End the Games of Higher Education

By Professor Doom

Me, as a college student, whining: “How come you will only let me sign up for two electives?”

Advisor: “Because we want you to graduate in four years.” (which I, and many of my friends of the time, did).

--nowadays, around 60% of graduating students needed 6 years to graduate.

     It used to be that going to college was a plan, and students were expected to choose a major within a semester or two of arriving on campus. Changing majors was allowed, but required the signing of forms and getting permission. It was not done frivolously.

     This was back when institutions acted with integrity. Institutions realized that high school graduates were still quite young, and needed direction and good advice. Thus, there were policies making it very difficult for a student to spend half a dozen years wandering through dozens of introductory courses and a handful of majors before finally settling on a “General Studies” degree. Students went to advisors, who kept them from wasting time.

Student, in tears: “But you have to pass me through College Algebra. I need this course to graduate, and I don’t have any more loan money left. It’s not my fault I don’t know any of this, I haven’t seen it since high school!”

Me:  “This is an introductory course. You are supposed to take it your first semester. Why did you wait six years?”

--Nearly every year I have such an exchange with a student. Typically, students in this position have taken 4 or more years to get a 2 year degree, with a 2.01 GPA. A question I never ask, but should, is “Why is my introductory level, freshman high school, course so much more difficult than the most advanced college courses in your degree?”

      Administrators, void of integrity and feeling no responsibility to the young in their care beyond fleecing them as thoroughly as possible, changed the policies. Now students can sign up for basically any courses they want, whenever, regardless of whether the courses lead to a degree. A student can withdraw from courses repeatedly, delaying his education and making it easy for him to blow off semester after semester, rather than develop the real skill of working hard when it’s time to work hard. These changes in policies certainly went a long way to supporting bloated campuses and bloated administrative salaries, but have obviously harmed and taken advantage of the weaknesses of a great many young students—the latter issue only a concern for those acting with integrity.

      With “protect the young” discarded for “grab more loot” every time, it’s no wonder that typical students take 6 years or more to get a 4 year degree. Educators clearly need to have more influence in administrative policies, more influence than even that which needs to be given through accreditation. But first we’ll go through more easy fixes to higher education.

     So, again, the fixes here are easy. Instead of the “infinite drop” policy we have now, a student can only drop a course three times at a university. That’s what the rule was for most of the previous century, and back then we didn’t have most students taking 6 or more years to get a degree, along with many thousands of dollars of debt.

     We also need to scale back all the elective and introductory courses, or at least the capacity to take them (which ultimately is the same thing). Maybe the 6 credit hours I was allowed was too small, but the 120 credit hours allowed now (or so it seems) is too much. After a certain number of hours (30? That’s over a year, enough time for people to make a decision), a major must be picked, and courses going towards that major need to be taken. The old “student advisor” system needs to come back, making it impossible for students to register for classes without that advisor approval. I know, it’s so easy to register online in today’s system, but so many students, our young people, have been screwed over by that system that it’s time to acknowledge getting rid of adult supervision was a bad idea. Again, this will help to end the “six year degree” student that is so common on campus. Students can still change majors…but it needs to be for a better reason than “I can only pass Psych courses,” which is why there are so many Psych majors today.

“159,645”

--this is the number of waiters and waitresses with a college degree, up 81% over the last decade. The number of janitors with college degrees is up 87%. You want to bet some of those degrees were in questionable fields like Diversity, Urban Studies, and Communication? You want to bet some of these poor fools are in debt for those degrees? You want to bet they’ll be making payments on those debts for the rest of their lives? I do.

     Will these simple reversions to the working system of times past cause students to drop out, with no degree (i.e., “nothing”)? Sure, but this isn’t a bad thing, since most of these drop outs would otherwise spend years on campus, getting deeper in debt and learning nothing, gaining no useful skills at all, and, at best, getting a worthless degree that is good for nothing outside of getting a job as a janitor or waiter.

     It used to be, “some college” meant something on a resume, but with open admission colleges the norm, obviously having gone to college today means nothing—possibly even less than nothing, since it’s such a foolish idea for most people.  

