Obama’s Stupid Community College Plan

By Professor Doom

      Over the last year or more, I’ve documented extensive fraud and corruption in higher education. While universities totally have their share, when it comes to the truly awesome fraud, nothing beats community college, especially in terms of betrayal of public trust.

     Much of the reason for this is because community colleges (and for-profit schools, a slightly larger source of fraud in some ways) are built practically overnight from the top down: administration sets the rules and controls the entire system. So, education is tossed very quickly, and standards annihilated, in pursuit of fast growth and a large student base.

      I have no faith in government to do the right thing, but I still foolishly have a bit of faith that, at least sometimes, it won’t do the worst possible thing. Obama crushed that foolish faith in a recent announcement, where he announced a plan to offer 2 years of “free” community college to everyone. Naturally, higher education administration is thrilled at the growth potential:

Obama's Free College Proposal Could Be 'Game-Changer' For State's Students

     Seriously, “free” community college for everyone? You. Have. Got. To. Be. Kidding. Me.

      For readers that haven’t been following along in my blog, here’s a quick primer of three things that best describe what really goes on, academically, in community college:

1.     25% of Community College Is 6th Grade Level

--even though it violates Federal law to use government money for “college” material below the 9^th grade, community colleges regularly violate the law, since following the law cuts into growth.

2.     90% of Community College isn’t College

--I’m not simply talking about all the bogus gender-studies type coursework here, I’m talking, literally, the same material that everyone in the public school system learns is simply being retaught in community college. I also should note that only about 1% of the coursework in community college is actually 2^nd year coursework as a university knows it (in fact, what’s going on at your local high school is now second year community college work). Failing students cuts into growth; it just makes sense to present and reteach coursework they already know, or at least have seen before. Oh, wait, words like “coursework” and “reteach” are inaccurate, because:

3. Study Finds Community College “Unhinged”

--this study found that while on paper community colleges use college level syllabi and textbooks, what actually goes on in the colleges is way below college, even in the “College level” courses. The reason for this fraud is because accreditation only looks at the syllabi and textbooks, and, past that, trusts administration to report that what’s going on in the classroom is legitimate. That worked really well at UNC, right? Yes, UNC is a university, and absolutely massive frauds go on at university…but UNC had at least a small tradition of legitimacy that allowed their 18 year fraud to eventually be exposed. Community colleges have no such tradition, and I know of at least one community college with decade-long frauds running with no hope whatsoever that anything will be done about it. Having integrity cuts into growth, you see.

     So, there is absolutely no legitimacy to the community college system…and Obama wants to put everyone in this system? I’d send him an e-mail detailing the above if I thought it would do any good. Anyway, back to the article’s unbridled enthusiasm for forcing kids into this scam:

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal said: "Having listened to students and their parents across the state — all of whom have implored me to do more to combat the prohibitive costs of higher education — I will work hard to assure prompt consideration of this promising and important proposal."

     This is just classic government. Tuition wasn’t a problem before the government-created student loan scam…but now tuition is high. It’s a problem created by government. So, government to the rescue! It plans to fix this problem by creating a bigger problem, namely by promoting the community college scam.

     Yikes.

If all states participate, federal officials estimate that 9 million students could benefit.

--I don’t see how there can be a “benefit” to putting our kids into such a fraudulent system

     Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for job and technical training, but that’s not what goes on at community college. Most of the coursework is “liberal arts” coursework…again, not a problem per se, but why should endless tax dollars be spent on training our children to, for example, hate white males? Alas, there’s only a touch of hyperbole in that rhetorical question, as this is, realistically, what will happen.

     See, job training is a low priority at community college. Your community college administrator wants to keep the price of teaching down. Hiring someone with actual job skills (the only ones that should be doing job training, right?) is expensive, and materials for courses that teach real skills are pricey—you can’t teach computer, lab, or mechanical stills without computers, a lab or a machine shop, after all. Even more problematic, someone with job skills isn’t going to pass someone completely ignorant out of class—people with skills take pride in their skills, and have integrity, and don’t want their skills to get a bad reputation.

