So you signed up to be a TXGU educator. You've been crushing the 'get students in the know' game vis-a-vis letting them know what their grades need to look like, how they can find financial aid, and what their college options are—for all this and more, we salute you. But when your students start asking about where they should go to pursue their dreams, we wonder if you've ever been asked about the virtues of Texas Tech versus say...DeVry? 

If you've ever spent a sick day or a school holiday marathoning some good ol' fashioned syndicated television (gotta love that "Law & Order"), you've seen the commercials for pretty much every for-profit institution in your area. And you've definitely seen them about four times an hour. But for a student enjoying some downtime (okay, so it's more like vegetating) with the tube on summer break, that "I'm workin' for an hourly wage..." jingle is more than an annoyance—it's Pied-Piper-level persuasion. 

You'll notice your ambitious TXGU'ers talking about colleges that they've heard the names of most often, and yes, sometimes it's just because they like the football team. And you're certainly steering them in the right direction when you tell them there's more to their education than being associated with winning athletes. Combatting the lure of non-accredited schools however—that's a whole different story. You're dealing with institutions that emphasize working with a student's schedule, the comparable competence of their professors, and most seductive of all—a degree for a (potentially) much lower price than a non-profit university. One father realized just what he was up against when a question from his son about the University of Phoenix put him at a loss for an adequate answer. Check out his story for yourself (as well as the mostly civil comments section) and see if what you've got to say on the subject stacks up. Call it a preemptive strike.