By Professor
Doom
Time and again I’ve claimed that much of
what goes on in our higher education system is fraudulent. I concede that this
is just a blog, and I encourage the gentle reader to read all things online with
some level of skepticism, to think through the implications and see if the
conclusions read online are even reasonable, much less true.
A recent-ish Lew Rockwell column cited
some statistics about education where the conclusion of massive fraud becomes
quite reasonable. As always, I have some things to add:
The author, much esteemed Walter Williams, begins his
discussion with some relevant statistics regarding our public school system:
Only 37 percent of
12th-graders tested proficient or better in reading, and only 25 percent did so
in math.
The author breaks things down by race,
but I want to focus more on the fraud. The sentence above asserts
“proficiency,” that is, high-school level ability in reading or mathematics.
Those are some pretty terrible numbers, but let’s reinforce them with another
stat:
Nationally, our high
school graduation rate is over 80 percent.
The conclusion of fraud at this point is
quite reasonable. If only 25 percent of our 12th graders are
proficient in math, for example, it is not possible for 80% of our students to
graduate under a legitimate system which requires proficiency in the graduates,
after all. This is what government has done to our basic education system:
corrupted it to the point that a high school diploma is meaningless. In times
past (as in, the time of my grandmother), graduating from the 8th
grade was considered quite good…but a high school diploma of today is hardly as
meaningful as an 8th grade education of a couple generations ago.
It’s grossly dishonest
for the education establishment and politicians to boast about unprecedented
graduation rates when the high school diplomas, for the most part, do not
represent academic achievement. At best, they certify attendance.
I quote the above for future reference,
our leaders patting themselves on the back for their “great success” in
graduation rates when any casual look at the numbers reveals considerable
fraud.
Now let’s get to the fraud in higher
education:
According to the Bureau
of Labor Statistics, 70 percent of white high school graduates in 2016 enrolled
in college, and 58 percent of black high school graduates enrolled in
college.
These numbers are broken down by race, but
overall nearly 66% of our high school
graduates go on to college immediately after graduation. The fraud here is evident:
how can it possibly be that 25% of our high school students are ready for
college math, but 66% of them are accepted into college?
The answer, of course, is remediation.
Wide swaths of our students go into remedial programs. These are dead ends, and
around 90% of students going into
remedial programs get nothing out of college but expenses, more likely debt,
and a big waste of time. Even those who manage to get a degree out of college
often get degrees of minimal, if any, value.
It’s a huge waste, and the numbers are
self-evident.
One study suggests that
more than two-thirds of community college students take at least one remedial
course, as do 40 percent of four-year college students.
I don’t know this study, but I’ve shown repeatedly that some 90%
of community college work is non-college, often lower than 9th grade
material.
Students come into college needing considerable remediation, the numbers are
very clear here…let’s consider an implication.
We have many students coming onto campus
needing remedial work in reading/writing, and mathematics. So they take a
remedial English course, and a remedial mathematics course. Fair enough.
But a student needs to be a “full time”
student to get that sweet student loan and grant money which flows most
prodigiously into administrative pockets. To be full time, a student needs 12
credit hours.
3 credit hours goes to that remedial
English.
3 credit hours goes to that remedial
mathematics.
The student needs 6 more credit
hours…what to do with students not ready for college material? Load up the
course catalogue with many bogus courses which, quite obviously, can NOT be
college level (because the student is not college level). Thus we have all
these silly Gender Studies and Impact of Michael Jackson and Sexual Deviancy
courses all over campus. They’re not academic, they’re not educational…they
just soak up the money of the hopeless suckers students while they’re on
campus.
The situation is, of course, worse in
sportsball:
During a recent
University of North Carolina scandal, a learning specialist hired to help
athletes found that during the period from 2004 to 2012, 60 percent of the 183
members of the football and basketball teams read between fourth- and
eighth-grade levels. About 10 percent read below a third-grade level. Keep in
mind that all of these athletes both graduated from high school and were
admitted to college.
Please understand, many of the students
coming on to campus aren’t simply “1 semester” behind college material; in
fact, only a tiny minority of students are so academically elite. My own eyes
from my community college years tells me the bulk are around 8th
grade in overall skill level. Many community college campuses have mathematics
courses addressing basic addition and subtraction, 3rd grade
material…and anyone who bothers to look at the
course offerings can see this with their own eyes.
We have fraud here no matter how we look
at the situation. It clearly takes 4 years to bring a student from 8th
grade to 12th grade. If it didn’t, then our public schools are
frauds for taking so long. Yet colleges claim they cover 4 years of education
in 4 months all the time. So, are our colleges lying, or our schools? (Warning:
trick question!)
Much as our leaders in the public schools
boast of their “success” even though it’s obvious fraud, so it is our leaders
in higher education also take pride in their bogus success.
I agree with Walter Williams’ conclusion:
I’m
not sure about what can be done about education. But the first step toward any
solution is for the American people to be aware of academic fraud at every
level of education.
If the people only knew about the huge
fraud of the community colleges, they would (and should) close them down
overnight, and the same can be said of quite a few universities as well.
I can’t claim to know what can be done
about our public education system (beyond simply closing it all down), but I
suggested a series of solutions for fixing higher education in my book.
But, as Mr. William’s says, first people
need to know about the obvious fraud here…
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