      On the other hand, someone with skills in Gender Studies or whatever?  This kind of person doesn’t really have any prospects in the job market, so can be hired very cheaply. Since these courses typically have minimal assignments at best, the college need spend almost nothing on course materials. Since there are no skills involved here, these people pass students, regardless of whether the students did anything or learned anything.

     I’m not saying that previous paragraph to be mean, it’s now quite documented that many college classes have “no requirements” (i.e., no reading, no writing, no demonstration of learning), that community colleges offer degrees in Urban Studies (taught, presumably, by people with training in Urban Studies), and that even if there is minimal college coursework, it’s on the level of “don’t shave.”

     Nothing in the article or Obama’s proposal indicates how we’re going to make community colleges legitimate…instead, there’s just cheering of “free” college for all. I keep putting “free” in quotes because nothing from government is free; anything government hands out is just a fraction of what the government first took from someone else (keeping the best for itself, of course).

      This “free” college idea isn’t terrible because it isn’t “free”, however. Community college isn’t college, and that’s a serious problem. A far better proposal would be simply to shut down most all community college programs, and give them a chance to start over, as tiny schools that grow because they offer legitimate education, instead of huge, fraudulent schools that only exist due to the fraud of Pell grant and student loan scams.

     Bottom line, the government’s response to the huge mess it created with the student loan scam is to…make an even bigger mess, with an even bigger scam. Coincidentally, last year I started writing another book, The Community College Scam…still trying to get a mainstream publisher to even consider it, however.

    

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Open Admission Administration Gibberish

By Professor Doom

     Administration: “Pure lies.”

--often I quote things I’ve heard with my own ears, but here I’m just paraphrasing.

     When I was at a college, it was amazing how many times administration would spew such open lies, and I, and other faculty, would simply sit there with our mouths shut. Even when the lies were so blatant that only an idiot could believe, we said nothing. Granted, we had no choice, and no power to do anything about it.

      As always, the gentle reader need not take my word for it, as another article shows just how stupid administration in higher education thinks everyone else is. Their arrogance doesn’t let them see that the only reason they get away with their lies is because the student loan scam, and the thorough corruption of accreditation, means administration can do whatever they want. That they fritter away such power on pointless lies further illustrates their worthlessness, but I digress.

      So, here go again with another flurry of lies:

Thomas Moves to Non-Testing

     At first glance, this is just another school going to open admissions. I was a big fan of open admission to higher education, too…I drank the Kool-Aid. “All those tests are elitist!” I was told to believe. But the reality is, for all the problems of standardized testing, in lieu of nothing else, standardized tests do at least give a slight clue as to whether a prospective student has any interest in academics. Incidentally there’s a big difference between the endless high stakes tests-for-all of public schools and entrance examinations for those-that-want-it of higher education, but I digress.

      Let’s see how the college rationalizes the elimination of using test scores:

“Thomas College will continue to concentrate on a student’s high school record and activities as the primary factor in offering admission…”

     Rubbish. Entrance will be reduced to “has a high school diploma or GED”. Keep in mind, the school already uses the high school record (the word “continue”)…administration will deliberately now use LESS information to decide to accept a student.

     Well, gee, since they’re using less information, that means that some administrators will be fired, and other administrators will have their pay cut, since they’re doing less of a job now, right? Right? Yeah, right.

     Back to reality, the only thing that can happen from this decision is that the school will be taking worse students than before.

“Thomas College joins a growing movement among universities and colleges nationwide by no longer basing its admissions decisions on standardized test scores.”

    

     This is from the article, and not from administration, so it’s true. The only thing administration cares about, at any school, is “growth.” Trouble is, roughly 88% of our high school graduates eventually go to some sort of college…the other 12%, through a variety of good reasons, aren’t going to go despite all the easy student loan money. Admin things getting rid of standardized tests will allow them to screw over the remaining 12%.

