Recruiters Determine College Is Worthless

By Professor Doom

     For years now, higher ed administration has watered, and watered, and watered down what it means to have a college degree. Instead of making higher education about education, they made it about growth. Not once in my lifetime in higher education have the “leaders” shown even the slightest interest in education, but I can’t even begin to count the number of times they gloated about achieving growth in a system where anyone who can check a box can enter.

      It’s no secret to those in higher education that the goings on in college are nothing like they used to be. At many universities, coursework has been eliminated almost completely, while community college campuses are unhinged, using the bogus accreditation system to get away with what can easily and accurately be called fraud. A degree from a community college is hardly worth more than a 9^th grade graduation certificate.

      Meanwhile, tuition skyrockets, and people come into the system ever more desperate to get a degree, because they’re told the big lie of “People with a college degree will earn a million more bucks.” Now, maybe, in the past, any college degree legitimately translated into more money, but it takes little imagination to guess that today’s degrees, with their requirements reduced to less than a high school diploma of a generation ago, are worth very little.

      Imagination? My bad, it takes no imagination, as it is now understood as fact:

Ernst & Young, one of the UK’s biggest graduate recruiters, has announced it will be removing the degree classification from its entry criteria, saying there is “no evidence” success at university correlates with achievement in later life.

     Now, I grant the above concerns a recruiter in the UK, but that gives me more concern, not less, about the value of a degree in the US. See, I’ve been following higher ed in the UK, because their higher education system is at least a decade behind ours in terms of corruption. Yes,  they have the golden parachute model for their administrators…but it’s not yet as infuriating as here. Yes, they have the bloating out of the questionable degree programs which actually hurts a graduate’s income, and they even know those programs are not useful…but the bloating there is an echo of what happened in the US, years earlier.

      So, if degrees in the UK are worthless now, it’s a safe bet that many degrees handed out in the US, starting a decade or so ago, are worthless also. We have whole schools handing out bogus coursework and degrees now, after all.

      In the US, the whole point of a college degree, for most graduates, isn’t the knowledge, and hasn’t been the knowledge for a long time now. It’s been about access, about getting one of those golden jobs which only a college degree holder can apply for. Who cares about going tens of thousands of dollars into debt, if doing so is the only way to get a high paying job, right?

      Considering how so many degrees requiring nothing besides tuition checks which don’t bounce, why should it mean anything else? But what will happen once it becomes common knowledge how little a degree represents?

“Academic qualifications will still be taken into account and indeed remain an important consideration when assessing candidates as a whole, but will no longer act as a barrier to getting a foot in the door,” she said.

     So…why go deep into debt for a degree now?

     Please understand, recruiters are not idiots. They don’t make major changes to how they determine a candidate’s worth lightly. They looked at the data, and came to the rather obvious conclusion that spending 4 to 6 years drinking beer and talking about feelings doesn’t mean much:

“Our own internal research of over 400 graduates found that screening students based on academic performance alone was too blunt an approach to recruitment.
“It found no evidence to conclude that previous success in higher education correlated with future success in subsequent professional qualifications undertaken.”

--emphasis added: there’s as much evidence success in college will help you as there is Trump is a Russian stooge.

     So, the data says a degree is worthless. If this was just one recruiter, we could easily discard this as a special case, but other recruiters are figuring it out:

In an unprecedented move, one of the UK’s largest graduate employers is to scrap using UCAS points as entry criteria for its graduate scheme, something which could lead to a huge shake-up in the recruitment sector.

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) is believed to be the first major employer to exclude UCAS points from its employment process,

--UCAS points in the UK are roughly comparable to grade point average in the US. College GPA in the US is already known as useless.

     PricewaterhouseCoopers aren’t exactly nobodies, they’ve recruited on my campuses.  

    In the US, people are starting to seriously question if a college degree is worth the ever more astronomical price. For many degrees, it’s a sign of foolishness to spend years of your life and go many thousands of dollars into debt to acquire them. If you put “BA in Women’s Studies” on your resume, it doesn’t help if you have a 4.0 GPA.

      What will happen if “college recruiters” decide they’ll have better luck finding good candidates if they just stay off campus, and instead decide that the smarter people are the 18 year olds who know nothing but have no debt, instead of the 24 year olds who’ve financially destroyed themselves learning nothing?

