More On The Failings of Higher Education

By Professor Doom

    Of late I’ve been reading a book by an Australian academic, which details the collapse and fraud of Australia’s higher education system.

     I should point out, what he sees there and I (and many others) see here isn’t really a result of higher education, per se. It’s quite common in institutional systems for administrators and bureaucrats to take over. It happened with many US corporations (especially in the area of Detroit), where bloated middle management sank company after company.

      There are some differences, though the most important from the view of the taxpayer is that the wild inefficiencies created by too much management no longer lead to bankruptcy of a corporation. Instead, they lead to higher tuition, paid for by the taxpayer. That the underlying product, education, is very susceptible to being fraud is just icing on the crap cake that the taxpayers are now forced to buy.

      The “titans of industry” running the institutions in Australia, much like here, are degrading the system first by treating the students as customers, rewarding them not for learning, but by simply paying for tuition. The results in Australia are likewise similar to the United States:

The end result of a Student-Centred/Constructivist education is the

emergence from our institutions of poorly-educated people with

unrealistically high opinions of their abilities. This feature of modern

Australian society is something that citizens experience through

virtually daily encounters with rank incompetence at every level of the

society. …”

     The above is so familiar to me. I’m reminded of a student who said he was a “human calculator” but could not function at the 7^th grade level in math comes to mind. I’ve stopped asking for “6 ounces of provolone cheese” when I go to the deli…I get a blank look, since the scales are digital. When I instead ask for “.375 of a pound”, I still get a blank look—the counter person really doesn’t understand the decimal system much beyond “1 pound” or “half a pound”.  Rather than frustrate myself or confuse the drone behind the counter, I just buy the prepackaged cheese. I see Australia is having the same problem.

“…Without the mental resources that should be acquired as part

of a proper education, these products of Australian “Educational

ism” typically blame others for their own failures and expect everyone else

to do the hard work…

     Again, there were so many people at Occupy Wall Street, just completely clueless what had been done to them, and wanting someone else to bail them out. Indeed, much of what is said in this book is familiar.

     The similarities continue:

“…Fortunately for the hapless, Australian universities, with a keen eye on collecting fees from young Australians and foreigners alike, have responded by simplifying their courses and degree curricula so that in many cases they are teaching what previous generations learned, sometimes as far back as primary school. After all, who cares whether our graduates can do long division or write a coherent sentence?...

     While the author doesn’t delve into in how the courses got simplified (mainly through bogus Educationist degrees and firing faculty with integrity, as I’ve documented in my blog), what he’s observed in Australia is no different in here. It’s a simple matter to show that 90% of college work is at the high school or lower level, after all. Because all that matters is “butts in seats,” having any challenge or educational material in the courses would be counter-productive.

     The rampant greed I’ve shown to dominate educational institutions in the US is also pretty apparent in Australia:

“… Surely all that matters is the amount of money that can be extracted from the consumer of education product (i.e. you or your children)…”

    For the most part, the book just shreds all the inane Educationist theories that are being inflicted on Australia’s youth. The author does a fine job of this, but he does have an unfair advantage: the idiotic ideas of Educationists have already failed horribly in America, so he’s got a head start on understanding their failures in Australia.

     Most people outside the system truly don’t understand on how many levels Educationist idiocy is harming education, from primary school to higher education. Pointing out all the ways it’s bad is counter-productive. Instead, we just throw the entirety out, and use common sense to realize what should be done. The author makes it easy:

    “…If you needed to learn something conceptually challenging, what learning environment would you choose? Most people would choose to have the best physical resources at their disposal, an expert in the relevant area to teach them and a class size of one... “

     I’ve certainly pointed out that, throughout human history, humans have learned by standing near an expert. I’ve accomplished in a few months tutoring a student 1 on 1 than what the student learned in years of being in a stuffed classroom. We all know the obvious here.

     These are obvious things, and higher education did the best it could for centuries, following the obvious ways for how humans learn and become educated. Modern Educationists have studied education as a scientific endeavor, supposedly, for decades now.

