Fixing Higher Education part 3: Penalize accreditation violations

 

By Professor Doom

 

    So let’s continue talking about how to fix the horrid corruption in the higher education system in the United States. In previous essays I addressed the ideas of killing the antiquated regional monopoly, and reducing (if not eliminating) administration’s role in “evaluating” institutions of higher education.

 

" we finished the
self-study part of the program review.  It is 530 pages long, ..."

 

--One more accreditation booklet written. That was just for one department. That’s a lot of work for a complete joke, isn’t it? An accreditation review team has perhaps 8 members, what are the odds that these guys really do read the literally thousands of pages generated by the accreditation bureaucracy.

 

    Administrators simply can’t be trusted to do much in the way of verifying even basic educational principles. It must be faculty that do this. Yes, paying four or five experienced faculty to secretively go take a load of courses will be expensive, but the institution seeking accreditation will doubtless be willing to pay the tuition (since that’s not actual money, merely replacing the money given to the institution by the evaluators when they registered for the course), and even the government might be willing to pitch in, since the savings by eliminating all the bogus courses (and hence student loan money wasted on such) could easily cover the cost of faculty salaries. It might be hard to make faculty evaluate other courses, but this needs to be part of the job description: not just teach courses, but on some occasion evaluate (and learn from) what goes on in other courses. If each faculty member did this once a decade, this would allow for 5% of courses to have a legitimate evaluation (far above the 0% of today). Taking a full load of courses of material the faculty member already knows would nearly be a sabbatical for a semester, and a once-a-decade commitment wouldn’t cut that much into faculty’s usual desires of teaching and research.

     Once accredited, only a few courses every year would need to be surreptitiously taken, to keep the institution from simply putting up a façade of legitimacy for the accrediting process, then abandoning it once accredited. I’ve been behind the façade enough to know this would be necessary. Time and again I’ve seen “already accredited” schools completely blow off their principles, due to pressure from administration to increase retention and growth. It also needs to be done surreptitiously; once again, I’ve witnessed Potemkin coursework that was not representative of what really goes on at an institution.

     Only with approval of most of the faculty taking these courses could an institution become accredited, and could only keep accreditation provided the institution adheres to the principles of legitimacy it promised to keep. This brings up the next issue necessary to fixing accreditation: penalties for violations.

     After accreditation, an institution could be subject to significant fines if future course evaluations come up as unacceptable, and that brings me to the new idea for this essay. This idea is markedly missing from accreditation: clear penalties for violation of accreditation principles. I want to go over that again, because this concept is pretty amazing: accredited institutions NEVER pay a fine for violating accreditation principles.

 

Admin: “We were unable to make payroll this summer…”

Admin, 6 months later: “With enrollment dropping, we won’t be replacing the two faculty we lost. However, we’re opening up 2 new vice chancellor positions, and 4 dean positions.”

--it’s completely out of control because there are no checks on administrative growth.

 

     Let the concept of “no penalty for violating the regulations” settle for a bit. That school selling bogus degrees? No fine, gets to keep accreditation—granted, the school will need to fill out more accreditation forms, but that just means hiring more administrators, not exactly a problem, and suspiciously self-serving when you consider administrators run accreditation. Heck, a few of the administrators received PROMOTIONS for their assistance in the fraud.

     When accreditation was all self-regulated, penalties weren’t needed because the institutions legitimately wanted to improve as an end. Institutions back then didn’t deliberately violate accreditation, because there was no student loan money on the line, and if there was problem, the institution wanted to fix it because it was the right thing to do.

     Now, accreditation just means the loan money spigot opens up. With “growth is the only thing” administrators, improving education cannot be a goal. With for-profit institutions, by definition, it is unreasonable to believe they’re for-education. Since good intentions can no longer be assumed, there needs to be some drawback for institutions that are not acting in good faith to provide legitimate education.

     Just consider some penalties.

     What should happen to an institution that offers bogus courses? Seems fair to refund the student tuition, negate the bogus credit, and make the institution responsible for the loan money, letting scammed students off the hook. How is it I’m the first to think the penalty for “selling bogus product” is “refund the customer’s money”? The penalty would be the same for bogus degrees, as well. This sure strikes me as far more fair than now, where ripped off students get nothing but a lifetime of student loan debt for their bogus coursework.

     An institution that ruthlessly exploits “students” that don’t have the fiscal acumen to understand the nature of the loans they’re taking, a lack of acumen demonstrated by enrolling the students in coursework appropriate for an 8 year old? This type of violation goes on hundreds of thousands of times every semester, with no penalty. It sure seems fair it should be treated like the criminal behavior it is, and the institution would be obligated to pay off the student loan.