     So end the “open admission” game, admit it’s a failure, and bring back entrance examinations; again, this is just a reversion to how it used to be. Different schools can have different levels of examinations, but having seen the mentally disabled exploited by administrators, I think even a small examination might help keeping these latter from being exploited into a lifetime of debt to enhance administrative salaries.  This may seem discriminatory, but if a prospective student can’t be bothered to study for an entrance exam, maybe academia isn’t the right choice for that student? How did that idea not occur to anyone?

     For the most part, I’ve proposed mindlessly simple fixes, but I do want to at least propose one fix that’s more clever than “go back to the way that we know works,” which summarizes much of what I’ve said so far. Next time.

The Oak Island Mystery Show...and Statistics

The History Channel has taken a break from Hitler and Pawn shows to have a series on the Oak Island Mystery, specifically "The Money Pit". I remember reading about this pit as a child, and much like stories of the Loch Ness Monster and alien spaceships, there haven't been any real breakthroughs in the last 40ish years.

The short discussion is the Money Pit is this mysterious pit that supposedly has treasure in the bottom of it. Nobody knows, of course, because supposedly booby traps were set, and and now it's flooded with salt water. There's a whole mythology around the pit, I won't bore any with the details...but they actually kinda-sorta found something, and had some statistics on the show.

One of the many stories about the island is a mysterious cache of coconut fiber that was supposedly on the island, years ago. The nearest coconut trees are a thousand miles away, so finding such fiber would be a sign that someone (or a really bad storm) brought coconut fiber (common on ships in the sailing vessel days, to stabilize cargoes) to the island.

Sure enough, they did some digging, and found some coconut fiber. A natural question, of course, is to date the fiber, to get an idea of when it might have been brought to the island. I used to teach carbon-14 dating in class, before admin told me it was too hard for students (a shame, since I learned it in 10th grade algebra...).

Anyway, they get it dated, and the dating lab said they were 95% confident that the fiber was from the 12th to the 14th century.

Hey, look, statistics! What they've just said here, is, using a technique that (according to theory) works 95% of the time, they're confident the fiber dates between 1200 and 1400 AD (that means a 100 year margin of error, and the sample mean likely dates to 1300 AD). That's a "confidence interval."

Now, the PROBABILITY that the true age of the coconut fiber is between 1200 and 1400 AD? That probability is 0 or 1...we'll never know. But the technique works 95% of the time, and that's good enough. Even if the technique didn't work, it's not outrageous to suppose the fiber is from 1199 or 1401 or something. Anyway, that's why they call it "confidence" as opposed to probability.

And it's kinda neat they finally found a tiny little bit of something that indicates that maybe that hole is quite old, indeed...at least if you want to make the leap to think that the hole is related to the coconut fiber.

Online Education Must End

By Professor Doom

“Our nearly 60 fully online doctoral programs include Marketing, Leadership, Reading and Literacy, ”

--Yes, that is from an accredited school.

     Online education is major part of higher education today. It has been a huge source of money for institutions, especially private for-profit institutions that care nothing for education (i.e., slightly less than public institutions), caring instead only for the quick buck of student loan money.

     Administrators, blinded by the dollar signs in their eyes, gave higher education cancer when they watered down accreditation to a laughable joke. It’s taken years for their cancer to destroy the integrity of public institutions from their acts, and it’s not over yet.

“I go there because it’s easy.”

--many of my students go to University of Pheonix, and that’s the reason they give. Every time.

      Administration has been cancerous to higher education, but administrators cut higher education’s throat when they influenced accrediting agencies to allow for accredited online courses and degrees. They lacked the vision to see how quickly for-profits could spring up to take advantage of this loophole. These for-profits are able to exploit the weak accreditation to casually gain legitimacy accreditation, and then slap together an online curriculum able to compete with all traditional institutions everywhere, for an infinite number of students.

          Public institutions are bleeding students to online for-profit institutions, and have been sacrificing everything they can just to keep up. Public institutions have been around longer, but with their integrity destroyed, their physical campuses are just not a good enough advantage over for-profits that can compete with all public institutions, everywhere, for all students. All institutions are in direct competition to offer the easiest admission, the most minimal coursework, and the most convenient transfer of loan money.

      “We’re easy and convenient!”

--typical promotional line for an online institution. It used to be, institutions of higher education boasted of quality, success, reputation, challenge, prestige of the faculty. Now, it’s all “easy” and “convenient”, as though the institutions were selling fast food.

