Category Archives: Community
Energy Loan Program
If I told you I had an idea that would reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, would create good paying jobs, would help spur innovation, would reduce individual families energy bills, and wouldn’t cost the tax payers anything would you want to know more about it?
Well the White House apparently didn’t. I shared the following idea with them more than three weeks ago and told them I’d give them two weeks to think about it before I started to promote the idea myself. I’ve been rather sick with the flu and an upper respiratory bug so it took me an extra week but still the Obama Administration has not responded so I leave it up to us – my fellow citizens – to push for this plan.
The Renewable Energy Loan Program
I said it wouldn’t cost anything and here I go putting the word loan in the title but hear me out on this. We’ve got some amazing technology out there in renewable energy – solar PV systems, small-scale wind turbines, and so on but most home-owners can’t overcome the initial instillation costs to take advantage of these things. This is where the loans come in but how do we convince already cash-strapped Americans to take on more debt? Here is how:
The government loans you the money for the cost of installation but the loan is paid back at a rate that matches the cost savings of the system that was installed.
Let’s look at a simple example. Your electric bill is $200 a month. A solar PV system costs $10,000 and saves you $100 a month on your electric bill. The government lends you $10,000 and you get a solar PV system installed. Now your electric bill should be $100 a month but you’re still going to pay $200 plus the 7% yearly energy cost increase (7% on average) until the system is paid for. Our example would take just over 8 years. After the loan is paid off the consumer begins to see the energy savings. While 8 years may seem like a long time to wait before seeing any benefit those figures are using today’s prices.
The costs for solar and wind is dropping quickly and by the time a loan program could be established we could see costs down by 25% and performance rates nearly double. With twice the performance the loan recipient could see savings of $200 or nearly the total cost of their electricity and by paying the same rate ($200) every month for a system that now costs only $7,500 the loan can be paid off in around 3 years. Even if this was not a no-interest loan the loan could be paid off in less than 4 years.
There are currently installation based financing plans but they are not accessible to everyone. The strength of a government based loan plan is in it being offered to everyone. Why should only wealthy and upper-middle class home-owners with great credit qualify for energy independence? Why shouldn’t low-income communities and families benefit from solar and wind technology and why shouldn’t they be given the chance to reduce their energy bills?
Plan Benefits
Environmental Benefit By creating and promoting such a plan the government can reduce our use of polluting and non-renewable forms of energy. We won’t need to debate things like “Fracking” or mountain-top removal mining because the cost vs. return will make these dirty and dangerous methods of energy extraction less appealing. There is a clear environmental benefit to the loan program.
Government Benefit The US government is a government for and by the people but in the past several decades it’s become increasing controlled by special interests, banks, the healthcare industry, and the energy industry. This loan program reduce the power of all three (if done correctly). These should be direct loans by the government, there should not be third-party-middle-men. Healthier energy means less particulates in the air from coal power plants. This means less kids with asthma. It won’t break the backs of the healthcare industry but it can reduce their ability to make money off of the middle and lower class. Lastly the energy industry, or more specifically, the fossil fuel and nuclear arms of it will have less power because their products will no longer be as desirable. While they won’t go away totally their reduced profits will reduce their influence.
Local Benefits Local communities will see increased jobs for installation and maintenance workers. These are skilled jobs that pay a fair wage. States and communities will also be more empowered when it comes to their local utility monopolies. Being able to produce much of one’s own power creates greater leverage for the consumer. These systems will need to be manufactured somewhere and while China is trying to get out in front of the US a program like this could help infuse the industry will cash and result in more US manufacturing jobs if implemented soon enough.
Individual Benefits The benefits to individual families and property owners is huge. Energy independence or reduced dependence for people of all socioeconomic positions is critical to creating strong families and communities. Reducing the stress that comes from bills that are always going up can free capital that can be saved or spent more effectively.
How do we do it?
We need more than one man with one blog post to get this done. If you’re interested in the idea spread it. Tell your friends and family to ask the government why they don’t have such a program already and let’s work together to push them to establish one. We’ve got to send lots of emails and make lots of calls if we want this to happen so let’s do it!