     What about selling questionable degrees, ones for which no jobs exist? Already some law schools are getting into trouble for this…but the students are still on the hook for the loan money, and the administrators involved laugh all the way to the bank. The institution should do more than just encourage the students to “click off a box to become eligible for loans”. The institution should have the student fill out a form indicating he understands that he’s going for a degree with no market value, or, again, be subject to having to return the money taken under false pretenses…otherwise, the institution would be guilty of fraud and have to make amends, just like how similar crimes are treated.

      This may sound extreme, but everything else that is regulated is subject to real inspection with real penalties for violation. The current system of self-inspection is a big part of how higher education has become so corrupted, and with the prospect of returning student loan money for giving bogus courses, administrators won’t be so eager to have professors offer content-free and otherwise questionable courses, or to reward professors that jeopardize accreditation by doing so. Administrators would have a real interest in being in legitimate institutions, instead of today, where their interests far too often lie in plundering institutions, or at least the students. While the straightforward penalties I suggest don’t actually hurt administrators directly, the pain they would cause institutions would probably make them rather reluctant to keep administrators that support fraud. This is superior to today, where as near as I can tell, a fraudster is actually desired by institutions.

     I’m no expert on such things, but there seriously needs to be penalties for violating accreditation. Today, institutions violate accreditation with impunity, because they know getting caught is unlikely, losing accreditation for even the most extreme violations is deeply unlikely, and other penalties are impossible.

      How did it even happen that a system of regulation was created that is utterly toothless?

 

   

 

 

 

Kill the regional monopoly of accreditation

By Professor Doom

 

    Last time around, I proposed a simple, obvious fix to accreditation: have faculty actually see what’s going on in other institutions. There is a little problem here, beyond the fact that administrators totally don’t want documentation of much of the bogus crap being peddled at their institutions.

     To explain the problem, I need to provide a little background on how accreditation works. Accreditation began in the late 19^th century, as a way to standardize to some extent what was going on in the institutions of higher learning. Accrediting bodies were formed by the schools in a region. This was understandable, since back then it simply wasn’t feasible for, say, a school in Texas to be accredited by a body in New England. Because of the regional nature of accrediting, all schools in a region MUST get accredited by the same accreditor. If there were a South Atlanta University and a North Atlanta University, they would have exactly one “choice” of accreditor, and it would be the same for both. It wouldn’t matter if the accreditor were very expensive and bogus (expenses for accreditation can easily run hundreds of thousands year, once administrative time is accounted for), both fictional Atlanta Universities would have no choice in the matter.

     This monopoly power might sound sinister, but accreditation back then was strictly voluntary, and if it were still voluntary today, I certainly wouldn’t complain quite as vociferously about how corrupt and useless it is.

    Now, accreditation today is still voluntary in theory. In practice, however, it isn’t. The Federal government only provides that geyser of student loan money to accredited institutions. This boon is so massive that it’s impossible for a non-accredited (legitimate) institution to compete. It’d be like a gas station subsidized to the point that they could hand every customer $50 with every fill-up, and the gas is free, too…even if the lines for a fill-up were 2 hours long, no other station would bother opening anywhere near such a place.

 

Me: “I see policy gives consideration for work in industry. Why was my paper, “A confidence cone technique for improved error estimation in geological surveys” written under contract for a mining corporation, ruled as not valid?

Admin: “We couldn’t determine if there was any mathematics in it.”

Me: “You have faculty here, that teach mathematics. Why couldn’t they help?”

Admin: “They’re not qualified to determine that sort of thing.”

Me: “But you hired to teach them to teach college mathematics anyway?”

--I didn’t actually speak that last line, but incompetent administration hiring incompetent faculty really should be discouraged. As it is, admin prefer incompetent faculty, because they have a tendency to be spineless sycophants.

     With accreditation de-facto mandatory, I feel justified in asking that it be made honest. Having academics evaluate academic work (as opposed to clueless administrators) is a start, but there’s a potential for corruption here that can still occur even with faculty, even competent faculty.

 

 Me: “What’s going on the nurse prep program is fraud, and we probably should do something about it.”

Administration: “You’re not being collegial, and if you continue to speak of this, you will be sanctioned.”

--it’s curious that my attempts to bring legitimacy to an institution were stonewalled, and met with bizarre accusations of “non-collegiality.” I imagine the same thing happened at Penn State. Every complaint of “children being sodomized in the showers” was rejected out of hand, because there’s simply no way to say “children being sodomized in the showers” in a collegial way, and so such complaints went on for years. Much like with what I had to say, truth was irrelevant.

 

     There’s a mostly-unwritten rule of collegiality that institutions are supposed to use when dealing with each other. They’re supposed to be collegial, which, basically means even if another institution is operating in a completely fraudulent manner, other institutions are supposed to not mention it. All well and good, I suppose, and I understand that institutions that are close to each other should try to get along. However, the antiquated regional accreditation system combines with collegiality to facilitate corruption.

