Revisiting The Remediation Scam

By Professor Doom

     I’ve written before on the remediation scam. The vast majority of classes on campus, at least community college campuses, are remedial, pre-high school coursework (with the high school coursework most of my readers would be familiar with being now regarded as college coursework).

     I’ve shown many times that 90% of the academic coursework on community college campuses is pre-college, with much of it 6^th grade level or lower. It’s well known and quite documented that 90% of remedial students fail to get even a 2 year degree in 3 years. Despite what admin says, you can’t make up six to nine years of public school in two semesters.

    Advocates for a Better College (ABC) is a Facebook page, with posts mostly in protest of the frauds at Reedley College, but it also focuses other horrors of higher education. Naturally, there is no particular name associated with page: we all know that if you’re going to point out the frauds of higher education today, you need to do so anonymously.

     ABC posted the stats for remediation in California. I’ve done much research on remediation, and California is representative of much of the United States in this regard (there are a couple of northern states in the central US where the remedial students would be considered college students anywhere else, but these states have such small populations that they are just special cases).

      Like any honest educator, ABC looks are remediation, realizes something is wrong, and knows the obvious way to fix it:

The issue of remedial education ties into the census day and financial aid scam. Essentially, remedial students are recruited to fill seats, often with huge grants, yet the failure rate of remedial students is staggering.
Federal and state grants should not be given to individuals who are not academically prepared for a college level education, nor should class registration favor remedial students, regardless of whether they are returning for another semester/year.

     Administration is paid based on the size of the campus, not on the caliber or success of the students. Even schools with legitimate coursework still have vast halls and endless sections of remedial coursework. This coursework is in violation of Federal law, but the money, the huge sums of money, administrators get for selling these courses make such considerations irrelevant. The coursework is paid for by student loans and the Pell Grant scam…and these students wander from campus to campus, getting this money, giving most of it to the colleges, and taking the scraps home. It’s an open, everyday fraud on most every campus in this country.

     But let’s pretend it’s not a fraud. How much good is remediation doing, under the assumption this is a good faith effort to help people? Let’s look at the stats:

In Math, at 1 level below, 57.4% do not complete a degree/certificate, or become transfer prepared, at 2 levels below, 57.4% do not complete a degree/certificate, or become transfer prepared, 3 levels below, 68.6% do not complete a degree/certificate, or become transfer prepared, at 4 levels below, 74.6% do not complete a degree/certificate, or become transfer prepared.*

     Allow me to explain the above. “College Algebra” is the math that was (and is at many schools) offered to 10^th grade students in much of the country, or at least by the 11^th grade. I tutor high school students as well as teach at a university; I’ve seen with my own eyes that “College Algebra” is the same course as the early high school algebra.

      Then we have the “below” courses, and at many schools, these courses are broken down in many ways. Each “below” is roughly two grade levels (this may seem odd, but the gentle reader should understand that the public schools do an abhorrent job of covering material, and so, indeed, what even a fake college does in 4 months is comparable to two public school years).

      Thus the “4 levels below” course referenced above is roughly 2^nd grade or 3^rd grade level work. Again, I’ve taught such courses at the community college, where I try to get the ideas across of how to add and subtract whole numbers, for example. I do the best I can, but attendance is poor; for some reason, almost nobody shows up once the checks are distributed. Admin is happy to tell me, repeatedly, the reason is because I’m a terrible teacher…but I notice attendance is better during semesters where there’s a delay in handing the checks to the students. Until the delayed check day arrives, of course, as then classes empty out, not to fill again until next semester.

      Administration has enforced these courses, because they can grow the school this way, but the success rates, as given above, are awful. Everyone who walks onto campus gets tossed into a course somewhere, even people who have no interest in education (and I’m making no judgement there). Administration helps them with the forms, and takes a huge cut of the loan/grant money. 

      Let’s see the odds of a student enrolling in a “4 levels below” course, actually making it through College Algebra:

     As above, this student has only a 25.6% change of making it through that first course. After doing so, he’ll have a 31.6% chance of making it past the “3 levels below” course. 

