Tuition Free Higher Education: It’s Here

By Professor Doom

     I’m pretty sure, “once or twice”, I’ve mentioned the corruption of higher education, and how it’s completely insane to teach 6^th grade math to adults, charge a fortune for it, and call it “higher education.”

     The main reason higher education is so “successful” in the US today is the massive student loan and grant scheme, which pours outrageous sums of money on institutions to teach students, teach them anything, no matter how ridiculous, useless, or outright wrong the material may be.

     The main reason student loan debt is soaring is the same reason there was a housing bubble, or a stocks bubble before that: government money pouring into a system causes prices to rise in that system. With tuition rising, the loans rise, the tuitions rise again, the loans rise again. It’s pretty simple.

     People feel trapped into taking ever higher loans, because they feel they *must* have a degree to get a job. I have my doubts about that, because the kind of degree is pretty important (and most of the crap sold at US institutions isn’t useful for getting a job), and even jobs for the right degrees are far from a sure thing. The fact remains: people are willing to pay (or borrow) whatever it takes to get that degree, so they can get that magic rainbow job.

      Trouble is, houses and stocks are actual things, there’s a minimum, intrinsic value there. Education? Ultimately it’s just a piece of paper, which, much like US dollars, can be generated in basically infinite amounts. Only the rigged system traps students into thinking a piece of paper means anything and should cost a fortune.

     But what if some place outside the system was formed, where tuition didn’t rise, and, in fact, was very cheap? If the education was every bit as good as in the US (and that’s a low, low, bar for most institutions), what would happen to the higher education bubble?

     Can someone say “pop”?

     Well, it’s happened. I present to the gentle reader, University of the People. If you or a loved one might be going into higher education for getting a job, I strongly recommend checking out the TED talk on that link. Fair disclosure: I’ve done some work for UoPeople, though I’m no officer or administrator or anything like that. Allow me to explain the good and ill of UoPeople.

     First, price is by far the good. It’s tuition free. In case someone didn’t hear me, I repeat: TUITION FREE. One more time, because it’s just that important:

TUITION FREE!!!!!

     How exactly are traditional US institutions, with their $20,000 a year tuition, going to compete with that? I suspect laws will be passed very quickly to shut this place down, but, for now, the price is awesome. The only drawback is students must pay for tests, $100 apiece. For typical courses, that means the entire 4 year degree costs about $4,000 bucks. That’s for the entire degree, not just a year, or a semester. That’s ridiculously cheap compared to anything being offered in the US.

     Second, textbooks are free. I’ve written a little on the textbook scam, which seems to only get worse. UoPeople only uses public domain textbooks. A 4 year education at a traditional school could cost $4,000 or more just for the textbooks.

     That’s pretty much it for the good. I’m not damning with faint praise here, knocking 95% or more off the usual price of a legitimate university education is such a powerful good that there really is nothing I can say in the realm of “bad”  that will be comparatively relevant. I’ll say it all the same.

     As you might expect, UoPeople is all online. I’ve written before that online degrees are highly questionable, and are of minimal value in the marketplace. Of course, people are paying huge fortunes for online degrees now, so UoPeople’s very cheap online degree is superior in the only way that counts, once you consider its product is identical. This is “blessing with faint criticism” as far as I’m concerned.



 

     Well, not exactly identical. UoPeople is taking the high road here (that’s why I do work for them, is they have that “integrity” thing that is sorely lacking in much of the US’s higher education system). UoPeople only has 2 degree programs: business administration, and computer science. The coursework is exactly what students need for those degrees.

     These are the exact two degrees in super-high demand in the job market, and that’s what UoPeople is all about. So, no Gender Studies or Queer Musicology or other crud. UoPeople exists exactly for those people that think a college degree is necessary for a job, and it sells the best possible such degrees to those people, without crippling them with a lifetime of student loan debt. There’s no liberal arts at UoPeople. Nothing against liberal arts (and my degree is in liberal arts), but it really is long past time to stop taking advantage of people that want higher education just for a job.

      How does UoPeople pay the faculty and staff? Not much, the people aren’t in it for the money (I volunteered). Again, it’s about integrity. It simply is wrong to cripple young people with debt for a worthless education, and I’m hardly the only faculty member willing to volunteer to stop crimes being done to the young.

     Realize, online schools are very limited in interaction with an expert, and even moreso in UoPeople. Students grade each other’s work, and are, largely, responsible for their own education. Yes, they totally can cheat…but with no money involved, I’d like to think integrity is more common than in the cheating-infested for-money system everyone else uses. It can’t be less common than any other online school, after all.

