11Alive and Decaturish reported on Monday that Laurus Technical Institute, which has three locations around Atlanta including one along Church Street in downtown Decatur, unexpectedly closed its doors this past Monday.
Laurus Technical Institute Closes Its Doors
Trader Joe’s!
That building’s got around 80 dedicated parking spaces. DM, is it time to resurrect your grocery co-op?
Very unfortunate. I hate losing technical/trade schools. They fill an education gap for many; not everyone wants or needs to go to a traditional college, and trade schools offer valuable training for important jobs.
I don’t know if this was one of the good schools.
You and Bob could be right. I don’t know.
My post was really more a general lament on the increasing unpopularity of tech schools. So many intelligent and talented people are steered away from them, despite the fact these skills and jobs are crucial for a strong work force and economy.
Agree with that absolutely.
Agreed. Mike Rowe (from Dirty Jobs) does a great job of educating people of this. Our push for everyone to go to college has created so much debt for folks, with no job to pay it off. There are jobs available in a lot of technical fields. I would have no issue with my son becoming an electrician (for example) with the goal of owning his own company, over spending a crap ton of money to get an English degree…
“over spending a crap ton of money to get an English degree…”
The spending a crap ton of money part isn’t a good idea, but if I had children I would have no problem with them getting an English degree if that’s where their talents and interests lie. Though I agree there probably should be more people learning a trade, not everyone is cut out for that kind of work either. What I would have a problem with is if my children wanted to attend a college because it had a great football or basketball team to root for. I think that’s more common than people would suspect.
Certainly wasn’t putting down an English degree. It’s just that most people who get them (and other similar degrees) don’t end up utilizing them in their careers.
There is significant time and investment in GA in the Technical Colleges.
The evidence shows that popularity is not down the last 4 years. Enrollment has been flat, but the state is investing Hope Scholarship and other funds to make this a more attractive and complementary program to 4 Year programs.
While for-profit vs. State run is another debate, there is no evidence that the TCSG is losing popularity.
This is no loss for Decatur or education. Do a little research and you will conclude the same.
It was a great vehicle for a student to accumulate a whopping student loan debt, with little chance of paying it back.
Don’t know anything about this particular school, but I know many of these for-profit schools are set up to extract the maximum in federal dollars from students via loans, grants, etc. Knew someone who taught part time briefly for one of the more well-known companies, and she said it was almost impossible to accurately grade students because the goal was to keep the tuition money coming in, no matter what. Failing grades were not allowed.
I suspect that the tightening up on the admission rules referenced elsewhere are an attempt to curb that sort of thing. Laurus is not the only proprietary for-profit school to close lately. I’m all for getting an education, but it needs to be a meaningful education at a reasonable cost. I’d be interested in their real percentage of graduate placements in their chosen field of study.
I also knew someone who taught at a similar institution, albeit at the true college level, who was well educated and had the credentials to teach at plenty of other places. He took the job partially because the prepared syllabus was handed to him and essentially all he had to do was sit up front and read it. He made decent money for just reading.
“I know many of these for-profit schools are set up to extract the maximum in federal dollars from students via loans, grants, etc.”
The “non-profit” schools are hardly different in that regard.
Some of them, yes. But not the community college system, and things like the Technical College System of Georgia. (Google it if you’re not familiar; I’m avoid the link to avoid moderation.) Putting tax money into high-quality pre-K, community college, and technical colleges is IMHO money well spent.
That’s a popular opinion re: pre-k, but the feds themselves have studies the results from Headstart, and the “returns” on that massive investment have underwhelming, at best. It’s a (mostly) well-intentioned waste of money.
Investments in Head Start are not a waste of money. Many of the gains that dissipate over time are due to children going into a struggling elementary environment that cannot maintain what was built in the early childhood years.
There’s debate about the academic benefit. Personally, I believe that any kind of positive enrichment is worthwhile. That’s why even well-off stay-at-home parents who don’t need child care send their 2-4 year olds to some kind of preschool and preK. Doesn’t really matter what their eventual SATs are–people like to see their children learning, socializing, and developing. There’s also another angle–where would those little ones have been otherwise if not in Head Start? With parents working two minimum-wage jobs or, worse, three part-time jobs with no benefits, the little ones could have been in makeshift, unlicensed, marginal, maybe even dangerous, informal child care. Head Start was vastly better than some of scenarios that little ones end up in.
I don’t know those studies. The research with which I am familiar suggests investing in early care and education (not specifically HeadStart) pays significant dividends over a lifetime. Some good resources:
http://www.highscope.org/content.asp?contentid=219
http://abc.fpg.unc.edu/
http://heckmanequation.org/
According to this, for-profit institutions account for 12 percent of enrollment, but 50 percent of loan defaults. BTW, the article is about the much larger U. of Phoenix, which may be on the way to the same fate as Laurus.
money.cnn.com/2015/03/25/investing/university-of-phoenix-apollo-earnings-tank/index.html
Looks like a nice spot to build a new elementary school
Could be a new 3/3 Academy.
The last thing Decatur needs is to take prime taxable commercial property and turn it into untaxable govt purposes.
Live music venue! With, hopefully, some good metal bands rotating on a regular basis.
Eddie’s Dungeon?
😀
This would be a good time for Decatur to consider acquiring this property and, from DeKalb, the probation office next door.
Selig owns that half of the block up to Commerce. This wasn’t going to be a technical school for much longer anyway…
So DeKalb doesn’t own the probation office building?
Not according to tax records.
Looks like Selig has had most of the land on that side of Church for a while. Don’t be surprised if something is already in the works…
Unless DeKalb bought it within the last year, but I don’t see Selig breaking up their assets here.
It’s not likely that probation offices are owned property anywhere unless they are co-located with other government offices, which, because of the nature of their “business”, is also not likely.
That probation building is a sweet example of a small-scale mid-century office building. The kind of building that will be valuable to preserving an interesting building stock in downtown Decatur for years to come. I hope the community makes it a priory to keep that building around.
The Laurus building, however, unless there is something special hidden under its current facade, is ripe for total redevelopment, in my opinion.
The Laurus building was actually built as a Super-X drug store (remember those?) in the 60s-70s.
The probation building was in the 1960’s Southern Bell offices. I can remember going there with my mother to pay our phone bill. And the 529 building (next to Laurus) was once a Jewel T store.
Is this the same property parcel or adjacent to the parcel with the Bank of America? If so, there had been a big multistory redevelopment proposed for that site a while back. I heard BofA didn’t want to close or relocate during construction so the project was put on hold. Anyone know if that was a Sembler project?
The Laurus property is across Church Street and down the block from the BOA property. The proposed BOA development fell apart for the reason you mention. It was not a Sembler project.
If it was a for profit school it was most likely a rip off. Get the maximum student loans from the government & most students just get stuck with repayments. There are plenty of state run technical schools in the Atlanta area where the students can get a real education.
The school loan bubble is eventually going to burst and all of these campuses with the massive infrastructure and overhead and employees are going to be in a real bad way as are the students who borrowed the excessive amounts of money with no degree to show for it. Also, school loans can’t be eradicated by filing chapter 7 either, so the credit is going to be messed up for years. It’s a mess for sure.
This is going to be part of an assemblage of property in that area. I know several teams already looking.
There is a good chance a lot of students got screwed by this closing. Not that they weren’t already being exploited.