College Enrollment Drops…CNN Clueless

By Professor Doom

     Good ol’ CNN, the major news organization that’s been dying on the vine for years…am I the only one that wonders how these guys make any money? It’s almost like they have a benefactor with very deep pockets that doesn’t care about CNN profits as long as CNN continues to spout the party line, but I digress.

      It’s a guilty pleasure, but I go to cnn.com from time to time. In between the endless “Trump sucks” articles, pointless tease headlines, and puff pieces there are some nice train wrecks. Let’s consider this one:

College enrollment is dropping. Bad sign?

     Seriously, enrollment dropping is a bad sign? Uh, no. After years of wild fiscal mismanagement, irresponsible enlargement of useless degree programs, and incredibly predatory behavior (to list a mere few issues), institutions of higher education are finally destroying the good will they built up over centuries of honorable work.

     Why are people turning away from college? I reckon it's the same reason rats avoid a trap with a dead rat by it.

     It’s one thing when you see an older sibling getting a degree and then moving into the basement, to serve coffee for a few hours a week. A prospective college student can see that and simply say “my big bro/sis was always a screw up, it won’t happen to me,” but when your parents can’t help you pay tuition because they’re still paying their own student loans, and your grandparents can’t help either because they’re losing their social security checks to their student loans, the thought that maybe college isn’t a sure path to riches has to come to mind. 

     Bottom line, there are way too many victims of higher education in plain sight today to blindly trust an administrator when he asks you to check a box for a guaranteed student loan.

     Regrettably, the drop in enrollment worthy of a CNN news piece isn’t enough to make a dent in the number of future victims:

For years, America's college campuses swelled with more and more students. But enrollment peaked in 2010 at just over 21 million students. Attendance has dropped every year since. 

By the fall of 2014 -- the most recent year government data is available -- there were 812,069 fewer students walking around college campuses. 

      We’re talking not even a 5% drop over the course of years. This is not exactly ruinous, not with all the wealth pouring onto campus from the higher tuition. Still, a reasonable person might wonder at the drop. CNN suggests an answer, and of course screws it up:

Some say not to worry, the drop is happening because the economy is improving. More people are going back to work instead of signing up for additional degrees.

      Heheheh…no. An honest look at real things tells us the economy isn’t improving, and to even say it’s going nowhere is moronically optimistic. There are hundreds of locomotives sitting idle; the government can fiddle with the numbers all it wants, but the locomotives aren’t moving because there’s nothing to move.  If goods aren’t moving, they aren’t selling because nobody is buying them, and the goods aren’t stacking up because nobody’s making them. How healthy can an economy be if nobody is producing, buying, or selling?

     A record number of people were on food stamps in 2013, and the numbers haven’t changed much since then. How good can an economy be if the people can’t even feed themselves?

     The word “unemployment” doesn’t mean the same thing “unemployment” did a decade ago. We have more people in the country today, less of them working, the smallest labor participation rate in more than a generation. And yet we’re supposed to believe unemployment is low? If it were measured the way it was at the turn of the millennium, it’d be more than double what our government says it is today.

     How does CNN not know these things? Well, seeing as I couldn’t link to CNN news articles for the above simple facts, I guess we know the answer there…but still, to suggest the “improving” economy as the reason less people are getting suckered into college nowadays is willful ignorance.

     Instead of considering recent news, CNN focuses on long debunked “facts”:

College graduates make almost double the salary of workers with only a high school diploma. If you care about the rise in inequality in America, declining college enrollment should alarm you. 

"A college degree is the surest ticket to the middle class," President Obama said last year. Now there are 800,000 fewer Americans on that college path to the middle class. 


     Wait, what? We’ve had record numbers of people going to college for years now, enrollments today are still millions more than they were in the 70s.

     If we honestly believed college led to the middle class, then the middle class should be growing due to decades of increased enrollments. But the middle class is shrinking, and the consensus regarding the shrinking middle class is far greater than you can find regarding global warming.

     How can you suggest college is the path to the middle class today, when middle class shrank in the face of steeply rising enrollments? How does CNN not see the flaws in their thinking here?

      I maintain the reason for declining enrollment is people are figuring out that there are lots of scam schools out there, and are staying away, rather than being taken advantage of by our predatory higher education administrators.

