28% of Students With Debt Don’t Know It

By Professor Doom

     Integrity. It’s something of an antiquated concept anymore, but it really is worth nothing that every accredited institution promises to act with integrity.

1.1  The institution operates with integrity in all matters. (Integrity)

…Failure of an institution to adhere to the integrity principle may result in a loss of accreditation…

      The very first principle of the Principles of Accreditation for SACS accreditation, quoted above, says institutions need to act with integrity, it even specifically says that not acting with integrity is grounds for loss of accreditation. SACS, incidentally, is the accreditor for UNC, you know, the university that ran an 18 year scandal of bogus courses, firing whistleblowers, squelching investigations, falsifying documents, and lying extensively about the extent of the fraud.

     UNC will, of course, not be losing accreditation (and access to those sweet student loan checks!), or face any other particular penalty for this and other blatant violations of accreditation.

     Excuses have been made for UNC—they really only intended academic fraud just for the athletes, and things just got out of hand. Whatever. The important thing for the gentle reader to understand is UNC is not special, not in terms of academic fraud, and not in terms of lack of integrity.

       Another obscure article highlights how ridiculous things are in terms of integrity:

A Shocking Number Of College Students Don't Even Realize They Have Loan Debt

     Adults reading this post would, and should, find that hard to believe. First, a quote explaining just how bad it is:

"About half of all first-year students in the US seriously underestimate how much student debt they have," according to the report.

Additionally, the report found that 28% of students with federal loans reported having no federal debt. Another 14% with federal loans said they had no student debt at all….”

      Really, over a quarter of students with federal loans don’t even realize it. Now, an adult should find this surprising, because an adult probably figured that student loan debt is like every other debt: you have to sign some forms, you have to go through a (sometimes extensive) credit check, you have to know how much you’re taking, and only after all that do you get handed a check.

      Student loan debt is nothing like that, however. The checks come much later than when the student signs up for classes, and payments come much, much, later, years after the loan is taken out. When the crime is committed of putting a student into debt without telling him, it can easily be 5 years before the student knows about it, when he’s asked for the first payment. By then, administrators will be long gone with the loot, I promise.

      The far more critical difference is the “sign some forms” part. See, a student, to qualify for debt, all he has to do is check a box saying “I am a degree seeking student.” And…that’s it. No credit check, and then the money flows, mostly to college administrators, but a trickle usually makes it to the student (although even public schools are looking to slurp up that last trickle).

     Oh, there’s one more thing for this loan to be accepted: the school must be accredited. Having brought a school through the accreditation process, it’s not all that hard to get considering the money involved…and UNC shows it’s pretty tough to lose.

     Poor kids. They have no idea how real loans are supposed to work, so they get suckered into this system. They only find out years later that they’ve saddled themselves with a lifetime of debt, one that cannot be removed via bankruptcy (heck, some student loans don’t even end in death, but “luckily” Federal loans generally do). The students can’t even get rid of the debt if their education is totally bogus, as, again, was demonstrated at UNC.

      An adult reader would be shocked at just how easy it is to qualify for student  loan checks, and having learned from hard experience, “there’s always a catch”, would immediately become suspicious at being handed so much money, but realize, your typical college student is fresh out of high school: not a child, but certainly not wise in the ways of the world. His parents, alas, figure the “accredited” school will take care of their child, little realizing the caliber of people running higher education today (and, these are the same people running accreditation).

     The kid just figures college works like public school: he shows up, and everything else is taken care of. Higher education takes care of those kids all right…in much the same way a stockyard takes care of cattle.

     But wait a minute here, as part of accreditation, schools promise to act with integrity. Taking advantage of people, kids or adults, in this manner is as far away from integrity as possible.

     Because these kids figure higher education is just like public education, many students really don’t have a clue what kind of expenses they are incurring at college:

only a bare majority of respondents (52 percent) at a selective public university were able to correctly identify (within a $5,000 range) what they paid for their first year of college.

