Government Regulations Killing Education?

By Professor Doom

Higher education is expensive, far too expensive for many people to afford. The big reason I advance is higher education is ruled by a ruthless, plundering class of highly paid administrators, eager to suck up every dollar; this is facilitated by the student loan and grant scheme, providing vast sums regardless of the quality or legitimacy of education.

This being my blog, I’ve naturally presented primarily my side. The administration’s side of education, justifying a vast legion of administrators is as follows: we now need vast numbers of incredibly highly paid and gifted administrators, due to there being so many complicated regulations and such.

A recent administrator was allowed to present this case on Inside Higher Ed. The titan of industry speaking is Arthur Kirk. He makes nigh $650,000 a year ruling St. Leo University—a non-profit Florida university with around 10,000 students, a great number of which (a majority in 2012) are military. Each student pays about $65 a year just to cover this guy’s salary—a couple generations ago, that was the total fee for tuition, and now it just pays for the guy at the top, a guy that has no influence whatsoever on any student’s education. If this guy vanished, not one student’s education would be impacted in the slightest.

     $650,000 a year is a vast sum, comparable to a skilled NFL football player. Now, a NFL player is the best player in his neighborhood, the best at primary school, the best in his high school, and probably the best at his college. The best of the best of the best of the best. When a pro NFL player goes to tackle a typical person, he does so with grace and efficiency.

    For $650,000 a year, this guy must be an awesome writer, the students are certainly paying dearly for such skill.  Government is certainly part of the problem, so I’m eager to read how it could be the main issue.  He should be the best of the best of the best of the best in writing, and should tackle this softball thesis with grace and efficiency  

Let’s take a careful look at what he wants to say, what he actually says, and what reality says. He begins his little essay with a preamble about higher education in general:

“…I won’t argue that its return on investment makes it worthwhile, although it surely does…”

    Barely into the first paragraph, and the administrator spews this line. Higher education’s expense is surely worthwhile? It’s been well known for years now that for millions, a college education makes no sense at all, especially at the insane prices most institutions charge, and that’s not even factoring in the bogus degrees that many (especially for-profit) institutions peddle. That’s not a sure thing by any stretch of the imagination, and it’s documented. It’s not good to start with a non-truth, it makes the reader suspicious of the author, but perhaps he’s just puffing a bit, like any huckster of wares. Perhaps he thinks highly of his snake-oil, I can hardly blame him for that, I suppose. A misstep like this is not grace and efficiency.

Let’s get on with the essay:

“In recent years at Saint Leo University, we have added positions...In every one of these instances, we are generally responding directly or indirectly to federal regulatory mandates, legal trends, insurers’ expectations, accreditors’ requirements, and so on.”

I’ve added boldface to identify the thesis: there’s too much government and other regulation. This is not a tough thesis, as it’s pretty obvious there’s too much government in everything. Let’s see how well a $650,000 a year Poo-Bah can write an essay backing up this softball claim. Someone paid this well should have no trouble nailing it to the floor.

“Take internal audit. The federal Sarbanes-Oxley legislation was a reaction to the collapse of the energy-trading behemoth Enron Corporation in 2001 and to legitimate concerns about corporate accounting accuracy, integrity, and boards of directors fulfilling their governance-oversight responsibilities. However, it has driven significant changes in our nonprofit board’s concerns, oversight, and actions. The resulting increased financial oversight, internal audit, and risk management are all reasonable and responsible activities—and all require administrative staff and add substantial real costs.”

This is some serious misdirection here. Yes, Enron is a problem, but in higher education, administrative abuse is massive. Why point the finger at Enron when I can trivially come up with half a dozen posts on administrative corruption (without even getting to Sandusky…)? 

Considering the rampant theft and plunder that seems to be an everyday part of administration, I think a bit of oversight makes sense, as less money stolen by administrators might mean some savings in tuition, right? Plug up the huge leaks, and more of the massive money pouring into education might actually go for education. Short of plugging leaks, we could always just hire people with integrity instead of mercenaries for these positions.

In short, these are crocodile tears, he’s upset that it’s harder to steal as much as before. 

With an essay, you generally start with your weakest argument, so I give him credit here, as “Administration has stolen so much in the past that now we have oversight, and that needs to be paid for, it’s not our fault it’s coming out of the student’s pocket” is a pretty weak argument for justifying $650,000 a year salaries. It’s obviously weak, it shouldn’t be his only argument, and it isn’t. That said, for such an easy thesis as “too much government,” he shouldn’t be scraping the bottom of the barrel. 

