By Professor
Doom
I’m finishing up a quick look at a book, Community Colleges and the Access
Affect, which
details how most all community colleges operate in open violation of Federal
law, since they sell coursework below the 9th grade level.
The book tries really, really, hard not to
pin the blame on the lawlessness and corruption of higher education on
administration—no wonder, since the authors use their real names, and are not
administrators. They’d be fired in short order, and be unemployable in higher
education if they dared to do such a thing.
Despite their quite understandable
interest in covering their own butts, the book is a trove of information on
what’s going on in higher education today. Allow me to present some select
quotes:
“…twenty-seven of her first credit
hours at the college will not count toward a degree…” (p1)
As I’ve written many times before, most of
community college work isn’t college, and it’s quite common for students to
literally take a year or more of material (students can easily take 24 credit
hours in a year of college) before they can even think about taking college
courses. The student discussed here wants to teach small children and is
majoring in Education; the gentle reader would be surprised to learn just how many students I’ve had that want to
teach small children, but can themselves barely function at the 5th
grade level.
“…for many new students little or
none of their coursework applies toward a degree…” (p3)
The books says stuff like this, but never
really asks who allowed for so much useless coursework to be sold, or who
allows people with no chance of getting a degree onto campus, or who tricked
these people into taking out huge loans for coursework that is worthless no
matter how you look at it.
Those are really pertinent questions to
ask.
“It doesn’t really matter how you do; you can always get into community
college and get it paid for.” (p4)
Many students in community college have
this attitude. For them, community college is just a source of checks. Again,
the authors fail to point out that before the students get their checks, the
college (and thus, administration) gets first dibs on the money…students just
get the crumbs. Since administrative pay depends on the size of the
institution, administration is really, really, motivated to have lots people on
campus. It’s odd that the authors don’t see the real problem here.
“…no student who entered the college at
the lowest level of math preparation had ever graduated with an associate’s
degree.” (p13, boldface added, describing the success rate of students at a
particular community college)
I ask the
reader to consider that quote. No student, none, not a one, who entered the
program got anything out of it. It’s an anecdote, but a common one. At one
large school where I taught, of some 25,000 students that went through the
remedial program, zero made it to a
college level math course. Again, that’s just an anecdote, but I want to
emphasize a point the authors keep skipping over:
Administration knows full well that the
chance of success for many remedial students is, effectively, 0. And yet it
keeps enrolling those students, keeps encouraging those students, year after
year. Anyone with integrity would realize that enrolling these students is
cruel to them, and a waste of taxpayer resources…until you remove the people
without integrity from higher education, none of the fixes proposed by this
book will do much good.
“…No public institution of higher
education shall offer any remedial support, including remedial courses, that is
not embedded with the corresponding entry level course…” (p14)
Many institutions/states have instituted a
“just in time” system for teaching remedial courses, where the remedial work is
served up at the same time the college work is presented. This is, of course,
just another fraud, and I’ve written in detail of this before. The reality of these initiatives is
the remedial material is just put into the “college” course, while the college
material is eliminated. In other words, the college course turns into a
remedial course with a misleading name. This is why you can find 2nd year college courses
now that are little different than remedial courses of a few decades ago.
So, unless these illegal institutions of
plunder are shut down, that will be the next “solution” to the disaster of
remedial education. It won’t be a solution, but it’ll mislead people for a
little while. Years ago, remedial education was a disaster, so they renamed it
“developmental”. Now, developmental education is a disaster, so they’ll just
rename it to “college” work.
The end result will be the same, however,
in that we’ll be graduating people with nothing more than what they had coming
out of high school. Except that they’ll be older and deep in debt, and
administrators will be much wealthier.
“…21st Century Commission
on the Future of Community Colleges—with one token community college professor
in the group of 39 contributors…” (p28)
As I’ve said
repeatedly, the problem with higher education is that educators have no control
over anything. The book will occasionally touch on this problem, but never
seems to figure it out completely. It does at least mention that 38 of 39
contributors to community college policy recommendations were CEOs of community
colleges and the like…educators have at best less than 3% of the influence on
education right now, and that’s being generous.
Groups such as the above are looking into
improving graduation rates, but not, of course, at the expense of growth, the
only thing administration really understands. Key to these plans will be
accelerating the process of “education”, and, of course, just make things
easier than they are now (like “don’t shave” is difficult?).
…”Bill Gates declared, ‘We owe it to
every American to make it pretty darn easy for them to get through the system…”
(p29)
“Pretty darn easy,” he says. Yeah, that’s
what I want in a nurse, someone who can barely think as well as a 10 year old,
but still has a nursing degree received through an accelerated, super-easy,
program. Bill Gates says we owe that to ourselves? I’m sure the next time he
needs medical help or another mansion built or someone to fly his private jet,
he’ll make an effort to get the kind of professionals he’s describing here.
The book is a little pricey for personal
use (even the PDF is $30) and is classified as a textbook, so not available
through interlibrary loan. Odd that the information within is so hard to
disseminate, as I don’t see any course using this as a textbook. Allow me to
share one more of the book’s gems detailing how messed up our higher education
system is:
“…In the state of Tennessee, the
graduation of some students is now more financially rewarding to institutions
than the graduation of others…” (p36)
It’s so funny how often I’m told how
institutions “do not discriminate” on the basis of race or whatever, but in
Tennessee, your race can improve your chance of graduation. That is, of course,
assuming administration thinks getting more money is important. That’s a pretty
safe bet…the book doesn’t connect the dots here, however.
While the book has much to say,
ultimately it dances around the real problem in higher education today: a
corrupt, untouchable caste of administration has a stranglehold on education,
and can force students and faculty to do anything it wants them to do. Since
administrative goals are growth, and retention, concepts like “integrity”,
“skills”, “education”, and “reputation” are merely objects to be sacrificed in
the name of growth and retention, nothing more.
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