By Professor
Doom
In times past, getting into an institution
of higher education was no freebie—there were entrance exams, standardized
tests to take, possibly even community service the would-be student must perform
before, possibly, getting an acceptance letter (for the young reading this, an
“acceptance letter” is an antiquated concept, where the university would send
the would-be student a letter saying that, yes, he would welcome to come to the
university).
Student: “You have to pass me. I’ve
failed all my other courses, and if I fail any more I won’t get my scholarship
money!”
--it used to be “scholarships” were
awarded to good students, or students that performed well. Now “scholarship”
has been defined down to merely having a pulse.
A good
student could often get grants and scholarships, but now, Federal Pell Grants
(up to $5,500) are available to just about anyone that can show some sort of
minimal economic need…in these bizarre economic times, that’s all but the 1%.
Now, such
money only goes to schools with accreditation, a fairly bogus form of
regulation. When a school opens, the first thing it does is hire legitimate
faculty to look good for accreditation purposes. Once it gets accredited, such
faculty are flushed away (much like I was)—accredited institutions self-report
their legitimacy, which is why utterly bogus institutions have little
difficulty keeping it no matter how outrageous their violations.
Mainstream
news doesn’t touch the incestuous relationship between institutions,
accreditation, and the fat loan/grant checks.
Occasionally, however, it sort of glances at what’s going on. For
example, let’s see what it has to say about the Pell grant scam:
Thousands of
Michigan residents have collected Pell Grants without attending classes in the
past year…
--from USAToday,
the nation’s newspaper, as mainstream as it gets.
While the USAToday article is focused on Michigan, the problem is
actually country-wide.
I’ve heard of some campuses where
over half the students are bogus, just there for the check, never to return,
and I’ve taught a few classes where it was clear 30%, perhaps more, of the
names on the roll had no intention of learning anything. While a few students
never show up, most are clever enough to at least attend the bare minimum of
classes so that they can claim they at least tried to learn (and thus it was
the professor’s fault for failing them), so they won’t someday have to give the
money back.
For cheaper institutions, to its credit the article points out how these
grants are really just a form of income for the more desperate among us:
“…fraud is
particularly pronounced at community colleges because of their lower tuition
rates. A student can sign up for a full load of classes for as little as $700
per semester at some Michigan community colleges and then pocket the leftovers
from the $2,750 maximum grant.”
--that’s an
extra $500 a month, just for clicking a box that admin will hand anyone a pen
to click. Weird, it seems like an obvious loophole to me. Wonder why admin never
noticed a problem here? At least a student can only get away with such robbery
once, since our highly paid and numerous administrators are more than competent
enough to keep records, right? Read on…
The article focuses merely on the few students that never show up at all,
with no mention how it’s quite possible the majority of the students are
actually scammers just there for the money. A student that attends but a few
weeks of classes, even if he does no assignments or anything isn’t a “scammer”
as far as the institutions are concerned. Again, it’s strange how the article
doesn’t hint that there’s more to the scam than just not coming to class,
because bogus students represent a very significant proportion of students in
higher education today…the scam is much bigger than the article implies.
If that were the only thing missing from this news piece, it would just
be run-of-the mill weak journalism, but there are so many missed details here I
feel the need to fill things in.
The article at least bothers to hint that the scam is probably pretty
big:
“No one knows exactly how much these Pell
scammers are costing taxpayers because central record-keeping is spotty at best
and often out of date.”
--Seriously? You
need a central planner to add up the reports of fraud from, what, 20
institutions in a state? Actually, I guessed at 20. The real number for
Michigan is 43;
it took me 30 seconds to find that information, and this still doesn’t strike
me as too many phone calls to make to see just how many billions are being
thrown away. Administrators get $100,000 or more a year, minimum, which I guess
just isn’t enough money to spend an afternoon making phone calls. Oh wait, that
assumes admin actually cares about billions being stolen...
That’s
right, folks, the Pell Grant money is being tossed away, and, well, gee, there
are just no records, and ain’t nobody got time to make a few dozen phone calls.
I’ve been on campuses with a full-time accountant for every 100 students, where
faculty expenditures of $40 need to be signed off on by four different
administrators on forms filled out in quintuplicate…but the Pell money that
pours into administrative pockets? Nah, no record keeping on that. It really
seems like a journalist would ask “How is it that you guys with your huge
staffs and massive salaries aren’t competent enough to know where the Pell
grant money goes?”
Now comes
the real incredible (as in “not believable) zinger for how ridiculous this scam
is:
Think about
how positively unbelievable this line is; the reporter was clearly not using
any critical thinking here, but let’s go with the flow: we now have “student
nomads” wandering from campus to campus, registering for, and grabbing, Pell
grants semester after semester. A dedicated “student” can clear $6,000 a year
this way, more than that if he thinks to register at two (or more!) campuses a
semester.
Wait, what?
Admin: “Please make allowances for
students that haven’t purchased their books and lab materials yet, as the
checks will be delayed for at least two more weeks.”
--I’ve had students need to wait a
month to get their books because they won’t dare spend their own money on
education. In the interim, they use their very expensive phones to just take
pictures of the relevant pages in my book. My classes only need a book, but how
can lab courses be legitimate when students literally can do nothing for the
first month?
Aren’t these
Federal Pell grants associated with a student’s name? Social Security number?
Address? Nothing at all? Seriously, no records at all of who is getting these
checks? These checks aren’t stamped in a matter of seconds, it takes weeks for
them to get printed, distributed to the college, and then after the college
takes their cut, the remainder passed to the student. There’s plenty of time
there, if administration gave a damn about the legitimacy of these grants, to
check the student’s info. If I buy a handgun, my name and records can be
checked nationally in far less time than it takes to get these checks to the
students. But nobody has time to make the 43 calls so a student can’t repeat
the scam in the same state.
Hmm.
Why does the
reader think there just happens to be no records here?
Think about
it….but next time I’ll discuss the easy answer to shut down this scam in no
time at all.
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