Administrators brought that oversight on themselves, punishing students makes no sense at all.

The essay continues:

“Societal, institutional, parental, student, and insurance-company concerns about concussions and other injuries demanded more athletic trainers to evaluate, watch over, and treat collegiate athletes. Baseline concussion tests for all athletes every year before the season are prudent, but also add expense. Having athletic trainers attend to athletes before, during, and after every practice and game is a good thing, but it is costly. The NCAA also expects us to employ a person who does not coach, to ensure compliance with the many NCAA rules. That costs money, too.”

Wait, what?

It’s been well known for years that athletic programs (which have very little to do with the mission of institutions of higher education) are generally a drain on institutional finances. The Poo-Bah’s institution is not one of the tiny handful of institutions that turn a profit in athletics (and those few that do profit, funnel those profits back into athletics. It is impossible for institutions to have athletic programs and keep to their mission).

Rather than pay even more for those regulations he’s upset about, he could always just get rid of these programs, and pass on the savings to the students. Wouldn’t that make more sense than complaining about all the administrative support he needs to run these money-losers. I point out, the more administrators, the more money he makes, since he gets more people under him. 

His whimpering here makes no sense at all, since if he really cared about the students more than justifying his salary, he’d get rid of these programs.

So far, then, the $650,000 a year administrator’s essay has done a terrible job of convincing me that government regulations are the problem in higher education. Considering my Libertarian leanings, that’s a very impressive accomplishment on his part.

Next time I’ll look at the rest of his essay to see if he has some better arguments for his case.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

So What is A- Work?

By Professor Doom

 

HEY I HAVE CAME UP WITH A MAJOR PROBLEM AND I NEDD YOUR HELP PLEZ….MY MOTHER WAS DIGNOSED WITH CANCER AND IM DA ONLY CHILD AT HOME AND I HAVE BEE MISSIN ALL MY SCHOOL AND I WAS WONDER WOULD YU BE KINDA ENUFF TEW HELP ME REPLACE ALL MY MISSIN GRADES AND ASSIGMETS PLEZ!!!

--actual e-mail from a second year student at my college, yes, it was in all capital letters. While I strongly suspect this student wasn’t really interested in education, the fact remains: she was in her 4^th semester of “progress” in college level work, sucking up loan and grant money all the while.

 

     I’ve mentioned before how the average grade on college campus is A-, and I’ve mentioned how easy it would be to fix it without influencing graduation rates in the slightest, giving employers a way to judge the merits of a college graduate without looking at the now bogus GPA.

     In my last essay, I addressed the bogus courses for athletes scam at UNC. I came to UNC’s defense, pointing out that other campuses also have bogus courses for athletes, and that such was hardly a secret. The NCAA agreed, and won’t punish UNC for getting an “unfair advantage”.

     Accreditation, of course, doesn’t care about bogus courses and aren’t even a factor here.

     UNC doubled down, however, and said that their bogus courses weren’t just for athletes, that, in fact, that their classes were bogus for all students. While I find this a very questionable defense, I again feel the need to connect the dots.

     The average grade on campus today is A-. This inflation is due to many factors. There’s immense pressure from admin to pass students no matter what. The primary definition of good teaching today is student evaluations, and evaluations are higher the easier the grading.  Admin forces faculty to lower standards; the good students still get A’s, while the weaker student grades have no place to go but up (it’s rather like if you reduced the definition of “perfect fitness” from “50 push-ups”  to “1 push-up”—suddenly everyone would be perfectly fit).

     So, the average grade is A-, and that’s for legitimate courses. For bogus courses the average grade, of course, is A, the best it can be. There’s not a lot of room in between the two, so it’s worth looking at how a student gets that A- in a legitimate course.

 

      Let’s take a look at an actual essay from an A- student athlete at UNC:

On the evening of December Rosa Parks decided that she was going to sit in the  white people section on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. During this time blacks had to give up there seats to whites when more whites got on the bus. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. Her and the bus driver began to talk and the conversation went like this. “Let me have those front seats” said the driver. She didn’t get up and told the driver that she was tired of giving her seat to white people. “I’m going to have you arrested,” said the driver. “You may do that,” Rosa Parks responded. Two white policemen came in and Rosa Parks asked them “why do you all push us around?” The police officer replied and said “I don’t know, but the law is the law and you’re under arrest.

