By Professor
Doom
Admin, 1996: “If you do not get your retention up to 85%,
your contract will not be renewed.”
--why I had to leave a certain state
university. “Retention” is the percent of students that do not drop the course
and do not fail. On this particular campus of 50,000+ students, fraud was so
rampant that some 20% of the names on the roster never actually came to class.
If you wanted to remain faculty, you had little choice but to pass students who
you never even saw, much less never did any work or took any test demonstrating
they knew anything.
I’ve focused so much on the politics
infecting our campuses that it’s been a while since I’ve discussed how our
campuses became overwhelmed with students who have no business being on campus.
How did it happen?
Admin worked to trap them on campus.
Keeping a fake student on campus is called “retention,” and, as always, it
started innocuously enough. Simpler courses, changes in policy, adding climbing
walls and lazy rivers are common enough tactics, although they all needed
approval because they went against the whole concept of education. How did they
get people that knew higher education was about education to go along with it?
Admin: “Education is important. Thus,
we need to work to improve retention.”
Admin’s argument seemed reasonable enough.
I mean, we’ve all been raised from birth to believe that education, any time at
all spent in any classroom, is a good thing. So, faculty did nothing to stop
the shift on retention.
It started with mandatory meetings, but
it was clear in these meetings that the primary means of increasing retention
would be to reduce the education.
Admin: “The math department’s low
retention numbers are not good. We need to bring in Education specialists to
teach the courses.”
Since education, actually learning
anything, in the courses, was irrelevant, admin quickly realized that they no
longer needed knowledgeable faculty. Educationists moved in, destroying courses
that had been defined and refined over the course of a century or more,
erecting new courses with the same names, but without the content.
Admin: “Congratulations to Professor [Useless]. She got 100% retention
this semester. We’ll be promoting her…”
--yes, this was at the same campus
where 20% of the students never came to class even one time.
Higher education on many campuses became a
race to the bottom. Instead of challenging students (which might cause a
student to drop the course), faculty were promoted, praised, even given awards
for offering courses completely devoid of content. Content was irrelevant, you
see, what mattered was no student dropping the course.
All in the name of retention.
Faculty with integrity have a hard time
surviving in this environment. I concede I gave up much of it, hoping that I
could accomplish some good by staying and fighting to return even one campus to
honor. Many of my friends could not sacrifice their integrity, and I respect
that (similarly, I understand that some of my friends had family to feed, and
so held their nose and did all they could to increase retention).
Coursework has degraded so much that if I
dared to give a course like I did in the 80s, I’d lose 90% of the class,
perhaps more. Back then of course, I wouldn’t lose so many students but campuses
were different then: the bulk of students were on campus because they were
interested in learning.
The focus on retention over everything
has changed the dynamic. Now campuses are bogged down with students holding
little to no interest in learning, and, to judge by the riots, are only
interested in advancing a violent and self-destructive ideology.
The American form of higher
education—ridiculously expensive and low content, with all risk assumed by the
students to pay loans while the schools are immune to malpractice suits—has
spread to the UK. It’s been nauseating to watch every single mistake made in the US be repeated there, and the
creepy focus on retention is no exception:
The article I’ll be quoting from above is
so totally wrong, I feel the need to make considerable corrections of the errors.
First error is the article asks the wrong
question. We shouldn’t ask “How can…” but rather “Why should…” The American
version of higher education has trapped over 20,000,000 people into debt
slavery, and even though a great many people now know that higher education is
a trap, there’s still no serious effort being made to stop it.
Instead, “free community college”
movements are rising up. I grant that this will, technically, not put students
deep into debt (instead transferring the debt to the taxpayer, and we’ll just
pretend students won’t pay taxes ever), but much of community college is a
fraud, as I’ve detailed extensively in this blog.
Even without tuition debt, even without
the fraud factor, we’re tricking our kids into squandering years of theirs
lives partying in community college…this is so wrong.
Anyway, the UK is now looking at
retention, and, of course, doing it wrong:
“The UK is a world leader when it comes to student retention – it came top in the latest OECD data (from 2014), with 71% of the country’s students completing their undergraduate courses, in contrast with 49% in the US…”
Ok, great, you’re the world leader in
something that shouldn’t even be a competition. Stop. You’re done. That’s good
enough. If there was any integrity, that’s where it would end, but the Poo Bahs
only want one thing, ever: MOAR.
So now we’re off to
the another error. No, universities are not losing a thing when a student drops.
A publicly funded university is not in it for
profit. A student who drops out isn’t “costing” the university anything. All
the university is losing is the money that would educate the student. The
university’s expenses drop by what it would cost to educate the student, so no
loss at all.
That’s how a
steward with integrity would view a dropout. But, the leaders running our
schools realize that every dollar that doesn’t go to the university is a dollar
(or pound, in this case) that isn’t going into administrative pocket. See how
backward the point of view is?
“Teaching
Excellence Framework, which will use non-continuation rates as one its
metrics,…”
And here it comes,
the fatal error. Retention (or “non-continuation rate”) is now going to be the
measure of “good teaching” in the UK. Hereafter, an educator’s job in the UK
will depend not on providing education, but on keeping butts in seats. How long
until they, too, are going to be forced to have 85% retention to keep their
jobs?
The rest of the
article tries to cover up the reality of what higher education will become once
the focus is on retention (and, do keep in mind, they’re the best in the world,
and still think retention, and not education, should be the focus of education).
The article claims
retention will be improved by telling the students what they need to do. Don’t
get me wrong, letting students know what will be expected of them is all well
and good but that’s just now how it will ultimately work out.
There’s no way to
quantify “I told the students what they needed to know.” On the other hand, an
administrator can quantify what percent of students didn’t drop or fail the
course…and that will be the precise measure of teaching.
One comment sums
up how the “problem” of poor retention can be quickly and easily fixed:
“Improve retention and standards by not
recruiting virtual illiterates.”
It really is that simple. It’s the same thing faculty in the U.S. said
when admin here told them to increase retention. Admin then laughed in
faculty’s faces, and opened enrollment further.
One hardly needs a crystal ball to see what will happen in the UK in a
few years.
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