Retooling College with Mark Dottore

It's a subject near and dear to everybody's heart because all of us are either gonna put a child through college or we've put a child through college, and the debt structure is just enormous. We are finally, I believe, waking up and coming to the end of the two hundred thousand dollar French Literature degree. What's happening now is, and I've worked on a bunch of Catholic college bond issues, you can't charge thirty to sixty thousand dollars a year anymore to go to school because you just can't come out on the other end and get a job, and this is the model that you need to be in. You need to get out of college with a skill or trade. But a lot of these colleges are going to find that they need to enter receivership to get rid of some of the past debt so that they can retool and move forward.

One of the places that I helped, and is doing a great job, is a school called Ohio Dominican University. They got it. It's a Catholic non-profit university outside of Columbus. Fabulous location. They got so tied up in the strictly education bonds that they had come to the point where they had to borrow more money than they could so they could keep enrollment up. They retooled themselves. They put in a physician's assistant program. They put a physical therapy program in. They got a nursing program in. So they've started to retool themselves.

For too long we told people that if you work with your hands or you're in the trades, you're never gonna make it or you're gonna be looked at in a different manner. That is coming back to roost right now and getting us. Most of you have called a plumber, called an electrician, called the appliance repairman. The guy won't show up when you want him to show up, when he comes he charges you what you believe is an exorbitant amount of money. The thing is he can now. What these colleges are going to do, I'm in these community colleges, is they're going to put people into community college so that those people can move on in their career, move up in their careers, without the dreaded debt factor that they have going on. What's gonna happen is some of the  colleges now or some of the state agencies, some of the employers, will help pay for the offset of the tuition costs as long as it doesn't get into a situation where it's so high or take a lot of time from work.