     Followers of my blog know that the primary type of scam schools are accredited for-profit, and accredited community colleges. So, using my logical thinking, one would expect the drop in the student base would focus on these two types of institutions.  So where is the drop occurring?

The two types of colleges with the biggest declines in enrollment are: community colleges and for-profit universities. Those schools draw heavily from low-income and minority households.


     Gee, the schools that target the most vulnerable are running low on victims. How come CNN couldn’t connect the dots here? CNN fumbles at the reasons for why these types of schools are losing students, although they get something right:

Some for-profit schools have been criticized heavily for offering "worthless degrees" and leaving students with big debt.


     Good job, CNN! At least CNN tells the obvious truths, sometimes. Now, about those community colleges:

President Obama proposed making community colleges free for two years because they are the gateway to higher education -- and better jobs -- for so many Americans.


     Ah, Obama’s stupid community college plan. Community colleges certainly can be a gateway to a better life, but all too often these places are traps, nothing more. For every student that manages to get something positive, hundreds, possibly thousands, of students are cheated.

      Honest, community colleges and the for-profits are losing students for the same reason: people are catching on to the fact these places are rip-offs.

      Again, CNN doesn’t seem to understand logic, and tries to blame finances for why enrollment is dropping at community colleges:

Finances are the top challenge…

     But…community colleges are the cheapest institutions we have. How can you suggest finances as the reason people are running away from the cheapest schools, while still going to the more expensive schools? Look, maybe CNN is simply a propaganda site nowadays, but if that were the case their lies would be more plausible, instead of this endless stupidity. Articles like this lend credence to the theory that CNN is just stupid, nothing more.

      Even if people weren’t still going to more expensive non-profit and state universities, finances can’t explain why students are avoiding the common scams at the community college level, because the Pell Grant scam will pay full tuition for anyone who wants to go, and provide extra money on top of the tuition. This is quite the train wreck, even for CNN.

      Regardless of CNN’s ineptitude, we can at least take comfort that fewer people are being victimized in today’s higher education scheme.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

University Buries Google News

By Professor Doom

    Hey, remember when universities were only about education and research? If you do, you must have grey hair, because it’s surely been a while.

     Hey, remember when news came out, there was bad publicity for awhile, and that was it? Grey hair is no longer so necessary to remember that, because that’s how things were before the internet changed news, some 20ish years ago. Back then, if you wanted to read old bad news, you had to go to a major library, and search the newspaper stacks. Now, any black mark on an institution or person is truly permanent, just a mouse click or two away, even if the incident was years ago.

     Well, this is the case for the little guy, but if you have a few hundred thousand bucks to spend, you can hire firms to bury news articles, making them difficult to find via common search engines.

      A university really should be led by leaders with spines. If something bad happens there, a university should just own up to it, and then go back to the university business of education and research. The last thing our “leaders” in higher education should be doing is spending many thousands of dollars burying old bad publicity…I mean, these guys are constantly telling us they need to raise tuition because there’s just no money left for education, so surely there’s no money available for burying old news.

     Enough generalities. Way back in 2011, a campus cop pepper sprayed a bunch of clearly non-threatening students. It being the 21^st century, it was filmed and photographed, and became a meme for police behavior in the 21^st century (truth be told, I suspect this kind of behavior was quite common in prior centuries, which merely lacked widespread handheld video technology).

      This happened at UC Davis, a premier university led by the very best (and very highly paid) leaders in higher education. Wasting time and money burying this kind of story is beneath them, right?

     Har.

UC Davis spent $175K to hide pepper spray cop on Google, says report

     I’m so embarrassed for UC Davis. There are so many horrible, horrible scandals in higher education today, and this merits their notice? I mean, if the cop was following orders from the Poo Bah, I could see it, but this was just a cop being a jerk cop jerk. UC Davis was just as much a bystander as the students, there’s no reason to cover anything up here.

      Well, unless you have a massive ego:

University documents show that the school paid public relations firms at least $175,000 to hide bad publicity on Google when people searched on the university name and the name of its chancellor, Linda Katehi, according to The Sacramento Bee, which obtained the papers.

     Isn’t it nuts the kind of power our leaders in higher education wield? Adjuncts are paid starvation wages to run courses bringing in huge amounts of money; our leaders tell us it has to be that way, because there’s no money in education to pay the adjuncts a living wage.

