Jail for Grade-Fixing!

By Professor Doom

     Mainstream news sure is a funny thing; questions don’t get asked, and you’re very lucky to get even the facts. Despite being a typical mainstream news piece, the following is well worth consideration:

Guilty Plea in Grade-Fixing at Baruch

    The highlights are simple enough. A college administrator was changing the grades of students, turning F students into A- students (this goes a long way to explaining why A- is now the median grade in college), allowing them to get those all-important degrees. He would forge faculty signatures to facilitate the grade changes.

     I’ve mentioned before that going to admin is the thing to do when failing (it’s good, albeit corrupt, advice that could have come from Machiavelli himself, I admit), but this is a little over the top.

     The article makes it clear the administrator wasn’t taking bribes to make the changes (one might conjecture the salary these guys get is pretty much an “advance bribe” to make sure students do well). The article does a poor, poor job asking the question why he did it.

 

      He’d been at the institution well over a decade, so it’s a safe bet that this sort of thing had been going on for quite some time. The administrator has little to say in his own defense:

“They did not like the way I was doing my job, and we mutually agreed I should leave,”

     His job, apparently, was to make sure students got their degrees no matter what. He says there was no pressure from above, but I find that claim preposterous. I’ve worked for over 20 years in higher education, and at most institutions the pressure from above to pass students no matter what is, simply, relentless.

     Incidentally, he wasn’t fired right away; he stayed on the payroll long enough to cash in his sick and vacation days. That’s amazing; even if not convicted of job-related fraud, faculty lose that sort of stuff immediately when they’re fired, and they’re fired immediately. 

     Letting him stay employed long enough to for that shenanigans is a clear message that the administration of the school approved his actions.

     It is, of course, completely impossible for this level of fraud to only have a single person involved; I suspect the administrator’s unwillingness to implicate others or claim he was pressured into committing fraud is merely assisting the cover-up, with vacation and sick leave as a reward. His immediate supervisor also left the school:

The dean… quietly resigned to take a job as dean of the University of Connecticut’s business school, starting in August.

     In my research, it’s jaw-dropping how often an administrator involved with fraud, even if fired, has no trouble landing another plum position somewhere else. As I mentioned before, the only other fields where fraud and incompetence doesn’t disqualify you from future work in the same field are banking and politics.

     For his fraud, the administrator will get 6 months in jail, and 5 years’ probation. I figure a better than 99% chance that when he gets out, he’ll get another plum position in higher education, since nobody will ask the questions that need to be asked here.

    

Me, at graduation: “ I have no idea who that person is. Did you pass that student?”

Faculty: “Nope.”

Me: “Is there someone else besides you and me teaching the courses it says she passed, to graduate?”

Faculty: “Nope, but I know better than to ask questions.”

--I grant my memory for faces and names is far from perfect, but I really started to hate going to graduations at one school, which was just too small for so many students to have slipped through the cracks. Asking questions got me in some trouble there, I concede.

    Only 15 students were specifically mentioned in this case (I repeat, this admin was there for over a decade, so I bet there were quite a few more students involved). Despite the fraud, none of the students will lose their degree. Lucky them, though I honestly believe this sort of thing cheapens the value of the degrees the legitimate students, if any, receive.

     Let’s talk about the money involved here. The article helpfully says that the program the students were in could cost nearly $75,000 per student. Hmm. Times 15, that’s well past a million bucks. Much like in banking, just a few forged signatures are necessary to procure that kind of money.

     But no, the administrator says he wasn’t paid extra to help those (and other) students, and the article doesn’t dare suggest that there was some financial benefit to the administrator for passing those students.

     Despite the fraud, the school remains fully accredited. In fact, it will not even get a second look from accreditation. Of course. Accreditation has no means to even discover fraud like this, so can’t be expected to penalize a school engaging in such fraud. This is why, time and again, I stress that the way to at least start fixing higher education is to make accreditation something besides a fraud and a joke.

     I wish this case would set a real precedent in higher education. Churning out worthless degrees for bogus and/or non-existent coursework is actually quite common in higher education today, and the administrators involved should probably be the ones looking over their shoulder, instead of the minimally paid adjuncts who are under constant pressure to pass everyone, lest they be fired and have the grades changed by administration anyway.

     A man can dream, right?

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

My book...

Many of the essays posted here are from a book I wrote, Why Johnny Can't Read, Write, or Do 'Rithmetic Even With A College Degree. Publishers won't touch this book: the big ones just aren't in the business of revealing what's really going on in higher education. I'm no great self-promoter; the book is the result of my investigation into higher education after starting to suspect that most of what goes on is fraud.


It's not expensive, and if you find it tedious to look through my blog (which has essentially everything in the book), plunk down $8 and get it while it's still in print:


https://www.createspace.com/4597332

The Remedial Disconnect

By Professor Doom

     The people doing the actual teaching in higher education know that the biggest problem is in remediation. Simple statements of fact: more than 90% of community college work is at the high school (i.e., remedial) level or lower. More than 90% of remedial students fail to get at least a 2 year degree within 3 years. Those are only two dots, and yet administrators and educationists are simply unable to connect them. 

