Criminal Community Colleges, Pt 3

By Professor Doom

    

     I’m finishing up a quick look at a book, Community Colleges and the Access Affect, which details how most all community colleges operate in open violation of Federal law, since they sell coursework below the 9^th grade level. 

     The book tries really, really, hard not to pin the blame on the lawlessness and corruption of higher education on administration—no wonder, since the authors use their real names, and are not administrators. They’d be fired in short order, and be unemployable in higher education if they dared to do such a thing.

     Despite their quite understandable interest in covering their own butts, the book is a trove of information on what’s going on in higher education today. Allow me to present some select quotes:

“…twenty-seven of her first credit hours at the college will not count toward a degree…” (p1)

     As I’ve written many times before, most of community college work isn’t college, and it’s quite common for students to literally take a year or more of material (students can easily take 24 credit hours in a year of college) before they can even think about taking college courses. The student discussed here wants to teach small children and is majoring in Education; the gentle reader would be surprised to learn just how many students I’ve had that want to teach small children, but can themselves barely function at the 5^th grade level.

“…for many new students little or none of their coursework applies toward a degree…” (p3)

     The books says stuff like this, but never really asks who allowed for so much useless coursework to be sold, or who allows people with no chance of getting a degree onto campus, or who tricked these people into taking out huge loans for coursework that is worthless no matter how you look at it.

     Those are really pertinent questions to ask.

      “It doesn’t really matter how you do; you can always get into community college and get it paid for.” (p4)

     Many students in community college have this attitude. For them, community college is just a source of checks. Again, the authors fail to point out that before the students get their checks, the college (and thus, administration) gets first dibs on the money…students just get the crumbs. Since administrative pay depends on the size of the institution, administration is really, really, motivated to have lots people on campus. It’s odd that the authors don’t see the real problem here.

     “…no student who entered the college at the lowest level of math preparation had ever graduated with an associate’s degree.” (p13, boldface added, describing the success rate of students at a particular community college)

     I ask the reader to consider that quote. No student, none, not a one, who entered the program got anything out of it. It’s an anecdote, but a common one. At one large school where I taught, of some 25,000 students that went through the remedial program, zero made it to a college level math course. Again, that’s just an anecdote, but I want to emphasize a point the authors keep skipping over:

     Administration knows full well that the chance of success for many remedial students is, effectively, 0. And yet it keeps enrolling those students, keeps encouraging those students, year after year. Anyone with integrity would realize that enrolling these students is cruel to them, and a waste of taxpayer resources…until you remove the people without integrity from higher education, none of the fixes proposed by this book will do much good.

“…No public institution of higher education shall offer any remedial support, including remedial courses, that is not embedded with the corresponding entry level course…” (p14)

     Many institutions/states have instituted a “just in time” system for teaching remedial courses, where the remedial work is served up at the same time the college work is presented. This is, of course, just another fraud, and I’ve written in detail of this before. The reality of these initiatives is the remedial material is just put into the “college” course, while the college material is eliminated. In other words, the college course turns into a remedial course with a misleading name. This is why you can find 2^nd year college courses now that are little different than remedial courses of a few decades ago.

     So, unless these illegal institutions of plunder are shut down, that will be the next “solution” to the disaster of remedial education. It won’t be a solution, but it’ll mislead people for a little while. Years ago, remedial education was a disaster, so they renamed it “developmental”. Now, developmental education is a disaster, so they’ll just rename it to “college” work.

      The end result will be the same, however, in that we’ll be graduating people with nothing more than what they had coming out of high school. Except that they’ll be older and deep in debt, and administrators will be much wealthier. 

“…21^st Century Commission on the Future of Community Colleges—with one token community college professor in the group of 39 contributors…” (p28)

     As I’ve said repeatedly, the problem with higher education is that educators have no control over anything. The book will occasionally touch on this problem, but never seems to figure it out completely. It does at least mention that 38 of 39 contributors to community college policy recommendations were CEOs of community colleges and the like…educators have at best less than 3% of the influence on education right now, and that’s being generous.

      Groups such as the above are looking into improving graduation rates, but not, of course, at the expense of growth, the only thing administration really understands. Key to these plans will be accelerating the process of “education”, and, of course, just make things easier than they are now (like “don’t shave” is difficult?).

