One or two of the nineteen people who were in the room with me that day will eventually earn a degree.

Four or five will default on their student loans.

It may be that most of the others will be little worse off for their time at Phoenix. The hopes they expressed—to make their children proud, to prove their own worth to themselves, to redeem past mistakes, to have a better life—will be redirected elsewhere.

Perhaps it will come to seem strange to them that sitting in a classroom—something they nearly universally admitted that they’d never before enjoyed in their lives—had briefly held such promise.