     What have they done for education? Have they managed to improve upon the obvious ideas, or have they managed to turn education in the exact opposite direction?

      Are our classes well supplied, small, and led by experts? No.

Faculty: “So the dean, vice chancellor, and CFO all told me there’s just no money for glass beakers in my chemistry lab. They each make 100k or more a year. Shut down the lab, and there goes my job.  The beakers cost a few hundred bucks…guess I’ll just buy them myself, because there’s no way to teach the lab without them.”

     It really is nuts how time and again I can’t get lightbulbs or basic things for my classrooms, and my requirements are pretty minimal. There are college classes with 1,000 enrolled students in them, massive lecture halls filled with students that text or play on their computers while a very distant instructor drones away futilely. Instead of teachers with actual knowledge, time and again I’ve seen Educationists that don’t have a clue take over teaching positions, because their degrees in Education mysteriously qualify them for everything. Even though casual conversation reveals them to be incompetent, they get promoted through the system...to advance more idiotic ideas.

      Much like modern drug companies are forever trying to find drugs just as good as aspirin, and ignore aspirin, so too does it seem that Educationists seem to ignore obvious ideas for education, in exchange for bizarre ideas of their own creation. Only one question remains: do they do this out of greed, incompetence, or pure evil?

    

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Common Core Ignores Science

By Professor Doom

    Of late I’ve been reading a book by an Australian academic, detailing the decline of the higher education system in Australia. Much like in the United States, a great part of this collapse is due to the influence of the wildly incompetent Educationists (or, as they apparently are called in Australia, “Educationalists”).

     Like any real academic, the author is appalled by the devastatingly inept research ability of Educationists. I too have given eyewitness testimony of how insultingly bad it is. It would be laughable, but because administrators have no understanding of how research works, the wild and untested theories of Educationists are often used to completely change known successful programs, with disastrous results.  These disasters aren’t restricted to higher education, as anyone familiar with “Ebonics” or “New Math” or “Whole Word” learning knows.

    Australian institutions have likewise been crippled by using bizarre Educationist theory. The book on the decline of Australian universities, however, doesn’t simply denigrate Educationists for their lack of intelligence and knowledge (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but it also discusses how real neuroscience shows Educationist theories to be fundamentally wrong.

     This is rather critical, since Common Core is also using the same demonstrably wrong Educationist theory (it occurs to me that putting “demonstrably wrong” next to “Educationist theory” is redundant, and I apologize).

     One of the new goals of Common Core is to de-emphasize the learning of facts, the gaining of basic knowledge, and instead start teaching small children the theories first, with hopefully facts and actual applications to come later. I’ve discussed how disastrous this will be, but some quotes from the book will address things from a more factual point of view:

“…If Educationalists were serious about establishing a rational basis for

improving learning and teaching, they would do well to acquaint

themselves with the products of the last 100 years of research in

neuropsychology. ...”

     As I’ve mentioned many a time before, every academic knows Educationists are part of the problem in higher education, and it’s very, very, hard to write about them without disdain. I’ll highlight some of the more readable technical results from the book:

“The existence of circumscribed areas of the cortex sub serving specific functions was presaged by the meticulous and methodical microscopy of Brodmann (Korbinian Brodmann -German neurologist and neuroanatomist, 1868 -1918), who showed on the basis of cellular architecture that the cortex can be divided into 44 discrete areas. The veracity of Brodmann‟s cortical map has stood the test of the ensuing 100 years of neuroscientific research. ...”

“…Australia‟s own P.J.Snow, however, who has synthesised a coherent understanding of this mass of information and established the neural basis of thought (or cognition as psychologists commonly refer to it). In his publication Charting the Domains of Human Thought (Journal of Consciousness Studies, v10 2003, pp. 3-17), Snow presents detailed evidence establishing that the human mind is composed of four anatomically distinct but highly interconnected areas of the prefrontal cortex that elaborate four distinct domains of cognition. He has termed these areas the social mind (Brodmann Area 9), the material mind (Brodmann Area 47), the abstract mind (Brodmann Area 46) and the temporal mind (Brodmann Area 10). …”

     While scientists focus on theories that are reinforced through demonstrable physical fact over the course of a century, Educationists force higher education to use ideas that after 50 years still have no physical support. 