      Just two more courses to go before finally getting to an actual college course!

      Each of these two more courses pass 42.6% of their students. Assuming good faith that this really is how it works, then, we have the following chance that, after 2 years of “college,” the student will be able to legitimately begin his 2 year degree program:

0.256 * 0.316 * 0.426 * 0.426 = 0.015.

      So we can reasonably guess around 1.5% of these lowest level remedial students (and keep in mind, this level, the lowest common denominator, has a large market share, to put things in terms an administrator can understand).

      That’s just the chance of making it to College Algebra! Realize on many campuses, this course is the “impediment to graduation” (as a deanling put it), the hardest course on a community college campus. Perhaps 50% of students pass College Algebra, and then breeze through the other courses. Hmm, now we’re at 0.7% success rate. Gosh, that’s the kind of rate we see on successful community college campuses. I’ve assumed (falsely) that there’s actual independence in the chance of making through each course, but bear with me; no matter how you make this calculation the end result is always that the chances of a student successfully getting through all this are slim.

     ABC posts the success rates for other remedial courses in English, but…yeah, they’re a disaster as well.

For every seat occupied by a failing remedial student, the taxpayer pays the freight not only for the attendance number on Census Day, but also in financial aid grants in the Tens of Thousands of dollars per semester. The college(s) should not have any remedial courses. They should be institutions for higher education, not basic education.

      And so, I revisit the horrible disaster of remedial “education” and see nothing has changed.  Every educator involved with remedial education recommends that we stop wasting immense resources in this way. But the failure just continues to get bigger and bigger.

      This is no surprise, as the people that run higher education are paid very, very, well to see that this level of failure continues to grow.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Fake University: CNN Blows It Again

By Professor Doom

     Every few years, we receive a hint, just a passing wisp of a hint, of how huge the frauds in higher education are. Whether it’s a well known chamber of horrors running in the gym showers for over twenty years, an 18 year open scandal of fake classes affecting thousands of students, or billion dollar fake schools with tens of thousands of students finally being shut down despite satisfying all accreditation requirements--those are all mainstream links, by the way--it’s clear higher education is a system ripe for massive, massive, fraud.

     The internet is a big place now. Generally, you can’t just set up a website and have a thousand paying customers, each willing to pay $10,000 or more for your product, at your site in short order. Even if you have an amazing product and an amazing price, there would need to be a huge pool of potential clients to get that many customers, especially if you don’t do much in the way of advertising beyond setting up a page.

     Consider the University of Northern New Jersey. Yes, it had a website and a Facebook page, but no professors of any note, and certainly no famous programs at all. Tuition, according to their page, was not exactly cheap  ($12,620 a semester). So, I’m not talking about an amazing school/product at an amazing price.

     The University of Northern New Jersey doesn’t even have a campus. Despite this, there were over 1,000 foreign students willing to pay tuition and come to this school, soon after the website and Facebook page were set up.

      I should mention, University of Northern New Jersey is a completely fake school:

“…fake university uncovered an immigration scam”

     This is a CNN article, and it’s about a government sting. The government set up this fake university specifically to catch immigration scammers. As always, mainstream media just blindly passes on information and fails to notice important details, or to ask important questions.

      Allow me to once again highlight what the mainstream media neglected. Here’s the most significant information that wasn’t highlighted:

Those arrested worked as "brokers" who solicited the university's administrators -- who were actually undercover agents -- to participate in the scheme.

    So, the brokers collect the students, and then arrange the deal with the university to sign the students up for fake classes/degrees. It’s just one sentence, but it reveals two pieces of information about the level of fraud in higher education today:

      The first piece of information? These frauds are all arranged through the administration. These brokers didn’t contact faculty, or even department heads. These brokers had many people willing to hand them tens of thousands of dollars for frauds. That’s a lot of money. It’s a safe bet the brokers weren’t incompetent, knew exactly what they were doing, and were experienced in their jobs.