I’m open to ideas about different ways we can change the plan too – should we include energy reducing things like adding insulation? Maybe. What do you think?
The Occupy Movement: One Half of the Equation
Freeing the country from corporate influence is one half of the equation freeing ourselves is the other.
The Occupy Wall Street Movement is awesome and I support and stand with my fellow 99%ers and the 1%ers that have joined in the cause because they realize that things must become more balanced either for altruistic or selfish self-preserving reasons. While I agree 100% that we need to end the influence of corporate greed in our government and in our homes I can’t help but feel that we must take a holistic approach or face a return of the problems that we are railing so hard against.
If we want to bring about change we need to fight the corruption but we also need to make ourselves more self-reliant and work to set up checks against this ever happening again.
We need to remove the control these criminals have over our government but we must realize that we let them take control in the first place and we financed their take over.
So many people these days have been and are being forced from their homes. These people find themselves eating as cheaply as they can, wearing clothing longer and maybe trying to patch things when they rip. So many are doing these things with an expectation that we can all return to the days of living in large disposable suburban houses and the days of driving $60k SUVs, and eating out at chain restaurants 3-5 nights a week. If we do that we have only ourselves to blame when these profiteers and financial fascists claim power once again.
While it is not entirely our fault we do have ourselves to blame in that we let it happen. True we were marketed to and in many cases lied to but we chose to believe in the United States of Commerce and to believe we could have everything our way just as they sold it to us. The truth is many of us should have paused and said no. No, we don’t believe the hype, we don’t believe that we can live life on credit and never have to pay the collector. We should have refused to believe that we could leveraging our futures to enjoy ourselves now. We shouldn’t have but we did. Now we need to learn from that mistake, it was an experiment and it went horribly wrong.
We let the corporations and the banks take over, we let them feed us ideas that were too good to be true, we let them sell us giant toxic houses and worthless educations, we let them charge us $5 fees every time we use our money. So in that sense we do carry some blame for this mess. This is why we cannot go back to the same things that we did before as it will only lead down the same road. True these corporate overlords are doing everything in their power to maintain power but we allowed them the opportunity to take the power in the first place.
Our Revolution
That is not going to work if we don’t resolve to change who we are. We must refuse to allow banks to be too big to fail by investing in local community banks and credit unions who know us, who keep our money local, who invest our money in projects that we believe in or that at the very least have a local impact.
We need to live in smaller more human scale places that connect us back to our planet and to our neighbors and are build with local materials harvested locally and not by the hands of ultra-wealthy industrialists that rape the land, it’s people, and the end consumer. We need to build ourselves homes that functions for us, not houses that force us to work for 30 years to pay for them as they poison us and fall apart around us while continuing to put money into the pockets of those that work against our best interests.
We need to get back to growing our own foods. This will reduce our bills and increase our health and our strength. At the same time it will help break the food monopoly, reduce industrial farming pollution, reduce food transportation costs, reduce the abuses against illegal and migrant workers, and will reduce the spread of food-borne disease.
We need to begin mending and making our own clothes, and supporting each other on a local scale. Wool, cotton, linen, and other raw materials can often be locally sourced which again reduces transportation costs. While not everyone should buy or build their own loom localizing clothing production reduces environmental destruction, child labor abuses, and the corporate greed that comes when banks and other middle-men work their way into the system. Even if we don’t make our own, buying locally made materials and finished clothing products make a serious impact.
How do we get started?
We can find great joy in simple things like gardening & cooking, sewing & knitting, and building things ourselves.
Eat beans as your protein for several meals a week, not because meat is too expensive but because you can make amazing meals with them and they are cheap. They’re also easy to grow. Plant them in a victory garden and declare victory over your food bill by cutting the cost of food by 50% to 80%. When we start to make dents into our cost of living we can get to a point where we realize that we don’t need as much money because we don’t need as many material possessions.
We can’t all build our own homes but we can buy older smaller homes and retro-fit them with cheap locally sourced non-toxic materials. We can also cheaply build things like small wind turbines and small solar kits. If even 20% of us began to generate 25% of our own power (or reduced our use and generate enough to effect our usage by 25%) it would have a massive effect on the price of electricity. That would be 5% of the total energy used. There would be less incentive to dig up coal, less incentive to frack for methane, and so on. That 5% represents a huge amount of money these power companies use to buy politicians.