     It’s totally obvious online education is a fraud. Go to schoolsucks.com if you want papers; a small fee gets them written for you personally. Go to tutorialoutlet if you want to buy everything you need to do for online courses; you’ll just need to cut and paste your answers, and a few hundred dollars will have you covered for a full time course load. For your convenience, they sell material based on course number and by institution (and do note they have the entire U of Phoenix catalogue on sale) so you can be confident of getting exactly what you need. Still too much trouble? Go to boostmygrade.com and just hire someone to take your class for you. These sites aren’t alone, there are plenty like them providing whatever form of cheating a student may desire. Cheating is wildly out of control on campuses, and, bottom line, getting caught cheating in an online course is all but impossible using these methods…assuming the institution even cares (it doesn’t, generally). I’m not joking about that “doesn’t care about cheating” issue; when I first set up an online course over a decade ago, I caught cheaters, while similar courses didn’t. My course was shut down, while the other courses (which certainly had cheating issues) were not.

Accidental student email to me: “What did he give you on the test? I used the answers you gave me, and he gave me an F.”

--over half of my online class used the answers to the test I gave the previous semester, neglecting to notice that I had changed the questions for the current semester. This student elected to drop the course, seeing as she basically admitted to cheating.  

     The answer to the rise of online “competition” in higher education is easy: stop accrediting online coursework, with no such thing as accredited online degrees. It’s that simple, again, and the mad scramble for every institution to offer everything online, everywhere, all the time, ends. The “competition” of offering the least challenging programs also ends, making a college education meaningful again.

     Why destroy online accredited “education”? The answer is obvious, and should have been understood all along.

Faculty: “They’re cheating their asses off.”

--a brief but accurate description of online students.

   Eliminate accredited online courses because they represent nothing. It’s simple. Free online courses? Sure, no problem, if any institution wants to give credits and courses for free, I’m all for that. But stop this crap of putting people deep in debt for bogusly accredited bogus coursework.

      Online courses are nearly worthless when it comes time to get a job for good reason: if you do not personally know the person with the online degree, you have no reason whatsoever to believe that the degree represents any knowledge. An online degree is just too easily acquired, by cheating and/or without gaining any skills or knowledge, to open doors for someone who does not have any other connections, connections that often make the degree irrelevant beyond a job requirement.  

Student: “We studied together.”

--two students managed to get a question wrong in the same way, by thinking there were 24 letters in the alphabet, and thus blowing the calculation of “probability of randomly selecting the letters C, A, and T, in order. They were sitting next to each other. I had to ask how they both made the same mistake, and that was the explanation. I bought it. Stuff happens.

     “But there’s no guarantee that traditional students aren’t cheating!” is a counter-argument, but not a good one. As I addressed before, traditional schools need to start taking cheating seriously. The short-sightedness of administrators by encouraging cheating has annihilated the prestige of much of education. If all it takes to get a degree is to pay someone else to do the work, the degree simply cannot mean anything, even if merely half—and this is clearly an underestimate-- of degree-holders sub-contracted their “education” for some or all of their coursework.

     “But what about students that can only get a degree through online courses?” and “Why punish the minority of non-cheaters for the actions of the cheaters by denying online courses?” are other concerns, but again, only exist for the short-sighted. These online students are being robbed, paying a fortune for online degrees that are worth nothing. Accrediting online degrees facilitates the robbery. The students, even the honest ones, are cheated when they buy online courses only to find out much later how worthless such courses are. Only the institutions benefit from offering these courses, and only financially. Facilitating such theft is not acting with integrity.

Student complaint to admin: “I did not get the exam I was supposed to receive.”

--The student had somehow gotten a copy of the final exam in advance, and had the guts to ask me how to answer many of the questions on the exam, a few days before the exam was to be given. Thinking it odd that he asked questions identical to the exam, I changed the questions, passing out a different, but comparable, exam to the class. Of course, the complaint was taken seriously: admin felt I was unfair in doing this.