…”Bill Gates declared, ‘We owe it to every American to make it pretty darn easy for them to get through the system…” (p29)

    

     “Pretty darn easy,” he says. Yeah, that’s what I want in a nurse, someone who can barely think as well as a 10 year old, but still has a nursing degree received through an accelerated, super-easy, program. Bill Gates says we owe that to ourselves? I’m sure the next time he needs medical help or another mansion built or someone to fly his private jet, he’ll make an effort to get the kind of professionals he’s describing here.

      The book is a little pricey for personal use (even the PDF is $30) and is classified as a textbook, so not available through interlibrary loan. Odd that the information within is so hard to disseminate, as I don’t see any course using this as a textbook. Allow me to share one more of the book’s gems detailing how messed up our higher education system is:

“…In the state of Tennessee, the graduation of some students is now more financially rewarding to institutions than the graduation of others…” (p36)

     It’s so funny how often I’m told how institutions “do not discriminate” on the basis of race or whatever, but in Tennessee, your race can improve your chance of graduation. That is, of course, assuming administration thinks getting more money is important. That’s a pretty safe bet…the book doesn’t connect the dots here, however.

      While the book has much to say, ultimately it dances around the real problem in higher education today: a corrupt, untouchable caste of administration has a stranglehold on education, and can force students and faculty to do anything it wants them to do. Since administrative goals are growth, and retention, concepts like “integrity”, “skills”, “education”, and “reputation” are merely objects to be sacrificed in the name of growth and retention, nothing more.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

The Criminality of Community College, Part 2

By Professor Doom

     Last time around, I discussed that the Federal student loan scam program only allows for funds to be spent on college coursework, or, at absolute worst, on remedial coursework no lower than the 9^th grade. All community colleges regularly sell coursework below that level, in straight up violation of the law…as anyone, anyone, anyone who looks at online course offerings can tell.

     A new book, Community Colleges and the Access Effect, details the “amazing news” that all community colleges violate the law, and comes up with the solutions I’ve proposed a few times, albeit missing an important detail. Their solutions are that some sort of entrance examinations really need to return to colleges, and that schools need to return to operating with integrity. While these are decent fixes, they don’t identify the cause of the problem, and missed the important detail of administration’s role in this. The book, alas, lays the blame on “open admission” practices. 

     “Open admission” by itself isn’t a problem—as long as standards are kept, I see no problem giving anyone willing to work the opportunity to push for more. Unfortunately, the student loan scam gives “students” the chance to use higher education as a source of funds, and, since administration gets first dibs on the checks, the student loan scheme combines with easily corrupted administration to create the problem we have today.

Admin: “We need to have less students in the remedial math class. So we’re going to lower the exam score to get into college algebra.”

Me: “Those entrance scores are set by the company that makes the test. They have years of experience with tens of thousands of students, and know what they’re doing. Lowering the scores sets up students to fail, and we shouldn’t do that.”

Admin: “We’re lowering the scores.”

--how anyone can think entrance exams can change anything in this environment is beyond me. The proper usage, incidentally, is “fewer” not “less”, but long experience has told me how stupid it is trying to keep administrators from embarrassing themselves.

      Entrance exams alone won’t fix this problem—administration has such an absolute stranglehold that any entrance exams will be reduced to something passable by anything with opposable thumbs in short order. Higher education must return to the “old days” when administrators came from, and returned to, faculty. As long as administrators have no role in or understanding of education, higher education has no chance but to become ever more corrupt and useless.

      Despite the flaws in thinking, the authors have some things to say. Allow me to address some quotes from an interview:

     A lot of people will be shocked by the book's assertion that community colleges regularly admit students who operate at an elementary-school academic level. How did you reach this conclusion? 

This will only be shocking to people who do not work in an open-access community college.

 

    This isn’t shocking to regular readers of my blog, either. That said, just how many people have to know that most all community colleges are scamming, that they violate the law, before we start to eliminate these “public” institutions of private plunder? I do admit that community colleges do some good, on the same level as a crackhouse that looks after the small children of its addict customers…but community colleges quite obviously do more harm than good. 

     Another question and answer from the article:

Are community colleges inappropriately allowing or encouraging millions of students to take out student loans for remedial courses?

