For-Profit Colleges Disguising Themselves…Trump’s Fault?

By Professor Doom

     Last time I was a bit hard on Trump, so I figure this time to give him a break.

     So much of our news media is deranged these days. It takes real effort to pick out information from the propaganda, and a recent article from Ctrl-Left hate site The Nation, a “weekly journal of progressive news” that’s been around for ages, highlights the problem:

For Profit Colleges Are Dodging Regulations By Becoming…’Nonprofits’?

Under Trump, the scam-college industry is getting a second wind.

     I’ve been saying the for-profits have been disguising themselves as non-profits for years (here’s a post from before the 2016 election where I said it, on the college debt list of shame). NYU is the most famous “non-profit” school which really puts the screws to students in the name of profits, but…this isn’t a Trump thing, as NYU was founded in 1831.

      Now, just because the site falsely tries to put the blame on this “new” trend on Trump, doesn’t mean it’s not a trend (although a trend identified by me years ago…seriously, mainstream media sucks).

As a prominent college-scam entrepreneur and purveyor of faux philanthropy[R1] …

     Goodness, the hatred guiding the author is palpable, but before getting to what little the article has to say, I want to use the above to inform. Yes, Trump was involved in a dubious “school,” though it wasn’t an educational institution. The profits--if any, he shut it down fast like smart businessmen do with losing propositions--from it pale next to the massive sums “acquired” by the likes of Sanders and Clinton in their own involvement in schools…schools that are actual universities, screwing kids forever in exchange for student loan money. I covered this hierarchy of fraud before, of course. It’s curious how the author neglected to mention this detail. Oh yeah, that’s right: when you’ve a narrative to push, you can’t divulge anything to contradict it. It’s the big problem with our news today, you have to go somewhere else to get the full story.

      Similarly, “faux philanthropy” is a strange thing to say, unrelated to the subject of the article.  But seeing as it was brought up, does the author truly not know about the immense fraud of The Clinton Foundation? Maybe she could go to another site and learn about it.

     Anyway, let’s get to the piece:

…his administration is taking a lax approach to regulating the college business…as the disgraced for-profit education industry revives itself.

      I do wish she could have backed up this claim, as the most recent data sure indicates the for-profit education industry is taking a relentless beating, and is in no way reviving itself. Much as other Ctrl-Left articles talk about “rising hate crimes” even when nobody can see any at all, there seems to be an agenda being pushed, one that cannot respond to facts.

      As far as lax regulations, sure, Trump hasn’t done much. But neither have the last five or more presidents. Again, here’s a piece from 2014 where the Feds knew a school was a fraud, well before the Trump presidency, and the Feds still gave the school well over a billion in student loan money, in a single year, because the regulations allowed even a fraudulent school, if accredited, to get student loan money. Total student loan debt goes up around 100,000,000,000 a year, and has been for years, because there hasn’t been a way to stop the fraud. And then there’s the long-running Pell Grant scam, 20 years or more, where nomadic students go from campus to campus in the same state getting the SAME grant (and taking the same courses, likely), because there’s not enough regulation to even keep student names on record so they can’t get the same “free money” multiple times.

      It’s a real shame the derangement of the site re: Trump gets so much in the way of addressing the very real problems we’ve had in our higher education system for years, if not decades.

            So “these creatures seem to be multiplying.”

     Finally the article gets around to talking about what a non-profit school is supposed to be, and cites the benefits of such a school, assuming it’s run by an administration with integrity. That assumption is a big problem. Sadly, these schools have been systematically plundered (here’s such a school from 2014, getting looted due to the lack of regulations. Because of Trump, being elected 2 years after the looting, you see…), our system is just too vulnerable to having a Poo-Bah come in, and granting him too much power to enhance his bank account and real estate holdings at the expense of the school (cf, Mrs. Sanders, you didn’t think he got the money for those multiple houses from speeches, did you?).

      And what solution is proposed to this “rising” problem of scammy non-profit schools?

            To protect students, simply demanding real transparency through stricter oversight of nonprofits…          

     As is typical of the Ctrl-Left, “more government control” is proposed. Thing is, government had control, and ceded it to accreditation…which in turn became controlled by the very institutions which were to be controlled. This process is called “regulatory capture,” and while higher ed is hardly alone for this type of corruption…you don’t respond to regulatory capture by adding more regulations. Not rationally, anyway, although one doesn’t expect rational thought from the Ctrl-Left.

     The simple solution, as always, would be to end the student loan scam. Without the massive profits, the for-profit schools would die, and the fake “non-profit” schools would die as well. Of course, a solution that doesn’t involve “free stuff” from the government (in this case, a free set of regulatory controls created by volunteers with experience in higher ed, and doubtless enforced by an army of free volunteers until the end of time) cannot possibly be suggested by a Ctrl-Left site. This is really the big problem with our media, they so blatantly fail to discuss things in detail, or consider anything outside the statist point of view.