      Finally, the issue of “What about students that are learning through a life fulfillment goal?” needs to be addressed.  If the goal is honestly life fulfillment, then accreditation, a certification that the education is legitimate, is unnecessary—a person knows in his heart if he’s satisfied with what he’s learned. If the libraries and the internet are not enough to provide training and information for a topic, then surely some entity will provide content for those that really need and want to pay for training despite the lack of accreditation/student loan loot. Accreditation was accidently turned into a source of money through student loan programs, and needs to become something of value: a seal of legitimacy.  

     The problem is, this will never happen with online coursework. Even a minimal guarantee of legitimacy is impossible with online courses as they are now, and no institution can have them and operate with integrity. Get rid of fee-based, accredited, online coursework.

     Market realities won’t let this happen, I suppose, but with administrators in control of education, corpulently obvious ideas like “online students must take tests in proctored testing centers” and “after papers are turned in, students will be required to write summaries of said papers in proctored testing centers” will never be advanced or enforced…it would cut too much into those loan checks. These testing centers already exist throughout the country and are used for a variety of tests and certifications where integrity is important; it’s simple to set a center up. Those testing centers have been around for years. Only a system with rulers that don’t care about integrity would not already be using them.

     I must admit something self-serving here in wanting to be rid of online education, although “it’s robbery” is a pretty good reason unto itself. Sooner or later, an online school will get accreditation…and offer all their coursework for free. That will be the end of higher education in its current format, and I’ll be out of a job, but why I’m ok with that is for a later essay.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Educationists need to leave higher education.

By Professor Doom

     “I will now demonstrate the FOIL technique with an example, by multiplying

       (a + b) times (c + d + e).”

--Math Education degree holder trying to teach math. FOIL, incidentally, is a mnemonic specifically for multiplying two binomials, and makes no sense in the example given. I’ve given many laughable examples of Educationists attempting to teach a subject they know nothing about, but I must clarify. I’m not picking on any single person here; each example comes from an experienced, different, Math Education major attempting to teach mathematics on a college campus.

     Time and again, I’ve seen mathematics positions being handed over to Math Education degree holders at the college level. I just assumed from the name of the degree that these people were well trained in how to teach mathematics, and that’s what explained their higher retention. Early in my career this made sense to me, like administrators I was completely ignorant of what Math Education entails—the difference being, I’m willing to make an effort to rectify my ignorance.

Student asking question from book: “Is y = |x| differentiable at x = 2?”

Educationist, teaching Calculus 1 for the fifth time: “Let me look it up.”

--Honest, it’s not that tough a problem for a teacher of the course.

     Eager to learn the ways of Educationists, I sat in courses and saw with my own eyes that Math Education degree holders thoroughly didn’t know what they were doing, and were instead only covering the lightest material, poorly, achieving higher retention via lowering standards to the point of irrelevance. I’ve reviewed what a Math Education degree entails, and I’ve taken an Education course, so I can say with certainty that the degrees are not interchangeable with actually knowing the subject of mathematics. It is puzzling how the holders of such degrees see nothing wrong in what they are doing when they apply for college positions. It is as unethical and irresponsible as a veterinarian performing heart transplants on humans.

Student: “What is the probability the population mean is in the 95% confidence interval?”

Educationist, with ten years of experience teaching statistics: “95%”

--wrong answer, by the way. I kept my mouth shut.

     Math Education is a splinter field, at best, addressing some minor topic which I admit I just don’t understand (more accurately, I don’t understand how you can study teaching of math as an end for two or more years of graduate level work that has almost no mathematics in it). A course called “Math Education” belongs on college campuses the same way courses on Gender Studies in Children belong on campus: a single splinter dead end course for those filling out a degree. The degree curriculum for this field has clearly been designed for people wanting to teach in public schools, and while it probably doesn’t have enough mathematical training for even that, such degree holders on a college campus should only be teaching courses called Math Education, nothing else seems to apply.

Educationist: “Now let’s try to do this exercise, copying the words after first turning the page upside down.”

Me: “The instructions say we’re to try to copy the letters as a mirror image”

Educationist: “No, it’s upside down.”

(I show her the handout she gave us, clearly stating to write the mirror images of the letters in our continuation of the first exercise.)

Educationist: “Well, it’s all the same. Turn the page upside down.”

Me: “Are we now doing the last exercise, since it’s now at the top where the first exercise used to be?”