Eating less processed foods, building our own homes, and powering them ourselves will all help to make us healthier. Spending more time sewing, building, and creating what we need with our hands will make us stronger and smarter. All of these in concert will make us more free and will help to prevent the financial and corporate elite from taking control again.
Measuring True Success
The occupy movement might succeed in getting better representation for the people but it will be a hollow victory if we don’t see this revolution for what it is and that is a chance to fundamentally change how our society functions.
True victory will come when we are all living within our means, when we create our own authentic lives, and when we don’t provide opportunities to be taken advantage of. We let the wolf into the hen house when we left the door open. Putting this wolf down only solves half of our problems. Once we arrest the enemies of our republic we need to make sure we don’t leave the door open for their return and that will take changing who we’ve become.
Economists believe that we will see stagnant growth for maybe the next 10 years. They see that as a bad thing. I don’t know that it is. Our growth since the 1980s has been a lie. It has been based on the phantom profits of Wall Street. It has not been real growth. In fact this growth was more like cancer in that it did more harm than good as it rapidly expanded and consumed the health of the rest of our collective body. If we want true prosperity we need to realign our society. We need to learn to provide more real valuable and tangible goods to ourselves, our families, and our communities. Doing so will allow us more time to pay attention to what the government is doing. It will also remove the incentives for the kind of corporate greed we’ve seen.
Stage 2
So yeah, we have yet to even buy the property and I’m already designing stage 2 but in my defense that is only because we don’t think we’ll have the money to do this all in 1 stage but this is what we want it to look like. Here are the latest series of photos of how the sun will hit it starting with the winter solstice at 8am, noon, and 5pm then moving on to the summer solstice and finally where it will land during the the equinoxes.
Pittsburgh Cob Home Building Update
Cob Home Design
So the wife and I found the land we want to build on inside of the city of Pittsburgh and we’ve got an email into BBI asking what information they will need to give us a building permit and ultimately an occupancy permit. We’ve also got an email into the local community group. As the land is city owned (actually URA owned) we need their approval for our project. I know some people might find that to be a huge pain but I actually really like that – maybe it has something to do with the fact that I am a VP on the board of directors of a similar community group.
Learning to build cob
While we are waiting to hear back from BBI and to have our meeting with the community group we are not sitting on our hands. We’ve been reaching out to others in and around Pittsburgh who may have some interest in what we are doing as well as talking to people around the country who have already built cob houses to find out how they got their buildings to pass inspection or what tested they had to have conducted for a structural engineer or architect to sign off of the building.
Compressive Strength vs. Tensile Strength
One thing we found is that the straw that is required for tensile strength brings down the compressive strength so we’ve looked into different types of pozzolans (additives) and while fly ash is abundant and free in Western PA we are worried about it’s toxicity. The soil we are going to be using will already probably contain some amount of lead so we want to use the cleanest stuff available.
It seems like pumice is probably our best bet. While pumice is not going to be able to be locally sourced it will not only make the cob stronger but will also make it lighter allowing us to build faster. It also adds insulation (or R) value. It will increase our cost for the cob but will lower the cost on the plaster side as we won’t need a full 4 inches of plaster to increase the R value as much.
If you are interested in learning more or in helping us when the project gets underway use the contact form or leave a comment and thank you for your interest!
Designing a Low Cost Home Redux
So if you read my post about cob building I said that we are thinking about building a cob place to stay in for a few years well … it’s funny how things change so fast!
The more than we’ve researched the more information we’re finding out about cob that tells us that a cob home is not only the way to go for a few years but is in fact the way to go for good. One of the concerns is that concrete (which we’d need for our underground home) is made of Portland Cement. Portland Cement releases 1.5 tons of carbon for each ton of cement produced. That’s not cool.
While we plan to have modern electricity, gas (for cooking and to add some mechanical heating), we can’t bring ourselves to a point where we are OK with releasing that much carbon when half the reason we want to live underground is because we want to help the environment!