       Sadly but predictably, the article both begins and ends in mindless misleading hate:    

Under the leadership of a politician who built his own fame with the help of a fake university scam…

     Gee whiz, really? The guy had a big TV show, if memory serves, and I seem to vaguely recall he had some real estate and casino interests as well. Far more likely, he was hoping his reputation would drive sales at Trump University. I imagine most people don’t recall his “real estate university,” an unaccredited nonacademic business which never took a nickel of federal student loan scam money (and thus has nothing to do with the topic of the article), and certainly didn’t hurt nearly as many kids as, well, other politicians (double meaning intended here) who involved themselves in schools.

       Anyway, there’s still a tiny piece of truth in the article, despite the author’s derangements: don’t assume that just because the school is “non-profit” that it’s not out to extract every last dollar it can from the students.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

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Reaction To Trump’s “Free Speech” Order Reveals Bias

By Professor Doom

     Trump recently issued an executive order denying Federal funds to campuses which restrict free speech. It’s a bit toothless, since it would only affect research funds (i.e., not the bread-and-butter of student loan money), and doesn’t define “restrict” well…but it highlights that we clearly have a problem on our campuses, even as I acknowledge that this should only apply to publicly funded schools in any event.

      But, we clearly have a problem on our campuses, which use social media to screen students and punish professors for saying the wrong things off campus. We have a system where most critics of higher ed must use pseudonyms because retribution is swift and pitiless from those who run the system. We have a system where the guy who discovered DNA is banned from campus because of something he said decades ago.

     So even if the order doesn’t mean much, the response to the order is interesting.

This is not the first time President Trump has used an incident at Berkeley to suggest that federal research dollars should be cut off over alleged denial of free speech rights.

Berkeley used to be an icon of campus free speech, but, sadly, those days are long gone. Anti-free speech incidents keep happening there for a reason, after all. That said, they tried to dismiss Trump’s assertions:

What he didn't note at that time was that Berkeley officials had allowed Yiannopoulos to speak, calling off the event only amid the violence. Berkeley had defended his right to appear on campus (and he has appeared since), citing principles of free speech even as some on campus said he should be kept away because of views many find offensive.

      What a backhanded defense of Milo Yiannopoulos! Why not instead say “Berkeley defended Milo from the terroristic actions of violent racists…” instead of the limp and ill-defined “views many find offensive.” The article I’m quoting from clearly is biased against Trump, and that’s the reaction I’m noting here:

Terry Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education, in an interview shortly after President Trump's Saturday speech, called the proposed executive order "a solution in search of a problem.

     Wait, what? We have so many anti-free speech incidents on campus that we can run statistical tests to correlate them with tuition, assuming my previous examples weren’t evidence enough. You’d have to be extremely ignorant of higher education not to see there’s a problem here. It really seems like a big site like Inside Higher Ed could poke around a bit to see this.

      Instead, the article attacks “The Trump Administration” record, including Trump blocking hecklers from his Twitter. This is very far removed from an Executive Order, and I do hope someone lets Inside Higher Ed know just how much deplatforming of major news sites has been going on of late. How does a site this ignorant of reality and loaded with hypocrisy stay up?

Among organizations that promote free expression on campus, the response to President Trump's Saturday speech was tepid.

      Really? They go on to quote from places in higher education I’ve never heard of (I remind the gentle reader I’ve been in higher ed for 30 years). They couldn’t find anyone excited about this? How hard could it be? I’ll take a few seconds and see if I can find anyone excited about it. Yeah, that was tough:

It was the moment I’ve been waiting for.

      Yeah, I guess Fox News isn’t big enough for Inside Higher Ed to know about it. Conservative voices are silenced on campus, but I guess Inside Higher Ed doesn’t know that. It took me all of 30 seconds to find it, and I bet I could find more by going to other conservative and religious sources…in other words, the people who’ve been silenced. The fact that the site I’m quoting from doesn’t know such sources even exist demonstrates how those sources have been snuffed as much as possible.

      While it’s being blown off as a non-issue, the comments section agrees with me that there might be something going on here:

Around two dozen states have passed some kind of legislation or issued executive orders requiring the respect of free speech on campuses. Ontario has done the same thing. So many public officials have seen a problem with the restriction of free speech on campuses. Obviously the rote assurances of education bureaucrats did not convince the states. There have been too many ugly campus incidents, with way too little serious response from administrations.

     If it’s a non-issue, why are various states and other countries thinking there’s a problem?

     Moreover, it’s very clear that at least in some (probably many) cases, admin supports the squelching of free speech. Time and again we see riots on campus, and the students involved in the riots, if not conservative, are approved. Meanwhile lone conservative students get punted off campus for violations which pale in comparison to violence.

      The poster above gets attacked for daring to support anything by Trump, even something so weak as this executive order, which at worst only tweaks the nose of our plundering leaders in higher ed.