      If there’s no education, and no job, what exactly will higher ed have to offer a high school graduate? Besides pointless debt, I mean. Can higher ed survive when it's well known their ridiculously expensive degrees have no value?

     I sure don’t have an answer, but I suspect the real world will provide one fairly soon.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

UK Universities Admit ‘Almost’ Illiterates

By Professor Doom

     It’s funny, yet sad, to watch the higher education system of the UK degenerate into the same abyss much of the US’ higher education has become.

      First, I point out that I’m extrapolating a bit:

Around 85% of respondents in the Times Higher Education survey were from 130 UK institutions, though staff from regions including the US, Canada, Australia, Europe and Asia also took part.

     I really wish they’d narrowed down the respondents better…but with the bulk of the respondents in the UK, it’s reasonable enough to guess these results are most applicable to the UK.

      Now, I promise the gentle reader that the complaints we’re hearing in the UK have their mirror here. The big difference, however, is we have something called “community colleges,” largely fraudulent enterprises that primarily exist to suck weak students in, swirl them around  for 3 to 5 years until every dollar has been squeezed out, and then discarded. Here’s a quick summary of the immense fraud of community colleges, and I encourage the more recent arrivals to my blog to peruse the documented facts there, the better to have no doubts about the true nature of most community colleges. Bottom line, however, is these fake schools supposedly have 2 year degree programs, but it’s quite common for less than 1% of 2-year degree program students to actually graduate in 2 years.

     In the US, we put our semi-students, our "almost illiterates" as they say in the UK, into the community college system. The UK doesn’t really have this system, so if it’s going to match the fraud, it has to put these semi-students into their university system. The survey respondents let us know how it’s working out:

“Each year, the entry requirements for undergraduate programmes are reduced, meaning we get a high number of students who are almost illiterate,” one professor complained.  

      It used to be, a school could only be accredited if it actually had entrance requirements. Those requirements were annihilated in the US, and now ‘open admission’ is pretty standard now. I’m not a jerk, I believe education should be available to everyone, but slamming unqualified kids into tens of thousands of dollars of debt when they have no chance of getting anything for that debt strikes me as evil. Administrators disagree with me, of course, considering this activity simply a “vision for excellence.”

     Because of open admission, I used to teach students at the community college how the number line works (i.e., 2^nd to 3^rd grade material), used to regularly snip off chapter after chapter of material in a hopeless attempt to present a course even the least interested student could pass. Faculty in the UK see this is what will have to happen if they continue to lower standards:

A creative arts professor said: “When 45% of of school-leavers go to university, standards must be different from what they were when 7% did…

     Now, in the US, those “different” standards led to the creation of immense remediation programs. Again, I’ve covered the remediation scam in great detail, with the key point being we’re spending huge resources on “teaching” 6^th grade material, calling it college, and pretending not to notice that 90% of remedial students get nothing out of college but debt.

      The UK, of course, wouldn’t dream of considering what’s happening in the US and taking it as a warning what not to do:

However, lecturers said institutions were failing to provide additional resources to teach these less academically-able students

     With this level of thinking, it’s just a matter of time until remedial programs are standard in the UK as well…perhaps they’ll even copy our criminal community college system, too.

     It’s a shame nobody over there is willing to connect the dots. We’ve already tried the “provide additional resources” idea, and it’s led to a huge boondoggle in higher ed. I wish there were a way I could warn them, since they’re not willing to read the writing on the wall about how effective those “additional resources” will be:

More than half (52%) said students turned up to class without doing the required reading…“Few students will read the material on the reading list, [relying] instead solely on lecture handouts or PowerPoint slides,” one law lecturer said. 


     Why can’t they figure out that students who don’t read or study aren’t going to learn anything no matter how much you reduce standards or water down the material?

     Again, we saw this in the American higher education system years ago. It’s why we have so much coursework that doesn’t rely on students actually having read anything, why we have whole degree programs based on students watching Powerpoint presentations. Similarly students don’t have to write much, either, and whole programs have students simply talking about how they feel about things, learning nothing that they don’t already “know”…it’s nuts.