So we’ve found a bit of land in the city and we’ve researched how to buy it. Our next step is to talk with the local community group about getting their help with buying the land and we need to double check that we are up on our taxes and make sure that Pittsburgh’s Bureau of Building Inspection will sign off on us using cob. After that we’ll buy the land and start to do this:
If you’re interested in helping build our home we are interested in doing an exchange – we’ll help you build yours if you help us build ours! Contact me via the website to discuss.
Why build with cob?
Why do we want to build a permanent cob home? We believe (we’ll find out) that we can build a home out of cob that is roughly 1,600 sq feet for under 20k (including the cost of the land). This means we could do so without needing a mortgage. If we can do it so can you and so can the other folks in the community we are looking to build in. This will free us from the grip of the industrial builders and all the other things that come along with them (mainly mortgage costs but also high energy costs, the cost of repairs, the risk of fire and need for fire insurance, health costs associated with volatile chemicals inside of industrial products like treated lumber, as well as environmental costs).
Cob is build with the onsite ground (which is what makes it less expensive) so we’ll also want to do some soil testing but as long as it checks out we should be in our cob home within 3 years!!!
Cob Building Missed-Adventures
First let me explain the title of the post. If you’re a regular reader you know that my wife Teresa and I are interested in building a cob house but don’t have any experience (yet). So over the weekend Teresa found a local group on MeetUp.com that was holding a cob building workshop today. We both tried to register but we needed to be admitted to the group first – something that has still not happened.
No worries – I’ve never been one to shy away from crashing an event that could benefit from my attendance so after checking yesterday to make sure it was still on – off I went in the 94 degree heat on my bicycle to learn how to make cob in the unforgiving summer sun.
Or not.
See when I got there 2 minutes late (is that fashionably late or still on time? I have a hard time knowing) I was alone. I was not even joined by crickets. Just me, the blistering summer sun, and an urban garden with some dudes in the alley behind said garden tossing horseshoes. I did think about asking the horseshoe fellas if they were there to learn about building things out of cob but they didn’t seem the type so I rode right past them heading for home.
On my way home I stopped in Espresso a Mano which is great little coffee shop in Lawrenceville about half-way between where I live and where I found disappointment in the face of Cob I checked the meetup group again and saw the event had been marked cancelled. Bummer. I wish they’d have cancelled earlier – like a few days ago maybe but I can’t get too upset since they didn’t know I was coming.
While I was really looking forward to the workshop the fact that it was cancelled has given rise to the idea that the Schmutz Company could maybe host a cob building workshop. I plan on running this past Dave to see what he thinks of the idea but seeing as how he was talking about building an oven for baking bread and pizzas and things I don’t know that I’ll need to twist his arm too much. If you’d be interested in attending leave a comment below or email me from the contact page and I’ll be sure to let you know what the plan is. Oh, and if we schedule and then cancel it we’ll let you know several days in advance.
For some great photos of what cob and other natural building materials look like check out the Natural Building Flickr group or just do a Google image search for cob – there are a ton of pictures of amazing things that are and can be built out of the stuff!
The Changing Face of Media
We all can see that the media game has changed so why are so many people still trying to play by the same rules? Can we measure how much the game has really changed? Have those massive changes affected everyone equally? By everyone I mean the owners, workers, and consumers.
I was at a photography seminar yesterday watching two of the most amazing photographers alive today tell stories, teach, and do demonstrations and I came away having learned something kind of photo related but more-or-less related to media and information in general. What I leaned came from David Hobby – new media world shaper extraordinaire.
We’ve all been told that newspapers, magazines, and other such printed media are going away and that a brave new world awaits us. It seems to me that much of that change has occurred at the top and middle but what comes out in the end – what the consumer gets is not and will not change much if at all. Sure there will be changes to how they consume, (on phones, computers, and digital paper), but not WHAT they consume.
Personally I think most of it is hype driven by the people who have the most to loose which is why the average consumer has been all by totally silent throughout the past decade as circulations have swirled around the drain.
David Hobby
David Hobby, (aka Strobist), is not listening to the old rules. David has built his Strobist blog into a hugely successful enterprise, (keep in mind that success doesn’t equal money). In the photography community the Strobist brand is as well known and well respected as Nikon or Canon.