Way to go out of your way to avoid the issue here, which is that whatever problems of free speech exist on campus Trump addressing them is planting a flag on Mount Hypocrisy.

     It saddens me to see such irrational thinking on a site supposedly for academics. Even if Trump kicking a troll off his own personal Twitter feed is a “violation of free speech,” even if we can ignore how Twitter regularly shuts down pundits and independent news organizations who say uncomfortable things…neither is relevant to the fact at hand, that free speech is very much in danger on many of our campuses, and that it doesn’t matter how much you hate Trump, we should probably appreciate that he did a tiny and nearly irrelevant something about it, rather than deny the problem.

      One comment pretty much wins the thread:

The pervasive 'bile for Trump' behavior now on full display is not lost on families of high-school juniors and seniors who are in process of making that crucial decision: Where will we invest the time, money and energy for a particular child's higher education?

This decision is not so much ideological as pragmatic: If University A is constantly embroiled in political controversies, athletics scandals, financial scandals, reports of violent behavior on campus--do we send our child there? My alma mater hits a number of those markers, thankfully not the violence reports, yet.

Until I see the tide turn, my wallet remains closed, and I steer all inquiries from other families around me to safer options.

     Our leaders in higher ed have turned many of our campuses into ideological indoctrination centers where, absolutely, free speech is discouraged. The leaders are thrilled at the lack of opposing views but, bottom line, are the students and parents of those students happy about it? For those students who have parents who care about their education, you better believe these schools are the ones losing the most enrollment, and for good reason.

     Get woke, go broke, is a catchphrase for a reason, after all.

     Now, Mr. President, can you amend this executive order so that student loan money can likewise be denied?

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

A Minor Post...

...while I weigh which madcap option gives me a better than minute chance of not dying from cancer in the near future. It's so tough to pick between a 10% chance (with brutal side effects), an unknown chance (with unknown side effects), and straight up hopeless chance.

     My book has received a highlight on a non-fiction book site. I write a bit there of why I wrote my main book:

  This was a book I needed to write. I’ve been in higher education 30 years, all my adult life, and I’ve seen it change from the inside. You don’t have to work in higher ed to know something is very wrong, from the Diversity Commissars making a half million a year to the race riots to the endless graduates who can’t answer even rudimentary questions about our country, much less write even a single sentence without struggling, not to mention the roughly 50,000,000 citizens now trapped in student loans (including over 100,000 senior citizens losing their social security to pay for their loans).

The interested reader can read the rest here.

Student Loans Warping Society, Part 2

By Professor Doom

      So I’ve been wandering through a Buzzfeed article of all things, which talks about the student loans. We’ve established that 15-20% of the population has these loans, that they’re inescapable, that default rates are steadily rising and, bottom line, these victims won’t be able to pay them off.

      The important detail here is the 15-20%, around 50,000,000 people, is concentrated in the 20-35 age group. Yes, there are 155,000 people getting their social security checks garnished from student loans…but what are going to be the consequences of financially obliterating much of the current adult generation?

     For many of us, student debt means delaying — if not entirely forgoing — homeownership, marriage, and parenthood.

      Student debt forgoing marriage? As bizarre as it sounds, there’s some truth to it. If you want a wife, why pay an extra $35,000 (the average) for one? Yes, it’s possible for a male to overlook it, but some do care about such things. That might sound mercenary, but I assure the gentle reader a male with such debts will be even more hard pressed to find a female marriage partner willing to take such a negative-provider.

      Parenthood likewise can be a problem. It can take a decade or two of payments before the victim realizes that he/she will never, ever, pay off the loan, and it’s tough to consider paying for a child when you’re struggling to just barely get by as it is…and still in debt.

      Perhaps marriage and parenthood will work out in the end, I rather think so. But what of homeownership? A massive part of our economic system involves real estate, and “the American dream” does indeed involve owning your own home.

     Realistically, a person with tens of thousands of inescapable debt will never accumulate enough money for a down payment, and it’s probable we won’t give ourselves another sub-prime mortgage meltdown again. So, housing demand will have to fall off…and now we’re going to have a problem, since falling demand means falling prices, and falling housing prices will bring everything else down with it (see also, the 2008 crisis). I guess our government could step in with another multitrillion dollar bailout, but that still leaves a problem for our student loan victims.

This new form of social stratification — between those who have student debt, and those who do not — will have ramifications for generations to come.

      They’re going to be serfs, forever in debt, trapped in a system they can never escape. We could easily devolve into a society where a whole generation would be little more than feudal slaves, vulnerable to ever more financial depredation. I wish Buzzfeed had talked about this a bit more, but they have a poor reputation for a reason, I guess.

…a 28-year-old, now in her first year in the PSLF program, with $110,000 in graduate school debt. Her health insurance with a public service employer doesn’t cover specialist visits to the doctor — so she goes without, because she uses her extra income toward covering her student loans. “I basically can’t have children until I’m at least 38, and who knows if my eggs will be dead by then,” she told me. “I have pretty abysmal views that I’ll save much money at all in the next ten, twenty, THIRTY years.”

