Colleges that profit, students who don't

TO PARAPHRASE Steely Dan, the five years at the college didn't turn out like she planned.

In 2002, Marianne Hicks of Brigantine - bored with her accounts-receivable job and part-time work as a cook, and eager to reinvent herself as an industrial designer - was wooed by a recruiter for the Art Institute of Philadelphia with assurances of job help once she got a degree.

Today, Hicks says, her diploma is about the only thing that she can cling to. Often unemployed since graduating from the for-profit career college in 2007, she's under the gun from collection agencies for more than $90,000 in student loans that she can't repay. She's staying with a brother because she can't afford her own place, and a sister is mad at her because she co-signed one of the delinquent loans.

"I was just excited I was going back to school - of course they painted a pretty picture," said the now 44-year-old Hicks, who admits she didn't know that her loan balance would grow so high and didn't grasp the problem that her Art Institute credits mostly can't be transferred to other schools.

But she faults the Center City college for teaching outdated skills, and she said that job-placement help amounted largely to forwarding some ads from Craigslist.

And she's not alone: Her classmate Taryn Zychal, with similar complaints, says she owes close to $150,000 and is working in a convenience store when not selling her artwork.

Advocates say that the remarkable thing is that horror stories like those aren't that unusual. Thousands of middle-income students who've rushed to for-profit career colleges in recent years have been overwhelmed by aggressive recruitment, loose admission policies, overhyped academic programs, a crippled U.S. economy with few jobs - and, finally, their massive taxpayer-funded student debt, with little hope of repayment.

At the same time that enrollment at for-profit colleges - many now owned by large, publicly traded firms backed by big banks and investment houses - has soared to 11 percent of U.S. higher education, statistics show that these schools now account for a mind-boggling 48 percent of all defaults on federal student loans.