“…Using nationally representative data, we find that about half of all first-year students in the U.S. seriously underestimate how much student debt they have,…”

     Administrators justify their vicious exploitation of children by saying “in the eyes of the law, they’re adults”, but even this is dodgy. As I’ve shown many times, much of college is sub-high school level, and a substantial percentage of college coursework is 6^th grade or lower. In order for a student to get into a 6^th grade level “college” course, he takes a placement test provided by the institution, documenting that he has the intellectual capacity of an 10 year old, or younger.

      So, it doesn’t matter if the kid’s chronological age places him as an adult, the institution has provided its own documentation that the kid is not mentally competent to function as an adult…and certainly not competent to understand the monumental risk he’s taking on with college loans. Admin signs him up anyway, laughing all the way to bank as it does so.

     What is being done to our college students is completely indefensible, and it’s very clear that a great many students are coming on campus and being outright deceived and exploited into taking student loans. If accreditation were legitimate about integrity (or much else, really), schools that did this to their students would instantly lose accreditation, much like accreditors say in writing. That’s really what should be done.

     Fix accreditation to fix higher education. Or you could just end the student loan scam altogether, a much better solution.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Social Promotion Comes to College

By Professor Doom

     Many times I’ve warned that what’s going on in higher education today is mostly fraudulent, but rarely have I tried to link any of the fraud to the likewise mostly fraudulent “public” (more accurately, “government”) school system. This isn’t a simple oversight on my part—I prefer, when making such serious accusations, to have my own direct observations to add, and I just don’t have the personal experience with what goes on in public school to do so.

      Nevertheless, it’s quite plausible that higher education’s decay is simply an extension of “lower” education. In the past, people were particularly willing to surrender their tax dollars to get their children educated. Only now, after a century of such waste, have citizens started to realize that what’s been going on in the public school has, primarily, been detrimental to their children. As we see more and more students graduating high school with the inability to read cursive and lacking other abilities we used to associate with 10 year olds, and, in short, the unwillingness to learn or do anything but to go to the government to get the next dollop of information/food/money, it becomes ever more obvious that putting a child in government school is probably one of the worst abuses a parent can do.

      The abuses and mistakes of government school have been filtering up to higher education. There’s been no choice in the matter. “Open admissions” foolishness, combined with the student loan scam, have caused a flood of semi-students to come on campus to get their checks…and these students have no equipment for the obscure theory-crafting of higher education. They want their money, and they want to go home.

     While higher education has been heavily debased, there still are a few rules here and there that make it tough, or at least inconvenient, for the completely ignorant to go far in college coursework. Even defining “college” down to the 6^th grade only helps a little: there are still educators in higher education that honestly believe a student shouldn’t attempt material intended for adults until the student has mastered the material any 10 year old can learn.  These educators are vastly outnumbered by administrators that only view standards as an impediment to further institutional growth.

               “The Civil War was inevitable, but it didn’t have to be that way.”

---quote from a student history paper. A month before the paper was written, the history professor ranted extensively to the rest of the faculty how annoying it was that he had to stop his lecture, and spend time defining the word ‘inevitable’ to his class. This student was in the class, heard the professor give the simple definition of “inevitable”…but still didn’t understand. This is common to remedial students: they can look you dead in the eye, nod in agreement that they understand, and still not comprehend a word you’re saying. Remedial students can take other college classes, even if they have yet to take, much less pass, the remedial courses. They usually do terribly, of course.

      This coursework is “remedial”, and, as I’ve shown many times before, almost the entirety of community college is remedial work, with only a miniscule amount of what goes on in community college being even remotely passable as college material. To emphasize: I’m not saying “in my day…”, the material in community colleges is oftentimes identical, if not simpler, than the material being taught right now in public schools, to children, in places mere blocks away from the institution.