--ok, this may be a draft…but it’s still an example of the writing skill of a student athlete at UNC. He’s at least a high school graduate, and probably has a number of hours of college credit already at the time he wrote the essay.

     The above paragraph was part of a larger assignment, and much apology has been made that perhaps it was draft work. I have my doubts about it being a draft, I’ve seen many an essay or e-mail from a student, and I’d call that a fairly decent writing sample, one that a student would not bother to rewrite. Note that under Microsoft Word, there is nothing underlined in red. “Nothing underlined in red” is pretty much the definition of good writing for a student nowadays.

     Seriously, the above writing (from a legitimate course, by the way, not one of the bogus courses) would merit an A- from many courses I’ve seen offered on campus. Considering how most college papers are probably bogus anyway, I can see a faculty member being so thrilled at the student actually submitting his own work to grant extra credit (I’ve seen some classes where the grading is on a 100 point scale, but students can get up to 50 points of extra credit—real tough to not get an A there, I promise you). An A- is very defensible for this work, nowadays.

     So, I have to concede UNC is correct; their academics in general is the problem, and it is not simply restricted to the athletes. That said, they’re no worse than many an institution.

     Student athletes supposedly get an education in exchange for the many thousands of dollars’ worth of entertainment they offer their schools, but it’s fairly clear they get no education, at least at the top schools…instead, they get a slim of chance of “making it big” in the pros of sportsball (and hey, “sportsball” is underlined in red in Word). On the other hand, the “normal” students just get into debt (with an average closing in on $30,000).

While both groups get degrees with awesome GPAs, neither is getting much of an education. This is why most employers give competency tests to college graduates before hiring them—the real world has caught on to the fraud of higher education and knows that most degrees are meaningless.

The students are getting horribly exploited by this system to the point of being trapped into a lifetime of debt slavery, and yet, amazingly, a case could be made that the “student athletes” are getting even more exploited.

I’ll look at that case soon, but next I must examine an essay by a $650,000 a year administrator justifying what’s going on in higher education. It’ll be fun, I promise.

 

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

A Whistleblower Resigns

By Professor Doom

 

     And so at last I decide to discuss, at least a little, the immense fraud of college athletics programs, specifically the “big game” sports like football and basketball (I’m going to call it all “sportsball” after this).

     Before starting in, I must preface some. I’ve nothing against athletics, and I even accept that, to some extent, they have a place on campus. The ancient Greeks recognized that physical fitness was just as important as mental fitness, and classical sports like martial arts, fencing, wrestling, and such are a part of culture that should be preserved somewhere.

      On the other hand, there are campuses where much of the land is devoted to the football team, and the mission statement of no institution of higher education says anything about “making the coach the highest paid public employee in the state.”

 

"The only choice left, is to eliminate big-time college sports entirely. There is no other means to rid ourselves of the corruption, and stop the degradation of our educational system."

--Howard Cosell, 1986. Anybody that’s cared to look knows college sportsball is corrupted beyond all hope.

 

      While the fraud and corruption of college athletics is extreme, it isn’t everywhere. One semester, I had the pleasure of having much of the school’s football team in my class. They were hard-working students—the kind of people that become great athletes tend to be hard workers. That said, I was at a school with no delusions of having a winning football team; the players knew their athletics was going to get them an education, with no hopes of making it to the NFL or the like.

      “Geology of our National Parks ”

 

--more commonly called “Rocks for Jocks”, this is one of several courses I know of that was basically fake, intended for athletes to take. Assignments were minimal, so that the course wouldn’t cut into the real reason the athlete was on campus: to play sportsball.

 

     I’ve known for years that top tier schools have bogus classes for their athletes to take. Did everyone know about these fake classes? I doubt it, but it’s absolutely certain administration knew, since they were the ones that allowed such courses to be offered—they have to know, to put them on the schedule, and made sure athletes were steered towards them.

     Because there is so much other fraud in higher education, dealing with the fraud of athletics was low on my agenda—most students don’t know how they’re being screwed by the system, but on the sportsball crazy campuses, the athletes know they’re only there as a springboard for a professional career. One has to pick battles, after all, and I chose to try to help innocent victims over not-so-innocent victims.

     Anyway, someone else decided to speak up about a common campus policy:

 

UNC Fake-Classes Whistleblower Resigns After Meeting With Chancellor

--the whistleblower made the mistake of doing so with her real name, a career-ender. Oopsie. Time and again I’ve seen faculty punished for having integrity. Not one time in well over 20 years have I seen a faculty rewarded for having integrity. I’ve seen many with no integrity glide through the system.

