Students Pay Extra For Real Skills

By Professor Doom

    I’ll be the first to admit that higher education need not be about job skills, that learning, as an end, is a perfectly legitimate pursuit for a human being. But, I must qualify this:

      As soon as you take loan money for education, you MUST justify how that education will be used to pay back the loan. Somewhere in our education of our children, we’ve lost the teaching of a critical, basic idea of personal finance: the only justification for taking out a loan is if the loan will give you a means to pay back the loan, and hopefully some profit.

     So, taking out a huge loan for a home can make sense: even if you spend 30 years paying off the mortgage, it still might be a better deal than paying rent for 30 years, and ending up with nothing. It’s not a sure thing, mind you, but at least it’s possible.

      On the other hand, taking out a loan for a car really only makes sense if you need to have that car to get a job. It’s a shame that our society is built upon the necessity of having the immense expense of a car before a human being can support himself (in most cities), but that’s the facts. Most people don’t run the numbers, however, and I remember many friends from high school getting a job just to pay for the car…then finding out the job didn’t really pay enough to support a car, eventually losing both car and job.

      So, back to higher education, where students are going deep into debt for degrees, degrees that, presumably, are going to help them get a job…the only reason to get the loan in the first place. This is why many “liberal arts” degrees like art, philosophy, pure mathematics, and such are dying on campuses, but that’s for another article.

      With so many degrees being all about “getting a job”, and with tuition skyrocketing to insane levels, shouldn’t the degrees already include some level of basic job training?

Nearly nine out of 10 of 500 executives polled said graduates lack the necessary skills to succeed.

     That’s a large enough sample that it’s safe to say 90% of the hiring “real world” has figured out that higher education isn’t doing the job. The other 10% is only paying minimum wage anyway, and doesn’t care.

      Students aren’t stupid, however, not the legitimate ones, and so they realize that they need to learn some job skills, and that these skills are not to be learned on college campus. So what are they doing?

So he gave up his winter break just a semester before graduating and paid another $3,000 to take a three-week business boot camp designed to teach him how to work a full-time job.
The course, offered by a company called Fullbridge, covered problem-solving, collaboration and communication

     Hmm. Students are taking out loans to cover some $100,000 for a degree, and even at this level of expense, still aren’t learning critical skills. So, they pay extra to learn the things they need to know…somewhere else.

     Wonder if any college administrators are connecting any dots there? Nah.

     I want to point out that “somewhere else” is teaching critical skills, and yet isn’t accredited…and is doing a better job than any accredited school, because that’s the ONLY WAY they could possibly justify (and get!) those prices. Accredited schools don’t need to be legitimate (I was flushed away as soon as my school received accreditation), while un-accredited schools have to actually be effective. Anyone else think that’s a little backwards?

     

“…that many liberal-arts colleges and universities aren’t keeping up with the ever-evolving, hyper-competitive demands of the workplace. That’s provided an opening for companies like Fullbridge, which holds workshops in cities including New York and San Francisco at a cost of up to $8,500 per student…”

     The article I’m quoting from has it a bit wrong. It isn’t that liberal-arts colleges and universities, “aren’t keeping up”, not exactly. Don’t get me wrong, higher education is slow to change, but there are good reasons not to rewrite programs to follow the latest fad. The good reasons are irrelevant here, however.

      The real issue is: these schools don’t care. Yes, with loan money on the table, a school with integrity would care about making sure graduates learn job skills. Our schools of higher education don’t care, for reasons very similar to why our banks no longer pay interest in deposits. Allow me to digress:

       It’s hard to believe there was a time when I was getting 8% on my savings account, while today to get even 0.5% would be nice. Banks used to pay interest, because they wanted deposits. Since the federal government is flooding the banks with money, banks don’t need money from “the little guys”, and so there’s no interest in paying interest. End digression.

      Similarly, our schools in higher education are being flooded with student loan and grant money via the Federal government. This money comes through (bogus) accreditation, not through offering real education or job skills. All our institutions of higher education care about is selling courses to students…it’s why we have courses on Gilligan’s Island, or Lady Gaga, or Star Trek. 

      These courses sell well, but have little to do with job skills, or academic skills for that matter. Of course, the real world doesn’t give a whit if a student can talk about Gilligan’s Island, and so it has to teach employees what the schools won’t:

Walmart employees who want to move up can take free online college-level classes in business administration. McDonald’s has its own Hamburger University at its Oak Brook, Ill., headquarters, where managers and prospective managers spend a week a year learning not how to flip hamburgers but how to sharpen their business and leadership skills. And Starbucks workers can take two custom courses designed for them…

     Higher education is now at the point of such uselessness that even places like Wal-Mart, McDonald’s and Starbucks—employers with negative reputation for employee treatment, and in industries neither high tech nor inscrutably complicated—are feeling the need to set up their own education programs…even as our universities and community colleges expand and expand with irrelevant programs, paid for via student loan money. That these expansions are for buildings filled with useless administrators or bogus coursework is irrelevant in the face of the massive student loan checks.

