By Professor Doom
When it comes to
sportsball players, colleges “steal” star athletes from each other on a regular
basis, at least when it’s time to grab incoming freshmen. It’s little different
than in professional sports, which often bid for available players. It’s funny
to use the word “steal,” of course, but I can certainly understand how people
might claim some ownership of a player on the home team.
Colleges have been
losing students for years now, and bottom line, each individual student
represents a great sum of money for a school. How much? Well, a recent set of
accusations provides insight into that, as well as other features of today’s
higher educational system:
Now, this is all
just accusations right now, and until the court case is settled the gentle
reader should take it as conjecture that anything untoward happened here. I’m
fairly confident that the settlement will seal the records and the issue will
vanish from the public eye. There are details here which need highlighting now:
Mercy College charges that
Long Island University hired one of its deans and he then used confidential
information he emailed to himself while still employed to poach students who
had accepted admissions offers.
On the face of it,
the charge seems quite reasonable. Time and again I’ve seen an administrator
come onto campus, and diligently work to sell out everything he can (reputation
and educational integrity being towards the top) to get more students. Then the
new admin uses his skills at degrading his school to get a better, higher
paying, position at another school, where he can find more things to sell out.
It’s a sick,
demented system. In times past, the “leaders” of a school were chosen from
faculty, people who devoted their lives to the school, but now higher education
is run by roving bands of wandering plunderers. So, sure, I can see a Dean
doing this. Did he at least get a better job at the new school?
Edward Weis was until May 31 the dean
of Mercy's business school, and Mercy says he had access to all of the
information in the spreadsheets, as well as communications between the college
and prospective students.
In June, Weis started as vice president of
academic affairs at LIU.
Dean Wise
held his position for 5 years before moving up to Vice
President. That’s hardly a lifetime. So, as I’ve documented many times before,
he certainly fits the profile of your typical plundering school administrator.
The allegation
here is this Dean, after he moved to the new school, used his insider
information to contact students and, basically, give them slightly better
offers at the new school. There are supposedly e-mail records to this effect,
so it sure doesn’t look good.
Mercy's suit says that as of May 1, it had
42 new students who had accepted offers to enroll in the business honors
program. By July 20, nine of them had notified Mercy that they would
enroll instead at LIU. Confidential information about all nine of them was in
the material Mercy says it tracked Weis sending from college accounts to his
private accounts before he left the college.
So, we’re talking
allegedly 9 students here. This is what higher education has come to. Mercy
College has over 7,000 students, so we’re talking a bit over 1/10
of 1% of the student base being “meddled with” (to use mainstream media’s
latest over-used phrase) is sufficient to bring a lawsuit.
Just how much
money is a student’s head worth?
The loss of a single student, considering
tuition, fees, room and board, costs Mercy $32,252, the suit says.
So each student is
worth over 30 grand a year, hence the lawsuit is for $700,000, at least to
start. I really feel the need to highlight that at no point does the lawsuit
discuss in any way how (allegedly) offering the students better deals is
harmful to the students.
Doing harm, or
helping, the students is irrelevant. It’s about the money, and only the money.
Again, this is what higher education has come to.
The loss of these students was more damaging,
the suit says, because they had high SAT scores and stellar academic records,
and many had already participated in Mercy's summer program.
Wait. These
students already knew Mercy well, and still flipped. Those alleged e-mails must
be pretty damning to overcome this…I bet they are.
The suit charges that Weis and LIU obtained
confidential information to which they were not entitled and then used that
information to engage in "unfair competition" with Mercy. The suit
says that they acted with "Intentional, malicious and/or wanton
disregard" for the rights of Mercy.
Unfair
competition? These aren’t athletes, there’s no equivalent to the NCAA for how
you can recruit students. I’m a little confused. I’ve seen quality schools
“lose” students to other schools because the latter offer “fast, convenient”
degrees. Why is that unfair? There’s been a huge race to the bottom in many
schools, lowering standards as they “compete” to scrape up still more
students—gotta pay for all those Vice Presidents of Higher Education
Degradation somehow.
Malicious
disregard? Again, I’m confused. I’ve never
seen an admin give the slightest
regard for anything a school stands for. I sure hope Mercy, in addition to
those alleged e-mails, has some serious documentation that the admin they hired
(and casually replaced) really cared about the school, and really worked to
adhere to standards and integrity.
Good luck with
that.
Turns out, there
are some written rules about this sort of thing, a Code of
Ethics and Professional Practices:
"Colleges will not knowingly recruit or
offer enrollment incentives to students who are already enrolled, registered,
have declared their intent, or submitted contractual deposits to other
institutions. May 1 is the point at which commitments to enroll become
final, and colleges must respect that."
I’ve seen schools repeatedly
and extravagantly violate the code of ethics they agree to when they become
accredited, at every opportunity where following that code would cost them even
a penny of that sweet student loan money. Once again we have a problem: if
other written codes of ethics can be violated at will with no penalty, why
should this code be worth more than the pixels which glow when you click on the
link?
Really, all I’m
seeing here is just continuation of the “best practices” and policies which
school administrations have been following up to this point. Having looted
everything else, this new Vice President should be commended for his (alleged)
actions…those 9 students will generate enough revenue to pay his salary and luxurious
benefits for at least several years.
It wouldn’t
surprise me at all to see more of this in the coming years, and past this point
we’ll expect to see admin receive promotions and transfers in exchange for
bringing even a handful of students with them to their new school.
This, indeed, is what higher education has
become.
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