certainly don't think anyone wants the process to work that way," he said. If there are isolated cases of wrongdoing, he said, it's "healthy for the industry" that they be exposed.

The Chronicle of Higher Education
January 31, 2005

Congressional Proposal Would Tax Some Tuition Benefits and Shrink Other College Tax Breaks

College employees would be required to pay federal taxes on the tuition benefits they receive and two popular Clinton-era federal tuition-tax credits would be combined into one under recommendations made last week by a Congressional panel that performed a broad review of the federal tax code to find ways to generate revenues.

The recommendations were part of a 430-page report by Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation. The report contained a slew of proposals that could raise more than $300-billion for the federal government over the next 10 years. Among those of interest to colleges were ideas that would cap the amount students may earn without paying Social Security taxes, at $920 a year, and would sharply reduce the deduction people can take on their individual income taxes for donating land.

Whether the plans will go anywhere is unclear. One of the lawmakers who requested the report, Sen. Charles E. Grassley, a Republican from Iowa and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said in a written statement that the proposals would get a "close look" from his panel as "we roll up our sleeves to deal with the deficit and address tax reform."

Of most concern to colleges is the proposal to tax tuition benefits, which the Joint Committee on Taxation said would raise $1.9-billion over the next decade. College lobbyists in 1997 fought off a similar idea, and its re-emergence in the committee's report caught some of them by surprise.

"We thought this issue was sort of dead," said Cynthia A. Littlefield, director of federal relations at the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities.

While colleges have tightened tuition benefits in recent years -- for instance, many no longer cover tuition at neighboring colleges or the full cost of education -- the perk is still considered one of the most attractive reasons to work at a higher-education institution. The benefit is particularly helpful to small colleges that cannot afford large salaries, Ms. Littlefield said, and to low-wage workers.

"It's a huge help to the secretarial pool in allowing their families to go to college," Ms. Littlefield said. "If this proposal is put into law, it would be a huge stumbling block in achieving that success."

But in its report, the Congressional committee said failing to tax the benefit is unfair because it is available to only a "limited group of taxpayers." Within higher education, the panel noted, the perk "may be available primarily to those working for educational institutions which have the greatest resources and by employees of the most resource-rich schools within such institutions because such institutions and schools may be in the best financial position to provide such benefits."

Sheldon E. Steinbach, vice president and general counsel at the American Council on Education, said on Friday that he worried the idea may gain momentum in Congress because of the public's anxiety over college costs. "For some in Congress, it may be hard to justify giving tuition to the children of faculty members tax-free when middle-class families are struggling to pay for college," he said.

If the proposal becomes law, Mr. Steinbach said, it is likely that faculty members would push colleges to somehow compensate them for what they ended up paying in extra taxes.

The Joint Committee on Taxation also took aim at two tax breaks that were a hallmark of the second Clinton administration, recommending that the Hope and the Lifetime Learning credits be combined with an existing deduction for college expenses. Having one single credit, the committee said, "would promote simplicity in delivering education tax benefits."

Under the committee's proposal, the combined credit would pay for 25 percent of the first $10,000 of expenses per student. By contrast, the Hope federal tax credit covers 100 percent of college expenses up to $1,000 and 50 percent of the next $1,000, for a maximum of $1,500; the Lifetime credit pays 20 percent of tuition costs up to $10,000; and the deduction covers $4,000 for higher-education expenses.

The committee rejected a change, proposed by advocates for needy students, that would make the tax credits fully refundable. Most low-income families are unable to receive the credits now because they do not pay enough in taxes.

"Refundable credits," the committee's report said, "are administratively complex and potentially more subject to fraudulent claims that are difficult to recoup."

Changes in the rules governing land donations would help the government raise $2.5-billion over the next nine years -- more money than any of the committee's other proposals.

That revenue would come in part from a change the committee suggests in how much donors can write off on their taxes when making gifts of land. Donors would be required to take a deduction for the basis they have in any property they donate, rather than the fair market value, as they can do now. For example, if an individual gave property to a college worth $500,000, but has paid only $200,000 on the property's mortgage, the individual could write off only $200,000.

A copy of the report, "Options to Improve Tax Compliance and Reform Tax Expenditures," is available on the committee's Web site. It can be viewed using Adobe Reader, available free.