Let’s pick apart a few key paragraphs from the article:

Willingham confirmed her imminent departure after an hour-long meeting with Carol Folt, the university’s chancellor. UNC described the encounter as “productive,” but Willingham indicated it had been acrimonious.

There’s a big disconnect between admin and faculty on campus, although in this case it’s simply a matter of point of view. Admin got rid of the whistleblower, which indeed is “productive” when you’re running a scam. That said, I tend to side with the whistleblower’s description, having been on the business end of administrative hostility a time or two myself.



A former tutor to top Tar Heel athletes, Willingham helped reveal that the university had for years steered football and basketball players into fake classes that never met. She said that she and other academic advisers did so as a way of keeping the athletes eligible to play. The former chairman of UNC’s black-studies department is under criminal indictment in connection with the scandal.

(boldface added)


One thing to take from this: for YEARS administration promoted this corruption, but you can bet they won’t pay a price for it…somehow faculty will pay. Neat.

 I yet again point out: accreditation, which supposedly legitimizes an institution, has absolutely NO MEANS WHATSOEVER to know if courses are bogus. They never check, and the accreditation procedures are such that it’s not possible for an accrediting organization to check in a meaningful way. 

There could easily be entire college campuses with 100% bogus courses operating right now, completely accredited, and running fine…the only way the public will ever know what their tax dollars are buying with Pell Grant and student loan money is through whistleblowers. Accreditation is meaningless.

Anyway, maybe the criminal indictment of the chairman of one of the departments offering fake courses will lead to something, but I have my doubts. Making bogus courses cause for criminal action will open up a huge can of worms, since so many campuses offer so many bogus courses the jails would get flooded. Note how it will be faculty, not the administrators that hired and quite probably “influenced” the faculty to offer the fake courses, that take the fall for this.

North Carolina has acknowledged—and apologized for—the corruption but insists that it was “academic” in nature, rather than “athletic.” That distinction has apparently held sway with the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which so far has declined to investigate the goings on in Chapel Hill. 


Whoa, let’s read between the lines here. The institution is saying that the bogus courses weren’t just for athletes, that the “real” students also were taking these bogus courses, and that makes it ok.

How demented do you have to be to think of that explanation? Imagine a criminal saying “I don’t just rob people with odd social security numbers, I rob people with even social security numbers, too”…would this get him off the hook?

UNC has questioned Willingham’s credibility, even as it has conceded the core of her revelations. Top university officials have repeatedly tried to change the focus of the controversy from the corruption of courses and the padding of transcripts to Willingham’s separate allegations that a substantial percentage of…players she worked with over the years could not read at anything close to a college level.


In addition to giving demented explanations for the acceptability of the corruption, administration is also engaging in character assassination. Again, I’ve been on the business end of that, too, so I certainly know their play book.

The claim that a “substantial percentage” can’t read at the college level is pretty timid, and it’s odd that admin would try to dispute that. I mean, it’s fact that most students coming on to college campus aren’t ready for college. Already established, published, undisputed, studies acknowledge that a substantial percentage of college graduates can demonstrate no improvement from their skills graduating from high school.

Connect the dots there: if they’re not college level coming in, and they don’t improve by the time they graduate from college, how can they possibly be college level at graduation? Administrative degrees are pretty feeble, but that’s a fairly tiny jump in logic to make…a mighty intellectual leap for an administrator, to be sure.

So, yes, I totally buy the whistleblower’s claim. If admin continues to dispute it, all she needs to do is produce one athlete of questionable academic skills, but a degree (or substantial college credit) from UNC. Just one such student demonstrates the fraud exists, after all. I bet they’ll back off before she calls their bluff.

“It was time to end this hostility,” Willingham said. “This chancellor has totally sold out.”

--Indeed, once you realize admin has completely sold out, it’s time to move on. The trouble is, it’s getting hard to find a place where admin haven’t completely sold out. Hope she finds one of the few places remaining where honest work helping people is appreciated. Higher education in general is fast becoming “not such a place.”


     Despite my agreeing with the whistleblower, UNC does have a valid point. Since their bogus classes are not just for athletes, this may not truly be an issue of fraud in college athletics.

     But how is it not then a fraud regarding the academics at UNC? All degrees from there should now be suspect, by administration’s own admission. Considering how many employers now administer their own competency tests to college graduates before hiring, college degrees are already de facto suspect.

     More on this next time.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com