      This system really is destroying much of a generation, and, insidiously, it’s targeting our brightest, the ones who go on to graduate school. The long term effects here could debilitate our modern civilization.

And if hundreds of thousands of people aren’t even saving for themselves, we’re certainly not saving for our kids’ college tuition, effectively ensuring their future monumental student debt.

     Those victims who do manage to reproduce and raise children will have literally nothing to give them (except possibly the debt). I have friends who’ve used the inheritance from their parents’ homes to pay for their own or their kids’ education, so they’ve staved off the trap for a generation. But…what of the next generation? You only get to do that once, after all.

In 1983, the average full-time student borrowed $746 ($1,881 in 2018 dollars) per year. The most recent statistics from the College Board indicate that in 2018, the average annual undergraduate loan is now $4,510, while the average graduate loan hit $17,990. In 2016–2017, the average borrower left college with $37,172 in loans.

     Our government “helped” with the high cost of education by providing those student loans, with the end result that the cost, and the amount of debt, skyrocketed to insane, hideous, levels. Similarly, our government “helped” with the high cost of buying a home by establishing Federal lenders, leading to an explosion in real estate prices.

      Buzzfeed never really gets to solutions, beyond talking about government forgiveness programs, programs loaded down with so many exclusions and restrictions very few people will ever qualify. A widespread repudiation of these debts would be a simpler and more fairly implemented solution.

      And, of course, we need to stop the government “help” of providing student loans. Just end those, and we’ll see tuition fall to more sane levels. Our economic system doesn’t rely on tuition like it does on real estate, so this effect won’t be nearly so devastating.

The cost of education shifted from a societal investment — spread across the tax-paying public, in the name of a thriving society and economy — to an individual one. And no matter how astronomically priced that investment became, we continued to rationalize it as a worthwhile one.

      The above hints at another important detail: we established our state schools because, at one point, education was to public benefit. Many of our schools have been warped from education centers to indoctrination centers, instilling an ideology which is causing harm to this country, creating not only debt serfs, not merely debt serfs with no significant kills, but also debt serfs with no skills who’ve been psychologically damaged to the point that they can’t work at a job, because they believe that the government can save them with welfare, a huge minimum wage, and free housing, paid for (if such a mundane notion is addressed at all) by looting those who have earned a living and a place to live…because that’s what our colleges are teaching, to a considerable extent.

       The point being that many of our campuses are now public detriments, again paid for by the student loan scam. We really shouldn’t pay for things which hurt us (even as I bought one painful medical treatment after another for six hellish months, with an end result that the cancer is still growing in my lungs, so I concede some hypocrisy here).

Even in a culture that idolizes high-profile college dropouts (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs)…

      Gee whiz, Buzzfeed, we don’t idolize those people because they’re dropouts, we idolize them because of what they’ve done for our civilization (for good or ill, I concede). That they can succeed in highly technical fields without college degrees highlights we have a problem here with our higher education system, reinforces the notion that these degrees are overpriced in terms of the skills they supposedly provide.

    The article also goes into extensive discussion about students being ripped off by various debt service companies, but all such discussions come to the same conclusion:

     End the student loan scam.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Student Loans Warping Society

By Professor Doom

      I’m often asked about the long term effects on our culture from the huge student loan scam. I don’t have a crystal ball, so I have only conjecture, but a recent article from Buzzfeed (bear with me, I’ll be making corrections) tries to address this problem:

Jen’s story is like a lot of people’s stories. She’s 35 years old. She and her sister were the first in their family to go to college. She emerged from undergrad with $12,000 in debt, and even though she was making just $30,000 a year at her first job, she made her standard monthly loan payments on time. In 2008, when she was laid off into the depths of the economic crisis, she decided to do what so many other people did then: go back to school…

      So far so good for Buzzfeed, the above really is the typical story. Bottom line, students pay way too much for college degrees which financially reward far too little, hurting them greatly. A significant proportion of those students don’t quite learn their lesson and go into grad school, utterly devastating their lives in exchange for an overpriced graduate degree which is no more useful than their overpriced undergraduate degree.

      The Buzzfeed piles on with their anecdote by giving Jen a stroke, but that’s entirely unnecessary…simply going to grade school sealed her fate, stroke or not, much as it’s destroyed many of our citizens.

Jen is one of more than 44 million Americans with student loans, and her current balance of $70,000 is just a tiny fraction of our collective $1.5 trillion debt load.

      The 44 million number is mostly correct; it’s the official estimate, and I can forgive Buzzfeed for using it. Trouble is, that estimate comes from a strange accounting method, which doesn’t count many students currently in college taking loan money, as having student loans, because the loans don’t “officially” count until the student leaves college. As around 70% of college graduates (and, presumably, college dropouts) have loans, and there are around 20 million college students, we could be looking at 60,000,000 people with student loans now…that’s close to 20% of the population.