     Really, higher education has captured 88%...there is just so little room for more growth. While normal businesses at this point would try to stand out amongst the crowd of competitors with quality or something like that, in higher education, they’re still trying to get into new markets. “Open admission” is a very simple way to expand the market, by lowering standards to as low as possible, although, seriously, there is no more market to expand into.

      “Our faculty recognize that admissions criteria need not rely on singular examinations,” commented Academic Dean Dr. Jim Libby…”

     

      Back to quoting administration, and thus quoting lies. The Dean, by the way, has his Ph.D. in Public Policy in Higher Education…in other words, an Administrative Degree, which I’ve investigated before. The bald-facedness of this lie is amazing. The faculty didn’t make this decision. No honest faculty member, anywhere, says “our school will be better if we take worse students”. Faculty don’t even have the capacity to make this sort of change…it came from admin.

      Faculty know that standardized tests aren’t that great, but faculty also know that you don’t simply throw away data when you have nothing better to replace it. This lie from administration is being crammed into faculty’s mouth.

“…the College feels that standardized test scores are not as accurate as an applicant’s high school career in predicting success in college for most students…”

     Wait, I thought this decision came from the faculty? Administration can’t even keep their story straight. Anyway, this is just more lies. See, there are lots and lots of high schools out there, and no institution can possibly keep track of what’s going on at every high school in America. A student might be valedictorian, president of three different service organizations, and winner of “best student in school” award for 4 years running…but that doesn’t mean much when the high school only has 1 student. Between the grade inflation and social advancement of public high schools, there’s just no way to tell much about a student looking just at a high school diploma and whatever the student says…and we all know admin is too lazy to do any real follow-up on the high school transcripts.

     Hence the entire point of standardized tests: they provide the institution a unified standard of measurement. While public high schools have many, many, scandals, ETS (which runs many standardized tests) does an extraordinary job of maintaining integrity. ETS has to, as a private institution. If they lose their integrity, they have nothing...that doesn’t seem to apply to public schools, however.

      Why does the gentle reader suspect institutions in higher education are avoiding anything that looks like integrity? 

     Anyway, everyone knows that eliminating standards will reduce quality.

      Vice President of Enrollment Management Jonathan Kent emphasized that a “test-optional” admissions process does not mean the College is lowering admissions standards…

      Vice President of Enrollment Management…that’s a spiffy title for a school with less than 1400 students. Seriously, way too many administrators in higher education…

      Anyway, how can removing standardized test scores, RAISE admission standards? That’s impossible, on the face of it. The vice-Poo-Bah here is saying it’s not lowering it, either. Hmm, not lowering, not raising…so it’s exactly the same as before?

     Wait, what? If it’s exactly the same as before, then there’s absolutely no point in making any change! Why the wasted effort, then? 

     It’s so easy to catch administration in their lies, all you have to do is think for a second. 

“Thomas College is a special institution…”

     It’s amazing how pretty much every word out of an administrator’s mouth is a lie. If Thomas is so special, why are they trying to be like everyone else? How is that an advantage?

     "The College believes this policy change will allow a larger and more diverse applicant pool…"

     Ah, finally, after torturing it for a while, administration lets the truth out, sort of. “Larger and more diverse applicant pool”. In other words, growth, although couched in words that make it sound good. Keep in mind, most every other school in the country is open admission now, and yet Thomas is actually crowing about it.

      Let’s put that in perspective. When Jackie Robinson became the first African-American professional baseball player, it was a big deal. But imagine if, today, every single time a baseball team recruited a minority baseball player, it had a big press conference to make a big deal out of it getting a player, just because that player is a minority.

     We’d look at the team owners and administrators like they were idiots. And yet somehow the media and public don’t think it’s idiocy when administration in higher education does the same thing?

    Of course, in baseball, we all understand being a minority is irrelevant in a team member, what matters is quality. “Racial purity” silliness was discarded in pro sports, because what is critical to owners of professional teams is having quality players—owners (generally) want wins, above all else.

      In higher education, however, quality is discarded whenever possible, because administration wants growth, above all else.