      I’m not the only one to notice the huge joke that is community college, and if it ever becomes widespread knowledge that community college coursework is mostly pre- and lower level high school work, there’s going to be a problem. Fixing this problem in advance would require integrity, and regular readers of my blog know that’s not an option in higher education.

      Instead, the problem will be covered up using the technique that the public schools used to cover up the fact that, quite often, they’re not doing anything at all with the children in their care: social promotion.

     Yes, social promotion has come to college. I kid you not, as the title of the following states:

Social Promotion Comes to FL CCs

--it’s just Florida Community Colleges for now, but I assure you it will be copied…I’ve been to many meetings where we copy the frauds committed at community colleges elsewhere. Faculty explain to admin that the new plans are academically frauds…and then we get it shoved down our throats anyway.

     As is so often the case in these little news pieces, everything is candy-coated to give the appearance of legitimacy, as though the actors involved would be shocked, shocked, if anything untoward was going on.

     So allow me to rip off the candy coating in the article and reveal some truth of what’s going on:

Students are often placed into remedial courses at community colleges by inferior standardized tests… 

      Those standardized tests are inferior? Inferior to what, exactly? I concede they’re far from perfect, but considering these tests take about 15 minutes to administer (which is all the students will stand for), and cost about $2 to grade (which is all administration is willing to pay), they do a GREAT job of summarizing what the student has learned in 12 years of government schooling.

     I promise you, if there was something better, we’d use it. “Inferior” is rubbish when there’s nothing superior available. 

“…with arbitrary cut scores, “

     Uh, nope. The cut scores aren’t arbitrary at all. The cut scores are determined by looking at the success rates of students in the courses, based on the scores they got on the tests. They’re about 95% accurate when it comes to placement, which the best you can hope for—sometimes students will just have a bad day or be lucky guessers. For what it’s worth, every institution has a “the student can do whatever he wants” clause if he doesn’t like the test score, and register for courses that we know he isn’t ready for despite what the placement test says.

Admin: We’re changing the cut scores to put more students into College Algebra. They’ll still be competitive.

--even though the test makers know what the test scores mean, admin views them as an impediment, and will override them for the goofiest of reasons.

     About every year, a student will get a low score on the standardized tests, yell at admin “I got a 4.0 in high school, I’m not a remedial student!”, and they let him enroll in the sophomore level high school courses that pass for “advanced” community college coursework today. In ten years of my being at a questionable community college, every single student that did this failed.

     Despite this, I still argued in favor of having the clause; no matter how good the tests are, they’ll never be perfect, we should always allow an individual student to do what he thinks is best, even if that means ignoring our advice.

      No, the scores aren’t arbitrary…they’re just the best possible guess based on thousands of students.

     The article continues with the barrage of misinformation:

“..and less than one-third of students placed into remediation are likely to graduate from college.”

     This is inaccurate. It’s not less than 1/3, it’s less than 10% of remedial students graduate. Granted, most community colleges boast less than a 10% graduation rate overall, so perhaps this is just picking on remedial students. The point still remains: this article is not doing the most accurate job of conveying information. Otherwise the article would simply also mention that most community college students are remedial students, and that community college graduation rates run below 10% in general.

“…with a wave of their legislative wand, the Florida legislature has made all of the students that would have placed into remediation disappear.”

      And, just like that, maybe the 90% of the community college work that is high school level or lower will just disappear, right? Nope. The remedial courses will disappear…but they’ll quietly be replaced by “college” courses that cover the exact same material as the remedial courses, just now for (worthless) college credit.

“…According to National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data, in 2009 only 32 percent of students leaving Florida high schools tested proficient or above in reading, just 19 percent in mathematics….”

   

     So yes, what we have here is, indeed, social promotion. The students, the strong majority of them, are not ready for college, completely unprepared, in fact. That’s how it’s always been; in the past, only students that took college preparation courses in high school were prepared for college, which really strikes me as reasonable.