     Right now, administrators in a region evaluate institutions in the same region, always. In my example above, administrators at South Atlanta University would have influence on the evaluation of what’s going on at North Atlanta University, and vice versa. “Collegiality” means these administrators would have a vested interest in letting the institutions be fairly bogus. Racing to the bottom of a pit is so much easier than climbing to the top of a mountain, after all.

     My Atlanta Universities are fictional, but the reality is this is what has happened today. How else can one explain outright diploma mills keeping accreditation, and all the other examples I’ve given of incredibly fraudulent institutions still keeping accreditation year in and year out?

     Now, faculty would at least be qualified to judge academics, which is a big jump over what we have today, but the regional system means the potential for corruption would still be there, a potential for “quid pro quo” fraud that simply doesn’t need to exist. Pseudo-faculty at pseudo-colleges could just mutually accredit each other, little different than today.

So: kill the regional accrediting monopoly system.

     An institution should be allowed to pick what accrediting body to use. The regional system just makes no sense in the modern world, where travel and communication is so much quicker and easier than in the 19^th century. Now, collegiality wouldn’t be nearly as critical as doing honest work, and faculty wouldn’t have to fear for their jobs and lose the ability to work someplace nearby (I’ll have to address the culture of fear as faculty in higher education later) if they say something admin don’t like. If distance is such that sending evaluating faculty  to the institution is a problem, the accreditor could sub-contract sometimes through a closer accreditor…accreditors don’t have to watch every second, but even looking once every few years is better than the perpetually shut eyes of accreditation today. I repeat that doing some work for accreditation would have to become part of faculty’s job, so that accreditors would have access to faculty—it’s a small price to pay to regain respectful treatment, and the money would be a fraction of the stupid-large sums administrators in accreditation get.

     As an added bonus, competition, instead of the regional monopoly of today, would probably lead to lower costs of accreditation. It’s bloody expensive and time consuming right now, and I bet an accreditor that promised “a fair evaluation for only $500,000, and you’ll only have to fill out 500 pages of forms” would pretty much shut down all competition, because that is a vastly superior offer to what the monopoly accreditors of today have. Honest, there’s that much room for improvement.

     Now, certainly, there will be some bogus accreditors that charge little and do nothing, and those will be attractive to some schools; other schools may well include having a “real” accreditor as part of their prestige, and we won’t have the situation today, where a completely fraudulent accreditor (like the one approving the diploma mill) is the ONLY choice a legitimate institution has for its own accreditor. This is superior to today, where right now accreditors do nothing and charge a vast fortune, and that’s not even addressing all the bogus accreditors that exist already.

    So yeah, one more fix to accreditation: kill the antiquated regional monopoly system. I don’t even understand why lawyers haven’t broken up this de facto monopoly already.

 

A little post on the madness of the economy...

I was a stockbroker before I got into academia, and while I've basically outlived my clients from the 80s, I still follow the markets and try to figure out what to do with my money.

I lost darn near every penny any client was stupid enough to give me, for the first six months of being a stockbroker...I got so tired of reading all the "official" stuff passed to me and having things go the opposite of what all the numbers said would happen, that I started doing the exact opposite of what I was told to do.

When the highly paid financial analysts said to buy...I sold (well, I told my clients to buy "put options", but I don't want to get too technical here). My manager didn't really care, as long as I churned (and options trading is the ultimate churn), it was ok with him.

I made money.

So, I kept doing the exact opposite of whatever the back office said to do. I made lots of money for my clients. My office, even my previously supportive manager, didn't like it much, but it funded graduate school, and I left the business with many happy clients. My last check was addressed to "Mickey Mouse" (a bad play on my real name)--unprofessionalism isn't limited to higher education, I assure you.

Back to the point: once I made the decision that every word was a lie and based every buy/sale recommendation to my clients on the assumption that I was being lied to, I made money. Now, maybe not every word was a lie, but I was much better off assuming it was all lies. The next six months was, at the very least, a ridiculously good run of luck.

And thus started my somewhat contrarian investing strategies, that have mostly (not always by any means) paid off. I know that "assume everything is a lie" is a bit cynical...but mathematically, if you know most of what you're told is lies, your best course of action is to assume it's all lies.

Looking at the news and economic reports of mainstream media, it really seems like we're approaching 100% lies. The Fed is printing money maniacally...and precious metals, shiny rocks, the paper prices for shiny rocks anyway, don't move. Heck, even the government shutdown didn't cause a move. Weird stuff.