While blogging didn’t make him rich it did provide him with a platform that has allowed him to see the world of media from a different viewpoint. No longer confined by the chains of advertising supported, high-overhead, generalistic news world of old media David has started a quiet revolution in the suburbs of greater-Baltimore. Working away David has managed to shift the future of media into what he wants it to be.
How has he shifted the entire world of media? There are already others who are doing similar or slightly different projects, projects that are compatible and comparable. What is it then that he is doing? David has shifted the world of media by making incremental changes, small changes, to the way media is gathered and shared and it looks like this: hoco360.blogspot.com
HOCO360
David is providing a visual documentation of his community with very little overhead, no editorial bias, and a visual focus on his community. Free from the bonds of the old world. He is now working on what he wants to do in a way that can be made profitable. Has he started to monetize it yet? No, but that will come.
The beauty of his method is it’s simplicity. Everyone is talking about the new world of media being so different. Whereas David Hobby, former staff photographer from the Baltimore Sun has walked over, unplugged this part, hot-wired that part and cut off all the parts he doesn’t need. No longer is David working as part of a tank or 18-wheeler. He’s broken off a chunk of that old machine and fashioned himself a bicycle that is nimble, light-weight, and able to do just what he needs it to do.
What is David Hobby Doing?
What is he doing that is so very slightly different?
David is visually recording his very local community of Howard County, MD – just like a newspaper would or at-least just like the non-hard news parts of a paper would. He is talking about arts and culture and business, and uncovering things that are of interest to the locals. He is delivering content to his readers purely online at hoco360.blogspot.com. The content he is sharing is visual. It’s not weighty and wordy, he doesn’t tackle the local school budget, or the council’s plan to allow solid waste dumping on playgrounds – he has loosened the chains.
There still are restrictions sure but they are less and they are different. One big difference in breaking the machine into smaller parts is that the market can now dictate what the consumers can consume. The gatekeeper has been removed.
Free Market Content
I recently read a post, I think if was by Seth Godin (http://sethgodin.typepad.com), where he talks about the free market and how those that benefit from the free market the most are the ones that want to prevent it from being free most often (through patents, monopolies, and so on). The reason that you can’t choose every article that you get in the paper (or at least every subject) is because the generalism of the paper maintains the ideals of it’s owner. While many readers might not care about a particular subject covered by the paper they still get articles written on that subject because the editor likes to read about it or they like to read about it with the slant that the writer they hired puts on it.
With what David and others are doing they are ultimately creating a pure and free market for news content. If his photos of his community are worth the cost to make them then he will succeed. If there are enough consumers to support someone writing about the flowers and garden clubs and such in and around Howard County then a writer writing about them will succeed (assuming they understand the business end enough).
This is all revolutionary in it’s simplicity. Everyone keeps talking about the new face of media and what a vastly different media world we are driving headlong into but David Hobby has shown that through small tweaks the new world won’t be so new to most people – it will simply be a world free of middle-men.
Square Up Credit Card Payments
Tell us how you really feel Don
I’ve told people over at Facebook about Square but I’ve got to post a blog about it because it’s just freaking awesome. Before you get into the bulk of the post please note that I am not being paid to post this. I’ve got to say it up front because I’ve read through what I wrote and some of it sounds like it was written by a paid spokesperson. I promise you that I genuinely LOVE this idea and their execution and that I am not in any way being compensated for writing this.
What is Square
If you have not heard about it Square is a credit card payment acceptance system. There are a few other systems out there – Intuit (the people who make Turbo Tax and Quicken) have a similar app and doggle for your smart phone but I’ve not tried it. Mostly I didn’t try it because at first it only worked with iPhones and I’m an Android user.
I keep seeing them advertise their version but I’m honestly not even interested in checking other options (beyond looking at the price points) because I really like Square so much. That’s not to say that I’m not a fan of Intuit. I use a lot of their products and like them a lot. I know there are a few more out there too and I’m sure PayPal will likely get into the game soon but as long as the price is right I’ll stick with Square and since they are already cheaper than PayPal I’m saying good bye to them.
Where did you hear about Square?