     Is there a bigger signal of the worthlessness of the “jobs training” aspect of higher education that even the cashiers and greeters of StarBucks and Wal-Mart need extra learning after blowing $100,000 on a jobs-specific degree?

     Yikes.

    So, now students pay an extra few thousand to go to an unaccredited school to get real job skills. How well do the unaccredited schools perform? We’ll look at it in detail, but just a hint, below:

You only pay us if you find a job as a developer after the program. In that case, the fee is 18% of your first year salary, payable over the first 6 months after you start working.

--any universities want to step up and make the same offer to their students? Keep in mind, these coding schools are for-profit. Accredited for-profit schools that get federal student loan money are scams generating clueless graduates that only a fool would hire. For profit schools that that aren’t accredited have no choice but to be legitimate to the point that they can GUARANTEE jobs. So, yeah, once again it’s clear the student loan program really needs to stop…and accreditation could use some legitimacy, too.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

The High Cost of Free College

By Professor Doom

     Usually, the mainstream media has never met a tax or program it didn’t like. It’s never a question of whether we should have some new social program, instead the media presents the question that the reader should decide between “more” or “much more” government involvement.

       So I was a little surprised when a CBS article, of all things, dared to sound even a little critical of Obama’s stupid community college plan:

The high cost of free community college

     I’m just amazed that the article even comes close to questioning whether “free community college” is good for everyone.

The proposal has generated accolades from those who support greater college access and skepticism from those who predict much of the money will be wasted.

     Look at that! Both sides mentioned. Of course, it’s not much of a “prediction” to say much of the money will be wasted. After all, already most of community college is a waste, with graduation rates below 10%, most coursework being worthless remedial programs, and roughly 80% of the students suckered into this system being victimized by it.

      So yeah, both sides mentioned, although the “much of the money wasted” side is presented as fortune-tellers, rather than people that are looking at the hard evidence of waste. Still, this is pretty good for CBS…a low bar.

      Curiously, CBS follows up with the hard evidence showing what a waste community college is for most people:

“... For a two-year associate degree, that would mean fewer than one in five students graduate within three years. A report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center concluded that just 20 percent of community college students graduate to four-year schools…”

      Look, two different measurements, in addition to my own, say that for 80% of students, community college is a waste.  No program is perfectly efficient, but high schools with 80% drop out rates aren’t held up as models to be used everywhere, why is community college’s immense failure rate such a great standard that we want everyone to be subjected to it?

      How is it a “prediction” to say much of the money will be wasted when the facts spell out that much of the money will be wasted? When the thermometer says it’s 95 degrees, it’s not a prediction to say “it’ll be a hot day”, right?

      Anyway, the article fears that there just isn’t enough capacity for all the students that would take advantage of the free offer:

Making community college free could actually hurt access to these institutions that have traditionally served as a higher-ed gateway for lower income and nontraditional students. A spike in community-college popularity could make enrolling in classes for current and new students more difficult. California provides a recent example of how access can be threatened when classes are free or close to it.

     This is a foolish concern. Higher education is turning into a boiler room, and this is most apparent at the community college level. The issue isn’t capacity, the issue is quality. Yes, California had a problem with too many students, but, as I showed at a Los Angeles community college, much of the coursework is at the 6^th grade level or lower. Stop such waste of time courses, and the capacity problem vanishes.

     If there was any integrity in the system, college would be college, and we’d only accept applicants that actually are coming to learn, rather than people that are just there for the free checks that Obama wants to increase.

     Yes, increase. See, community college is already basically free. The Pell Grant scam is particularly good at community colleges, due to their low tuition. Students already can come to community college, and get a Pell Grant, which not only pays for tuition but gives a “refund” check to the student—I don’t call Obama’s plan stupid for nothing!

     Let’s go over that, because it’s clear not enough people understand what’s really going on in community colleges, especially as relates to the Pell Grant scam.

      Like most government handouts, the Pell Grant is in trouble, with around an 18 billion shortfall expected this year. Like most government handouts, there’s a hideous amount of fraud here.

      Roughly 25% of students in the community college system are some sort of “Pell Runner”, which is to say, not a student at all, but merely someone who shows up, signs up for classes, and vanishes once the Pell Grant “refund” arrives. With my own eyes I’ve seen classrooms empty the day after “check day”. Most people just don’t understand that Pell Grants have merely turned into a form of welfare for our young…and a massive subsidy for our community college system, which gets a great deal of Pell Grant money.