     A large percentage of community college students fail to perform academically, almost certainly because they’re at the school simply to get a check. Just a bit of effort to cut down on fraud would go a long way to fixing this glaring problem.

      A recent article at Insider Higher Ed just glosses over these facts, and instead suggests the way to deal with remediation is…wait for it…wait for it…to pour more money into the system. Despite being written by an educationist, the article is fairly coherent, although quite ignorant of the reality of what’s going on in higher education.

     Let’s have a bit of a dissection of what’s said:

“require that they address non-academic issues that may prevent students from succeeding,”

     This is an important problem; many of the students in my remedial classes had to deal with legal issues (often drug related, but sometimes actually criminal, like…scamming for government checks), or were pregnant, or had multiple infants to take care of. The article doesn’t offer suggestions, and I just don’t know how to address students that have to spend time in jail (or at least the courts) during the semester. I’ve always been willing to work with students that have tiny children to deal with, but ultimately, the material has been watered down to the sub-high school level, and assignments are basically non-existent. Content free, assignment free courses are the norm at many schools, and that should go a long way to facilitating success. What else is there to do?

 “improve the quality of instruction at all levels,”

Certainly this is a nice, obvious suggestion. Seriously, is anyone advocating reducing the quality of instruction? The educationist here seems to be unaware admin is very motivated to pay as little as possible (every dollar not spent on instruction is a dollar available for administrative salary, after all), and knows they can pay much less when they hire dubiously qualified instructors.

“ revise financial aid policies, “

“Revise”? Holy crap, even mainstream media acknowledges as much as 25% of student grant money is given fraudulently, and my own eyes would put it somewhat higher (but still somewhat below half). This is the only hint in the whole article that, maybe, the problem with remedial students failing is because…they’re not there to learn.

“provide better advising to students at risk,”

Again, I’m glad to see the educationist isn’t advising to provide worse advising, but I have to admit, for an educationist to even state what is obvious to normal people is pretty good. Thing is, years ago, students had to see an advisor before they could sign up for classes. Now, in many institutions, students can just take whatever, as long as the course has no pre-requisites, and most courses, especially the courses admin likes to offer, have no pre-requisites. So it’s quite common to have students with many dozens of hours of introductory courses, and with no actual skills that anyone is willing to pay for.

Administration killed the advisor system, because without advisors students could hurt themselves throwing away vast sums of loan money on pointless courses. How does the educationist not know this?

“ integrate instruction and support services,”

Again, no kidding. It’s funny, attempts to do this have been completely disastrous. How does he not know this?

“teach college success skills,"

Good advice…but if you’d just get rid of the scammers, that would do far more good than adding yet more empty credit hours in worthless “college success” courses that will be of no value when it comes time to get a job.

“invest in professional development"

Oh, please no. Year after year, I’ve been subjected to professional development by educationists and diversity specialists. It gives me great anecdotes, but I’d belong in Hell if I actually bought into that crap material.

Having actually taught remedial courses, it seems so obvious to me: just get rid of all the scammers, and you’ll see massive improvement in passing rates, and you’ll see it quickly.

Let me demonstrate. Let’s suppose we have 100 remedial students. Basically 50% pass the course, the other 50% don’t try (and are almost certainly there for the check). Let’s say 10 of these 100 students will actually get a degree within 3 years (I emphasize, this is better than what real data says what will happen). That’s a 10% graduation rate.

But get rid of the obvious scammers right away? Now you’ve got 10 of 50 students actually getting a degree. That’s a 20% graduation rate. Hey, I’ve just doubled the effectiveness of remediation, and that’s without changing a thing.

The only reason 50% pass remedial is because standards have been lowered so far that students can literally accidentally pass these courses; put real standards in and make the courses legitimate, identify the fraudsters more easily, and there will be further improvement.

But, for some reason, the article never mentions this stupid-obvious thing to try.

Instead, the article goes on in some detail about all the ways we could spend more money on an education system that is mostly bogus, on hiring more administrators to enforce more bogus standards, and on having more evaluation methods of the bogus remedial courses.

As is so often the case, what an educationist has to say is massively disconnected from the reality of what’s going on. Get rid of the fraud, and you’ll do far more for education than yet another hi-falutin’ untested theory.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

A picture sure is worth alot of words....

The above map, from here, really demonstrates how completely insane higher education has become.

That's a map of highest paid public employees, by state.

State by state, every state, the highest paid public employee is in higher education. Not the governor, not a senator, not some life-saver...but someone in higher education.

Yes, most of it is coaches, so I guess the time for me to talk about the immense fraud of college athletics draws nigh...but the fact remains, higher education is a system of plunder, devoid of integrity. All the money poured into higher education has not gone to education, or to educators.

And the picture tells the tale.

Administrative Avarice is Unlimited

By Professor Doom

In earlier articles, I addressed the Pell Grant scam, wherein administrators use very poor record-keeping to illicitly rake in loot, “growing” the institution by getting fake students to sign up for classes. Admin gets the pay boost for running a large institution, and the fake students get a check for whatever is left over from the Pell Grant from tuition.