     While much of the book is an easy read, some of it does lapse into material more suited for academic tastes. Allow me to move on to the point here:

“…The social, practical and abstract areas of the mind develop sequentially. The social mind starts to become functional late in the first year of life and is fully functional by about agesix. The material mind becomes functional in the middle years of childhood, commencing at about age seven and becoming fully functional by about age 11. The abstract mind starts to mature by about age 11 and is fully functional in the mid to late teens….”

     Allow me translate the above, key, paragraph in case any Educationists are reading, and note the above is backed up by real physical evidence, as opposed to Educationist theory, which never has anything supporting it beyond hi-falutin’ jargon and a hefty dose of bluster.

     (Now, don’t get me wrong, science makes mistakes. That said, given the choice between evidence-backed scientific theory and bizzarro Educationist theory that has no supporting evidence, well, I lean towards science, myself, especially if I’m about to do something that can harm tens of millions of children, like Common Core.)

    So let me clarify that quoted paragraph: the conscious part of the human mind has four areas that develop over time, in a physically measurable way. Three of the areas develop in turn (one after the other) and these three areas each help the child view the world in a particular way. (The fourth area is in near constant development, addressed later in the book)

    The first area to develop involves social skills, which a child needs immediately, the better to identify parents, understand and provide body language, and associate with other human beings. The second area deals with understanding how the material world works; as a child leaves infancy, it becomes more important for him to understand objects and physical situations that he’ll encounter without immediate parental supervision.

     Anyone with a human child will have already seen that sort of development in his own child already, but consider that third area, the abstract mind. It doesn’t begin to develop until age 11. Children (outside of exceptional cases) are literally physically incapable of abstract thought until that third area of the brain develops, starting at around age 11.

     But, Common Core will have our schools teaching 8 year olds to think abstractly, three years before science says they are capable of doing so. Educationists don’t see the problem here, but real science says that this is as reasonable as teaching 8 year olds to bench press 200 pounds.

     So it isn’t just intuition and common sense that tells anyone that Common Core will be a disaster, known science also says that Common Core’s goals are hideously misguided and fundamentally doomed to failure.

     Of course they are, Common Core comes from Educationists, after all. I’ll end with one more quote from the book, which I’ll consider further next time:

“The majority of the problems faced by the young have been faced previously by countless generations who have developed a repertoire of standard solutions. There is no need to reinvent the wheel at this age. The notion that primary school students should “discover” the rules of arithmetic or the cognitive complexities of climate change is a totally misguided expectation …”

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Australian Higher Education As Corrupt As US

By Professor Doom

I’ve written much of the debasement of higher education, but I primarily focus on things I’ve seen with my own eyes, or things that confirm what I’ve seen. There’s much crud on the internet, and I do not wish to add to it.

This focus means that I’ve primarily discussed the dastardly deeds of American universities; I’m only currently gaining some experience with a foreign university, perhaps in a few more years I’ll have something relevant to say there.

I do read much, of course, and recently came upon a treatise discussing the fraud of Australian higher education in some detail. Much like me, the author is a professor in a technical field, and knows fraud as fraud, regardless of any threats about “not acting collegial” as students and taxpayers are robbed blind.

“It is the story of the transformation of our higher education system from one that delivered a rigorous education, producing highly competent graduates, many of whom distinguished themselves on the international stage, into two-dollar-shop degree factories…”

I hardly know where to begin in discussing this work; when I first started, I thought perhaps I’d encountered my Australian doppelganger, as so much of what he said mirrored my own words. A few select quotes:

Perhaps the most egregious example of this approach that has come to my attention was that of a lecturer of a third year class who gave a multiple choice examination that contained the same questions in the same order as the practice examination that the students had received a few days earlier. The lecturer then self-nominated for the university‟s teaching award and won! No doubt the SFT was excellent and the student endorsement required for the teaching award was glowing and easy to obtain!!