The weight of all that student loan debt is markedly different than the feeling of the weight of mortgage or credit card debt — after all, those borrowers can declare bankruptcy, an option unavailable to student loan borrowers.

      If 20% of the population had AIDS, cancer, or some other lifelong debilitating and inescapable disease, it’d be major news. But somehow these lifelong loans just aren’t very interesting to the mainstream media. Hmm.

That Jen defaulted on her loans isn’t uncommon, either — default rates are projected to hit 38% by 2023. Like Jen, most who default don’t do so because they’re lazy, or not out looking for work, but because the loan payment amounts are just too much. Nevertheless, much of the conversation around student loan debt still puts the onus on the borrower.

      Wow, that’s a huge projection for defaults. Of course, the default won’t save the borrowers, since the loan only gets larger when you default. People with cancer or AIDS are luckier, I guess, since they can at least die—some student loans stay even after death.

      Back when we had the sub-prime housing loan crisis, we eventually had a massive default which destroyed several very large and powerful banks, while other banks got multi-trillion dollar bailouts.

      Soon, we’re going to have a massive student loan default. Maybe it, too, will be solved by bailouts, but I can’t rule out a violent revolt…20% of the population is large enough for a civil war, and seeing as they’d have little to lose, it’s at least a possibility.

“A member of my family once said I deserved student loan debt because I chose the unrealistic field of history,” one borrower told me.

     The above sentiment is quite common, but I feel far more pity than contempt for students trapped like this, and I’m not a sweet person by nature. See, these kids were indoctrinated into going to college, indoctrination which started at around the 2^nd grade (if not earlier), and becomes incredibly oppressive by the time they’re leaving high school.

     They’re told about the 23 genders, but never told about the perils of student loans. Heck, 28% of students with student loan debt don’t even know it...if they don’t even know they have the debt, perhaps the government is justified in not counting the debt as debt. I don’t agree, of course, since the microsecond the student steps off campus, degree or not, payments accrue.

     So, no, this isn’t the student’s fault. It’s our higher education system’s fault, especially since every accredited school (i.e., a school which can take student loan money) certifies in writing that they’ll act with integrity…even as they rip off and deceive students into taking on student loans.

      Now, there is a possibility of student loan forgiveness:

The issue came into focus in fall 2018, when the Department of Education released information related to the first round of potential loan forgiveness. Out of 29,000 forgiveness applications that had been processed, more than 98% had been rejected.

     Buzzfeed it a bit off here, the rejection rate isn’t 98%, 49 out of 50, it’s more like 279 out of 280…basically nobody qualifies. Eh, Buzzfeed is close enough I guess. The whole forgiveness thing really is a joke:

…just how illogical and intractable the system remains. If you pay even one dollar more than your set income-based repayment, the payment doesn’t count toward forgiveness. If you make the payment a day early, it doesn’t count. If you make a payment on the one-day gap between switching from one public service job to the next, it doesn’t count. If, for whatever reason, you cannot make a payment for one month, your loan will then go into forbearance.

      Now that we’ve established that student loans are crushing a generation of Americans…what’s this going to do to our country?

      Next time around I’ll talk about what Buzzfeed has to say.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Yale: White Boys Should Be Watched As Enemies

By Professor Doom

     As long as it’s in the news, let’s pick on Yale some more.

     One of the big problems on campus today is the lockdown to Progressive/Leftist/Cultural Marxist thinking…many departments, many fiefdoms, are filled exclusively with people who hold one particular set of beliefs and, more importantly, will not allow anyone who thinks differently to exist within those departments and fiefdoms.

     As this set of beliefs gets ever more deranged, we see things happening which should never happen at a university, an institution devoted to the free exchange of ideas. A recent editorial at Yale shows the kind of garbage which is created when not even the very slightest of opposing views is allowed:

Evil is banal

     The title is certainly harmless enough, but it doesn’t take long to see pathology here:

Everyone knows a white boy with shiny brown hair and a saccharine smile that conceals his great ambitions. He could be in Grand Strategy or the Yale Political Union. Maybe he’s the editor-in-chief of the News. He takes his classes. He networks. And, when it comes time for graduation, he wins all the awards.

      At first glance, the above is simple envy, but there’s so much here. Imagine instead if the author had said “black boy” and then described such in analogous terms…the outrage would have been incandescent in the media for weeks on end at the RACISM at Harvard. Taking classes and networking, incidentally, are options available to every college student, I’m not sure why “white boys” should be targeted for this activity. As far as “wins all the awards,” I beg to differ, and sure would like an example of this. When I won a national award in mathematics, I barely made the city paper—the local section, right after the kids who made Eagle Scout that month.