No, it's not millions of students. The number is effectively unknown.

 

---“Effectively unknown” is disingenuous, as the exact numbers of most things are effectively unknown. On the other hand, “not millions of students” is flat out wrong.

     Let’s do the math here to show that “millions of students” is fair to say.

Fact: there are over 20,000,000 college students. 

Fact: “Close to half” of college students are in community college.

     I don’t have an exact number, of course, but let’s say 9,000,000. It is almost certainly more, since my links are a little dated.

Fact: More than half of community college students need remedial work.

     Hmm, more than half of 9,000,000…how does this not translate into the millions?

While some of remedial work is at the ninth grade level, most is below that level, as I’ve shown, many times, in earlier posts. Even if you call it 9^th grade, that still means these students are four years away from college level work…realistically, it isn’t going to happen even if the loan money lasts that long (it doesn’t), although the debts the students incur are real, and the fat salaries that administrators get for screwing these people are very real.

     I’ve said it many times before, but I may as well toss in one more fact:

Fact: Over 90% of remedial students will fail to get any sort of degree within 3 years of entering community college. That statistic includes 2 year degrees.

     Let’s summarize: community colleges break the law by offering coursework suitable for a small child in a typical public school (and, let’s face it, the public schools have no reputation for offering challenging coursework). Breaking the law isn’t per se bad in our currently insane American system of laws, but putting people into a system of perpetual debt, and wasting years of their lives, for basically nothing IS bad. 

Community college administrators say they’re helping people pursue higher education, but they’re lying, and they know they’re lying…that’s bad too.

     Above, I’ve only talked about the math courses that are taught at the sub-9^th grade level. It is unarguable that these math courses are sub-9^th grade, since the content of these math courses is identical to mathematical material taught in the public schools.

     What’s going on in community college is much worse than that. Community colleges offer a host of marginal courses, containing minimal work that any child can do. Heck, to call the work “minimal” is an exaggeration.

Registrar, at a policy change meeting: “Due to a glitch, a number of students in various courses were enrolled in courses accidentally. They didn’t know they were in the course, so never showed up for class or did assignments, and didn’t know what was going on until they received their report card. We need to change the policy to allow students to drop late, for this reason.”

Me: “Of these students that did absolutely nothing, about how many failed?”

Registrar: “2/3rds failed. The rest got A’s, but complained because it cut into their loan disbursements.”

Me: “To be clear, 1/3 of the students that literally did absolutely nothing still got an A for their coursework?”

Registrar: “Yes.”

--I repeat this story, as it’s eyewitness testimony of clear evidence that around 1/3 of the coursework on that campus was utterly and completely bogus. Yes, I know, I could just as easily cite a book saying as much.

     Because administrators punish teachers that put content in their courses, many college courses have no actual requirements, no reading, no writing, no anything. Do I really need to enroll a 6 year old in such a course, and have that child pass, to demonstrate that the course isn’t at the 9^th grade level? There’s a reason why studies have found what goes on in community college is unhinged from the coursework they say they’re doing.

     Study after study, book after book, report after report…even a casual look reveals massive festering fraud and corruption at community colleges, we don’t need a TV show to know community colleges are, all too often, a complete joke. A joke is one thing, but community college is also a lawbreaking fraud that’s sucking massive amounts of taxpayer dollars.

 

     How long until people realize the scam here? People complain when crack houses stay operational for months, but there are community colleges, scoffing the law every bit as much as a crack house, that have stayed in operation for ten years or more. What will it take to get these places boarded up?

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Most (All?) Community Colleges Violate Federal Law Regularly

By Professor Doom

     Time and again I’ve shown that most of what’s going on in higher education is dubious. I’ll certainly grant, that, maybe, it’s a matter of opinion if studying how to “not shave” is really college level work. On the other hand, I’ve also shown that much of our resources in “higher education” is coursework that is identical to material taught in the third through sixth grade…and there’s no opinion there, the college work is totally the same material we’re teaching to our 11 year olds, if not younger. Material taught in the 6^th grade, obviously, is not college level material (no matter how many administrators claim otherwise). Hardly a semester went by where I didn’t have administration asking me to reduce content even further.