      Oh, one more detail. University of the People is FULLY ACCREDITED. Yes, accreditation is a scam, and I suspect, if UoPeople starts to threaten US higher education, accreditation will capriciously be revoked. Until that happens, however, a degree from UoPeople is every bit as legitimate as University of Pheonix, or your typical bloated state university, or just about any place else. It’s also every bit as valuable in the job market...it’s just so much cheaper.

     If UoPeople can stay away from student loan scams, not be taken over by plundering integrity-destroying professional administrators, and not be cheated out of being accredited, it can single-handedly snap the neck of the incredibly corrupt higher education system in the US.

     The only question is how long it will take before people realize “hey, I can pay $4,000 or $100,000 for the exact same product” and make the obvious decision.

      Any guesses how long that will take?

    

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

 

Colleges to get ratings system, administrators squeal!

By Professor Doom

 

     Anyone in the industry knows that higher education, as it is today, isn’t working, and hasn’t worked for perhaps a decade or more. A decade is about how long the Federal government takes to realize the bleeding obvious, and so, at last, the government is thinking about maybe-sort of doing something about the disaster being inflicted upon the nation’s youth:

 

Colleges Rattled as Obama Seeks Rating System

 

          The gist of the story is that the Federal government, slowly realizing that accreditation is bogus, has decided to take matters into its own hands, in an effort to try to keep track of all that Federal loan money that’s been placed in administrators’ bank accounts given to students for their education.

     As much as I’d like to see some smackdown given to higher education, I don’t have much faith the Feds won’t muck this up. The government is wildly overconfident, and clueless about its ability to fairly rate a system that nobody in the history of humanity has done in an undisputable way, as evidenced by the bravado of one Fed bureaucrat:

“This is not so hard to get your mind around.”

     The supposed rating system will look at all the little things that bureaucrats think measure education. It’s all wrong, of course, but it’s fun listening to administrators squeal at the thought of being held accountable:

 

“Applying a sledgehammer to the whole system isn’t going to work,”

“It’s hard for me to imagine how that can work,”

“I find this initiative uncharacteristically clueless.”

“We think that entire approach is quite wrongheaded,”

---I find “uncharacteristically clueless” the best. Only an administrator thinks that—characteristically!--government has a clue about anything.

 

     It’s so funny to hear the sweet hypocritical tears of administrators. Teaching, after all, can be measured in many ways, but administrators always boil it down to one and only one thing: retention (i.e., how many students you pass). I’ve known horrible professors, that have never done a tiny bit of research, whose courses students complain about year in and year out about being a “waste of time”, that get promotion after promotion, raise after raise, because all students get A’s, even the ones that don’t even know they’re enrolled in the course. Good retention is everything.

       And now admin gets to be on the business end of being bullied around by a clueless overpowering force? I have to like it.

     Unfortunately, I know it isn’t going to work. The measurements of “success” that the Federal rating program has proposed so far are a little hit and miss. Some are hard to measure, and prone to fraud in any event. There are three things mentioned in the article:

 

“…how many of their students graduate…”

      This measure is already used on state-run campuses, today, which is why Education departments (which pass everyone and are notorious for bogus courses) are huge on campus.

     If this becomes Federally mandated, challenging degree programs (you know, the ones that actually produce graduates that are capable of holding real jobs that pay a real salary) will be shut down. Instead, degrees not just in Education, but in Ufology and Queer Musicology will proliferate, while Computer Science degrees will be shut down—the latter would cut into graduation rates, you see.

 

…how much debt their students accumulate …

 

     I can see why admin hates using this measure, since suckering students into fat loans is key to getting massive administrative salaries. I rather like this one, but I bet admin will come up with creative accounting methods to get around the debt accumulation problem. It really seems it would just be more efficient to get the government out of the student loan business…stop guaranteeing these things, and the banks will follow, making the debts a nonissue.

     So, I like this one, thus there’s no way this would actually be used.

 

…and how much money their students earn after graduating…

 

     This one is highly problematic. What about a student that transfers from one institution to another, do the institutions share credit? I suspect the income would be double counted, and Ivy League schools, with their massive political connections, will have a bit much of an advantage. I also suspect that students that can’t find jobs will fall into the “couldn’t be reached” category, and not even count.

 

Me: “This document, which calculates points for promotion, is so littered with errors that you should be embarrassed to submit it.”

Accounting professor:  “Oh, the numbers don’t matter. I just put what I want to make Admin happy.”

--nothing like having a former Arthur Anderson accountant teaching students accounting…

 

     The real problem is privacy—do you really want your income reported to institutions after you graduate, possibly for the rest of your life? Almost certainly, this would be done on some sort of anonymous basis…and the numbers reported would be a complete fraud. I’ve dealt with university personnel that totally submit bogus numbers when they can get away with it.

