LCC's Innovative Tuition-Guarantee Offer Gets Covered In Time Magazine

Time magazine recently published a piece about Lansing Community College’s (LCC) promise to give tuition money back to students who cannot find a job within a year of taking a six-week class in certain subjects.

According to excerpts from the article:

Money-back guarantees hardly seem to go with higher education. And offering them to prospective applicants during a recession sounds downright insane. But that's the sweetheart deal a community college in Michigan has started dangling to try to increase its enrollment. Beginning in May, people who take six-week courses in certain subjects will be guaranteed a job within a year—or they'll be refunded their tuition money.

It's a radical idea, particularly for a school located in Lansing, Mich., where unemployment sits at 11.7%. Lansing Community College, the third largest community college in the state, has 30,000 students a year, but is looking for more. The new money-back guarantee will apply to the four most in-demand technical jobs in the area: call-center specialists, pharmacy technicians, quality inspectors and computer machinists. The average pay for these jobs in 2008 ranged from $12.10 an hour (call-center specialists) to $15.72 (computer machinists).

The cost for one of these six-week training courses—which don't come with a degree but rather a certificate granting qualification in a specific area—averages around $2,400.

Read the entire article here.