So I still have not seen any ads for Square but I heard a report about it on NPR which prompted me to look into it and I keep hearing about it via word-of-mouth. To me both of those are much better than an annoying TV ad any day. When I heard the report on NPR and then found out that it was cheaper than PayPal I signed up.
It was really easy, they do the micro-deposits to verify your checking account and they send you a free card reader that plugs into your headphone jack on the phone. That means that it works with any smart-phone that can have the app installed on it. You can accept cards without the reader too (it just costs a bit more) which is cool because when getting ready for a shoot I am usually focused on packing gear for the shoot, not on remembering a hardware plug-in for my phone.
Why is Square different?
I still get a lot of checks so accepting credit cards was something that I’ve always been a bit hesitant of (due to cost and volume). Most of the time companies charge you a monthly fee on top of taking a cut on each transaction. Square doesn’t do that. It was made with small businesses in mind – photographers, landscapers, and so on (per the report on NPR) so they don’t charge a monthly fee since the people it’s made for may only accept one credit card payment a month. I’m in that boat and since it still costs me money per transaction I’d prefer to keep taking checks as much as possible. That being said when a customer would rather pay by card I don’t need to send them to my website to use PayPal or to write down all of their info and then double shred it when I’m done.
Why wait until today to tell everyone?
I decided to say something today because I got this email from them that made me like them even more than I already do:
Hi WDO,
Starting today, Square has dropped the 15¢ fixed fee on payments you accept using your Square card reader. Now you’ll simply pay 2.75% per transaction, no matter what you sell.
Why are we simplifying our pricing? Learn more.
How freaking cool are these people! They’re making their service cheaper! That is just awesome.
Check them out and sign up to accept credit cards on your smart phone cheaper than any other service that I know of right: here.
WordPress 3.0
WordPress 3.0
If I or someone else has built a website for you on WordPress and you’ve logged in within the past few days you should see a notice under the header that looks like the image on the left. It’s letting you know that WordPress 3.0 is out. Does that mean you should update? Maybe.
Who should update
If somebody else built your site you should ask them if it’s alright to update your WordPress. If I’ve designed your site please sit tight as I’ll be updating you very soon. All of my sites should be updated but I’ll need to make sure your site will update without issue first. That means that I have to make sure your plug-ins and add-ons are working.
Why Update to WordPress 3.0
WordPress 3.0 has a ton of great new features, many of which existing customers may not use but there are a few that can help make your site more useful like the new menu module which allows for multiple menus. I don’t have any clients on WordPress with multiple menus (because before it wasn’t possible) but if you’re an existing customer who is interested in adding additional menus or are a new customer looking for a designer who can build you a site on a reliable platform such as WordPress that needs multiple menus shoot me an email and we can talk about your needs.
For more info on the changes made to WordPress in the 3.0 release please check the codex page here or watch this video:
A Word From Our Sponsor (disguised as a blog post)
I just have to share this with you all. I have a google alert set up with “need, photography, Pittsburgh” and I don’t normally get a lot of good results for that but sometimes it does provide leads so I keep it active. The other thing that happens occasionally is that it brings back interesting results like this one:
http://ihobbycorner.com/professional-photography/
Which will almost certainly need to be removed from that website. If it is before you get a chance to read it let me tell you what it is. It’s an advertisement for the Art Institute of Pittsburgh (AIP) disguised as a blog post on a hobby blog. The reason that I know if will be removed soon is because it’s illegal. Laws were past last year that made it illegal for bloggers and twitterers to endorse things without reveling their relationship or any compensation they are getting for doing so. This wasn’t even that well disguised – it looked like copy taken right from their website or from print material.
AIP is where I graduated from in 2001 and I really do value what I learned there but most of the people I graduated with are not doing what they went to school there for and we were told a ton of mis-truths and on occasion outright lies by the representatives of the school. Things have only gotten worse as these days they are owned by Goldman Sachs who have pushed even harder for ever higher profits.