I want to point out: the Pell Grant was supposed to be a way for anyone to go to college, with enough money to both pay tuition, and to cover some living expenses. 

Libertarian theory, for what it’s worth, says that this system of grants will only increase the costs of college, but that’s just a kooky theory, completely at odds with Keynesian/government philosophy.

Anyway, this scam has been going around for years, and it’s obvious to anyone in the industry that it’s a huge, huge scam:

As many as 25 percent of Pell recipients at community colleges fail to make “satisfactory academic progress” in a typical semester.

--25% is a very generous measure, this is the percent that, without any doubt whatsoever, are scammers. If we reduced the standard to “preponderance of the evidence,” it might be above 50%. I’ve taught many community college courses where over 30% of the students were obviously just there for the check.

Now, the above refers to community college, a place notorious for minimal difficulty, where I’ve shown before that less than 10% of the coursework is at the college level, and much of it is at the 7^th grade level or lower. A student not making progress here is either not trying, or simply not capable…either way, the path of integrity would be to simply get rid of such students.

Registrar: “Due to a glitch in the system, a number of students were accidentally registered for courses of which they were unaware. 2/3rds of them got an F, so we got a flurry of complaints to fix grades.

Me: “What did the other students in courses they didn’t know they were in get?”

Registrar: “They got A’s. They still complained, because they didn’t want to pay tuition for the course. It cut into their refund.”

--seriously, it’s not that hard to get by in community college. I bet everyone with an unexpected “F” complained, but the other way around? I suspect some students, upon getting a free A, would not complain, so 33% would be a low estimate of the proportion of community college courses that are bogus. Imagine if accreditation checked to see if courses were legitimate…

Anyone can put minimal effort into the courses of community college and succeed. Outside of mental disability, it really isn’t possible for a legitimate student to be able to not pass here.

Admin: “If this school experiences a 10% drop in enrollment, we may have to close. Make every effort to keep your students in your courses!”

--Every institution I’ve been at has said something to this effect. If “only” 25% of students are bogus, then that means that much of the higher education industry is currently running strictly via fraud.

Even more amazing, scamming students, even if found to be scamming, can “appeal” to get aid for two, even three more semesters, more if the student puts effort into it. I can’t make this stuff up. After years of this, the Federal government has decided to stop it, limiting the scam to only three semesters:

“That will change July 1, when new Education Department rules go into effect requiring colleges to cut off aid after a third semester of failure with no more appeals.”

I can’t make this stuff up. They’re finally putting it into law to stop the scam at three semesters. Writing such a law could only be justified if there were a great number of students scamming for 4, 5, or more semesters. Why do you think administrators allowed the scam to continue past 3 semesters?

Now, passing a law to put a cap on scamming after three semesters is nice, I guess, but there are ways that a system with integrity could do something about the first three semesters of scamming:

First, I’ve mentioned before that these grants should be restricted to people that actually show an interest in education. Instead of doing no-background check signups, just give scholarship grants to people that can demonstrate an interest in scholarship. Demonstrations of knowledge, of skill, or maybe even waiting until after one semester of success would be easy things to try.

Second, a system run by people with integrity would simply get rid of scammers immediately, instead of knowingly let them run the scam for semester after semester after semester, while admin takes their cut.

Finally, integrity means holding the true criminals responsible. Make the administrators responsible for the fraud actually pay back the money they’re stealing (right now, the institution has to pay back the money admin steals, a big factor in why the scam is so huge, as the thieves get the loot, while the institution gets the bill). Send admin a bill for their thieving, and see just how many semesters they’ll steal.

The above are three easy paths that institutions run with integrity could take, to fix this scam. The regular reader of my blogs knows that none of these options are on the table.

Rather than take a course of integrity, administration will simply take a bigger cut of the loot:

House Speaker Joel Robideaux has introduced a bill in the new legislative session that would allow the technical colleges to raise tuition to capture more of the Pell Grant, reducing the incentive for people to enroll for the refund.

I pause for laughter at the word “capture” being used here, openly showing how higher education has turned into a system of plunder. Would a thief willing to take $4,000 not settle for stealing capturing only $2000 instead? How about a bank, upon realizing thieves are stealing capturing customer accounts, deciding to just steal capture all the money for itself? Would that be as legitimate?

That’s the thinking here.

My guess is the student thieves will simply get a smaller cut, but now the admin thieves will get even more loot, incidentally screwing over all the legitimate students in the process—the legit students will be paying higher tuition, too, in this horribly misguided attempt to reduce the fraud. Realize that the majority of students in higher education could still be legitimate, but admin would much rather hurt legitimate students than engage in any action that would look like integrity. Would it be too much for me to say “I can’t make this stuff up” one more time?

Time and again, “expenses” is used as the reason to raise tuition. I’ve followed the money in higher education, and those expenses are primarily from a bloated and highly paid administrative caste. Alas, they’re not satisfied with creepy high pay, they want MOAR.  The next tuition raise will be justified because “we’re going to take more so that you get less.”

Could there be a larger, more glaring, sign of the lack of integrity in the system? Much like with my previous post, I ask: why would you want your children anywhere near a system run by monsters people like this?

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com