     But now everyone can go to college, because “open admission” policies are better for growth. Since there’s a stigma of the being a “developmental” student (hey, remember when “retarded” was a stigma, to be replaced by “special ed”, which was then replaced by “remedial”, and then by “developmental”? Anyway…), they’re going to socially promote these students directly into college.

     But…wait a minute. The lower education system is a forced system, imposed on children. So, I sort-of followed the idea of social promotion there, because it wasn’t all that fair to children to get labeled like that…even as I acknowledge that ultimately these children get harmed by being moved up to things they’re not ready to handle (it’s called abuse for a reason, after all). But this is college now…these students aren’t being forced to go to college, and I don’t see how there can be that much of a stigma when 90% of the campus is devoted to remedial coursework, anyway. If anything, being a real student on a community college campus would be the stigma. I know being a legitimate professor on a community college campus made me a target, since I was such a minority.

      The article fails to ask the OBVIOUS question: why are these students, with little to no interest in higher education, flooding onto campus? The answer is likewise, obvious: the student loan scam.  

  

     These people are coming to college to get those checks; with my own eyes I’ve seen plenty of community college classrooms with 30% or more of the “students” disappearing the day the checks arrive.

      So, when faced with the prospect of swarms of people showing up to exploit the student loan scam, the path of integrity would be to shut down the scam, or at least restrict it to just the students that obviously have an interest in learning.

     Instead, we’re opening up the scam to a wider audience.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Penn State: The Disgust Never Ends

By Professor Doom

     The massive corruption of higher education isn’t restricted to college sportsball, but, thanks to the spirit of competition, what goes on there is more publicized. It’s no grand conspiracy that sports scandals get more press, just how things work. Cheating teams make the news because the losing side complains immediately after the loss. On the other hand, even if every student in the school is cheating or if the whole school is operating fraudulently, it barely registers a blip in the media: there are no immediate losers. When the graduates go into the real world, it takes years to find out their illicitly acquired degrees are worthless…and by that time, it’s far too late to complain.

     Even in college sportsball, however, when the bad guys are caught, there’s only the illusion that justice is served. The Penn State sex scandal involved at least 15 years of young (not college age) boys being “molested” (a very kind word for it, to judge by eyewitness testimony) in the Penn State showers, before something was finally done about it.

      As I’ve discussed before, the reasons nothing was done are pretty simple; between the kangaroo campus court system, and administration’s fixation on growth and retention over anything resembling integrity, there was no way for a fix to come from the inside…justice must come from outside the system.

     Even when justice is served, it seems to be more of a show. Penn State’s President Spanier, who presided over the years of cover-up, was forced to step down from ruling over Penn State. Hey, that looks good, right?

     It’s a show. Spanier gets a golden parachute package of around $3,000,000, on his way out. If he manages to avoid jail, he’ll also get to keep a tenured, $600,000 a year “professor” position…seriously, nobody thinks this is odd? Einstein never raked in this kind of loot! Spanier is on paid leave (i.e., gets paid $600,000 a year for free—more in a month that most Americans get in a year) while the criminal charges are being decided. So, the front page news says he’s fired from the institution, and on page 18 you can find out the institution is handing him millions of dollars and a cushy job. That’s not exactly justice.

     More than a year after his termination, Penn State officials still have not said where Mr. Spanier is assigned as a faculty member, even as he earns a six-figure salary as a professor.

--seriously, when you hear about “tenured professors” making insane amounts of money in lifelong jobs, please realize that much, if not all, of it is just administrators further plundering education for their own profits. Legitimate faculty are being impoverished by an exploitative system of adjunct-hood.

     Penn State’s sportsball program also got some punishment: 112 wins were “wiped out,”  the coach’s record (at least in sportsball) negated, and Penn State also got a $60 million dollar fine (chump change compared to what they pay admin, but I digress).

      Hey, that sounds pretty serious. It’s stunning that the NCAA, an organization noted for its stellar lack of integrity, still has no trouble at all giving lessons to higher education administration on how decent people behave.