When I’m watching the white boy — who is now a white man by this point — on CNN, I’ll remember a racist remark that he said, an unintentional utterance that he made when he had one drink too many at a frat party during sophomore year. I’ll recall a message that he accidentally left open on a computer when he forgot to log out of iMessage, where he likened a woman’s body to a particularly large animal. I’ll kick myself for forgetting to screenshot the evidence.

     Goodness, I’ve heard of people holding a grudge, but this author is demented, holding a grievance against someone who’s done nothing, and regretting not preserving “evidence” of alleged RACIST remarks made when drunk, of unintentional utterances.

      These people need to be pitied, as I see no cure for the madness which has infected them. That said, the gentle reader needs to understand that this didn’t get posted randomly, the staff at the Yale student paper has had every opportunity to take this abomination down…and does not. Not a one of them is rational enough to see the sickness here.

The Kavanaugh trial was months ago, but still has an indelible effect on me.

     Holy cow, still bitter about that witch hunt/trial? Imagine how isolated you need to be not have been told that “all those women” who came forward with their dubious testimony (note: testimony, not evidence) against Kavanaugh have not continued to push their claims, which they would do if they honestly believed the things they were saying. Moreover, several have recanted their claims, admitting that they flat out lied.

     But these people are locked in their own world, so there’s nobody to tell them they’ve been lied to, repeatedly, about Kavanaugh. So they’re still angry that “that rapist” is actually on the Supreme Court.

Whisper networks, which are known as private chains of information which pass along knowledge of sexual assault, are useful, but insufficient in spreading information about indiscretions.

      Whoa, trial by “whisper network”? It took humans millennia to develop a court system, a method by which evidence could be examined and a conclusion about someone’s guilt could be reached. Although wildly imperfect, surely it’s better than whispering campaigns?

       Really, Yale, nobody there can think this through? Guess I’ll just start a whispering campaign about the regular human sacrifice going on at Yale then…

      The hate-filled essay ends with her solution:

But I can’t do that anymore — I can’t let things slip by. I’m watching you, white boy. And this time, I’m taking the screenshot.

      Yes, watch the “white boy,” take screenshots of his alleged transgressions so that, 30 years down the road, you can destroy him if he gets in the way of your political power. I guess the author will keep massive files on every “white boy,” much like Communist bloc countries did.

     Lest the gentle reader think Yale is an aberration, allow me to also quote from a recent editorial from a Pennsylvania college paper:

Should White Boys Still Be Allowed to Talk?

      I again point out the editorial is still up. I’m all for freedom of speech, but it’s queer how alternative media gets utterly de-platformed for daring to say Trump might win the presidential election, while this stuff stays up forever:

American society tells men, but especially white men, that their opinions have merit and that their voice is valuable, but after four years of listening to white boys in college, I am not so convinced. In my time at Dickinson I have listened to probably hundreds of white boys talk. It feels incessant. From classes and lectures, to the news and politics, there is an endless line of white boys waiting to share their opinions on the state of feminism in America, whether the LGBTQ+ population finally has enough rights, the merits of capitalism, etc. The list of what white boys think they are qualified to talk about is endless. Something very few of them seem to understand is that their (ill-informed, uncritical) opinions do not constitute truth. In fact, most often their opinions aren’t even original. White boys spout the narrative of dominant ideologies and pretend they’re hot takes instead of the same misleading garbage shoved down our throats by American institutions from birth. 

I am so g****mned tired of listening to white boys.

      Yeah, try substituting “black” for “white” in the above and see how easily you can get published in a college paper. Racist rants like the above are allowed because of the lockdown of Cultural Marxists in the papers (and elsewhere)…there are no sane people to stop this stuff being published.

So, should white boys still be allowed to share their “opinions”? Should we be forced to listen? In honor of Black History Month, I’m gonna go with a hell no. Go find someone whose perspective has been buried…

      While I’m against racism in all its forms, and particularly pieces like the above, I do encourage the reader to heed the author’s final line: seek out the people who’ve been buried, listen to the likes of Alex Jones, David Seaman, Greg Hunter, and many others who have been silenced for daring to provide information opposing the mainstream narrative.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Building A Successful Higher Ed Business…So Corrupt Anyone Can Do It.

By Professor Doom

     As I may be going into early/brief retirement, allow me to share some insights on building a successful business in an industry I know a bit about: higher education. Also, the recent revelation of wildly unqualified students getting into Ivy League schools brought this to mind, as I bet many of you are wondering how these kids manage to do the work in these elite college courses. Read on to learn how!

     There are three main ways to go for a higher education business.

      The first way is to build a full school. This is worth nothing unless you can get accredited; this can take a few years, but will open the floodgates of student loan money. It’s ridiculous just how much money is involved here, but unless you have the political connections to get degree-granting status, the money to keep the school open for a few years when you don’t have the revenue coming in, and the money to either build a campus (not recommended) or set up a fully online system, this isn’t an option for a typical reader. You could probably set it up for under three million dollars, though, making it all back twice over within a decade.