The numbers from the job reports are terrible once you factor in the people that simply disappear off the job rolls...most corporate earnings are bad...housing sales off...food stamp enrollments way up (whole towns revolve around the day the gummint checks come in) and yet nobody on the big channels seems to think there's any issue with the economy.

I guess ultimately the issue for me is the national debt. If it's what the government says, 15 trillion-ish, it'll never be paid off. If it's what the "fringe" economists say, 150 trillion-ish, it'll never be paid off.

That part doesn't matter, because we're in a death spiral either way. The Fed has to keep printing maniacally, and will do so because the economy is bad no matter how you jigger the numbers.

If the economy improves, interest rates will rise...the government can't pay the interest on the debt in that case, so the printing of paper money will become even more maniacal.

If the economy doesn't improve, then the Fed has to keep printing maniacally...the interest payments still rise, so the printing of more paper will become even more maniacal.

"They" say there's a conspiracy to keep precious metals down, and "they" are often angry about it...quite possible, but I'm not angry about it. I'll keep buying rocks. Paper only beats rock in children's games, after all.

I fear for the interesting times ahead.

Fix Accreditation to Fix Higher Education

 

By Professor Doom

 

After months of detailing the thorough corruption of higher education, it’s time to give some easy ideas on how it can all be fixed. Last time I addressed the main reason why there are so many suckers willing to indebt themselves perpetually for a higher education: the myths. The suckers can be much reduced simply by telling the truth about higher education: it’s not a path to riches. Those who become successful after getting an education are generally hard workers, and it is the capacity for hard work, not the slip of paper, that is the real determinant of success.

Still, there is much that is bogus in higher education today, and this must be addressed. The next fix isn’t so easy as “tell the truth,”, but it is still achievable:

 

Make Accreditation Meaningful

 

    “[My school] is accredited, and I have my two year degree. Every place I want to go to has a four year degree program. They’ll accept my degree, no problem. After I transfer my two year degree, it will take me at least three more years to get the four year degree, and that’s if I take 16 hours a semester. How does it all transfer, but not add up to only two more years to finish?”

--Common complaint from my students that graduate, and move on to a university. I explain that administrators don’t understand why 4  - 2 should equal 2, especially since it’s more profitable if 4 – 2 = 3 or 4. It’s queer how it can be viewed as acting with integrity to tell students their 2-year degrees are fully transferrable when administration knows students will only get about half credit if they’re lucky.

 

     So much of the accreditation process has so little do with education that it’s puzzling that anyone could believe being accredited legitimizes the institution. Part of this misdirection, no doubt, is that the same college administrators that have failed higher education are generally the same people who influence what comprises accreditation today. Having the watchers also be the watched is a recipe for corruption, and this alone makes it no surprise that accreditation as it stands now is meaningless at best and a complete fraud at worst.

     The entire concept of accreditation began well over a century ago with educators at various institutions getting together to help each other understand how best to run an educational institution and to standardize, at least a little, what it meant to be such an institution. Accreditation was never intended to have the responsibility for the disposition of hundreds of billions of dollars of loan money; it was a huge mistake of the Federal government to indirectly assign such a massive responsibility to accrediting agencies. While administrators have their influence, many of the requirements for accrediting agencies come from the Department of Education. This is perfectly understandable, as only accredited institutions are eligible to get student loans and other money from the government: it is government money (well, after it has been “forcibly donated” by citizens), the government is entitled to set the terms under which they’ll hand it away. Thus, accrediting agencies should at the minimum do what they’re already doing as a matter of necessity.

     This doesn’t change the fact that accreditation never looks to see if there is much going on that really relates to education. Almost always, accrediting agencies allow the institution to self-report, making accreditation practically, if not completely, alone among all other forms of regulation. This made sense in the distant past when education wasn’t about big money and wasn’t controlled by administrators with no real interest in education, but now that accrediting is responsible for so much more than it was originally intended, it needs to be valid for the purpose of education. There are a few easy ways to make accreditation relevant to education, but I’ll start with the easiest.

     The most blatantly obvious is, of course, to have evaluators, people working as faculty/teachers at accredited institutions, actually take courses at the institution wishing accreditation. I’m quite comfortable taking any undergraduate course in the math curriculum, and I would be stunned if any graduate degree holder in another field would have difficulty in courses that he is qualified to teach (a faculty member who can’t do so probably has a bogus degree, and identifying these people would further help return legitimacy to higher education). The evaluators need not show up every day (students can generally miss weeks), need not submit original work (courses with writing can be time-consuming, and plagiarized papers should probably be used a few times anyway), could even try to cheat, need not even do enough work to pass the course (the better to see if grades are being given honestly), and not all courses need to be evaluated or attended for the entirety of the semester. The point is to at least have the slightest idea what goes on in actual courses at the institution.

