By Professor Doom
So now we’re looking at a typical
“nontraditional” community college student, who has come to campus for the
exact reason the community paid for the campus: real job training.
Gert is about done. She has no idea why she
needs calculus and art history and chemistry to be a massage therapist…she is
having big-time trouble finishing her thirty credit hour [now forty-one
credits] certificate.
I don’t want
to sound like a jerk here but…not everyone is academically inclined. Community
college administrators only care about butts-in-seats, know nothing of
education, and don’t care about helping people. And so they set up programs so
that even massage therapists are taking “job training” coursework like calculus
and chemistry that is utterly idiotic on the face of it…and spending much of
their adult lives learning a trade that realistically takes a few months to
learn all you need to know, at most.
The results
are, of course, predictable:
This was her second try at art history, her
third try at calculus [after taking five pre requisite math classes over seven
years!], and her first attempt at chemistry…
…Gert had
spent nearly eight years working on what should have been a one-year massage
therapy program…been receiving Bell
Grants, been able to get school loans,…
--by “Bell Grants,” the book means “Pell Grants.” Recall,
this book is thinly veiled fiction at best. Every community college has
classrooms filled with students like this.
Does anyone
honestly believe this mother-of-four, even if she someday manages to get that
massage therapy degree, will actually be able to pay off all those years of
loans? Like many student loan victims, she’ll see her social
security checks garnished. Imagine how much better off she’d be if her
certificate training program was put together by people that actually wanted to
help human beings, instead of pitiless administrators out for yet another buck.
Gert would have been working for the last 7 years, instead of just handing her
loan money to the community college administrators.
The vast majority, 80% or more on some campuses,
of community college students are remedial students. While admin insists that
these students can get up to par just by taking a few remedial courses, it’s a well known
fact that over 90% of remedial students won’t get their degree within 3 years. Well
known to people in higher education, mind you, but admin never tells the
remedial student this important information. Instead, admin says “check this
box so you can get loans that we know full well are guaranteed to run out
before you get the quick degree we’re promising you…” It must be all
administration can do not to laugh maniacally every time they screw someone
over like this.
I’ve seen so many
poor students cheated in this manner, spending years and years to get that
“quick and convenient” certificate, trying to fulfill course requirements that simply
have nothing to do with the job training, and are far beyond the capacity of
non-academically inclined student (i.e., the kind of student who will be going
for those quick certificates). Many years later, these students are spit out
with nothing but deep debts and no useful skills. My begging admin to modify
programs to actually give students a fair chance garnered only administrative
enmity.
Me, at a
faculty-only meeting, addressing a deanling: “Hi. This meeting is for faculty
only. What are you doing here?”
Deanling:
“I’m here ex officio.”
Me: “Uh
huh. And what do you think that means?”
Deanling:
“I’m non-voting.”
Me: “Well,
we’d be more comfortable if you weren’t here.”
Deanling:
“No.”
--This kind
of arrogance is displayed all the time, and, incidentally, the deanling doesn’t
even know what ex officio means.
And the leaders
of these schools? They’re hideously ignorant despite their strange yet fancy
degrees; I’ve been shocked time and again just how little these people know.
The book highlights an all-too-credible Q&A with an administrator (and I’ve
had similar ostentatious displays of ignorance with Education/Administrative Ph.D.-crowned
admins):
"Oh, tell me, Doctor
Preston—who was Karl Marx?" asked McDougal as if he did not know.
"Ah, well, let me think, he
was, uh, yass, he was premier of the Soviet Union in the 1950's," said a reddening Dr. Preston.
"And do
you know…who is Hugo Chavez?"
"Hmm. I
believe he is president of Southern El Paso Community College—or at least
somewhere over in Texas. Yass."
"Dr. Preston, what do ye think
of collective bargaining?" queried the enlightened McDougal.
"Oh, Barb and I don't haggle
over prices at garage sales," said the cheery Dean.
"I see. And just what is your
doctorate in, Dean Preston?"
A beet-faced Preston replied, "What do you mean, what is my doctorate in?…I have an EdD in
Educational Leadership."
"What did you study in school
lad? What subjects?" asked the now-investigative highlander.
The dean seemed surprised.
"What? Well, we studied, uh, diversity, networking, uh, email etiquette,
operating PDA's and smart phones, salary negotiations, student organizations,
dancing, program review, quality management, higher education leadership, TQM,
collaboration, team development—-you know, an in depth look at management
processes and dialogue—oh, and best practice theory."
Seriously, the
people running the schools all too often are embarrassingly ignorant of a wide
range of topics, and knowledgeable of nothing academic. There is no reason to
believe they care about education, and every reason to believe they hurt the
vulnerable simply as a living.
While the book
might not be a complete discussion of the sad reality of community college, I
find it fairly accurate and worth a read for those interested.
In the end, this
“fictional” account of community college comes to the same conclusions all the
real data presented in this blog comes to: community colleges are primarily a
scam, helping a tiny minority at the expense of legions of victims. The book
goes over every aspect of the scam in a great epiphany at the end:
Is this why they refer to themselves
as leaders rather than stewards? Is this why they ignore the data—the
information which shows real merit, real quality [education of students] comes
from vocational programs? Is this why they can't decide on program review
rubrics, learning outcomes assessment, and program assessment instruments?
Perhaps they don't want to know—they
don't want to decide—they don't want better retention or more program
completers. They want enrollment—continuous enrollment—and now they even count
two-year degree completion after six or seven years of study as successful.
If the conjectures
above are all true, it does much to explain why schools where
essentially nobody gets their degree on time despite what it says in the
glossy brochure are nevertheless rewarded for their success.
I really want to
emphasize the key issue of the epiphany. Community colleges weren’t intended to
be major centers of academics. They were supposed to be, and are sold as, jobs
trainers first, with academics a secondary goal at best. Because of this,
there’s very little scrutiny over what goes on, academically, in community
college.
Our higher
education system has been taken over by a ruthless caste of vicious
mercenaries, “leaders” they call themselves, and this caste has exploited the
lack of academic oversight to all too often turn these campuses into their
private plundergrounds, hiding
their shenanigans behind a cloud of pseudo-academics.
This book is
presented as fiction, but I’m telling the gentle reader: it is an all too
realistic portrayal of how community colleges function.
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