Government to Claw Back College Scammers…Almost.

By Professor Doom

     For years, scammy “for profit” schools have been making a killing destroying our young people as they go to college. The plan is simple: first, open up a decent looking school. Second, exploit bogus accreditation to qualify to get tuition loans for students. Third, open up enrollment (especially online) and annihilate standards so the school can enroll hordes of students. Use aggressive recruiting to get the students, and help them max out loans, raising tuition in tandem with the loans. Then the money rolls in.

      I’ve covered a few schools that use this business plan (and many do), which generates great profits for the owners (and usually administrators) of the school, but churns out hordes of students with huge debts and bogus educations that do nothing to help pay those debts.

     The Federal government, the backer of those loans (until moved to the taxpayers), has, after 1.2 trillions of dollars of student debt, caught on that something’s not right here. It’s dimly become aware that accreditation, for all its shiny façade, is a festering pit of corruption that does nothing to verify schools are legitimate, and doesn’t penalize even outrageous acts of fraud.

     The Federal government has also become dimly aware that many, many, fake schools are operating, plundering and looting with abandon. It’s finally starting to shut down the schools, even schools that accreditation says are “perfectly legitimate,” and that certainly counts for something, but what of all the stolen money?

     Again, the government is thinking about doing something about it:

How The Government Plans To ‘Claw Back’ Loan Money From Shady Colleges

     Yes, the government is putting together a plan, but, alas, it’s heavily flawed. Allow me to discuss the plan, and the flaws.

"We want institutions to know, in no uncertain terms, that they are responsible for the malfeasance that they create."

“…adopt some form of “risk-sharing” that would require colleges to pay back some of the federal funds they receive when students cannot afford their loans. Earlier this month, a bipartisan pair of senators introduced a bill to do just that.”

     This is the first flaw right here. The government will be targeting institutions for the stolen money. Despite the “corporations are people” insanity that rules today, the simple fact is human beings are the ones actually committing the fraud. Yes, shutting down the institution is nice, but getting the stolen money from the institution will accomplish nothing: these institutions are being plundered, there is no money to claw back. Poo Bahs of higher education make a million a year in salary, and quite a bit more than that in perks (like planes, houses, cars and drivers, multimillion dollar bonuses for growth, and stellar retirement programs, to just list a few of the more common perks).

      Targeting the institutions, while the thieving rulers walk away with the money, is idiocy. By the time the government gets around to asking the college to pay “some of the federal funds,” there’ll be nothing left.

     Even more ridiculous, the administrators that plundered the school will have more than enough capital to start up a whole new school…and repeat the process again.

     Yo, Federal government! Target the human beings doing the stealing. Claw back the money from the people doing the stealing, or this plan will do nothing.

     One of the reasons the Feds are looking into changing how the student loan scam works is Corinthian Colleges, which the government shut down…stranding students with no way to pay their debts, and with lots of Corinthian credits which can’t transfer to a legitimate school…or even to another bogus school.

     Accreditation is supposed to make college work transferrable. Accreditors get paid lots of money to do this job, as well as make sure the colleges are legitimate. Accreditors took the money, but did not do any aspect of their job.

     Hey, Feds! Hold accreditation responsible for legitimizing bogus schools. Because of the regional monopoly of accreditation, simply shutting down accreditors (right now) would be problematic…but find the people responsible for legitimizing these schools, and claw back money from them, too.

     Corinthian’s example is also motivating the Federal government to focus on for-profit schools. Hey, nothing wrong with that, but let’s be a bit more efficient here.

     UNC’s 18 year long fraud scandal shows that state universities have been getting away with the financial murder of our kids for a very long time. It’s pretty obvious that many people graduate with worthless degrees. Even non-profit schools are quite capable of systemic plunder.

     Hey, Uncle Sam! Don’t just make the people at for-profits accountable for their fraud…realize what’s going on at for-profits is going on at many of our state and non-profit schools. You want to claw back money from those guys, too.

     Corinthian wasn’t actually targeted for its worthless degrees, incidentally. It was targeted for low graduation rates, and high defaults. The article only hints at where those low graduation rates were coming from:

“…should discourage bad behavior like growth at all costs since the company will have to show it has the money to reach the scale it desires.”