 

Registrar, at a policy change meeting: “Due to a glitch, a number of students in various courses were enrolled in courses accidentally. They didn’t know they were in the course, so never showed up for class or did assignments, and didn’t know what was going on until they received their report card. We need to change the policy to allow students to drop late, for this reason.”

Me: “Of these students that did absolutely nothing, about how many failed?”

Registrar: “2/3rds failed. The rest got A’s, but complained because it cut into their loan disbursements.”

Me: “To be clear, 1/3 of the students that literally did absolutely nothing still got an A for their coursework?”

Registrar: “Yes.”

--No, administration didn’t decide to look into pretty clear evidence that around 1/3 of the coursework on campus was utterly and completely bogus. Of course.

 

Right now, this doesn’t happen, an instructor can literally give no reading assignments, no writing assignments, no tests, manufacture bogus attendance records, assign all A’s at the end of the semester…and receive kudos from administration for doing such good work. I really wish I weren’t joking, but there’s a reason why the average college grade is A- (the last chart in that link says it all). At the bare minimum, an institution with integrity would look at a class with all A’s, think “well, this material is so easy everyone masters it, so there’s no reason to charge thousands of dollars to teach it.”  That’s not how it works, but it needs to work that way again.

 

Administration e-mail: “For night instructors, please use your class time wisely, these courses are supposed to meet for 3 contact hours a week.”

--I often taught night classes, meeting once a week from 6 to 8:45. When my class takes a five minute break around 7:30, typically the parking lot has as many cars as I have students, plus my own vehicle…even when many classrooms have a class registered to it for those hours. Since it doesn’t matter if anyone’s learning anything, and giving assignments is counter-productive to job security, I rather see the point of just letting students go early. I had integrity, thought I should adhere to my contract and legitimately try to help my students, and was punished for it repeatedly.

 

     Having faculty evaluators is important, and puts the burden on the accrediting agency to do its job, as it should be. The regulators at the accrediting agency need to see with their own eyes what is actually going on. There is so much bogus crap on accredited campuses, courses that absolutely are a waste of time and money for students, courses with minimal reading, minimal writing, laughable testing, and dubious lecturing, passing very happy students but accomplishing no real improvement in skills or gains in knowledge, and this is not even addressing “elective” courses that might well be of some value if minimal content. All of these shenanigans are covered up by institutions being allowed to self-report how great they are at what they do, not just in math classes or gender studies classes, but in all subjects.

     Accreditation is broken on many levels, and having educators, not administrators, determine if education is even being attempted is merely the start of it. Of course, this needs to be done carefully, but I’ll address that in more detail next time.

Failing in College?

What to do if you’re failing in college

By Professor Doom

What's below is just an overview. To fail at the end of a semester, a student needs to make mistakes starting not just at the beginning of the semester, but before he signs up for classes.

My book, "What to do if you are failing in College" says many things (like how to find the easy courses) that no guidance counselor will tell you. There's a whole chapter there on things to do if you're failing in college, right now...and lots of information to keep from failing again. Save that link...you won't find that book (or the advice in it) in any university bookstore.. It makes more sense to admin to sell you $20,000 a year tuition than a $25 book that tells you how to get your degree as easily as possible, after all.

Looking to save yourself tens of thousands of dollars, but want to do it for even cheaper than 25 bucks? You can read below for some quick tips:

This is the time of year when students that have blown off the semester realize they're probably going to fail...and it's also the time when parents of such students, tired of getting vague responses to questions of "how's school going?", get answers they don't like much.

So, happy Thanksgiving and all, and here's some advice.

Student: “Hi.”

Me: “Hi. Do I know you?”

Student: “Yeah, I’m in your class.”

Me: “I don’t think I’ve seen you before.”

Student: “I know, I’ve had a real problem with attendance, but I want to know what I can do to pass this class?”

Me: “The final exam is in ten minutes. Have you taken even one of the four tests?”

Students: “No. But can I do something for extra credit? Professor [well known fraud and administrative darling] is giving me credit.”

--I get students like this every year or so.

     Only a few weeks remain in the semester. This is the time of year I get graduate students offering to pay any hourly fee I ask for help with their assignments. It’s also the time of year that students that have blown off the semester realize that they’re likely to fail the course, and start thinking about what they can do to pass. The main reasons students fail is they don’t come to class, so I’ll talk about what to do in that case first.

“I had stuff to do.”

--one student’s excuse for missing classes. The sheer chutzpah of it made me give him a break.

     First off, do you have an excuse?  If you do, it helps to have a good one. Please, don’t do the grandparent dying thing…that works for missing a day, maybe two days. I’m sorry for your loss, but you’re not going to get a break for a whole semester based on that.

Student: “The reason I missed the whole semester was because my brother murdered his wife, my sister in law, in Mississippi, so my whole family had to go to Mississippi for the trial, you know, for support.”