Pell Runners, also referred to as “Stipend Chasers,” don’t bother with student loans or planning their finances in any way for college. Instead, they enroll in the cheapest community colleges they can find, often in simple online classes, and apply for Pell Grants to fund their academic endeavor. Then, once they receive their government-issued money, they stop attending class, flunk out, and vanish. They live on that free money until funds begin to run low, at which point they repeat the process.

     Repeat the process? Yes, because there’s no record keeping. An administrator only wants growth, so he doesn’t want there to be records: as far as a college administrator is concerned, a Pell Runner helps with growth, and so doesn’t care about all the fraud…an administrator won’t keep records to cut down on fraud, because that would cut into growth. The gentle reader really needs to understand that most community colleges are systematically frauds, in addition to being openly criminal.

      We really do have “Nomad Tribes of Students” that just wander from one community college to the next, re-applying for, and getting Pell Grant loot, semester after semester.

Lee M. Carrillo, director of financial aid at Central New Mexico Community College, had a personal encounter with a Pell Runner ring. Carrillo was approached by colleagues and asked to investigate a group of students who were calling in on a daily basis demanding their Pell Grant money.

He found that the group of students calling in was actually enrolled at multiple nearby colleges. Their history at these colleges showed that all of them were enrolling in online classes, and then failing out.  After further investigation, he found the group was working out of Mississippi—over a thousand miles away.

“They had a ringleader calling for all those students, saying she was that person and needed to get her funds,” Carrillo told the Community College Times.

--if they weren’t bugging admin too much by calling on a daily basis, they would never have been caught!

      Above is just one example of the organized student crime complementing the organized college administration crime, but I assure that, across the country, school after school after school is populated with students like this, mostly individually, but as the above shows, sometimes it’s a group effort.

      How did record keeping get to be so bad that a student could enroll and apply for Federal Grant money at MULTIPLE colleges? Why is supply so excessive that MULTIPLE colleges are so near each other? Neither is a fluke, and we’ll just see more of this once community college becomes “free”.

      So, while the CBS article doesn’t really understand WHY the “new” free community college plan is a stupid idea, I still give them credit for at least mentioning that, yeah, it’s a bad idea.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

    

Colleges Overregulated? No way. Part 2.

By Professor Doom

      So today I’ll look at an official report to congress, written by the Poo Bahs controlling higher education, criticizing all the regulation our institutions receive, in exchange for $160 billion dollars of official federal tax money (and many more billions of tax dollars in other ways).

The compliance problem is exacerbated by the sheer volume of mandates—approximately 2,000 pages of text…”

     Now, I’m no fan of government regulations, and I’m sure most of them are a joke, but let’s put this in perspective. I was at a small school, a few thousand students at most, and, like most schools, there were far more administrators than faculty, well past 50.

      Hmm, 50 administrators. 2,000 pages. So, um, each full time administrator needs to be responsible for 40 pages of material. That doesn’t seem too onerous, especially since administrators get six (or seven) figure salaries in exchange for reading less than a page a week of regulations.

      Seriously, to become qualified in my profession, I, individually, have to demonstrate mastery of thousands of pages of material (calculus textbooks alone break 1,000 pages, and not a lot of folks think government regulations are more complicated than calculus…). And these guys are complaining about being responsible for 40 pages. Larger schools would have even less requirements per administrator.

—and the reality that the Department of Education issues official guidance to amend or clarify its rules at a rate of more than one document per work day…

    And having to read a WHOLE PAGE of text every day is a problem for these guys, too. Why is it any wonder that administration has degraded higher education to the point that most courses don’t ask students to read even 20 pages a week? Ok, the quote is “document”, not “page”…but administration doesn’t have a problem forcing faculty to teach classes so large that faculty would have to read 5 student papers a day (if they made the course legitimate). There’s a touch of hypocrisy here, honest, especially in light of just how many administrators schools have to spread the load of “a document a day” around.

    Seriously, flush the administration already, these guys have no business in higher education, by their own admission.

   

     Let’s see what else the report has to complain about:

Moreover, many regulations are unrelated to education, student safety, or stewardship of federal funds

     Holy cow, talk about the pot calling the kettle black. I remind the gentle reader that the Poo Bahs of higher education are responsible for accreditation procedures. A line by line analysis of those procedures shows that they are unrelated to education, student safety (seriously, what a stupid issue—admin has no problem screwing over students because “they’re adults”, but now they care about student safety?), or stewardship of federal funds.