     Our institutions of higher education, of all types, are focused on growth over everything else. It’s why a state college with a 0.6% graduation rate over a decade is still considered successful, because it achieved great growth during that decade: that the growth was achieved by enrolling anyone with a pulse (even though 25%, perhaps more, of those students are scammers), and loading them up with student loan and Pell Grant fraud money—admin still gets great pay raises for growth, no matter how many fake students have signed up.

Admin: “We have over 1,000 students taking our night courses.”

Me: “How come we have only a dozen cars in the parking lot on nights where classes are held?”

--I didn’t ask that last question, but the school wasn’t on a bus route or anything like that. Granted, I asked that question after “check day” (i.e., the day that students get their checks for signing up for college), but the fact remains, anyone with eyeballs could tell we really didn’t have a lot of students there for the education…

     The Feds will foolishly start expecting higher graduation rates. This isn’t going to work—all a fake school has to do is just mail the diplomas to students that never show up on campus. Accreditation doesn’t care about even this level of fraud. Even though standards have been reduced to the point that many classes have no requirements now, no reading, no writing, no studying, no nothing, graduation rates are still low because fake schools often have many fake students—once they get the loan check (minus tuition), they’re gone. It’s tough to graduate those kinds of students, but I’m sure if Feds require it, it’ll happen. There’s nothing to stop a college graduate from re-enrolling, and playing the student loan scam game again at a different school, by the way.

      While my previous suggestions about how to effectively punish fraudulent schools are pretty obvious, the suggestion for dealing with low graduation rates is a bit more subtle:

     Restrict admissions. 

     Right now, our fastest growing (and, typically, most fraudulent) schools get their students by promising various levels of easy, convenient, and fun. I don’t have a problem with people doing easy, convenient, or fun things, but that’s not what effective higher education is, or ever was supposed to be (ok, maybe fun, but only if you really enjoy studying 1,000 page books on history, splitting subatomic particles, or similar esoteric things).

     The Feds should force legitimate entrance requirements, you know, like accreditation used to require before it became corrupted. 

     I know, asking the Feds to set entrance requirements is pretty silly, but right now many schools have no requirements for entrance, indirectly forcing no requirements in their classes…I’m actually a little curious to see if the Feds can be worse than the nothing we have now. 

      I again point out that non-accredited for-profit schools have entrance requirements…and have graduation rates in the 90% range, providing money-back guarantees on tuition. Meanwhile, our open admission schools can’t break 30% no matter how low the standards. And many students can’t pay off the loans for the tuition…with no chance of getting their money back no matter how fraudulent their coursework.

     The unaccredited schools can guarantee jobs to their graduates, while our accredited schools can’t seem to do much beyond guarantee a lifetime of debt.

      Right now, the Feds are thinking about clawing back money from the institutions that have been ripping off our citizens, and planning to have some graduation rate standards. These plans won’t work, and will likely do even more harm to our already deeply troubled higher education system.

     I doubt the Feds would even consider my more realistic fixes, above. If they’d at least stop the student loan scam while they try to figure out how to stop the fraud, that would stop creating millions of victims a year.

      I bet that’s not going to be considered, either.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

    

     

Community College Poo Bah Has Personal Restaurant

By Professor Doom

     I’ve certainly pointed at the excesses of a Poo Bah at a for-profit school, and I’ve mentioned that the same can be found at a non-profit school as well. So I may as well complete the trifecta by showing that excessive Poo Bah lifestyles are to be found at publicly funded schools. As always, it seems the corruption is extreme at community colleges—the foulness at these places is due to the “top down” structure which keeps plunder first and foremost among institutional goals, made all the worse because people actually think community colleges exist to help the community.

      So, today’s school is College of DuPage, a publicly funded community college, which plunders around 29,000 students a year…isn’t it amazing that “community colleges” have grown to the size of significant towns?

      The Poo Bah, and his administrative entourage, live large, eating so high on the hogs that they have to put them on stepladders to really capture the extravagance. The hogs, not the administrators, not that there’s much difference, at the risk of offending hogs.