     These competent and experienced brokers tell us how it’s done. If you want to do fraud, you go directly to the administration. We’re talking dozens of brokers here, and they all knew exactly how to perpetrate the fraud: go directly to the administration. Not the faculty, as the faculty are completely irrelevant in higher education today, especially in the newer schools (ones less than 30 or so years old). 

      I’ll say it again: if you want to do fraud, you go to administration. Administrators want students, and they don’t care if the students are complete frauds, as I’ve documented in this blog many times. If an administrator can get growth, and get a paper bag stuffed with $100 bills as well, more’s the better.

      The second piece of information in this one sentence? Administration has complete control here. In order for this fraud to work, you have to enroll these fake students in classes, not just the fake paper classes of UNC, but completely fake classes where there’s not even a faculty member. And then you’re going to set up transcripts saying these students took, and passed, these classes, year after year.

      The brokers, dozens of them, knew this could be done, knew that even a “real” school could do this. Yes, we’ve seen this before, and I know I’m not the only faculty to stand at graduation and wonder at graduates who I knew couldn’t possibly have earned their degree. At a small school, it’s particularly easy to see this happening, but only the older schools really have any mechanism for catching this fraud.

      This really is the level of chokehold administration has over higher education today: they can totally put fake students in fake classes and award fake degrees, and it’s all perfectly legal (the issue here was immigration fraud, not academic fraud). Faculty are in no position to know about any of this, or do anything even if they know, on many campuses.

     And this is why the brokers knew not to waste their time talking to faculty, they went straight to administration, who control the system from beginning to end.

They paid the undercover agents thousands of dollars to put the school's letterhead on phony documents.

     If it was just one broker doing this, you could possibly delude yourself into thinking it was a fluke. But when you put up a lousy web page and get several dozen people handing you bags of cash…you know the fraud here is systemic. It’s not just this one fake school any more than it’s one broker.

      Now we come to the question that CNN should have asked in light of this sting operation. See, it took a bit of effort to set up the web page and a Facebook page to make this school look legitimate. Doing this the reverse way would be quick and cheap. So CNN should have asked:

     “Why didn’t the Federal government do an even easier sting?”

      Imagine how simple it would have been for the Federal agents to just show up at “real” schools with bags of cash and see how easy it is to set up fake students for the fake classes at the so-called “real” schools. If a simple web page causes dozens of brokers to show up in northern New Jersey with, literally, bags of cash to enroll fake students, then it’s a safe bet that there are many of these brokers throughout the country showing up at schools to do the same. Successfully. 

     So why not set up the easy sting?

     Since I asked the question, I guess I should answer it: “Because it would cause chaos.” 

     I’m not saying every school would trivially take the bags of cash. But the new schools, especially the community colleges? I am sure you could do this. I mean, already, 25% of the students on those campuses are well known as fake, and that’s just the percentage the schools will admit to…it’s almost certainly much higher, at least on some campuses.

      Imagine the chaos, then, as the Feds go to school after school after school, and find out how easy it is to just walk up to a fully accredited school and flat out buy your degree, or at the bare minimum buy fake enrollment into fake classes. Accreditation has already come out and said that schools which accept fake students like this won’t lose accreditation and access to the easy student loan money. This is no surprise, as the same people that run accreditation also run our colleges. I’m telling the gentle reader, if Feds start showing up at schools with bags of money, they’re going to find administrators willing to do this.

     Lots of administrators.

      Imagine the chaos if (when?) it comes out just how many schools  are running these sorts of scams, in addition to all the other scams going on in higher education today.  If the government actually checked on many schools, instead of setting up a single fake school, then we’d have campuses all over the country shut down overnight. 

     Chaos.

      And that’s the reason they won’t do a sting on the schools, because nobody really wants to know just how widespread this sort of fraud is, and you sure won’t learn it from CNN. But at least my gentle readers know.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Tenured Prof Sues Over Suspension

By Professor Doom

     Earlier I covered a conservative professor, at a private Jesuit school, who had been on suspension well over a year for naming a student with pro-heterosexual views in a blog post. 