Upon reading this blog post advertisement I couldn’t pass up the chance to share with potential readers the lies and misrepresentations that abound with these folks. Being that my comment needed to be moderated and the fact that the post should be taken down I’ve decided to share my comments here with you dear reader so enjoy:
WDOphoto Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
February 2nd, 2010 at 3:17 pm
This poster is almost certainly a sales person – a paid sales person and their post may be in violation of recent laws that require a blogger to identify anyone who might be paying them to blog about a particular subject or any relationship that they might have with the subject that they are blogging about.
What the author also fails to tell you is that many graduates also are crushed by the huge expense of the tuition that the Art Institute charges.
I graduated from AIP in 2001, out of the folks that graduated with me and before and after me by a few quarters I am one of maybe 10 people that are working as a photographer.
Forget getting a job as a photojournalist right out of AIP – the newspaper industry has been shedding jobs, not adding them, and the vast majority of the students they pass through are not focused or driven enough to work in such a competitive field.
Nor are they set to work in commercial photography which is just as competitive. The majority of the students who are herded through their programs like cattle are meek and mild and set-up to fail.
This poster fails to tell you dear reader that you can learn just as much at a state school, more even, than what you will at AIP for far less money.
They’ve also failed to tell you that since Goldman Sachs bought EDMC (the company which owns AIP that the poster almost certainly works for in a sprawling cubical filled warehouse in Pittsburgh’s Strip District) the focus has become far more financially driven and profit motivated and far less about education.
Don’t get me wrong – the school was always profit driven. It’s just that now they are even more ruthless in their pursuit of financial gains at the expense of the general public.
EDMC employs hundreds, if not thousands, of sales people. They are not “councilors” they are sales people, their backgrounds are in sales, they don’t care if you are mentally deficient – if you have the money they’ll tell you how wonderful your future is going to be. After all the schools they are pushing have a 100% acceptance rate.
I strongly encourage everyone to read about the high costs of these schools and how these schools have a higher percentage of students who default on their loans as was my case because the cost of AIP was so high that I was forced into taking out private loans. They at one time set up (and still might have) a private loan just for them through Sallie Mae that I was told was the only private loan I was allowed to apply to my bill there. When I took out this loan the interest rate was 23% (compound that).
Something else to keep in mind – these schools target lower income high-school students and working adults that more than likely come from a family or background where they in no way can understand the complex financial problems that are being thrust upon them.
I was a wide-eyed teenager herded into a tight hallway full of 6×6 rooms with a waiting line an hour to two long. My mother and I had little to no time to read anything that was shoveled at us. We were told to sign here and sign there – it was as if the devil himself, with all of his slickness, was on the other side of that desk. We got taken. And so did nearly everyone I waited in line with that day. As I said only a few of us made it out doing what we went in there for.
They told my mother that for me to get additional aid she’d need to apply and be turned down for parent plus loans. The problem was that she wasn’t turned down and there was no way, according to them, that she could NOT take the loan out. She was forced into taking on debt that she could in no way afford.
A popular misconception is that this is an “art school”. It’s not – it’s a trade school. They crank out students every 3 months with the same degree, many with no chance of doing what they have been, for-the-most-part, poorly trained to do.
I don’t mean to come down hard on the instructors because for the most part they are quality folks and I really do respect the vast majority of them but at the same time they are trapped in a hard spot.
It has become obvious to me from what I saw when I was there, when I’ve gone back to speak with portfolio students, and when I interact with graduates, (usually when they are serving me at a coffee shop), that the teachers are encouraged to do as much as they can to NOT fail students. How can one teach people when they are not allowed to weed out the poorly performing students?
Don’t waste your money on these people or believe anything their sales people tell you. If you don’t believe me I encourage you to look at the statistics or even read what is happening in the news right now where these for-profit school owners are fighting the dept of education to keep from being held accountable.
The Obama admin wants to tie their ability to get fin. aid (which is where most of their money comes from) to the ability of their students to pay that money back. Meaning that their higher level of defaults could put them at risk of loosing their source of income. They are fighting this as hard as they can because they don’t want to be held accountable for their failure to actually educate and train students.
Shame on you cstein for posting misleading advertisements in such a manipulative manner.
That’s the end of the post but for more info on how they are fighting the dept. of education see the following articles:
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9DGTFCO0.htm
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20100128-715543.html?mod=WSJ_latestheadlines
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