      Don’t believe me? Consider the food bills of the Poo Bah and his gaggle of cronies:

“…College of DuPage President Robert Breuder hosted a holiday dinner for the school's board of trustees in December 2013 at the campus' high-end restaurant, Waterleaf. The tab — $2,331 — was paid by taxpayers.
The next night, Breuder threw another holiday dinner, this time for top administrators; 18 people were there. On the bill were 18 bottles of wine, with six of them listed at $114 or more. The bill to taxpayers: $3,572, or nearly $200 per person.”

“…A month later, Breuder and his administrators toasted their accomplishments at a "recognition" event over $60 bottles of Champagne and $32 plates of crab tartlet. The check totaled $1,574, again paid by taxpayers…”


     Please note, the first two parties were on consecutive nights. Ok, these are holiday dinners, it was apparently Christmas season, and so time to party down, especially with someone else paying the bill…but there really is excess here.

      The Poo Bah and his cronies don’t eat like this all the time, right? Actually, they do:

“Indeed, hundreds of receipts from the restaurant show that, since it opened in October 2011, Breuder and senior managers at the community college have used it as their executive dining room. Records obtained by the Chicago Tribune show they have spent nearly $190,000 on close to 500 occasions…”


     As a faculty member, it’s amazing how every semester I get a threatening letter about how I must minimize travel expenses (assuming I’m granted any at all), how even a cup of coffee might be disallowed. Many community college faculty have to go to food banks to get food, while this community college Poo Bah gets his meals paid for…extremely fancy meals, at that.

     The restaurant that these plunderers enjoy is beautiful and lavishly stocked:

Waterleaf features a mahogany-accented bar area with a fireplace and a dozen lithographs by artist Richard Serra that cost $60,000. It has spent more than $250,000 to stock its wine cellar, which has won Wine Spectator's Award of Excellence. Breuder himself has been featured in the magazine.


      Hey, did the gentle reader catch the part about this being “the” campus’ high end restaurant? That’s right, this campus has its own high end restaurant. Why would a community college have a high end restaurant? Students are going to community college to save money; unlike the Poo Bah, they can’t blow $200 on a meal, much less do so a few times a week. How is this restaurant staying open on a campus that serves the poor (or at least, non-fabulously wealthy)?

“…Even though state law says that the restaurant should be self-sustaining, it has lost nearly $2 million since it opened, and is budgeted to lose more than $500,000 this fiscal year,…”


     For a student at this school, it must be wonderful to watch the tuition rise, knowing that his education money is going to support a high end restaurant that he’ll never be able to afford to eat in, that, in fact, about the only people who can eat there are those who are getting his tuition money…and I’m not talking about the faculty.

      The gentle reader needs to understand: I’m not picking on this school, any more than I’m picking on any of the other schools I highlight in this blog. These schools are typical in how they are run, the only thing that makes these schools special is the information is very public…but most every school is run like this: an untouchable administrative caste plunders, plunders, plunders its way through the student loan money.

      Bottom line, the student loan money really is going to buy car collections, mansions, jet planes, and ridiculously expensive meals for the Poo Bahs, along with huge salaries and awesome golden parachutes. It’s not going to education.

      This high end restaurant is pretty much the personal playground of the Poo Bah and his crew. How did this ridiculous boondoggle get built?

The 130-seat restaurant was Breuder's brainchild, and he has defended it as a marketing tool that brings community members to campus and wows them with a first-rate dining experience.


     That’s right: the Poo Bah said “Let there be a high end restaurant,” and so it was, never mind that it loses half a million bucks a year. That kind of money is basically a full scholarship for hundreds of community college students, every  year…but that’s thinking like an educator, and not an administrator in higher education. The whole restaurant is the Poo Bah’s personal vanity project.

     The godlike power of our Poo Bahs really is remarkable. Faculty protested this mess, of course, even gave a “no confidence” vote (which used to be a problem for administrators back when faculty had a little power in higher education)…but these guys are untouchable in their plundering.

     Hysterically, the Poo Bah says the restaurant is really a learning tool, that students (in their job training programs) can go there and learn how to run a restaurant. As is always the case when a Poo Bah speaks, he lies:

The college offers two classes — one on Mondays, one Tuesdays — teaching students to run an upscale restaurant. In all, they get 52 days during the year to cook at and manage the restaurant, said Waterleaf's general manager, Jean-Pierre Leroux.
Ted Nagengast, a student in the culinary program, took both classes. He said the experience was valuable, but he lamented the limited access for students. Only a few dozen customers go to Waterleaf on Mondays and Tuesdays, he said.