    So, I like the idea of tracking student debt, even though it’d be smarter for the Federal government to just stop loaning money to institutions. Still, how about a few other ideas to rate colleges:

 

1)     Floor space devoted to teaching and research

 

I’ve been at institutions where way over half the floor space is devoted to administrative offices, student recreation, sportsball, in short, stuff that has nothing to do with the education dollars being spent. Campus space should be mostly about education and research. Open land should actually count as nothing either way, or maybe as a tiny contribution to teaching and research (to cut down at least a little on the excessive building on campuses today).

 

2)     Proportion of employees that are educators or researchers

 

While I probably should talk about the immense and varied fraud of academic research, the fact remains that educators are a minority of employees on campus today. Instead, most employees are administrators, and administrative support. Campus workers should be mostly about education and research.

 

3)     Proportion of salary and wages going to educators and researchers

 

I’ve shown many times that ridiculous sums go to administration, while educators get very little, often so little as to qualify for welfare. Most of the money should be going to education and research.

    

     I’m unaware of any school that would get a pass (i.e., majority going to teaching and research) on any of the above ratings I just listed, and those are all very easy measurements to make (at least, easier than figuring how much student debt is “too much” or how much graduates make or assigning relative value to a graduate who transferred through 3 institutions). I trust the reader has seen a trend to my ratings, but I feel the need to highlight it in case any Feds read my blog for ideas:

     Every institution of higher education puts in its mission statement that its primary goals are education and, often, research. If you’re going to rate these schools for doing their job, rate them for doing their job. If institutions want to be institutions of “administration and constructing buildings” instead of education and research, let them do so (without Federal money)…but measure institutions of higher education based on how they devote resources to their job, which is education and research.

      I suspect, however, that all this interest in rating institutions of higher education is moot, as something’s coming that will probably devastate the entire corrupt system of higher education in the United States.

     Next time.

 

 

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

 

 

 

 

Learn English in College? Har.

By Professor Doom

     While mostly I discuss what “college mathematics” has become, that’s only because I’m very intimately familiar with mathematics at all levels. I can speak from direct experience and observation.
    
     Nevertheless, I’ve been blessed with some success as a professional writer, and even taught a college level writing course. So while not “intimately familiar”, I still have some direct observations to add when it comes to what others say regarding the fraud that is much of higher education today.

     Last time, I looked at a report that discusses community college mathematics. It also discusses English, which covers both reading and writing. Despite my own biases towards mathematics, I openly concede that reading is the most important skill to teach a human being. Writing, being able to discuss in written form what is read, is only very slightly less critical than reading. No civilization has advanced beyond the stone age level without acquiring some method of preserving and transmitting information in some written form.

     We need to be able to read, to learn what our forefathers knew. We need to be able to write, to pass down our knowledge to our children. First learn to read, then to write…doing so coherently is what we generally call “literacy.”

     The report has already shown that mathematics is a fraud and a joke at the college level. What did it find in English literacy?

“…We found that the reading and writing currently required of students in initial credit-bearing courses in community colleges is not very complex or cognitively demanding. While the information load of texts students encounter in community colleges is considerably more demanding than of those assigned in high school, students are not expected to make much use of those texts…”

     Much like with the math coursework, the study finds fraud, though it never has the guts to say so. Again, the texts are college level texts, but what actually goes on in the courses? Not even close, and the study looked at many public college campuses, it wasn’t just an isolated incident just at one for-profit school known to be bogus.
    
     The study never asks the obvious question of “why is this the case?” but I’ll happily do so, and answer as well. Colleges are run by clueless, uneducated administrators that don’t care at all about education, all they care about is growth. These clueless administrators need to submit textbooks and syllabi for the courses on campus to accreditation…so the textbooks and syllabi look like college courses. Accreditation never actually goes into the classroom in a legitimate (i.e., secret) way and verifies that the school is legitimate.

      Administration then goes to the instructors of these courses and says “pass students, or we fire you.” Administration never looks at what goes in the classroom, or even cares—I could literally serve coffee and doughnuts in class every day and administration would neither know nor care. I’ve seen classes that met less than half the time the catalogue says they were to meet, with no assignments despite what the syllabus says…as long as the students all get A’s, administration is happy and the professor gets promoted.

     All administration cares about is passing rate: growth and retention. Instructors that offer legitimate courses that ask students to do anything are fired. Instructors that offer “not very complex or cognitively demanding” courses are promoted. I’ve seen this with my own eyes, many times, and study after study shows my eyes do not lie.

