Study Finds Community College “Unhinged”

By Professor Doom

     Time and again I’ve pointed out that much of college is a joke, with students taking loads of coursework of little relevance or usefulness, either to education or to actually getting a job.

     While I’ve done what I could to set things up so that any who doubt me can see with their own eyes, I’m hardly the only, or even the first, to point out that which should be obvious to any legitimate regulator.

     Throughout the country, community colleges are steadily growing like weeds. These colleges promise “higher education” and “job skills” and “cheaper than university”, but I’ve already shown these to all be lies, many times.

     There’s no higher education, as most of the courses, 90%, is at the high school level or lower, often much lower…and anyone who looks can see that.

     Job skills can happen, but usually it’s minimal; most courses are taught by minimally paid adjuncts that can’t get jobs in the workforce—how can people without job skills teach job skills? Community colleges simply don’t pay enough to hire people with job skills, and are content to provide the cheapest instructing they can, on useless topics.

    Cheaper than university? Unfortunately, no, not for the taxpayer. Community colleges don’t add to the real “student base” of a town, instead taking students and faculty away from universities…while adding a legion of ridiculously highly paid administrators.

     Community colleges are simply a scam to grab student grant and loan money from suckers. Every study says as much:

As the facts presented in these reports came to light in the course of our research, I shared them with people very close to the institutions we were researching. Few of them were surprised. Most told me that the emerging picture corresponded closely to what they saw every day in the field. They had long ago concluded that the debate about standards was unhinged from the realities in our community colleges…

---Emphasis added. Everyone in the industry knows what’s going on. “Unhinged” really is the word for offering ever more ridiculous coursework, charging a bundle for it, and calling it “higher education.”

     A report from 2013 confirms what I’ve been saying about the math in community college. The report addresses what’s really going on in these allegedly “convenient and cheap” avenues of higher education.

“…Many community college career programs demand little or no use of mathematics. To the extent that they do use mathematics, the mathematics needed by first year students in these courses is almost exclusively middle school mathematics…”

--do note: “almost exclusively”.

   Middle school is 6^th to 8^th grade, and much like I’ve shown, much of community college’s “higher education” is this stuff. Except, of course that it’s generally taught by unqualified Educationist teachers who can’t pass the tests to become teachers in the public school system. 

     Now, don’t get me wrong, I honestly believe that not everyone needs to know calculus or whatever to function in the vast majority of jobs, but when community college students “almost exclusively” are learning up to 8^th grade math, should this really be called “college”? Somehow I suspect communities like the sound of “Community College” better than “Place Where You Get Another Chance To Be In The 8^th Grade, Except You Pay For It Forever” better.

     Naturally, the question arises: why are we teaching 8^th grade (at very best) math almost exclusively in our community colleges?

“Whatever students did to pass mathematics courses in middle school, it does not appear to require learning the concepts in any durable way…”

     The above is representative of the main difference between my blog and the report: the report acts as though what’s going on was legitimate, instead of just plain calling a spade a spade.

      “Learning the concepts…” is a false premise here. I’ve had many students sit in the back of remedial math, and read romance novels to get their easy A. I’ve had many classes where 20% of the names on the roster never show up at all. I’ve had many classes where another 30% of the students vanish a few weeks into the semester—they vanish at the same time they get their student loan money checks.

       I dispute the assumption of legitimacy here. What’s really happened is that administration, with “growth uber alles” as their motto, has simply eliminated coursework down to a level that, safely, anyone can do if pressed, and that even people that don’t care a bit about education can still “look good” in the bogus college courses that bloat campuses today. Since growth is all that matters, administration doesn’t care about scamming students—it’s still growth. The fact that calling a scammer a “student” is about as reasonable as calling a shoplifter a “customer” just doesn’t come to an administrative mind.

     Yes, there are students that graduated high school without the ability to function at the 8^th grade level. Yes, some of these students really want another chance to get that education that they missed out on the first time around. Yes, I believe they should have that chance. Too bad they won’t get it at community college, since these types of math courses generally have large enrollments, are taught by dubious teachers, and these teachers have no job security, so have only minimal learning requirements (since the teachers know if they ask anything of the students, they’ll be fired).

     If communities really wanted to help these people, they’d be far better served having an “extra GED” night class system, taught by high school teachers.

“…The research showing that many students who fail their placement tests

in mathematics but then go on to be successful in community college,…”

 --again, the false assumption of legitimacy shows up in the report. Being successful in community college requires little more than the ability to “not shave” after all. The report never questions the assumption of whether the community college is actually of any benefit to a community, instead of simply a massive suck of taxpayer dollars and means to exploit the young into endless loan debt.

         While the report does have much to say, the false assumption of legitimacy really leads to bad conclusions. Just one more such quote:

“…While the textbooks in the introductory program courses were often impressive in their demand for mathematical thinking, the tests were a different story. Judging by the tests community college teachers administer to their students in the introductory program courses in their career majors, their courses are typically pitched to the lower set of expectations …”

     In so many words, what the above quote is saying is that yes, the college course texts are legitimate textbooks. Unfortunately, what’s actually going on in the courses is way below the textbooks. Again, this is because there is no legitimacy here.

     

     Accreditation never looks at what goes on in the classroom, instead it only looks at the textbook and, maybe, the syllabus.

     Anyone looking at the course syllabus and book will think “hey, this is a college course.” Anyone actually sitting in the courses will realize that in many cases, the course doesn’t follow the syllabus. The syllabus might say the course is covering six chapters, but the reality? Two chapters, tops, and just the easiest material. The reason, again, is the teachers of these courses are motivated not to teach, but to get as few student complaints as possible…this is best achieved by doing very little in classes.

  

     Still, they have to turn in a syllabus and textbook to admin…

      There are certainly legitimate community college courses, but for the vast majority of students, it’s just a big trap. The report also examines what’s going on in the writing/English classes.

     Next time.

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