     Now, for what it’s worth, I think the professor was wrong to name that student. Being known as pro-heterosexual marriage can destroy your career in academia, and can reasonably lead to death threats nowadays; the professor shouldn’t have named the student at all. A firm slap on the wrist, a warning not to do it again, a talk about how protecting students (and not destroying their future career paths) is part of the thing higher education is supposed to do…and that would have been the end of it.

     Unfortunately, the administration at this Jesuit school can’t stand the thought of anything even vaguely anti-gay marriage, and so manipulated the kangaroo court system of higher education to get this guy suspended without pay over a year (essentially a 6 figure fine!)…over a blog post. They even wanted a public apology and loyalty oath from him.

     As I’ve mentioned before, it’s impossible to get justice in the rigged campus court system, and the professor has, finally, come to that conclusion as well. After patiently waiting well over a year for some decency from administration, he’s come to the only rational conclusion:

Conservative prof sues Marquette for suspending him over blog post

     It’s sad that it has to come to court, but the penalty for this blog post was really extreme:

“In March, university President Dr. Michael Lovell sent McAdams a letter informing him that the university had decided to suspend him—with benefits, but without pay—until January 2017”

    

     If admin were reasonable, it wouldn’t have gone this far, but I assure the gentle reader that these guys simply do not budge. Having spent ridiculous amounts of time trying to convince admin that 120/50 = 2.4 (and not 2.35 like they insisted), that “mathematical average” and “consensus” are not interchangeably the same thing, among a host of other simple ideas…and failed, I agree with the professor that you need to take them to court to accomplish even the obvious. It’s how the Game of Thrones professor got his pardon, after all.

     So, he’s bringing suit against the Jesuit University. As always, administrative arrogance reigns supreme:

The lawsuit, filed in Milwaukee County Circuit Court, accuses Marquette of breach of contract.

"We welcome this issue being addressed in court, where the public will hear a comprehensive account of Dr. McAdams' mistreatment of our former graduate student, rather than the select details he has handpicked to promote his false narrative," Marquette said in a statement. "Once all the facts are made clear, Marquette fully expects that the decision to suspend him will be upheld."


     I concede I’ve put my own spin on the issues here, but the ultimate issue here really is big: you can basically lose your job, even a tenured job, over a blog post…a post that nobody claims was inaccurate. 

      It doesn’t matter that the blog accurately depicted an event, and told no lies. The administration simply doesn’t like the contents of the post.

"For blogging and defending an undergraduate student, Professor McAdams is being suspended," WILL president and general counsel Rick Esenberg said in his announcement of the lawsuit. "But it is worse than that. He is being told that he will be fired unless, in the manner of a Soviet show trial, he confesses guilt and admits that his conduct was 'reckless.'"

At a news conference Monday, Esenberg said the case is "about vindicating and validating an important principle" and "standing up for free, open discourse on campuses."

McAdams said at the news conference that the situation "has completely disrupted my life" and that if he didn't prevail in his case, "it would set the precedent that tenure doesn't mean much."


     Despite the administration’s bravado and claims of wrongdoing by the professor, I suspect that when faced with a court system they can’t intimidate and control, they’ll cave in pretty quickly….again, I’ve seen this before.

     All of these shenanigans, while fun to watch, further reinforces how demented higher education is today. Instead of focusing on education and advancement of the human race, this institution has spent over a year now dealing not with a minor spat between a student and an instructor over gay marriage, but merely with a blog post discussion of such a spat. How pathetic is that?

     Back when educators had influence over higher education, this whole thing could have been resolved in a few hours at most, costing the institution perhaps a few hundred dollars’ waste of resources in faculty pay as they discussed and solved the problem (it would be regrettable, but mistakes do happen).

     Instead, higher education has been taken over by an administrative caste, to the point that there are far more administrators than educators on campus today. These guys are paid a fortune, and they’ve spent months and months “dealing” with this mistake. In terms of wages, easily $250,000 has spent, and these clowns have yet to come to a decent resolution.

      And now even more money will be wasted dealing with this in a (more) legitimate court system. This kind of foolishness does no good for tuition, I promise you.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com