     These guys don’t care about education, student safety (!), or stewardship of federal funds…and they have the audacity to complain that others don’t care? Puh-lease.

      The report has a list of demands for future regulations, and they are hysterical demands, considering where they are coming from. Let me address the three funniest:

Regulations should be clear and comprehensible

      Keep in mind, administration can get seriously confused by a child’s t-shirt, and I documented a multi-year struggle to convince administration that “consensus” doesn’t mean the same thing as “average” and that “mutually exclusive” doesn’t mean the same thing as “as much as 33% overlap”, and that 120/5 is 2.4 instead of 2.35…only to be punished for my efforts.

   

      It’s not possible to make regulations clear and comprehensible to a group which is used to words meaning exactly what they want them to mean, no more, no less.

    

The Department (of Education) should recognize good faith efforts by institutions

     Ho ho ho. I’ve documented (and experienced) wild denials of due process by administration in higher education, and the scandals at Penn State and UNC have demonstrated that there’s really no scenario where one can expect good faith efforts from administration.

Penalties should be imposed at a level appropriate to the violation

     Again, I laugh. Anyone recall the government penalties to UNC or Penn State for their violations? I’ll give a hint: nothing. Accreditation has no penalties for violations, none whatsoever. The Poo Bahs want it that way, so you can bet “appropriate” in this case means “absolutely nothing under any circumstances.”

      I’m up to page 4 of this report, which runs over 100 pages. It’s time to start skimming, lest I blow out my vocal chords from laughter at the hypocrisy here.

“…In 1970-71, what was then the U.S. Office of Education awarded roughly 1.6 million grants and loans to low- and middle-income families. In 2013-14, the U.S. Department of Education reported nearly 20 million such awards. The amount of money disbursed grew from $1.6 billion to more than $160 billion. Over that same time period, federal support for research at the National Institutes of Health increased from approximately $1 billion to roughly $30 billion, while funding for the National Science Foundation rose from about $465 million to nearly $7 billion…”

     The above paragraph, from the report, really is demonstrative of the incompetence of our Poo Bahs of higher education. They include the above paragraph to give an idea of the growth of the Federal government…but none of these Poo Bahs have the acumen to look at those numbers and draw conclusions. 

Allow me to do so: 

Spending into higher education has grown from 1.6 billion to 160 billion. A HUNDREDFOLD increase.

Spending at NIH had a THIRTYFOLD increase.

Spending as the NSF had a FIFTEENFOLD increase.

      Hmm, spending on education has increased much, much, more than in other areas. And these Poo Bahs have the audacity to dare complain about being asked to account for the money?

      The whole point of the report is to complain to Congress that higher education isn’t getting fair treatment for the money they get. And the Poo Bahs put, right in the report, everything Congress needs to tell the Poo Bahs to just shut up already.  

     It’s like having a bunch of children the same age, but giving one kid a car, the rest get bicycles. The kid with the car bitterly complains to you that washing the car is harder than washing a bicycle. A responsible parent would seriously consider taking away the car.

     Congress should do something similar regarding all the money being handed to our institutions of higher education…or at least to the institutions of the Poo Bahs who wrote this report.

     Having already screwed up like this, the only hope the report has is if it can show that costs of compliance have increased to ridiculously high levels. You’d need an estimate of compliance costs to run around 120 billion or so; the report doesn’t come close to even making an estimate, instead just flails around with a few lines, later in the report.

      Let’s skip ahead to that:

Stanford spent 7.5 cents of every tuition dollar on compliance…

…Hartwick estimates that the actual cost of compliance could be as much as 7 percent of its non-compensation operating budget…

--page 11

    

     About the same numbers at two different schools, which is something. Hmm, $160 billion of your revenue comes from the Federal government, and 7% of your operating budget involves accounting for that revenue in a way to make your customer, the Federal government, happy. You get the feeling these Poo-Bahs have never operated a legitimate business in their lives? Most businesses would kill for those kinds of numbers, rather than complain to Congress about them.

     Of course, those costs of compliance would be MUCH lower if administrators didn’t award themselves such massive pay for their time satisfying compliance regulations. Feel free to look at 2014 administrative salaries with your own eyes and see that pretty much every administrator clears 100k or more a year…in exchange for the immense responsibility of reading a page of regulations every week. Imagine how much cheaper higher education could be if we got rid of these guys and went back to using academics for administrative functions—academics don’t need to be paid nearly as much to read, we do it all the time anyway!

       Seriously, this is the caliber of people running higher education today. The whole report is filled with such gaffes, I could probably do several more posts on it, but I reckon it’s time to move on to other horrors in higher education.

 

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com