       The second way doesn’t require much money, but requires more knowledge: tutoring. I’m ambivalent about even recommending this as a business. Yes, I’ve made good money tutoring, but not so much these last few years. The problem seems to be people don’t need to know much anymore. As coursework gets watered down, as grading becomes easier, as colleges mandate 80% of the class passes no matter what, knowing test material just doesn’t matter so much. That said, if you do know a subject, and it’s something in demand (math mostly, and Education never), then tutoring is a great way to make a little money on the side.

       But now comes my slam dunk business. I know it’s a great idea because not once have I seen my business idea fail (it’s not an original idea). Rarely, an accredited school may close, and tutors come and go…but not this one.

       The great idea?  A paper writing website. There are only a few dozen sites operating right now, as near as I can tell, so there’s room for more. It’s a great deal--you still get to take advantage of that sweet student loan money! There’s a weird balance to student loan money paying tuition, and also paying the student to hire someone to do the work so the student passes the class, thereby not “wasting” the tuition money. So let’s talk about what you need for this business.

     First, you need to set up a website. It’s not that tough, here are a bunch of great option:

15 Best Free Website Builders for 2019

     The days where you need to know HTML to set up a web page, much less a business, are long over, and the above gives you plenty of easy options. As far as what, exactly, to put on your site, start small: just do college paper writing. Some sites give options to take the whole college course, but let’s just focus on the easy part.

About 466,000,000 results

       Now, what to put on your site, what to charge, etc.? Well, just type in “college paper writing service” into Google and click on one or two, or all 466,000,000 options to get some ideas. In fact, spend some money on “research” and buy some custom-written papers from one of those sites, to get a feel for what’s going on here.

     Now, you’re probably thinking, “But Professor Doom, I can’t write college papers, I don’t know much about anything, and don’t write well anyway. This isn’t a business for me!”

      Au contraire. You have two options.

     First, you can hire writers cheaply. When I first started writing professionally (for magazines, not college papers), I’d get around 10 cents a word, with articles ranging from 500 to 1500 words, for the most part. Nowadays pay runs around a penny a word. Because we’ve slammed most everyone into college, we’ve massively overproduced people who can write college papers. Supply and demand means pay for writers is very low.

      Finding the writers is easy enough, too. You can place cheap ads on education-related websites and such. We have such a massive glut of marginally employed (at best) academics that you’ll get many applicants in no time at all, many of them grossly underpaid college professors looking to make ends meet.

     But there’s an easier way: subcontract it all.

     If you’ve done your homework (thereby putting you way ahead of your customers), you’ve gone to several of the sites Google showed you, you know their prices, you know their turnaround times, and you’ve done a little business with them to see which are reliable enough.

       So, make the prices on your site slightly higher, and turnaround times slightly longer. Most of the customers coming to your site are lazy (there’s a reason why they’re hiring you to do their work for them, after all…), they’re not going to shop around. They’ll pay your price, and tell you what they want.

     Then you go and place the order with another site, get the paper written from them, and pass it right on to your customer! This is a business idea so easy quite literally anyone can do this.

      Now, you’re probably thinking, “Isn’t this fraud? I mean, if I set up a hamburger business right behind a McDonald’s, then sold McDonald’s food to my customers after ordering and carrying it from that other restaurant, wouldn’t that be a problem?”

     It sure would. Thing is, McDonald’s is a legitimate (bear with me) business…they’d have a legitimate beef (pun intended) with you selling their food and passing it off as your own, and the courts would see it their way.

     But the college paper writing businesses are not legit. They completely operate off the fraudulent largesse of the student loan scam, which has brought a great number of “students” uninterested in academic work onto campus, and loaned them the money to do it. Unlike McDonald’s, their papers aren’t branded, in fact, their whole business is based on creating product which is untraceable (and thus won’t be discovered via plagiarism-detecting software).

     Besides, you’re actually a more legitimate customer than usual for such sites, sites, since you’re not actually buying papers which you’ll misrepresent as your work in a college course. If anything, you’ve got a case for being one of the very few (if any) people using these college paper writing “services” for legit-ish purposes.

     As long as the student loan scam exists, my business model of leeching off the college paper writing industry leeching off the student loan scam would be successful.

Admin: “You need to put more writing assignments in your math courses.”

--I received such directives many times when teaching at a fake CC.

      Allow me to take a few moments to summarize the level of fraud the student loan scam has reached. While any chucklehead knows full well that these “college paper writing services” exist only to defraud higher education, our administrators have done nothing, for years, to stop any of it, and a case could easily be made that they’ve encouraged the fraud to a considerable extent.

        Well, of course they have, our administrative class is paid for by the student loan scam, as is the students’ tuition, as are the papers purchased by these services. All I’m proposing is to simply add one more level of crap to the fraud…would it really make this cesspool more foul?

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

    

Admission To Top Universities Worth $6 Million…What Do They Know?