     Once again, administration in higher education is standing up and saying “we’re going to reduce quality” and being proud of it. Every potential student of that school should listen to what administration is saying, and head somewhere else.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

              

Higher Education: Supply Grossly Exceeds Demand

By Professor Doom

     It takes no effort to realize that the incredible building spree in higher education, combined with our new emphasis on “online education”, combined with class sizes going from 20 in the past to 1,000 today, has created a huge glut in higher education capacity. Even with the Federal student loan scam supporting anyone fool enough to go into debt for just  any degree, our institutions of higher education are finding that they just can’t all grow any more, and that any further growth can only come from taking students from other institutions.

     Now, in the real world, which an industry finds itself in this situation, the response of a competitor striving for success is either to increase quality or reduce price. Unfortunately, administration in higher education just doesn’t understand this. While most administrators still push  “growth at all costs, depend on growth!” because they have nothing, one administrator is willing to see what faculty realized over a decade ago, and is even willing to ask, and answer, the question:

Does supply exceed demand?

      The obvious answer is “yes,” of course…not every single person needs to spend 4 to 6 years in so called higher education, but that’s the only plan Admin can come up with. Thanks to the easy loan money scam, institutions have enjoyed spectacular growth the last decade, many of them doubling, and doubling again.

      But that time is coming to an end. We already have around 88% of our high school graduates eventually going to college, it’s simply insane to keep expecting more growth when every institution already has huge surplus capacity as it is. The next question is “What do we do about it?” Administration has already awarded itself huge pay based on an expected future growth that simply cannot happen.

     That’s a real problem. Because higher education is incredibly bloated, with a massively overbuilt infrastructure and a grotesquely overpaid and overstaffed administration, there’s a real question now of how institutions can expect to pay. 

     Faculty, of course, know the obvious answer: scale back. Two words, and how to do it is pretty easy: simply revert to the structure higher education had 30 years ago, back when faculty were the primary employees on campus, and “administrator” and “faculty” were fully interchangeable…unlike today, where education-free administrators run campuses, and faculty are a small and shrinking minority. I have no idea what to do with all the extra buildings that litter campus, beyond the obvious “sell them.”

     That’s what any faculty member will tell you. But let’s see what the senior vice-dean would say:

If perpetual institutional growth is no longer sensible, is it time for many institutions to plan for right-sizing programmes, services, estate and hence staffing based on far more conservative revenue projections of a multi-year horizon?

     Now, absolutely, simply shrinking the institution is an answer…but I really want to emphasize: why not consider improving quality or reducing price? Maybe everyone could get a 4 year degree if it only cost a few thousand bucks, like a few generations ago. Maybe more people would be willing to pay for a degree if there were a legitimate promise of quality. Think of every fast food hamburger restaurant that opened after McDonald’s: was their business plan to “stay small”, or did they actually try to compete in a saturated market through superior price and quality? It’s weird how I never see an administrator consider anything that involves improving quality or price.

     Keep in mind, administrators in higher education have actual degrees in administration…degrees that honestly don’t seem to teach anything related to higher education, or to business. Having taken administrative graduate education courses, I know why that is: such degrees have nothing in them that apply to higher education, or business…or administration for that matter.

     Instead of trying the things successful enterprises try, the administrator wants to go the easy route: cut back so there’s just enough to support the administrative caste in luxury. Hey, it worked for the old Chinese and Roman emperors, right? Once expansion was no longer feasible, they just focused on keeping themselves in luxury, which is why the ancient Chinese and Roman empires are such models for glorious endurance and innovation today. Oh. Wait. Nevermind.

     I assure you, this administrator is exceptional in coming up with his well-above-average administrative plan.

 

     So, if an administrator doesn’t learn how to be successful, and certainly doesn’t learn anything about higher education, what do they learn? Mostly, administrators learn how to talk in corporate-speak. I’ve written of this before, and faculty often laugh as administrators use complicated high falutin’ language to express obvious, basic, concepts.