     But when it comes to ego, suddenly money is easily found, easily spent.

      University PR people (also paid way more than educators, for the same reasons) were quick to spin this ridiculous behavior:

"Increased investment in social media and communications strategy has heightened the profile of the university to good effect," Topousis said. She added that it's important that good news from the school "is not lost during a campus crisis, including the crisis that ensued following the extremely regrettable incident when police pepper-sprayed student protesters in 2011."

     If this were the truth, then why hire an outside PR firm? Surely over the course of years, all the good things UC Davis does should overcome this unfortunate and not particularly university-related incident? 

      That’s the thing about these lies…they destroy the good faith respect I was willing to give UC Davis earlier. How do these firms destroy news, anyway?

Such PR services, often called reputation management, generally work by flooding the Internet with positive or unrelated blog posts and other Web pages. As a result, the controversial or negative stories get pushed down to the second or third page of Google results.

     So, these guys spam the net with multiple stories, troll sites, bogus blog posts, and the like, to make it difficult for the story of the police pepper spraying students to be seen. I’ve seen similar before, but I’m still fascinated they needed to hire an outside firm to help with this.

      Oh wait. Not just one firm, but two:

But spending money on the service with two different companies led to a new headache for the school. UC Davis is a public university, and that means it's subject to California's Public Records Act transparency laws.

    It must be nice to have money for such frivolous things, I might well have to follow up on this because some of my blog posts are getting buried…I’ll come back to this later.

     Back to the point, it sure looked like the chancellor wanted this story buried…but why? I mean, it’s insulting that tax dollars were being used (in a vain attempt) to erase history. The event itself isn’t nearly so interesting as the attempt at a cover-up here.

     $175,000 could have been spent on scholarships, “full ride” scholarships for at least 10 students (about 90% of education costs are sucked up by admin, with the remainder being spent on education), probably more like fifteen. This is, of course, just thinking like an educator, who focuses on using education's money for education. Instead, it was spent by admin on a pointless attempt to cover up history.

      Why bother with all this? The article makes no effort to answer that question, but a helpful commenter makes a credible suggestion:

“…She betrayed the public trust and abdicated her role in protecting the students under her care, allowing them (and let's face it, she gave the order to the police, I don't care what lame excuse comes from her mouth )  to be molested by the officers, fully armored, sworn to "serve and protect" them and hosed down in pepper spray while they were helpless. This was all so representatives from US bank and her little friends from Monsanto would not be bothered by the sight of Occupy protesters at their publicly-funded research facility. Any reasonable person would step down after what she has done, but she annoyingly clings to her post like a nepotistic security blanket…”

     I have to admit, this goes a long way to explain the bizarre behavior. And if she hadn’t tried to bury the story, this explanation would have never come up.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Revisiting The Remediation Scam

By Professor Doom

     I’ve written before on the remediation scam. The vast majority of classes on campus, at least community college campuses, are remedial, pre-high school coursework (with the high school coursework most of my readers would be familiar with being now regarded as college coursework).

     I’ve shown many times that 90% of the academic coursework on community college campuses is pre-college, with much of it 6^th grade level or lower. It’s well known and quite documented that 90% of remedial students fail to get even a 2 year degree in 3 years. Despite what admin says, you can’t make up six to nine years of public school in two semesters.

    Advocates for a Better College (ABC) is a Facebook page, with posts mostly in protest of the frauds at Reedley College, but it also focuses other horrors of higher education. Naturally, there is no particular name associated with page: we all know that if you’re going to point out the frauds of higher education today, you need to do so anonymously.

     ABC posted the stats for remediation in California. I’ve done much research on remediation, and California is representative of much of the United States in this regard (there are a couple of northern states in the central US where the remedial students would be considered college students anywhere else, but these states have such small populations that they are just special cases).

      Like any honest educator, ABC looks are remediation, realizes something is wrong, and knows the obvious way to fix it:

The issue of remedial education ties into the census day and financial aid scam. Essentially, remedial students are recruited to fill seats, often with huge grants, yet the failure rate of remedial students is staggering.
Federal and state grants should not be given to individuals who are not academically prepared for a college level education, nor should class registration favor remedial students, regardless of whether they are returning for another semester/year.

