By Professor
Doom
It seems whenever I consider the “big
picture” of higher education, community college comes out as the worst, most
corrupt aspect of it. Yes, for-profit schools are more corrupt on a per-student
basis, but somehow I find it more forgivable,
as a school billed as “for-profit” makes no claim about being
“for-education.”
Community colleges, however, are publicly
funded, they’re not supposed to be about the money. Yes, “not about the money”
is the most nonsensical phrase possible in American English, but, the fact is
there is at least a claim that community colleges are there to help students
get their start in higher education, and despite monetary reality, I feel that
the claim should at least be attempted well enough that one can honestly say there’s
an appearance of caring about helping
people.
Community colleges, regrettably, seldom
even have the appearance of being about anything but plundering the student
loan and grant money. There are two reasons for first. First, they’re organized
from the top down—the Poo Bahs that run such places don’t care about education,
they care about growing the school, since large schools mean large paychecks
and hugely billowing golden parachutes after a handful of years at the
institution. I’ve covered this reason many times.
The other reason is a bit more subtle.
Community colleges are invariably “open admission,” allowing any student that
wants to come on campus to take classes, paid for by various support programs.
The typical community college student is, well, not a great student. He’ll
typically come from a family that has never sent a child to college. Put
together, these two things make the incoming student particularly vulnerable:
he has no idea what higher education is supposed to be, has little personal
understanding of education in general, and he’ll get no guidance from the
family to let him know he’s being cheated. It’s easy enough to find graduate
student protests about unfair treatment…but community college student protests
seldom, if ever, get
past protests about rising tuition (and even then, the protests aren’t
nearly so extreme as
an entire class walking out).
So, community colleges, even though less
expensive than the “more” corrupt for-profit schools, have much larger numbers
of students, taking somewhat less from each of them.
The main support for these “cheap”
schools is the Pell Grant scheme, where students get free money for college;
any money not spent on tuition goes to the student. This scheme has allowed
community colleges to bloat to ridiculous size (tens of thousands of students
are common now, though in my day a university with so many students would be
considered huge). Administrators, bent on growth over all, don’t even check to
see if students have received their Pell Grants previously from another
institution, so we have bands of students roaming from community college to
community college, picking up their checks. I’ve been on campuses where half
the students disappear the day after “check day.” I’ve
written of the Pell Grant scam in detail already.
The primary courses in these cheap
so-called colleges are not college level. They’re remedial classes. Fully 90%
of community college work is pre-college work, little different than the
material students see in high school, or lower. 6th
grade level work is actually quite common for a community college class,
assuming the class has any material at all in it (quite a few classes are so
devoid of content that a student can pass without even coming to class a single
time, or submitting even a single assignment).
A recent student shows just how many
community college students are getting nothing from community college:
Now, California’s a big place, and
community colleges there have the same accreditation rules as most other places;
what’s happening at community colleges in California is happening at many other
places in this country.
To
be clear, this failure rate isn’t putting a timeline on graduation, this
failure rate is over an infinite timeline. If you do put the timeline to
something more reasonable, things get much worse—for example, a
successful community, 2 year, college can have 0.6% 2 year graduation rates
and this miserable performance is not a problem for admin as long as the school
grows…it’s all about growth, not education.
So, the 70% failure rate isn’t on a
timeline, that’s a failure rate if you give students fifty years to eventually
pass. We’ve been running the “free college for all” experiment long enough that
we know when students are gone for good:
These students
typically dropped out – some with a significant amount of debt and no degree to help them.
In addition, only 40% of community college students achieved sufficient credit
hours in school to boost their potential in the workforce.
These students are not transferring (the
usual lie administration says to cover for the fact they have few graduates),
nor are they learning any useful skills (the next most common lie, that any
education is incredibly precious). These students are just acquiring debt and
wasting time. Indirectly, these students are paying fat salaries for the administrators
that shoved them into 6th grade level courses that couldn’t possibly
teach anything useful to the community.
Past this point is where the article
addresses fixes to the disastrous failure rate, and runs astray. See, there are
three big reasons for the high failure rate, and because nobody wants to
consider the source of the problem, nobody will consider effective fixes. Let’s
consider the three sources of the problem here:
1) Students get free money for signing
up.
Honest, get rid of the free money and
you’ll have quite a bit fewer students wasting their time on campus.
2) Students don’t have to be interested in
education to sign up.
Community colleges have no entrance
requirements, so we’ve got lots of students on campus that have no interest in
education—getting rid of the free money will eliminate most of these, I’m sure,
but if community colleges only took students that actually wanted to learn
something, and were able to demonstrate they were capable of learning, instead
of wanting “some place to go,” graduation rates would go up.
3) Accreditation needs to be legitimate.
As mentioned before, most students going to community college
have no idea what college is. Community college administrators take this
opportunity to rip these poor kids off, and rip them off as brutally as
possible. Accreditation, a supposed regulatory agency that affirms community
colleges are legitimate, does no such thing, since it is run by the same people
that run higher education. Colleges with 90% of their coursework being below
the college level should be shut down, and schools
that offer coursework below the 9th grade are in violation of
federal law, and should be shut down. Accreditation won’t do it, however.
If it did, you wouldn’t have nearly all the students wasting their time on
useless coursework.
These common-sense
solutions are not on the agenda, however. Instead, administration will just
expand the plundering:
Community colleges are learning that they must provide more remedial services to students in the areas of math and
English, if they are to raise their success rates in the near future.
I’ve written
before of the remediation
scam, where administrators reduce standards to an ever lower point, and where
ever more ridiculous plans for fixing remediation get proposed every few years.
We’re already at the point where many community colleges offer 2nd-3rd
grade material (I’ve taught such courses)…offering even more remediation isn’t
going to help the graduation rate.
No, getting rid of
the free money, only accepting legitimate students, and only having legitimate
schools are not on the table when it comes to reigning in the community college
scam, although these are ideas any educator would suggest.
Keep this in mind:
our administrators have been reducing standards year after year, in the name of
“improving education.” What is the best our administrators can do, in the face
of endless data showing that reducing standards doesn’t work? Reduce standards
some more. With leadership like this, how is it a puzzle that higher education
is such a mess today?
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