--this is the kind of excuse that has a chance. I gave the poor girl a break, and told her if she could just pass the exam and last test, I’d pass her. It didn’t work out.

     A really good excuse really has to have some reason to explain why you missed a few months of coursework. Even if you do have the excuse, realize this is the modern world: you could have e-mailed at any time to let the professor know what’s up with you, and you need to have an answer for that.

“B+”

--Stuff-to-do guy took the final, and scored far better than students that had come to class regularly. It would have just been wrong to fail him. To me, a demonstration of skill is far more relevant than sitting at a desk for a few hours.

     Even if you have a great excuse, realize that ultimately you’ll need to demonstrate to the professor that you really have a passing knowledge of the course material. If you haven’t learned anything, then you need a different reason for not failing.

Student: “I have mercury poisoning. Here’s my documentation.”

--In over 20 years of teaching in higher education, I’ve given one “I” grade. This was his excuse, and he did look awful. It didn’t work out.

     If you’ve missed a few months, know that you don’t know enough to justify passing, and can document a serious reason (typically medical, like a serious auto accident putting you into a coma for weeks), you can get an “I” grade, for Incomplete. This will let you have a few more months to learn the material. It’s very rare, and not one time have I observed a student getting an Incomplete and actually passing the course (because typically, students with severe problems like this really have better things to do than college coursework). But this is one way to avoid an F grade…you’ll just most likely get one a few months later, and faculty really hate dealing with Incomplete students.

Student: “Sniffle.”

--about every semester a girl comes at the end and tries to use tears to get a passing grade. I’ve known a few females that can turn it off and on at will, so this generally goes nowhere, and other faculty tell me they’re seldom moved by mere tears. Despite my constant enforced gender training given by pompous buffoons that insist males and females are the same, I’ve never had a male student try this.

     So, you don’t know anything, have crap for an excuse, but still want a break?

Student: “The reason I missed the test two weeks ago is I went out on Saturday night and got hit with a roofie that put me in a coma for almost twelve hours.”

Me: “So you recovered on Sunday?”

Student: “Yeah.”

Me: “The test was on Friday. If you’d told me, you know, a few weeks ago I’d be inclined to give you a few extra days or something, but why did you wait until after the drop date? There’s not much I can do now.”

Student: “So you’re not going to pass me.”

Me: “You missed three weeks before that.”

Student: “I WAS PUT INTO A COMA!”

---she stormed away, and I was thankful.

     You have no legitimate reason for passing, but want to pass, and the faculty won’t help you? Try going to admin. As I’ve discussed before, administrators are generally the biggest academic frauds. At the minimum, they’ll politely listen to your complaint. Bring the syllabus, and try to lawyer how the syllabus was unclear what would happen if you’ve missed a test or three…administrators are very easily confused, and you can often confuse them with words.

     To be fair, many syllabi do not explicitly say what is meant by “missing a test.” If the professor gives any make-up, then “missing a test” means more than not showing up on test day, obviously. Even if you were absent, you can claim you were there, but the test was lost…or that you attended class but the professor just didn’t mark you down. This puts the professor in the impossible position of trying to prove you were not there, or prove you didn’t take the test…rather than try to deal with admin, the professor will usually just buckle, claim to have found the test and give the student an A.

    By the way, I’ve directly observed the previous, so yeah, as corrupt and evil advice as it is, I give it because I’ve seen it work…more often than not (actually, “not” was just one time).

Administration: “I’ve spoken with the student. She was in tears. Please, for the sake of publicity, give this victim of sexual assault an opportunity to make up lost work.”

--roofie girl went to admin. So now I look like a bastard, and I must pass her or make an enemy of admin. She didn’t tell me she was raped, but she did have weeks to just drop the course. I wonder if one can get through med school by claiming to be raped every semester…

     So, if all else fails, go to admin. I’m not saying it’s a sure thing, but depending on the quality of school (the lower the better) and where the admin comes from (for example, admin that has never been faculty, and only has degrees in administration is best).

     Now, if you have integrity, and you’re legitimately in college for an education, seriously consider why you’re getting an F. Honest, some professors are jerks—I’ve never known one to give arbitrary F’s, but I’m sure it can happen. It’s not the end of the world. One professor I know has a transcript littered with F’s, D’s, and C’s, barely getting all his degrees with 2.01 GPAs. He’s great and really knows what he’s doing. The only C I got in my college career was in a mathematics course (the professor was a beautiful lecturer, but his tests were insane)…a single bad grade doesn’t mean much.