     “Use a number line to determine the value of 3 – 2”

--actual problem from actual book in actual course I’ve actually taught on a community college campus.

     There are many reasons for the plunging level of coursework, although the student loan scam, where colleges can get huge sums of money for “teaching” anything at all, mostly crap, is big. Open admissions is still a bit of a factor. See, in the old days, when higher education wasn’t (much of) a scam, it was often accused of being elitist—only those that could pass the entrance examinations could come in. So, low-rent community colleges opened up. “We’re not elitist,” say these colleges, “anyone can come here!”

 

     And, absolutely, anyone that could fill out a student loan application (or, more likely, Pell grant) form can today come to campus and take college courses. Oh wait, I said “college courses”. Not so fast, just because it’s a course on a college campus, doesn’t mean it’s a college course.

     It could be a remedial course. Now, it’s well known that over 90% of students that take remedial courses fail to get any sort of degree within three years. It’s been well known for years, in fact, that if you sign up a student for remediation, you’re screwing over that student, setting him up to fail, and quite possibly be in debt for the rest of his life. 

 

      Now, strictly on moral grounds, hurting another human being like this is a problem, but, of course, college administrators have no qualms about hurting other human beings, as “integrity” is both literally and figuratively a four letter word for these guys.

 

      Turns out, there’s another reason community college campuses shouldn’t be overloading with these courses. It violates Federal law:

 

The federal government has strict rules about how financial aid can be applied to what it calls "remedial" coursework. We are stating that misuse and misapplication of financial aid around developmental education coursework occurs at many community colleges—intentional or not. Some developmental education course do meet federal standards.

 

     “Intentional or not”? That’s some sweet candy coating there. How do you accidentally select a book with 6^th grade material, base a course around that book, present that course every semester, year after year, and come close to thinking maybe it wasn’t intentional? Now, absolutely, there should be an opportunity for someone who is behind to play catch up, and the Federal guidelines allow for it, up to a point:

 

The most common violation involves allowing students to apply financial aid to coursework below the ninth grade.

     Wait, what? Coursework below the 9^th grade cannot be sold to students? But, but, EVERY COMMUNITY COLLEGE I’VE LOOKED AT sells coursework below the 9^th grade (I’ve linked six different community colleges, and I openly defy anyone to show me an accredited community college that doesn’t offer pre-9^th grade coursework). Many of those colleges sell a great quantity of coursework below the 9^th grade. All of them offer coursework that is clearly below the 9^th grade, and offered in the local schools to students 11 years old and younger.

 

      So not only are most (all?) community college campuses operating fraudulently, most (all?) are in clear violation of Federal law. Gee whiz, don’t the Feds know that these institutions put their course offerings online, so that it takes all of 30 seconds to tell they’re in violation? I bet the Feds counted on accreditation to keep colleges legitimate…too bad accreditation is a fraud, since it’s run by the same people that run the colleges. I’ve documented the fraud of accreditation many times.

 

     Does the entire system operating in open violation of the law not raise a flag anywhere that there might be a dash of corruption here? Don’t get me wrong, I know not all laws are good, but I honestly believe charging a fortune for material any child can learn with a little help is wrong. Putting people in perpetual debt for such material is definitely wrong…and stealing taxpayer money to give to the administrators who put such people in debt is a level of wrong that would boggle the mind of Kafka.

 

     Next time, I’ll take a quick look at what the authors of a book on the criminality of community college have to say. In the meantime, community colleges are overrun with great numbers of ridiculously overpaid administrators and support staff…consider the likelihood that none of these guys anywhere even have the slightest inkling that what they are doing is both morally and legally wrong.

 

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Blast from the past: From where the remedial students...

A rerun leading into my next education-related post. Much of higher education is now remedial work, coursework that's below high school level. Because faculty are threatened to pass remedial students no matter what, they are passed up and through the system. But where to remedial students come from?

--------

“Hey. We’re selling a plot of land, and thought we could ask our math professor friend for help. The land is a rectangle, 120’ on one side, and 300’ on the other. I know you need that much. What’s the square footage and how do you get it?”

--question from the wife of a longtime friend, valedictorian at her school, and a bright person. She and her husband just didn’t take math in high school.