--Educationist teaching us what having a learning disability is like, probably a bit more accurately than she intended. It’s nauseating how consistently Educationists can’t speak coherently on a topic even when they get to pick the topic.

      For some reason, an Education degree seems to be used as a joker, able to imitate any subject, or so Educationists claim. Much as mathematics has some application in physics or accounting, I accept the Educationist claim as some small truth, but not so much that these degree holders need to be held in such awe by administrators, and certainly not so much that everything they say should be taken as a face value undeniable truth applicable to all subjects. Educationists know about a field called Education, but past that? Not so much.   

     So that’s my next “brilliant” idea: only have people trained a subject teach that subject. Stop the insanity of wildly unqualified people teaching material they know nothing about. Much like my advice regarding the prevalence of cheating and the vast sums of “college loan” money spent on non-collegiate material, I’m puzzled that I’m giving such advice seriously…how did it happen that the rulers of higher education became so wildly incompetent, with no way to stop them?

Administration, at faculty meeting: “Let’s congratulate our new hire, as selected by the committee…”

(applause)

Me (talking with each member on the committee): “Didn’t we agree this guy was the absolute worst possible choice?”

Committee member: “Yes, I don’t understand. Even the incompetent woman was still  better than this guy.” (each candidate said something similar)

Me (in e-mail to admin): “How is it that the faculty committee’s last choice got hired?”

Admin: “Because all the others were offered the job, and refused.”

Other candidate (in e-mail): “Did you fill the position? I never heard anything back?”

--two other candidates reviewed by the committee applied again, and claim they were never offered the position, either.

     The way to stop Education from controlling everything is for faculty to reclaim a power that administrators took: the ability to hire faculty. Instead of, time and again, administrators overruling faculty and inflicting questionable “teachers” on a department, faculty should have ultimate input over who they want to work with, and why. I’m no elitist, a candidate’s degree isn’t nearly as important to me as ability to teach and knowledge of subject matter, but loading up departments with people whose only qualification is subservience to administration is simply not a recipe for providing a good education to students. Perhaps this, too, needs to be explicit in accreditation, although there is a distinct need for emergency appointments from time to time.

“You’re working with idiots.”

--time and again I’ve had friends and family say this to me when I tell them what’s going on in higher education. Some doubt, but then I provide documentation from my colleagues and superiors (sic) showing what’s up.

      Education as a field has made inroads into math, chemistry, English, and many other subjects, watering down the curriculum in a blatant attempt to increase retention of their majors in those fields. What will happen when there are Engineering Education, Medicine Education, and, God forbid, Airline Pilot Education graduate degrees? Maybe there is a need for such specialist specializations, but allowing such degrees to serve as wildcards for actual subject matter does a grave disservice to students that want to legitimately know these subjects.

Official letter: “We’ve reviewed the original committee’s work, and unanimously agree that 120/50 is 2.35.”

--I can’t make this stuff up. The reviewers all had graduate degrees (granted, mostly Education related). The reality is administration ordered the committee on pain of termination not to find any error, but…damn, it really seems like someone should have spoken up.

     It isn’t just that we’re screwing over people, inflicting hideous debt on them if they drop out without a degree…we’re also screwing over the folks with legitimate degrees, because there’s no way to tell if it’s a ‘real’ degree, or one given by Educationists. That needs to stop.

Education is not a joke…or a joker.

 

By Professor Doom

 

Remedial student, at mid-term: “Hey, how come the homework in this class don’t look like nothing in my book, and how come every student in this class has a different book than me?”

 

--Administration accidentally scheduled a college class and a remedial class in the same room. The error was fixed on the first day, but this student had missed the first day. This student will be paying a student loan debt for this course for the rest of his life, and is it really his fault? Remedial students are often invulnerable to input, and not just with regards to academic topics.

    These last few essays I’ve reinforced how ending the remediation scam requires so much, and is necessary to restoring credibility to higher education. Until faculty can regain control of what is college coursework, there can be no change.

“…the institution as a whole is phenomenally weird, following a North Korean governance model without the transparency…Jerry Sandusky found a welcoming and protective environment at Penn State not out of luck, but rather as an all-but-inevitable consequence of the institutional culture…all of the reference material I need…is free on the Web. Despite the library being literally next door to my campus office, I rarely set foot in it. Those 46% indirect costs go for what???... the proliferation of pointless administrative positions whose sole purpose is to make the institution more expensive and less efficient…There is almost certainly a small fortune to be made in Federal whistle-blower suits here.”

