I begin every weekday by briefing myself on any news pertinent to career colleges. Sometimes the news is rampant and other times hard to come by. When it's there, it generally fits into one of three categories:
Each time I come across such an attacking, one-sided slam against our sector, I lean back in my chair and sigh. I feel like I’m faced with a lose-lose situation. On one hand, I don’t want to perpetuate a negative image of career colleges. I’d rather nobody read the venomous spew fraught in Peter S. Goodman’s Times article at all.
On the other hand, though, I realize that’s just not a feasible expectation. The fact is, this piece was run in the one of the most widely read, heavily syndicated newspapers in the country. By the time our daily newsletter blasted to readers on the morning of March 15, the piece had already received over 500 comments on the Times web site. On March 16, the article was syndicated to the front page of Yahoo.com.
We at Career College Central pride ourselves on being “the definitive voice of the career college sector of higher education”. As one of few sources for purely career college-based news, we’ve assumed the responsibility of letting you know what’s out there, whether it’s good news or bad. We feel that we would be doing our readers a disservice by trying to shield them from negative news stories, because ignoring them won’t stop them from being written.
Only by making our supporters aware of what’s being said can we fight back appropriately, as the Career College Association and countless others have already done. Only by recognizing the initial assail can we provide a forum for the well-researched, respectful rebuttals that our readers construct. And only by adding our comments to the hundreds of others can we hope that articles like Goodman’s will begin to lose credibility.
It’s not easy for Career College Central to publish negative views of our sector, but we do believe it’s necessary. We hope you understand that by re-publishing articles like Goodman’s, we aren’t trying to perpetuate negativity about the for-profit sector, but trying to counteract the extreme bias shown by such unnecessary, one-sided journalism. Only through awareness can we begin to fight back.
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