     It really is laughable how little goes into so many college courses. Many courses the professor just reads the canned PowerPoint presentation, a collection of slides with tiny snippets of information on them. I’ve reviewed college courses where the entire amount of text students need to read is less than two of my blog posts—you can master all the information in two hours tops, though the information is spread out over the course of four months. I imagine I could make a great deal of money if I moved to the UK and “trained” the faculty there of the reality of open admission teaching…

      In the meantime, I guess I’ll sit back and watch the UK make the same mistakes the US did regarding higher education.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

CSU: Consensual Sex Is Still Rape, Boyfriend Expelled.

By Professor Doom

     I feel like having an easy day, so once again I’ll discuss the demented kangaroo campus court system. Quirks in how universities are created give them surprising leeway regarding disputes on campus. Their policy documents were established decades ago, when academics ran campuses, and so the system was set up to have disputes, scholarly disputes, settled by scholars.

      The administrative takeover of higher ed not only allowed admin to award themselves ridiculous pay and benefits, they incidentally took control of what has become a quasi-legal system. Scholarship has drained away from many campuses, and so this legal system now spends more time dealing with things that, frankly, are out of the purview of most academics…and absolutely beyond the ken of a typical higher education administrator. 

     I know, considering all the other ridiculous kangaroo rulings I’ve discussed in this blog, one more is just piling on, but this one is just so over the top:

Female Student Said, 'I'm Fine and I Wasn't Raped.' University Investigated, Expelled Boyfriend Anyway.

      Now, at first glance, one might figure “oh, she accused him, then recanted her testimony.” That is the sort of thing that can cause a miscarriage of justice but, no, it’s nothing so reasonable:

Colorado State University-Pueblo suspended a male athlete for years after he was found responsible for sexually assaulting a female trainer. But the trainer never accused him of wrongdoing, and said repeatedly that their relationship was consensual. She even stated, unambiguously, "I'm fine and I wasn't raped." 

     Curious, eh? She never complained about rape, so how the heck did this case even make it before the laughable campus court system? Well, the poor guy left a hickey on his girlfriend. Someone noticed:

The hickey was indeed noticed by another trainer, described as the "Complainant" in the lawsuit. When confronted, Doe confessed to the Complainant that she and Dean had engaged in sex. According to the lawsuit, the Complainant "presumed" this sex was nonconsensual, and reported it to the director of the athletic training program. 

     And, just like that, the poor guy’s life is messed up. I know it’s bizarre, but the same system too blind to see 10 years of weird activities at Penn Sate, too deaf to listen to eyewitness testimony to what was going on in the showers there can nevertheless see evidence of rape, even hear a cry of rape, even when there’s nothing to see, nothing to hear.

     To be fair, there’s a policy against athletes and trainers getting involved, so we do have a policy violation here. Informed of the policy, the guy breaks off the relationship. Alas, the girlfriend sends him a Snapchat after the breakup.

      The guy asks admin what to do about the Snapchat. Admin, eager for blood, tells the guy to read the text and send the administrator a copy. Oops, the poor kid listened to admin:

“…you could be potentially be [sic] in complication with your no contact order for opening the snapchats that she sent you,"…

In other words, the man in charge of investigating whether Neal had raped a woman—a woman who emphatically stated that Neal had not done so—first told Neal to open emails from his girlfriend, and later told him he could be disciplined for opening them.”

     It’s game over past this point. The kid is railroaded through the kangaroo system, his scholarship removed, he’s expelled…and he can’t even transfer to another school because he’s “guilty” of sexual misconduct. No other school would dare take responsibility for letting this “sexual predator” on campus, regardless of the circumstances.

      A laughable investigation (for campuses, this phrase is as redundant as “tiny shrimp”) ensues, and a report is compiled:

“…submitted his report to Jennifer DeLuna, CSU-Pueblo's director of diversity and inclusion. Neal was given just 24 hours to make himself available to appear before DeLuna. This meeting was, in Neal's view, a "sham."

"It wasn't actually a hearing at all," says Neal. "I was allowed to have legal counsel there if I wanted to, but the legal counsel wasn't allowed to counsel."

---note that the administrative title, “CSU-Pueblo director of diversity and inclusion,” is twice as long as the title-holder’s name, so once again we’ve found another administrative position that can be eliminated with no impact on education and research.