     Still, that F could be a message.  If you really come to class every day, do all the work, and actually get an F? Ask yourself if you’re in the right place. Ask yourself if college is the only way you can learn whatever it is, and if you really need to learn it in a college setting. Most college degrees are worthless anyway, and if you’re not going to get college credit, you could just get the books and read on your own time. It makes no sense to pay a fortune in tuition and waste months of your time for no credit at all.

     This is all just my advice, of course, but in decades of teaching, I’ve seen many failing students come near the end of the semester and ask for something. The later you go, the worse it will be; don’t even try to get a break 15 minutes before the final exam, trust me on that. Even some administrators don’t have time for that.

The first of many things to do to fix to higher education

By Professor Doom

 

Administrator: To address the problem of students failing College Algebra, we now have an Explorations in College Algebra course which can be substituted for the original course. It doesn’t have the material the students have no use for.

Faculty: What differentiates this new course from College Algebra?

Administrator (without shame): It’s algebra without the algebra.

--another year, another administrative plan to improve retention.

 

For months now, I’ve laid out the extraordinarily thorough corruption of higher education, explaining how it can be that a college degree no longer is a guarantee a person can read, write, or do ‘rithmetic at anything like an educated level. It is time to address each aspect of the corruption, and offer some suggestions that can allow education to return to its status of just a few decades ago. Many of these concepts are interrelated, but will be addressed as sequentially as possible.

 

Tell the Myths, But Tell the Truth, Too

 

 “If I get a B, I will die.”

--student complaint, in all seriousness, from early in my career. While this used to be an “every semester”-type complaint, I haven’t heard the like from a college student in at least a decade.

 

 “You need to pass me. If I fail another course, I might lose my scholarship for being a good student.”

--the most common student complaint at a CC.

 

     Earlier, I detailed myth after myth after myth after myth of higher education, and if the reader isn’t familiar with these myths, please, click on the links. Without the myths of college and higher education, the corrupted higher education system would not have had nearly as many victims to exploit. There is nothing wrong with a mythology that inspires a people to aspire to higher things, but the myths of college, spread so liberally in primary and secondary school, need to be corrected and clarified, instead of ruthlessly exploited.

     Higher education, particularly liberal arts education, needs to no longer be identified as a source of great wealth. The posters of “college graduates make a million more dollars” need to be ripped down and replaced with “people that work hard to get degrees in engineering, accounting, and some sciences make a million more dollars over a lifetime.” It’s the hard work and acquisition of in-demand technical skills that are responsible for the money, not the degree. Some may argue that such posters may not be much more accurate, but the current situation of students pouring into campus, indebting themselves for tens of thousands of dollars getting degrees in poetry, art, psychology, or “general studies” (yes, there’s a degree in that) and then being puzzled that they are not being showered with money after graduation, while administrators laugh hysterically, needs to stop.

      For the sake of those that believe life choices should be about money, and I’m not making any judgment on that, then high school counselors need to stop instilling awe into students about the financial glories of higher education. The high school graduate who fixes my car makes more money than I do with my high falutin’ degree, as does my plumber, my roofer, and many other workers. Instead of the nebulous “over a lifetime,” students should be told in high school what the facts are regarding annual salaries, should be told that fixing cars, for example, is good and honorable work…and pays better than reading essays written a century or more ago. Someone who can recite a poem in 17^th-century French is not, as a matter of fact, a better person than someone who can “only” repair a carburetor. Both skills have their uses, and both should be respected.

     There will always be a certain minority of humanity that pursues various types of knowledge as an end, with money not a particular concern; at least, there always has been in the past. They are unlikely to be dissuaded by a high school counselor’s discussion of facts, and even if they are, they can always go to college after a few years of pursuing a fortune. This is a risk this country should be willing to take, in exchange for not pulling so many people into the college system, and tricking them into wasting years of their lives trying to acquire hideously expensive degrees pursued for the wrong reasons. Without the crowds of students blinded by the dollar signs in their eyes, these few seekers of knowledge as an end will have an easier time reaching their life goals, and those many that are there seeking nonexistent fat checks won’t be cheated and spend the rest of their lives in poverty.

      There are many jobs or fields of knowledge where degrees are necessary. These are the degrees where money is to be made, but this money comes from supply and demand—there are relatively few people that can master the technical skills of aeronautics or medical equipment design. Money thrown at such fields must be done carefully—a massive glut of even engineering degrees can lead to a glut of degree-holding waiters, much like today. It may be a national priority to support these people, but it should be done through targeted scholarship, not blanket provision of loans and “scholarships” for anyone that wants to poke their nose on campus to “study” any topic they wish for years on end in support of vague promises that “you’ll make more money with a degree.”

     Outside of the sciences, it doesn’t actually take degrees to achieve greatness. The great novels of the 20^th century, for example, have not been written by Ph.D.s, and only a few doctorate holders have been candidates for sainthood. It’s a big world, liberal arts education is not the only way to succeed in life, and students need to be told as much. Often.

