Michigan's Lansing Community College is offering a money-back guarantee for certain programs if its students don't find a job within one year.
These days, jobs are tough to come by, and when the cost of a college degree can easily jump to the six-figure range, some people may wonder if that piece of paper is worth the price. But one school, Lansing Community College, is providing a generous offer to qualified applicants in several of its six-week courses: if they don’t land a job within a year, they’ll receive a full refund of their tuition money.
Even more surprising? The school making this offer is in Lansing, Michigan—an area that’s taken a huge blow from the economic meltdown, with unemployment levels of 11.7%. But because the school is offering the guarantee only in high-growth areas—call-center specialists, pharmacy technicians, quality inspectors, and computer machinists—the school is confident that their program graduates won’t have trouble getting hired. If proven wrong, they’ll be happy to send the students’ tuition money (around $2,400 per certification course) back.
So will this be a new model of education? Most likely not. “If every community college in America did something like that, they’d all be broke,” Russ Whitehurst, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, told TIME.
But while the money-back guarantee may not be a sustainable option for every school, these types of trends should help educators come to terms with a new reality: though its important that school helps to enrich our minds, it’s just as essential that it enriches our bank accounts in the long term.