By Professor Doom
When the
government shut down Corinthian, it was a complete disaster. Now,
it wasn’t a disaster for the administration of Corinthian, they all got huge
golden parachutes. It was an inconvenience for faculty, but they were all being
paid starvation wages as adjuncts, so the loss of the minimal paychecks wasn’t
so bad, and they just moved on to the next fake school.
It was a disaster
for the students. The students took out huge loans for this rip-off school, and
are still on the hook for the loans, even though the school was shut down for
fraud. Their course credits don’t even transfer, even though the school was
accredited, but accreditation is itself a fraud and no longer has anything to
do with education.
It also was a
disaster for the students who graduated from Corinthian in previous years: when
your school is known to be so fraudulent that it’s one of the very few our
government has shut down for fraud…it’s tough to tell an employer your degree
is worth much.
Even if a school
isn’t shut down for fraud, it’s still a bad deal for the students when it
closes. Between lost credit hours in transfer, and the sheer inconvenience of
possibly having to move hundreds of miles to get into a comparable degree
program…it’s a mess.
“But Professor
Doom, schools close so rarely that this isn’t a concern!” is a natural response
but…I fear more schools will be closing soon, many more, and not just the small
schools we’ve been losing a few of every year. We’re starting to see campuses
now which are converged, controlled by Leftist Social Justice Warrior lunatics,
and the first publicly noticeable side effect of convergence is the riots.
A few riots won’t
close a school, but people see the riots, and this alone tells the parents of
prospective students: “there are violent and insane people here, send your kid
to another school.” We’re already seeing this at schools like Missouri State, which
closed 7 dorms because they’ve lost so many students.
Even if the riots
ever get under control, these schools are doomed. They’re on the record as
saying they’re now dedicated to social justice, and indoctrinating everyone at
the school into this ideology.
Perhaps becoming
devoted to ideology is a good thing but…our students are paying $100,000 or
more to go the college now. For that kind of money, they’re entitled to get something
of value. Ideology can be learned for free, and has no market value. Once
again, someone looking into schools like this is going to come to the
conclusion that going to another school is a better option.
Now, when a
school starts to die, it generally changes to try to survive. More marketing,
putting in a climbing wall, or even improving their degree programs are all
options, though sadly the latter is seldom on the table. Trouble is, a converged
school can’t make these choices—ideology is so important, paramount to
everything else, that nothing else matters. Even if they engage in a massive
marketing program, the simple fact is they’ll destroy themselves with
marketing, as they’ll simply publicize how dedicated they are to the
ideology…scaring away even more prospective students.
The only solution
for converged schools is bulldozers. It might not be next year, but it’s
inevitable, and some of these schools are quite large. At some point, a
university with tens of thousands of students and graduates will find itself
shutting its doors for reasons which don’t involve pure fraud.
Now what?
I find myself
often looking to the UK for ideas and insights regarding US higher education.
The Federal student loan scam, with all the strings attached, have made many
American institutions nearly cookie-cutter copies of each other. While in many
ways the UK is adopting our very corrupted system, they’re still their own
system enough that there’s hope of some new, legitimate, ideas coming from “across
the pond.” Our higher education system is drowning in a bloated bureaucracy
which cannot be the source of the new ideas no matter how many millions we give
our Poo Bahs. Does the UK have any ideas for us? A recent article regarding
issues in the UK might be a source:
Much like here,
students are starting to drown in debt from their “precious” education, and
this in turn is leading prospective students away from higher education, lest
they too become victims. It might not be quite the same as the fraud or
convergence we have in the US, but the end result, a school closing for lack of
students, is the same.
Like me, the
author of the linked article realizes the big disaster here is the effect the
closing will have on students. While he’s discussing a near closing, he
realizes we’ve got some huge disasters here waiting to happen.
What does he
propose?
…outlined meagre protections for students at
universities which are closing down, offering to oversee student transfer
arrangements. ..
Wow, meagre protections? That’s so much
more than what we have here. Corinthian students, for example, got nothing, and
I’ve cited a few examples of students being crushed by loans for coursework
they didn’t know they enrolled for. Again, I’m looking at fraud, but it’s hard
not to constantly go back to the fraud when considering the American higher
education system.
Let’s assume
legitimacy. Why can’t we install protections for students caught in a failing but
legitimate university?
“We already have
those protections through accreditation” is a natural response…but it’s wrong.
Yes, in the past, one of the main reasons for our system of school
accreditation was to facilitate transfer of credits from one school to another—it’s
the whole reason that, say, the syllabus for the College Algebra course at
State University of East Coast has basically the same material as Expensive
Private University of West Coast.
Of course, many
campuses, especially community
college campuses, are completely unhinged—what’s on the syllabus is
unrelated to what actually happens in the course. Oh, wait, I didn’t want to
focus on the fraud here so…moving on.
Accreditation used
to allow for transfer but…the rules for accreditation changed. Now, instead of
allowing for easy transfer, accreditation is actually a roadblock—accredited schools
can’t transfer more than 2 years of credits (this varies a bit by accreditor),
so students in their 3rd year, or later, would still be greatly
harmed by accreditation.
It’s even worse
than that, of course, as most schools don’t come even close to allowing the
upper limit, with many schools only allowing perhaps 24 credit hours to
transfer—this is about 20% of a degree, so not just advanced students, but any
student with at least 2 semesters of college would be screwed by the university
closing, as a matter of policy.
Having seen accreditation rules completely
ignored many times in many ways, however, schools could just change their
policies. In fact, the Federal government can fix this whole issue in one easy
step:
Any school taking Federal student loan
money must accept all transfer credits from any other school taking Federal
student loan money.
And, just like that, the whole “we can’t
close the university, it’d be a disaster!” argument vanishes. Yes, the
accreditors might have a problem with it, but seeing as they have no problem
with massive systematic academic fraud (Hi UNC!), deeply immoral behavior (Hi
Penn State!) or any of the other problems I’ve highlighted in this blog, I
don’t see anyone paying much attention to their crying about my proposed rule.
Bottom line, accreditation has been irrelevant for decades now, serving as
nothing more as a co-conspirator with schools to skim that student loan money.
Oh, wait, I’m supposed to not talk about the fraud for a bit…my apologies, it’s
hard not to mention fraud when discussing any aspect of our higher education
system.
Perhaps my
solution is too draconian but the bottom line is at some point we know a number
of our big institutions will fail. Why aren’t any of our leaders in higher
education planning ahead to take care of students?
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