      The executive vice-dean, while well above average for an administrator, is no exception in this regard, in his use of corporate-speak in response to the obvious problem that higher education isn’t making enough to pay for all the expansion it bought the last few decades:

I am suggesting that the path to sustainability may be found by seeking the institution’s right size bounded by a realistic alignment of its recurring costs with a conservative assessment of probable revenue streams beyond the current year.

The process may take several years to implement fully. It will require courage and discipline.

     Allow me to translate the convoluted sentence and the two follow-up sentences into plain English: “We’s gonna have to get rid of the crap we can’t afford. Making them cuts is gonna take time and hard work by someone with balls. Not me.”

     Well said, but rather obvious on all counts. Already, of course, institutions are making those cuts, but not in an honest way. Instead, universities are gutting themselves, turning themselves even more into ghost towns, who sole residents, the administration, only come to campus to get their checks, even as faculty are fired and primary academic departments are shut down, while students are moved off campus via questionable online coursework.

     As long as nobody with appropriate leadership skills is in charge of higher education, “expensive ghost towns” will be the future of higher education…a few years from now, administrators will be standing around wondering why the overall student population is dropping, even with “great low interest student loans.” When that happens, I bet STILL none of them will guess that quality or price should be factors in education.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

The Future of Education: Right-Sizing?

By Professor Doom

     It takes little effort to realize that what’s going on in higher education today: instead of focusing on education, our universities and colleges instead focus on growth. More students, more buildings, more, more, more, moremoremore. Administrators believe everyone should be in school, always and forevermore.

     Now, don’t get me wrong, I believe human beings should, if they do desire, gain the education they desire…but this is already available. Public libraries have been around for ages, and the internet offers pretty much all the knowledge of humanity for free, or nearly so. Despite that, I still believe universities, institutions of higher education (whatever that means), still have a place in the modern world. Professional training centers also make much sense; there are many practical skills that are best learned by having a real human being, a teacher, right there with the student, helping him understand how to do things properly. Universities and classrooms aren’t even remotely the only way to learn, not that an administrator will admit it.

     But how many such institutions do we need, and how large should they be? This is an impossible question to answer, of course, but I do fear that the student loan scam has caused a massive over-investment in our higher education infrastructure. It isn’t just multi-hundred million dollar building projects on mostly abandoned campuses on North Dakota or billion dollar projects in population-losing Michigan that concern me, this phenomenon is widespread. I’ve seen so many pictures of those fake, empty cities in China, and people laugh that China could engage in such wild fraud…but nobody is laughing at what’s going on in our institutions.

      Many Americans thinks this country is immune to the level of fraud in China, but people don’t realize something similar is going on here. As an academic, I’ve been on quite a few university campuses, and I’m often surprised at how empty they seem, at times when they should not be empty. Yes, I know that on weekends, and between semesters, campuses tend to have few people on them…I imagine Disney World isn’t crowded at 3am, either. On the other hand, I’ve been on campus, at noon, when classes are in session, and almost all the classrooms are completely empty…I then pick up the school paper and read how the campus is “filled to capacity”, justifying slapping up another building named after another Poo-Bah. 

      I realize many of my gentle readers might find such a claim hard to believe. I’ve honestly thought about taking pictures, but a picture does a poor job of indicating time of day…I just don’t think such pictures would be convincing.

      Anyway, almost every administrator I spoke to talks of growth, growth at all costs, growth, growth, and only growth is all that an administrator cares about. I fear the student loan scam has already financed higher education past the point of no return, but let’s focus on what an administrator has to say.    

     This administrator is at least a little different. Occasionally an administrator stops rubbing student enrollment reports on himself long enough to consider that, maybe, we’ll reach a point of unsustainability, and this one comes close. The author I’m quoting is William Patrick Leonard, executive vice-dean at SolBridge International School of Business in Daejeon, Republic of Korea. 

     Hmm, “executive vice-dean”.  In this blog I’ve quoted deans, assistant deans, associate deans, senior associate deans, and there are quite a few levels of deanlinghood suggested by those titles that I haven’t touched on. Honest, higher education could be much, much, cheaper if we didn’t have legions of administrators sucking up all the money.