--the approach being referenced is the “student as customer” approach.

This quote is likewise what’s so very demented in higher education in the US as well. The weakest, easiest, least challenging teachers are the ones that get all the rewards. Teachers with integrity or standards are shown the door, sometimes violently.

I’m ashamed to admit, in order to keep admin happy, I’ve done the above. I would still do it, but I found myself so disgusted by students that, even when presented with the questions and answers in advance, still fail abysmally, that I couldn’t handle it anymore. My error, of course, is I would ask questions that required some effort to learn and understand; the key is to make the questions very, very, simple, AND tell the students in advance what the answers are. Then the teaching awards shall flow!

I’m not joking, I’ve seen many teachers of outright bogus courses like the above get promotions, praise, awards, and money for their “innovative” teaching methods.

I once received a comment that “The lecturer tried to teach us stuff we didn‟t know”

Much as I’ve commented before, there are many courses on campus that are content free, or at best contain only the most obvious of information. Teacher after teacher of their courses tell me “it’s just common sense stuff” and see nothing odd about presenting it as advanced education.  I grant that common sense is good to know, but most of the trillion dollars of student loan debt has gone to courses teaching students material about as sophisticated as “do not urinate on electric fences.” Students complain about courses that teach new information…and admin removes courses that cause complaints. It’s not complicated, but also leads to graduates that have no measurable knowledge.

…from the Dean, “These are fee paying students. Give them what they want.”

In short, the grades went up, managerial blood pressure went down and important feathers were smoothed.

    

Time and again I’ve pointed out how administration has enforced the watering down of higher education in the US. It’s clearly no different in Australia.

Despite the many similarities, there are differences between his book and my book (although we both include all the contents for free online). I’ve ranted much about the evil influence of Educationists on higher education, whereas the author instead refers to “Educationalists.” They’re the same alleged people, however, and he cites as many of the same idiocies to them as I do.

Australian universities do not have the sports program infatuation of the US. I take some comfort in this: many have claimed that sportsball has been a major factor in the grotesque corruption of higher education in the US, and even I have conceded some of it. But Australia’s higher education is a joke, and they cannot in any way blame it on their nonexistent huge athletic programs. At best, athletics is sufficient, but not necessary for the corruption of higher education.

Instead, the author instead focuses on administrative reasons for the failure of higher education. Australian universities are state funded, and paid strictly by the “butts in seats” model. They are, of course, run by administrators who care nothing for education, and only want butts in seats (for growth). Students aren’t damned with lifetimes of debt for worthless degrees in Australia, not yet, but the taxpayer is still being looted with abandon.

 

Like I said, not that much different than what’s going on in the US.

Probably the most critical data in the book is he identifies where these administrators are coming from. While I claim it’s the legion of bogus online schools churning out Administration and Education degrees, the author advances the theory that:

“…university bureaucrats are all graduates of the Seagull

School of Management. They fly in out of nowhere, start immediately to behave aggressively toward everyone around them, consume resources

at a prodigious pace, shit everywhere and then fly off at short notice, leaving others to clean up their excrement.”

With my own eyes I’ve seen many administrators come in, plunder and exploit the school’s reputation as much as possible, then leave, so I’m certainly not inclined to argue.

I’ll look more at this book next time, for there are some other insights that I’ve not addressed before.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Cut Student Debt by Firing the President

By Professor Doom

     I’ve ranted more than a few times about the wildly overpaid administration in higher education. I’ve advanced the notion that if administration weren’t paid such stupid-huge sums, we probably could afford to pay faculty a living wage, and wouldn’t need to put students in a lifetime of debt for college coursework that is, for the most part, worthless.

     But why should such a basic theory be just a rant on my part? No need, since a recent study shows that, indeed, there may be a link between administrative pay and student debt. No. Freakin’. Kidding.