     Administration is paid based on the size of the campus, not on the caliber or success of the students. Even schools with legitimate coursework still have vast halls and endless sections of remedial coursework. This coursework is in violation of Federal law, but the money, the huge sums of money, administrators get for selling these courses make such considerations irrelevant. The coursework is paid for by student loans and the Pell Grant scam…and these students wander from campus to campus, getting this money, giving most of it to the colleges, and taking the scraps home. It’s an open, everyday fraud on most every campus in this country.

     But let’s pretend it’s not a fraud. How much good is remediation doing, under the assumption this is a good faith effort to help people? Let’s look at the stats:

In Math, at 1 level below, 57.4% do not complete a degree/certificate, or become transfer prepared, at 2 levels below, 57.4% do not complete a degree/certificate, or become transfer prepared, 3 levels below, 68.6% do not complete a degree/certificate, or become transfer prepared, at 4 levels below, 74.6% do not complete a degree/certificate, or become transfer prepared.*

     Allow me to explain the above. “College Algebra” is the math that was (and is at many schools) offered to 10^th grade students in much of the country, or at least by the 11^th grade. I tutor high school students as well as teach at a university; I’ve seen with my own eyes that “College Algebra” is the same course as the early high school algebra.

      Then we have the “below” courses, and at many schools, these courses are broken down in many ways. Each “below” is roughly two grade levels (this may seem odd, but the gentle reader should understand that the public schools do an abhorrent job of covering material, and so, indeed, what even a fake college does in 4 months is comparable to two public school years).

      Thus the “4 levels below” course referenced above is roughly 2^nd grade or 3^rd grade level work. Again, I’ve taught such courses at the community college, where I try to get the ideas across of how to add and subtract whole numbers, for example. I do the best I can, but attendance is poor; for some reason, almost nobody shows up once the checks are distributed. Admin is happy to tell me, repeatedly, the reason is because I’m a terrible teacher…but I notice attendance is better during semesters where there’s a delay in handing the checks to the students. Until the delayed check day arrives, of course, as then classes empty out, not to fill again until next semester.

      Administration has enforced these courses, because they can grow the school this way, but the success rates, as given above, are awful. Everyone who walks onto campus gets tossed into a course somewhere, even people who have no interest in education (and I’m making no judgement there). Administration helps them with the forms, and takes a huge cut of the loan/grant money. 

      Let’s see the odds of a student enrolling in a “4 levels below” course, actually making it through College Algebra:

     As above, this student has only a 25.6% change of making it through that first course. After doing so, he’ll have a 31.6% chance of making it past the “3 levels below” course. 

      Just two more courses to go before finally getting to an actual college course!

      Each of these two more courses pass 42.6% of their students. Assuming good faith that this really is how it works, then, we have the following chance that, after 2 years of “college,” the student will be able to legitimately begin his 2 year degree program:

0.256 * 0.316 * 0.426 * 0.426 = 0.015.

      So we can reasonably guess around 1.5% of these lowest level remedial students (and keep in mind, this level, the lowest common denominator, has a large market share, to put things in terms an administrator can understand).

      That’s just the chance of making it to College Algebra! Realize on many campuses, this course is the “impediment to graduation” (as a deanling put it), the hardest course on a community college campus. Perhaps 50% of students pass College Algebra, and then breeze through the other courses. Hmm, now we’re at 0.7% success rate. Gosh, that’s the kind of rate we see on successful community college campuses. I’ve assumed (falsely) that there’s actual independence in the chance of making through each course, but bear with me; no matter how you make this calculation the end result is always that the chances of a student successfully getting through all this are slim.

     ABC posts the success rates for other remedial courses in English, but…yeah, they’re a disaster as well.

For every seat occupied by a failing remedial student, the taxpayer pays the freight not only for the attendance number on Census Day, but also in financial aid grants in the Tens of Thousands of dollars per semester. The college(s) should not have any remedial courses. They should be institutions for higher education, not basic education.

      And so, I revisit the horrible disaster of remedial “education” and see nothing has changed.  Every educator involved with remedial education recommends that we stop wasting immense resources in this way. But the failure just continues to get bigger and bigger.

      This is no surprise, as the people that run higher education are paid very, very, well to see that this level of failure continues to grow.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com