     In short, the myths don’t really need fixing, they just need to be supplemented with a heavy dose of truth. Additionally, higher education needs to do what it takes to make the myths true again, through the fixes relating to the other issues. Doing so will reduce the number of souls willing to sacrifice everything they have for college degrees of questionable value. We’ll discuss those other issues soon.

 

The other big lie of community college

By Professor Doom

 

     Allow me to finish my overview of the community college scam, explaining why these abominations keep springing up like mushrooms.

     In previous essays I’ve shown how the CC’s offer minimal education. My examples of the CCs that don’t offer marketable skills aren’t exceptional, and the explanation is simple. CC’s pay little for faculty (“We’re not a university, so we don’t pay those wages”, or so the excuse goes). People with marketable skills, say, computer skills, can generally make double the salary of a typical CC faculty member. So, CC’s can’t get people with marketable skills. On the other hand, people with skills in Gender Studies, or Sexual Deviancy (yes, that’s a course) are hard pressed to find well-paying jobs, and thus gladly work for the low wages of a CC, which offers great quantities of courses in non-marketable, non-rigorous courses.

    Thus is it that there isn’t a lot of job training going on at a CC either.

    “We bring education to your community!” cries the CC admin, but I’ve shown over 90% of that education is the same as is offered in the high schools. It would be vastly cheaper just to pay the high school teachers to offer some night courses covering the same material they do for the children. Still, there is a tiny amount of actual college material at a CC. Now it’s time for our second lie:

The Second Lie of Community Colleges:

“Community Colleges are cheaper than universities.”

     “We’re cheaper than the university!” screams the CC admin…but I’ve shown that the bulk of students waste years of their lives and thousands of dollars of tuition money learning bogus material for bogus degrees. It’s not cheaper for the students, most of them.  For the few remaining students that get some benefit by playing the game I described earlier, it might be cheaper, but let’s look at the big picture.

     Most of the population of the United States is within an hour drive of a university (heck, I’m within an hour drive of half a dozen), so in terms of geography, there’s generally no need for a CC. Due to quirks of university funding that I’ve only lightly touched on, most universities are massively overbuilt, with many empty rooms, if not open land; I know, I don’t have a study to back that up, but every university I’ve taught at has plenty of unused space, literally whole buildings that could be used for classrooms, either as-is or with a little remodeling. Hold that thought: there’s plenty of room at even fast growing universities.

     When a community college opens up, the student base comes from two sources. The first source is the suckers, the ones that spend years there bouncing from one remedial course to the next, accomplishing nothing but getting older and deeper in debt—that’s most of them. The remainder could just as easily have gone to a university.

     Those “remainder” at the CC are simply taking students away from the university. The admin of the university responds in the obvious way: cut back faculty, many of whom either use marketable skills to get other jobs, or go to the CC, taking the pay cut.

The point: a city with a university, and a city with both university and CC, employ about the same number of faculty, and have the same number of real students getting an education.

“Congratulations to our two new vice-chancellors!”

--in the previous years, a local CC managed to screw up the calendar (so that the semesters were much shorter than what they legally can be), mess up the tuition calculation (a 10% increase turned into a 1% increase…admin just don’t have the skills to tell the difference),  and fail to budget properly causing failure to make payroll by $100k, among other goofy mistakes. The people most responsible got promotions, however. Meanwhile, faculty promotions and pay are locked…budget problems, you see.

 

     So it’s all a wash, right? Nope. Same number of faculty, same number of real students…but the CC gets a bonus legion of administrators. Even a tiny college, with a campus holding less than 2,000 students, can expect to have (in addition to the minimum 5 member board of trustees): a chancellor, two vice-chancellors, at least one dean, a registrar, a head librarian, assistants to each one of those, half a dozen HR people, half a dozen accountants, a PR department, an executive secretary, an IT department, and more…each making between three and ten times as much as the faculty. For some reason, they don’t get minimal pay like faculty, because “best practices” determines their pay. It’s really weird, the justification admin uses for their high pay is that they are paid highly.

Lawmakers look to limit CSU executive pay

--Administrative pay really is so insane that they’re actually passing laws to cap pay raises for administrators to a “mere” 10% a year.

     There is no real savings to the community with those “cheaper” classes, those few that are actually college courses. The money is just extracted from the community via taxes, to pay for a boatload of administrators that would not even exist but for the community college. It would be vastly cheaper to just use that administrative pay to fund scholarships for the real students to go to the university; the administrative caste as a single small school could support dozens of scholarships via their salary.

     After months of detailing so many problems in higher education, I reckon it’s time I talk about solutions. Most are trivial to implement, but they are deeply unlikely to be implemented all the same.