     Now, it’s easy to blame the high schools for the unprepared students entering college, but that’s not fair. High schools offer College Algebra-level material, and often more advanced math, and also simpler courses, as well as other options. They tell students “this is what you need for college, this what you need to get by, and this is what you need to pump gas” giving their students the option to take the challenging material, something simpler, or no math at all. Students choose (or are advised by counselors or parents) not to take the challenging coursework, improving their GPA and chances of graduating high school. I don’t blame students for taking the easy way out when asked to do so; I would have myself if my parents had let me. A student who puts effort into it can avoid having a math class for his last few years of high school, if he wishes; I commonly get students that tell me they haven’t taken math since the 8^th or 9^th grade, and looking at their tests, I am in no position to disagree.

     “Find the exact area under the curve of the graph of y = 3x² + 2 between x = 2 and x = 4, using the limit of sums method.”

-- High school calculus problem. Using sums in this way is way beyond what I would attempt in an elementary college calculus course, where I often spend considerable time going over how to add fractions.

     I’ve certainly heard tales of bad teachers, teachers not doing their jobs, teachers that don’t care about students, and, of course, teachers that succumb to the immense pressure to pass unprepared students. While I believe such teachers exist, I’ve met quite a few public school teachers, and through tutoring many high school students, I can only conclude that the vast majority of teachers are dedicated, hardworking, knowledgeable, and do a legitimate job in offering real mathematics courses to their students. In short, the vast majority of students that want to learn have a fair opportunity to do so.

     Perhaps public schools shouldn’t give students the opportunity not to learn, but I suspect they’ve long since figured out that forcing students into classes they have no interest in taking doesn’t really help the students. If only that knowledge could be passed up to postsecondary institutions.

     If a student chooses not to be prepared for college, it’s no great surprise that such a student, when tricked into going to college, is not prepared for it. A student shouldn’t be made to suffer forever for a poor choice made in high school, but…recall how years ago getting into college was not a certain thing. It was reserved for those who worked hard and studied, demonstrating they were willing to do what it takes to achieve higher learning. The great slobbering greed of colleges with open admission policies, and the “increase the student base at all costs” major goal of administration, has led to a massive influx of unprepared, often wildly unprepared, students onto college campuses.

     These students, being unprepared for college, naturally do very poorly in college courses, and administration (with “graduation rate” being a goal of what makes a college good) clamps the pressure down on faculty to increase passing rates, as well as opening up an array of less regulated remedial courses, with no restraints on what goes into such courses. Unfortunately, the remedial faculty (often with less qualifications and job security than other college faculty) are bullied into having high pass rates, and the only surefire method of doing so is to lower the difficulty as much as possible.

(Two students at my door): “Hi. We’re in your statistics class, and we have a question about lines of regression.”

(Me, welcoming them in): “Certainly, those are some rough formulas, the key is to be very careful and not try to skip steps.”

(I take out some paper and start setting up a typical problem)

Student: “No. We’re not even going to try that. Our question is for when you already have the line, like for y = 2x + 1, because we can get that on our calculator. How did you get the points, and how do you graph the line? We’ve both had 6 hours of developmental and got A’s in College Algebra, and neither of us had to do anything like that.”

--Students at an accredited institution where developmental math wasn’t handled at all by the math department, and College Algebra wasn’t either, to some extent.

     With no restraints, “reduce difficulty as much as possible” is results in very low difficulty indeed, which is why at one campus, it was quite common to have students with 4.0 GPAS, 9 hours of passed math courses…and still completely overmatched by what should have been basic concepts.

     Since the flood of unprepared students doesn’t stop at remediation, faculty in the higher level courses have no choice but to likewise reduce course requirements, or lose their position. So, in my case, it isn’t just statistics students that can’t handle graphing a line, nearly half of the students I have in calculus, for years now, are unable to add fractions, despite the high GPA and multiple prerequisites.

     As long as administrators view everyone with a pulse as a source of a government check, with no concerns about how such a person can end up trapped in a lifetime of debt, remedial students will be a common feature on “higher education” campuses.


---

But what if most of the "remedial" coursework were illegal? That would totally warp higher education overnight, as at least 33% of college courses would be cancelled. Pure fantasy? That's what I'll look at next post.