     Speaking of money, I’ll bet you a lot of it that Mr. Leonard won’t be advocating a reduction in administration as a fix to higher education. Granted, having read the article, I have an unfair advantage, but having never heard an administrator suggest anything besides reduce the quality of education, I would have bet the same had I not read the article.

    Anyway, allow me to comment and clarify what he has to say:

“Many tertiary institutions in the United States are facing an uncertain financial future.”

--“tertiary” means anything past high school.

     Absolutely true. Because all institutions expanded, and expanded, and expanded, counting on endless growth, many of them are now in very serious trouble—the simultaneous hyper-expansion of all our institutions has put them all in an unsustainable situation. It isn’t merely the weaker economy, although the steadily weakening state support is certainly a factor. The problem is there are only so many suckers you can put into this system, and we’ve just about got them all, now…and kept building as though the growth could possibly continue. Our institutions now have the capacity to “teach” perhaps 60,000,000 students without really pushing classrooms past capacity, more like 200,000,000 when you factor in all the bogus online coursework. We’ve only got 300,000,000 people in the United Sates. I honestly don’t know the capacity, but every campus I’ve been on could support triple the population it has now (assuming admin would hire faculty at half the rate they hire more admin), and there are around 20,000,000 college students now.

     Trouble is, we’re massively overbuilt, and the maintenance costs alone on all those huge buildings (not to mention the legions of administrators that fill them) makes it difficult for the institutions to survive if revenue drops even a little. We’re at the point now that our institutions are simply cannibalizing each other’s students.

     Class sizes are as large as they can go, teacher pay is as low as it can go…and we no longer can count on insane growth. So how do the administrators expect to pay for themselves in the face of these problems? Raising tuition still more is also a problem:

Government officials, college students, parents and other traditional supporters appear to be less willing to accept unquestioningly ever-increasing subsidies and tuition fees than they have been in recent decades.

     The administrator is correct. People are looking at the $80,000 or so that 4 years of tuition costs, and saying “no more.” What the administrator is leaving out, however, is that it’s not merely the cost that’s a problem…it’s the FACT that most of the “education” being sold is worthless. 

     I’m teaching loads and loads of differential equations this year, section after section, while decades ago, when I taught at a school with a famous engineering program (and 25k students), there were like 3 sections for the whole department. Why the change? Because my students need the course for their petroleum engineering degrees—such a degree merits a very high paying job, right now, thanks to the (probably short term) shale oil boom. I wish students the best and hope I’m wrong about the longevity of shale oil, but I promise you, the students paying this money are doing it because their degree at least might be worth the money. Don’t tell admin, but I bet the students would pay more, because they’re learning something they at least sort of need.

Even the elite University of California, Berkeley’s plan to increase tuition fees by 5% through to the end of the decade has drawn unprecedented criticism.

--hey, if there was any investment today that offered a safe 5% return, so that parents could keep up with tuition, this might not be so bad, right? Question: how does the government keep insisting inflation is 1.5% when all the big ticket items and most of the smaller items keep going up far more than 1.5% every year? I remember being a stockbroker in the 80s, trying, and failing, to sell 10%+ CDs all day long. Good lord I wish I had those CDs now. Anyway…

     Many institutions load their students down with junk degrees like Gender Studies, and parents and citizens are starting to realize, there’s just no need to spend that kind of money for degrees of no value in the marketplace…if their kids want personal growth, they can just go to the library read Gender Studies books, as many as they want, for free.

     So, the administrator is right that “people are unwilling to pay more tuition…” but he left out the blindingly obvious answer of “…because most of higher education is worthless.” Eh, I can forgive the guy for missing a detail. “Quality of education” has never been an administrative priority.

     Instead of considering the obvious reason why people are unwilling to pay more tuition, the administrator considers other possibilities that’ll keep our bloated higher education administration comfortable. It’s an interesting look into an administrative mind that, at the very least, is capable of far more than simply saying “we need more GROWTH!”

     We’ll consider his answer, next time.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com