By Professor Doom

     I went to a large public school—over 3,000 students, the better to increase the odds of having the talent for a good football team. It wasn’t particularly notable academically, so it was a big deal despite its size when a student in my class actually got accepted into the Ivy League. That was well over 30 years ago, before higher education collapsed into the mess it is today.

      Parents paying attention realize there’s a huge problem, and that they no longer can trust simply sending their kids to the big state university for an education. They also know that going to a small (and expensive) liberal arts school is an even worse idea.

      Increasingly desperate, parents hold on to the belief that the Ivy League, in this case Harvard, is the only remaining reliable option for seeing their kids educated. Desperation isn’t enough to get a child accepted, however, especially if the child doesn’t have stellar academic qualifications. It also takes knowing someone:

In November of 2017, a wealthy, desperate parent…to get their child into Yale, contacted William Rick Singer, who ran a business, disguised as a charity, that could accomplish that goal.

     Singer’s plan was simple: change the student’s resume so she could claim to be a soccer player, and get her into Yale for the soccer team (no scholarship, just admittance)--athletes can get in even if they don’t have the qualifications. To the schools which allow this, we probably should ask questions about a school’s true mission…and that’s every school we have.

     Of course, this plan only works if the coach is in on it. How much does it take to convince the coach to do this?

It was then that Singer sent Meredith [the coach] a check for $400,000.”

     Yea gods! Coaches are already paid ridiculous amounts in higher ed, do they really need even more money? Singer got the lion’s share, of course—the parents paid him $1.2 million dollars to grease the wheels here.

      Goodness, over a million dollars just to get their child into Yale…that’s not even counting tuition or anything like that, that’s just to enroll.

      Now, the dog not barking here is pretty loud: you don’t give a million bucks to “some guy” unless you know for sure that guy can deliver…Singer clearly had been running this operation for a while, long enough to get a reputation solid enough to generate million-dollar checks.

      The coach by himself can’t do it all, so there are plenty of others involved in this long-running scheme:

According to NBC News and ABC 11, 50 people, including some college coaches and two well-known actresses, have been charged in a widespread cheating scheme aimed at getting students into universities as recruited athletes.

     Well of course admin was involved; the actresses were just getting their own kids onto campus. What do they know that we don’t, that they’re this willing to shell out money to keep their kids off the campuses us normal folk go to?

       The coaches involved are from Yale, Sanford, Georgetown, USC...with sports teams like tennis, soccer, and water polo. Once on campus, the not so academically inclined students doubtless vanished into the weaker departments, much like with what happened at the Landry School. My book on why we’re getting college graduates who are illiterate didn’t focus on the Ivy League but it’s clear that stage is here, if not coming soon.

      Now, bribes aren’t like other purchases, you can’t exactly shop around and compare prices. What was the upper end?

The feds allege one parent gave Singer $6.5 million to aid a single child.

    

     Read the above carefully. If someone is willing to pay this much, this must be the market value for admission to the school. We really need to break this level of brainwashing.

     It must be nice to have that kind of money to piss away. Does the parent realize he could quite literally hire 4 faculty to teach his child every year, for four years, in one-on-one teaching (the absolute best and most effective form of teaching), pay each teacher $100,000 a year (i.e., more than the vast bulk of faculty receive), and come out ahead by millions of dollars?

      While the parent here was probably an idiot, I again wonder if maybe he knew something I don’t about what’s going on in these upper tier schools. There’s something more here than education, there has to be.

      The fraud, incidentally, didn’t always involve coaches. Sometimes the parents paid bribes to have their kids’ SAT or other entrance exam scores “enhanced.” I find this form of academic fraud more troubling than the athletic fraud, but I’m sure admin, once paid appropriately, find it all about the same.

       How long will this stay front page news? We have a wide-ranging scandal running for years, involving tens of millions of dollars and fraud at our most esteemed institutions and I bet it all vanishes within the week. I conjecture  in a few days most folks will have an easier time finding out what Stormy Daniels had for breakfast Sunday morning than learning anything more about this. I grant that this fraud and Stormy Daniels have equivalent impact on most Americans, but there’s something here.

      $6 million just to get a none-too-bright kid into an Ivy League school?   Yeah, something’s not right.  

The schools are not believed to be involved, according to NBC.  

-- Seriously, I’m quoting Yahoo news quoting NBC. Does anyone at either media site have half a brain?

     HAhahahah, I needed that laugh. The coach doesn’t single-handedly enroll students, so admin at the schools had to be involved as well. How many people working at the school need to be involved before you can fairly say the school was involved? How do you read this and not believe the schools are involved? I suspect the story will be nicely buried soon enough, but hopefully someone will see it and do the digging necessary to get some answers here.

     The whole student loan scam was founded because we thought lack of money was the reason kids weren’t getting in to college. But if you have a good school, if you work to maintain a reputation, it’s very clear parents will pay whatever it takes to get in. Very clear, indeed.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com