--the restaurant’s manager, by the way, is paid about 6 times as much as a typical faculty.


      Hey, I agree having students run a restaurant is an excellent idea, but this restaurant only operates for students on average one day a week over a year. I have to emphasize that, because this isn’t how it works anywhere else. Teaching hospitals and dental schools have their students working there practically nonstop. Oh wait, those are places that actually care about teaching and having successful students, whereas this community college is more about supporting the administrative caste.

     It really is stunning how this whole restaurant is just for the Poo Bah:

In all, Breuder charged more than $100,000 to his house account between October 2011 and December 2014, records show. Separately, he has reimbursed the college $833 charged to the account since 2012.

Records show Breuder sometimes eats at Waterleaf twice a day…He has had $19 duck foie gras and a $69 bottle of wine over a dinner meeting, and he has held many "agenda planning" meetings there with his senior staff, including one where they dined on lobster, scallops, rabbit and filet mignon. He has ordered pate and alcohol from the restaurant to the president's lounge...

--do the math here: feeding this guy at his personal restaurant is more expensive than having a faculty member, more like a dozen fairly paid faculty when you factor in how much money the restaurant loses. All those extra faculty would allow for smaller classes. Smaller classes would improve education. There I go again, thinking like an educator again, and cutting into this guy’s foie gras allowance, which we all know is so much more important than education at the school. It’s probably in the mission statement…

     Often, you can find news reports of insane Poo Bah pay, but I really want to point out such reports leave out the ridiculous perks, such as, in this case, a personal restaurant and an endless expense account. In addition to this perk, this Poo Bah gets paid $484,812 a year for his “service” to the school. Yes, they really do call it a service, and by “it” I mean “rapacious plundering.” I’m really just highlighting the outrages here, the article has quite a bit more.

      Luckily, the school soon won’t have this particular Poo Bah. He’s retiring in 2016, with a sweet $763,000 retirement package awarded to him by the trustees, again for his service to the community college. Incidentally, that retirement package is for 7 years of service. Does anyone honestly think creating a boondoggle losing $500,000 a year really deserves such an award? He’ll also get a building named after him. Untouchable, I say.

     Incidentally, my own retirement package, after close to 30 years of actual teaching, helping people achieve legitimate goals, will be zero. A week after I’m gone, there’ll be no sign on any campus that I was ever around. I’m not saying I deserve a golden parachute (I don’t) or that buildings should be named after me (they shouldn’t, but I’d appreciate if many campus buildings were torn down in my honor). I just don’t see why Poo Bahs get such considerations no matter how badly they fail.

      I really can’t emphasize strongly enough how the student loan money is not going to education…

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Higher Education and Dumbing Down

By Professor Doom

     Last time I looked at an article that bemoans the dumbing down of higher education, which is certainly true, and worthy of bemoaning. The article complains, cluelessly, that higher education is turning into job training.

      I grant that it’s a bad thing that “education” and “job training” are becoming synonymous, but I’m not clueless about why this is happening. The student loan scam is naturally drifting higher education into a massive jobs training program.

     Most students are paying for university with loan money. The only financially sound reason to take out a loan is to get something that will pay off the loan. If you can pay off the loan otherwise, you don’t need the loan, and if you can’t pay off the loan with what the loan money got you, taking out the loan means you’ll be in debt forever.

      So, yes, every student that’s taking out a loan for higher education should be focused on job training. Now, higher education can certainly be about education…but the prices for such should reflect accordingly. I just don’t see why Fundamentals of Accounting 101, filled with perfectly relevant job training, should cost the same as Women and Gender Studies 101, filled with, well, stuff. One of these courses might well lead to a job, but the other? Not so much. 

      It’s criminal that higher education takes advantage of our young people by burying them in debt for an “education” that will not allow getting out of debt.