     Let’s take a look at some key results of the study, which looked at the top 25 public universities with the highest executive pay:

Average executive pay at the top 25 rose to nearly $1 million by 2012 — increasing more than twice as fast as the national average at public research universities.

Hey, I’m all for capitalism, but this is “winner take all” capitalism. The guy at the top gets a fortune, and the guys that do the work get very little.

But hey, at least Bill Gates and super-capitalists like him did something amazing. The average university president just has a semi-bogus at best administrative degree, never did any research or teaching, and, from what I can tell from speaking with them and seeing their writing, doesn’t really know what’s going on.

And these guys have an average pay of a million bucks a year…at public, non-profit, universities. These guys have *nothing* to do with education, giving them a million dollars a year for their work in education is like giving the guy who shines Bill Gates’ shoes a million bucks a year for his work in computers.

Even more insulting than the winner-take-all capitalism is…there’s no capitalism here. These are public institutions, serving the public good. I’m paid very little, I’m told, because I’m performing public service. Fair enough, but why do the bosses get so much? They’re performing public service, too, right? Well, wrong, as their primary service seems to be screwing over young people as violently as possible.

There’s something very wrong here. The money being poured into higher education is just going to the guys at the top, there’s no trickle down here, if anything the money has just incited the greed of these plunderers.

Let’s look at more highlights from the study:

At state schools with the highest-paid presidents, permanent faculty declined dramatically as a percentage of all faculty. By fall 2009, part-time and contingent faculty at the top 25 outnumbered permanent faculty for the first time.

You’d think the rapidly rising tuition would be enough to pay for the administrative caste, but they’re not content with screwing over the students, they screw the faculty too. Faculty are already a minority on campus, being outnumbered by non-education workers (i.e., administrators and administrative support). Permanent faculty are now a minority in the minority, being outnumbered now by minimally paid adjunct workers making $10,000 or less a year.

All that taxpayer money pouring into education, and less goes to educators now than before the student loan scheme started, while students get saddled with massive debt for worthless degrees. Talk about unintended consequences. Education was clearly better before all this money was dumped on it to “improve education.” Most college coursework is at the high school level or lower, after all.

At state schools with the highest-paid presidents, part-time adjunct faculty increased 22 percent faster than the national average at all universities.

Read this carefully: the more you pay the Poo-Bah, the less goes to education. Get rid of the useless Poo-Bah, and there would be more money to hire educators.

The student debt crisis is worse at state schools with the highest-paid presidents. The sharpest rise in student debt at the top 25 occurred when executive compensation soared the highest.

Read this real careful: the more money that goes to the Poo-Bah, the worse off the students are. Pay the president more, means you must raise tuition more, and students get hurt more.

Get rid of the useless Poo-Bah already. I’ve been in higher education for over twenty years, and not once have I seen a Poo-Bah *do* anything that the students could remotely care about, much less do anything worth a million dollars or more a year in salary.

It’s not just salary, by the way. Poo-Bahs get ridiculous perks, like jet planes, a free house, gigantic travel budgets, and other absurd considerations.

As students went deeper in debt, administrative spending outstripped scholarship spending by more than 2 to 1 at state schools with the highest-paid presidents.

One more time: the more money that goes to the Poo-Bah, the more money that goes into administration, and the less that goes into scholarship (i.e., research). All institutions swear that their mission is to promote education and research, but it’s clear that many institutions just think their mission is to increase administrative pay as rapidly as possible.

So, in FIVE different ways, the study says that the way to help students avoid crushing student loan debt for worthless degrees is to get rid of the ridiculously overpaid Poo-Bahs.

It’s shameful that when Kim Kardashian wears a prostitute outfit while pushing her baby carriage, it’s all over the news (I’m embarrassed to include the link, but I want to emphasize I’m not joking)…while real information that could help tens of millions of young people is unlikely to make it any further than my blog.

Not that anyone in power would do anything about it anyway.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com