Integrity

This week, the entire staff of the campus I work at (minus the instructors who had to remain on site to continue classes as normal) went to an off-site "Integrity Training." Let me give you a little recent history that will help to explain why.

I work for a trade school, more specifically, a for-profit school. Most (if not all) for-profit schools have programs for things like trades, medical assistants, criminal justice, etc (career programs). The programs are accelerated, fast-paced programs designed to get the students through school in much less time than a program in a more traditional school. This gets the student into their career in 2 years or less, rather than 4 years or more. One thing in particular to note about for-profit schools (at least the one I work for), they allow minority and low-income students who might not be able to attend a traditional school to educate themselves and give themselves an opportunity for a good job that they probably wouldn't have had otherwise. This mission is something that I can stand behind, and I think it's a wonderful thing to be able to give someone the chance they never had until now.

That being said, a video was recently released about what some for-profit schools are doing. Two men (news reporters, I think) went undercover and mystery-shopped several for-profit campuses across the state, meaning that they pretended to be real students looking to enroll at these schools. Their interactions with Admissions and Financial Aid representatives at these campuses were secretly video taped--and the results were shocking. The campus representatives were engaging in very illegal activity, including one case where the mystery shopper was told by a Financial Aid representative to omit on his FAFSA that he had $250,000 in his bank account to give him a better chance to get funding. Another two cases had an Admissions representative denying the mystery shopper the ability to talk to Financial Aid to see how much assistance he would get before he signed an enrollment agreement.

None of the schools owned by the corporation that owns the school I work for were involved in anything shown on the video (thankfully). Yet the damage is still done. For-profit schools now have a bad name because of what a handful of schools were doing (two of them closed because of content of the video). And now Congress is stepping in. Congress is trying to pass legislation (called the "Gainful Employment Rule") that would put harsher restrictions on these schools--and some programs at community colleges--leading to negative impact on the students and their ability to get funding for financial aid. No financial aid means the students wouldn't be able to afford the programs on their own. You can visit MyCareerCounts.org for more information on the topic (and to help support the opposition to this rule if you would like).

In response to this, the mother corporation of my school did a nation-wise training day to re-establish our policies that we have in place and really examine why we have them and how they are implemented. My school especially prides itself on doing things the right (ethical) way, and our internal and accreditation audits have consistently shown our ability to carry out all policies well.

One thing to come out of this was my personal reflection on integrity in general and library integrity specifically. In what ways must I exhibit integrity in the library? What problems could occur that would question my integrity? What about in other libraries? What does integrity in a library mean? I'm going to take this weekend to reflect on these and other questions that I have. Maybe I'll post my conclusions on Monday. I won't have much time to do any cooking this weekend, so I'll also post a recipe that I've made in the past and liked as well.