 

      The article meanders back to the anti-intellectualism of our society:

Well-educated and intellectual students are commonly referred to in public schools and the media as "nerds," "dweebs," "dorks," and "geeks," and are relentlessly harassed and even assaulted by the more popular "jocks" for openly displaying any intellect.

      This certainly rings true: I quickly learned not to raise my hand in class to answer a question, as that would simultaneously make me a target for bullies. I know there is intense hostility towards the “bright” students in school (and even experienced it towards the “bright” faculty in community college). I quickly learned to fail the first assignment every year, and to proudly display it in my notebook for classmates to see. It kept a few of the bullies away, and it made the teachers happy that I would improve so much. I imagine quite a few other “bright” students developed similar tricks. 

     Often indeed the bullies were jocks, untouchable because nobody wanted to risk the school team’s record for the year. Sportsball is taken way too seriously in our government schools. It’s also taken way too seriously in higher education—the highest paid public employee, per state, is typically a sportsball coach, after all. Public education might not be destroying intellectualism…but public education makes it clear you risk severe punishment for being smart or knowledgeable, and can receive tremendous accolades for being athletic.

     It’s really worth noting that the rest of the world doesn’t put sports in schools. There is no demented devoted sports culture on campuses in the rest of the world. I can’t help but suspect it’s why the rest of the world generally does better in educating its children, even when spending far, far, less per child than we do. At the very least, they don’t have to pay a huge salary to a coach.

     And back to dumbing down:

A 2008 University of Texas study found that 25 percent of public school biology teachers believe that humans and dinosaurs inhabited the earth simultaneously.

      Higher education has a role in the above. You don’t need a Biology degree to teach in school, you could just as easily have an Education degree. A look at the curriculum for such degrees, even at the graduate level, will find the whole program filled with special courses, such as “Math for Education Majors,” “Art for Education Majors,” and “Biology for Education Majors.” These courses are very watered down versions of the real courses that the non-Education majors take. I’ve written of much of the fraud of Education departments on campus, particularly “Math Education,” where it’s quite possible to get a graduate degree without having taken a math course higher than 10^th grade math…and then go on to teach courses in advanced mathematics, somehow.

      So, yeah, sure, some percentage of biology teachers probably do believe humans and dinosaurs inhabited the earth simultaneously (don’t get me wrong, I’m willing to consider the Earth’s age might be younger than mainstream science currently says, but I’d need to see some cave paintings of dinosaurs or similar evidence before I’m willing to accept more than coelacanths). Higher education is creating biology teachers untrained in biology in much the same way it’s creating math teachers untrained in mathematics.

     To give some idea of just how bad it is, a kid was suspended from school because he built a clock, and brought it to school. The teachers and administrators thought it was a bomb, you see, and called in the police. Now, nothing wrong with being cautious, mind you, but I feel the need to point out: not a single teacher, not a single administrator, has enough education to be able to look at a clock’s workings and distinguish it from being a bomb.

     The police, of course, were clueless, but every single teacher/administrator in that school system has a college degree...an Education degree. That is how watered down our Education degrees are.

     A final factoid from the article that, incidentally, indicates higher education’s role in the dumbing down of America:

“According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it "not at all important" to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it "very important;"

     In ages past, our young students were told “if you want to get into college, you better start studying now.” You had to take “college prep” courses in school, and do well in them, if you were wanted to get accepted into college. This was part of the mythology of higher education I’ve discussed before…and those days are over. 

     It used to be important to learn a foreign language so you could get accepted into a college. It used to be important to be able to read and write coherently to get into college. It used to be important to be able to calculate, perform basic arithmetic, to get accepted into college. All these educational requirements have been removed, and this, too, has led to the anti-intellectualism that is part of American culture now.

     Now, anyone can get into college, most any college. Just click the box saying you’re willing to take loan money, and you’re in…and administration will hire people to help you click the box (because so many students don’t even possess that much skill). Open admissions foolishness has destroyed any respect for learning. So, it’s not important to learn a foreign language…or to learn anything else. Social promotion will advance you through the school system, and now there’s social promotion in higher education as well. You don’t even need to learn these things once you’re in college.

       And so the dumbing down of our population no longer ends in high school. For many of our youth, additional dumbing down now occurs in college. The question is whether it’s incidental to the student loan scam, or by design.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com