     Not so fast. All those punishments?

It has now been announced that these punishments will be canceled

      The linked article says that, hey, NCAA was a little rash, and has reconsidered its “punishments”.

     Now, I guess it’s strange to cancel those wins, but seriously, that was a symbolic gesture. The players involved honestly don’t care (all their stats are preserved, after all, and, they’re just games, not even “professional”). Even a symbolic gesture is too much for the NCAA.

      The coach gets his titles back despite his extraordinarily foul and disturbingly regular extracurricular activities. I have a problem with this: the coach clearly used his position and “success” as a means for those activities, and so that success absolutely has a taint to it that should be negated (unlike the wins themselves, which was a product of an entire team’s efforts).

      What about the $60 million? Well, it will be spent “within the state” on something or other…hopefully some actual reporter will follow that money, because it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that it just goes to more golden parachutes.

     It’s funny to read the article and see how the chamber-of-horrors type acts in the showers are now being candy-coated. The most profane deception in the article must be this:

'The fact of the matter was, an evil predator operated in our community for years and everyone missed it,'

  

     NO. 

     Everyone did not miss it.

     Eyewitness testimony was submitted, repeatedly, to the administration regarding what was going on in the showers at Penn State.

In 2002, the then-graduate assistant told Paterno that he had witnessed Sandusky abusing a boy in a Penn State locker room shower. Paterno informed Curley, who later met with McQueary and Schultz. McQueary, who became an assistant coach at Penn State, reiterated his statement to the grand jury. He has reportedly said that he went to the police; the authorities dispute that claim. The school put him on administrative leave….

--what, being put on leave for daring to ask for an iota of integrity? Honest, Penn State isn’t the only place like this…

Calhoun, a veteran of the Korean War, was visibly shaken by what he reported seeing.

      It is insulting to the victims to speak so bold a lie as “everyone missed it.” These acts were reported, explicitly, as much as I’m sure it disgusted the witnesses to explicitly describe what they saw, and Penn State administration did NOTHING, beyond fire up the kangaroo court system and dismiss the claims.

      “Nothing” seems to be approximately the level of penalties Penn State will face based on their willingness to support such activities. How can anyone not be disgusted by this? I can’t emphasize strongly enough how useless the campus court system is.

Admin: The appeal was made by faculty, questioning the prior decision that continuing education coursework at an accredited state institution should not be classified as career development coursework at an accredited institution. The faculty asserts that accredited coursework at a state institution should count as accredited coursework. A committee was formed to make a decision on this matter.

The ruling of the committee is as follows: “Some feel that there is agreement. Some feel that there is disagreement. Some have no opinion on the matter.”

The committee’s ruling is final, and there is to be no further discussion on the matter.”

--in all my personal experience with the kangaroo campus court system, it’s tough for me to say which display of incompetence was the most ostentatious. I defy any normal human being to determine if the appellant won or lost the decision. It’d be nice to know, for any other faculty seeking to satisfy continuing education requirements (having read the policy with my own eyes, I assert any non-moron could determine clearly that accredited coursework counts as accredited career development). I remind the reader: the same system is used for quibbles over policy as for allegations of brutal sodomy.

How is it a wonder that grotesque violations which admin didn’t want to know about remained unknown? Can you tell if I’m talking about Penn State, or UNC?

      I maintain the administration of Penn State is not particularly special, and is fairly representative of the rulers of many of our institutions of higher education. Given the demonstration that these guys literally won’t make a tiny bit of effort to stop the degradation of children, if doing so might cut into growth and retention, why would anyone suspect they would do anything to stop the degradation of higher education?

      I won’t go so far as to suggest administration in higher education is promoting the degradation of children (although Spanier’s $600,000 a year job-for-life does have me scratching my head…), but I’ve shown many times administration has no issues with the degradation of higher education, at least if it will promote growth and retention.

      And not even symbolic gestures will be made to slow them down.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com