     So the report finds widespread fraud, courses that superficially look like college courses, but in fact are very simple and require no thought. No kidding: that’s the only coursework administration, especially at community colleges, allows.

     The report continues:

“…community college instructors typically make limited use of the texts they assign and use many aids (e.g., PowerPoint presentations, …”

     Ah, the PowerPoint presentation. A legitimate accreditation procedure would simply revoke the degrees of instructors that rely on PowerPoint presentations.   

     Don’t me wrong, for superficial, limited, discussion of a topic presentable to a wide audience, PowerPoint is pretty good. Unfortunately, a great many classes on campuses are exclusively PowerPoint, and the tests are completely based on the PowerPoint, which is provided to the student in a file (so he need not come to class).

      Let’s do the math on this. It takes an hour, tops, for a diligent student to master all the material present in Powerpoint presentations over the course of a month, and most classes give 3 tests. A student really only needs 3 hours of study to pass a PowerPoint based course, assuming he wants an A. He takes 5 such courses a semester, every semester (and that’s more than the 12 hour minimum to be “full time”), and he’ll graduate in 4 years, no problem.
  
     That’s what a college degree means for most students: 120 hours of actual work, spread out over the course of 4 years. That means a college degree needs about 5 minutes of work a day, over the course of 4 years. And yet people wonder why their college degrees don’t really mean anything…

     The report has more to say:

“…most assessments in community colleges come in the form of multiple-
choice questions that demand very little in the way of complex reading skills and no writing…”

     Again, the report doesn’t connect the dots…PowerPoint tests (i.e., tests in courses that delivered all through PowerPoint) are multiple choice, which is why studying for them requires so little.


     “…so little writing of any kind is assigned…”

     The report says this, but doesn’t ask the obvious question. Why didn’t the report ask the obvious question of why the writing courses don’t require writing? Hmm. The writing course I taught, incidentally, had students submit a writing assignment every week.


      “…We have noted that community college instructors do not expect their students to be able to read at the level of their texts or to write very much at all, …”

        Repeatedly, the study just assumes these colleges are legitimate, and this false assumption repeatedly leads the researchers to make wrong conclusions. For example, the above statement suggests to the researchers:

“…that those instructors have very low expectations for their students,…”

   The suggestion is not only mostly wrong, but to the small extent that it’s true, the false assumption of legitimacy prevents the researchers from asking the right questions.

     I’ll already addressed why this conclusion is wrong, but I don’t mind repeating myself. An instructor that expects his students to read and write “much at all” will be FIRED. Expecting this of students is self-destructive, the system is run by people that do not want this. Thus, very few, if any, instructors can afford to expect much of their students.

      Even in the case where the conclusion is true, the report heads in the wrong direction. The report blames the high schools for graduating poor students…but poor students have been coming out of high schools for a solid century now, so the researchers really should have thought some more about this conclusion. Poor students have been coming out of schools for a century, so why are they in college now? An obvious question the report writers didn’t think to ask.

      Had they done so, they would have learned that at least 25% of students are in community college for fraudulent reasons. Then the researchers would have asked why such scamming students are allowed to remain on campus. Then the researchers would have learned administrators fetishize growth over all else, and have long since sacrificed educational integrity in exchange for higher growth.

      But, at least the researchers agree with what I’ve said: what’s going on in community colleges is a fraud.




www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

 

Study Finds Community College “Unhinged”

By Professor Doom

     Time and again I’ve pointed out that much of college is a joke, with students taking loads of coursework of little relevance or usefulness, either to education or to actually getting a job.

     While I’ve done what I could to set things up so that any who doubt me can see with their own eyes, I’m hardly the only, or even the first, to point out that which should be obvious to any legitimate regulator.

     Throughout the country, community colleges are steadily growing like weeds. These colleges promise “higher education” and “job skills” and “cheaper than university”, but I’ve already shown these to all be lies, many times.

     There’s no higher education, as most of the courses, 90%, is at the high school level or lower, often much lower…and anyone who looks can see that.

     Job skills can happen, but usually it’s minimal; most courses are taught by minimally paid adjuncts that can’t get jobs in the workforce—how can people without job skills teach job skills? Community colleges simply don’t pay enough to hire people with job skills, and are content to provide the cheapest instructing they can, on useless topics.

    Cheaper than university? Unfortunately, no, not for the taxpayer. Community colleges don’t add to the real “student base” of a town, instead taking students and faculty away from universities…while adding a legion of ridiculously highly paid administrators.