--another faculty member explains why he’s getting out of academia. It’s a good read, and I point out I’m not the only one who’s realizing the immense fraud of higher education.

 

     Preventing the redefinition of a remedial student is why faculty need to control the definition of a remedial student at the accrediting level. Accreditation crosses state lines, so that the education industry can’t be easily subverted by any particular state changing its laws. “Accredited institutions will not try to qualify loan money to college students that cannot perform at the high school graduate level,” is integrity, nothing more. Institutions can still be open admission, any student that wants to come and take a course still can…but the “I am a degree seeking student so gimme that loan money” box needs to be just a little bit harder to check off.

     Administration can still subvert this by forcing faculty to pass all remedial students, turning the above into a procedure that is only one or two semesters slower than what we have now. As said before, the issues are interrelated, which is why so many things need to be changed and removed simultaneously.

 

Administrator 1, at a meeting: “We will be at full capacity the very first day we move into the new facility. We won’t have a single office to spare.”

Administrator 2, at a different meeting: “Our plan is, once we move into the new facility, to expand our student base as quickly possible, hopefully doubling it in a few years.”

--Yes, these administrators talk to each other, and are both discussing the same facility. All those graduate courses in vision and leadership, but administrators still can’t see when they’re leading an institution to a brick wall.

 

      Radical plans like “get rid of cheaters” and “stop taking advantage of people” might well cost me my job simply by reducing the number of souls in the system, and I can accept that. I have no faith in administrators, who can’t see the big picture of what their erratic behavior and questionable schemes are doing to higher education. I’ll lose my job when higher education collapses do their lack of vision anyway, and I’d rather lose it by doing the right thing as opposed to cravenly standing by like so many others and letting these mercenaries plunder the system.

     But enough of how to end the remediation scam, it’s time to move on to another topic: Education as a degree field, used as  “joker” to cover any other college topic. That needs to stop.

 

“Once I have my Education degree, I’ll be qualified to teach anything, even what you teach!”

--Student comment I’ve heard the like many a time, and administrators, with their own Education degrees, seem to feel the same way. Unfortunately, it’s true, but “qualified” and “competent” don’t mean the same thing. Of course, I spent a month, and failed, trying to convince administrators and educationists that “consensus” and “average” don’t mean the same thing, either.

 

     My degree is in mathematics. I can address most any undergraduate topic in mathematics and closely related concepts, like symbolic logic or arithmetic. Physics has mathematics in it, Philosophy has courses in logic, Accounting has lots of arithmetic. I don’t teach these courses, although when a professor is ill, I might cover a class or two. I wouldn’t dream of teaching these courses, as I don’t feel I could offer the same insights as someone who truly understands the subject and has devoted his life to it. This strikes me as perfectly sensible, and respectful of other people’s areas of specialization.

Educationist e-mail: “For my research, can you identify the parts of your course that students have trouble with? We want to focus on those parts to provide better education in future courses.”

My reply: “Sure. Systems of linear equations in three vaiables (sic). Inverses of non-linear functions. The difference quotient. Oh, and applications of exponential and logarithmic functions.”

Educationist: “Thanks! This will really help.”

Next semester:

Administration: “To improve retention, you need to remove the following from your course:

1. systems of linear equations in three vaiables (sic).
2.  Inverses of non-linear functions.
3. The difference quotient.
4. Applications of exponential and logarithmic functions.”
   --We really need to get rid of these guys. I’m pretty sure the reason my typo was preserved was because these guys with graduate Administration/Education degrees still didn’t know I was referring to “variables.” Anyway, removing this material means the students have no way to progress beyond the high school level…what kind of college work will they be able to do?
    
        This is a respect that Educationists do not have. That’s fine, I don’t need their respect, but if a college degree is to no longer be a joke, we need to go back to hiring people that know the material, and not, theoretically, “know how to teach the material” (more accurately, “know how to remove the hard material”) but not necessarily know the material. Another “brilliant” idea to fix higher education: hire specialists to teach specialist topics. I’ll explain further next time.