     Community colleges are simply a scam to grab student grant and loan money from suckers. Every study says as much:

As the facts presented in these reports came to light in the course of our research, I shared them with people very close to the institutions we were researching. Few of them were surprised. Most told me that the emerging picture corresponded closely to what they saw every day in the field. They had long ago concluded that the debate about standards was unhinged from the realities in our community colleges…

---Emphasis added. Everyone in the industry knows what’s going on. “Unhinged” really is the word for offering ever more ridiculous coursework, charging a bundle for it, and calling it “higher education.”

     A report from 2013 confirms what I’ve been saying about the math in community college. The report addresses what’s really going on in these allegedly “convenient and cheap” avenues of higher education.

“…Many community college career programs demand little or no use of mathematics. To the extent that they do use mathematics, the mathematics needed by first year students in these courses is almost exclusively middle school mathematics…”

--do note: “almost exclusively”.

   Middle school is 6^th to 8^th grade, and much like I’ve shown, much of community college’s “higher education” is this stuff. Except, of course that it’s generally taught by unqualified Educationist teachers who can’t pass the tests to become teachers in the public school system. 

     Now, don’t get me wrong, I honestly believe that not everyone needs to know calculus or whatever to function in the vast majority of jobs, but when community college students “almost exclusively” are learning up to 8^th grade math, should this really be called “college”? Somehow I suspect communities like the sound of “Community College” better than “Place Where You Get Another Chance To Be In The 8^th Grade, Except You Pay For It Forever” better.

     Naturally, the question arises: why are we teaching 8^th grade (at very best) math almost exclusively in our community colleges?

“Whatever students did to pass mathematics courses in middle school, it does not appear to require learning the concepts in any durable way…”

     The above is representative of the main difference between my blog and the report: the report acts as though what’s going on was legitimate, instead of just plain calling a spade a spade.

      “Learning the concepts…” is a false premise here. I’ve had many students sit in the back of remedial math, and read romance novels to get their easy A. I’ve had many classes where 20% of the names on the roster never show up at all. I’ve had many classes where another 30% of the students vanish a few weeks into the semester—they vanish at the same time they get their student loan money checks.

       I dispute the assumption of legitimacy here. What’s really happened is that administration, with “growth uber alles” as their motto, has simply eliminated coursework down to a level that, safely, anyone can do if pressed, and that even people that don’t care a bit about education can still “look good” in the bogus college courses that bloat campuses today. Since growth is all that matters, administration doesn’t care about scamming students—it’s still growth. The fact that calling a scammer a “student” is about as reasonable as calling a shoplifter a “customer” just doesn’t come to an administrative mind.

     Yes, there are students that graduated high school without the ability to function at the 8^th grade level. Yes, some of these students really want another chance to get that education that they missed out on the first time around. Yes, I believe they should have that chance. Too bad they won’t get it at community college, since these types of math courses generally have large enrollments, are taught by dubious teachers, and these teachers have no job security, so have only minimal learning requirements (since the teachers know if they ask anything of the students, they’ll be fired).

     If communities really wanted to help these people, they’d be far better served having an “extra GED” night class system, taught by high school teachers.

“…The research showing that many students who fail their placement tests

in mathematics but then go on to be successful in community college,…”

 --again, the false assumption of legitimacy shows up in the report. Being successful in community college requires little more than the ability to “not shave” after all. The report never questions the assumption of whether the community college is actually of any benefit to a community, instead of simply a massive suck of taxpayer dollars and means to exploit the young into endless loan debt.

         While the report does have much to say, the false assumption of legitimacy really leads to bad conclusions. Just one more such quote:

“…While the textbooks in the introductory program courses were often impressive in their demand for mathematical thinking, the tests were a different story. Judging by the tests community college teachers administer to their students in the introductory program courses in their career majors, their courses are typically pitched to the lower set of expectations …”

     In so many words, what the above quote is saying is that yes, the college course texts are legitimate textbooks. Unfortunately, what’s actually going on in the courses is way below the textbooks. Again, this is because there is no legitimacy here.

     

     Accreditation never looks at what goes on in the classroom, instead it only looks at the textbook and, maybe, the syllabus.

     Anyone looking at the course syllabus and book will think “hey, this is a college course.” Anyone actually sitting in the courses will realize that in many cases, the course doesn’t follow the syllabus. The syllabus might say the course is covering six chapters, but the reality? Two chapters, tops, and just the easiest material. The reason, again, is the teachers of these courses are motivated not to teach, but to get as few student complaints as possible…this is best achieved by doing very little in classes.

  

     Still, they have to turn in a syllabus and textbook to admin…

      There are certainly legitimate community college courses, but for the vast majority of students, it’s just a big trap. The report also examines what’s going on in the writing/English classes.

     Next time.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com