     So, this “CSU-Pueblo director of diversity and inclusion” looked at the evidence collected by another admin out for blood and convicts. Neat, eh?

      Now the kangaroo system has an appeals process. I’ve had personal experience with the appeals process when I was at a fake community college. The way how the appeal works is you appeal your case using the exact same information to the exact same people who ruled against you in the first place. It doesn’t have to be that way, but admin can do whatever they want.

     Anyway, in a non-kangaroo system, a second set of judges might go “Hey, nobody is saying the kid committed rape, at worst there’s a policy violation here, between two students. Seeing as there’s no crime, we should mete out a more reasonable punishment than destroying his life.”

      The poor kid can’t even conceive of how rigged this system is. The fool makes a good faith appeal, thinking it’ll make any difference. How did that appeal work out?

Neal appealed the decision. His appeal was denied.

     Yeah, no kidding. In decades of higher ed, I’ve never seen an appeal go against administrative wishes. Wonder why that is? Oh yeah, that’s right, it’s a completely rigged system.

     Finally understanding there’s no way to get justice, or even a modicum of reason in the campus kangaroo system, he’s suing the school for what they did to him. Even more fantastically, he’s suing the Education Department for their hand in how they set up Title IX, putting him into a kangaroo system that should not have the power to destroy lives over policy violations.

      As I’ve detailed a time or two in this blog, those wronged by the kangaroo campus court system usually have a much easier time finding justice in our “official” justice system, despite the latter’s well-deserved poor reputation. It’s still far superior to the thoroughly corrupt system our campuses use.

     I’ll wish the kid luck, though I suspect he won’t need it. Most likely, they’ll settle out of court for a few million, and no admission of wrongdoing. The taxpayers will pay for that, and no administrator will lose his job. Then CSU will hire another $150,000 a year administrator (proposed title: Assistant Pro-Vice Director of Campus Victimless Noncrime Reduction And Diversity) to see that it won’t happen again…they’ll have to raise tuition anther few percent to cover the expense of this as well.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

    

Government Eugenics and Higher Ed

By Professor Doom

     It’s no secret that something’s gone horribly wrong in education. Despite over a century of careful study of how to teach human beings, it’s clear we’re not learning as much as we used to. A simple glance at a college entrance exam from over 100 years ago shows that today’s high school graduates aren’t even close to the level of knowledge that 19^th century high school graduates regularly demonstrated.

      With high school graduates dropping so far in skills, it’s only natural to see either of two things in higher ed: a massive increase in the failure/dropout rate, or a massive decrease in the standards of higher education.

     It’s the latter by far, as I’ve detailed many a time in this blog. The question thus arises: what’s happening to our high school (and, presumably, pre-high-school) students? While certainly, it’s quite possible that the incompetence and corruption I’ve detailed in higher ed has counterparts in our public school system there are other issues that could also be a factor beyond the dumbing down of the material.

     We’re currently running all sorts of experiments on the human race, and I suspect as long as technology continues to rapidly improve, we’ll be running even more in the near future. Never before has the world’s infrastructure allowed for ideas and inventions to be exposed to humanity so quickly.

     As a quick example, online pornography is, well, ubiquitous, starting perhaps 20 years ago. A few years ago, researchers were curious if watching such things was harmful, but could not run the experiment: they were incapable of finding males not exposed to it. You can’t run a legitimate experiment without a control (I do wish we could tell Education specialists this important concept…). Let’s just hope watching porn isn’t a real problem…it seems harmless enough, but what would have happened to society if, after 10 years of watching it, it caused severe problems in the viewer? Half the population could have been crippled, warping society for generations.

      It isn’t just technology which can affect the entire population in short order, political systems and social programs unlike anything the world has ever seen can be devised and implemented within a few years…it’s reasonable to consider the effects of such systems.

     r/K selection theory is an evolutionary theory (theory!) that a species can engage in two basic strategies for continuation of the species. The r-selection strategy is to have lots and lots of offspring, and for the parent to not care too much about survival of any particular offspring. The classic example of a species following this theory is rabbits, although certainly more extreme examples exist, such as snails which lay millions of eggs, caring nothing for them, leading to less than 1% reaching maturity. 

     The K-selection strategy is to have few offspring, but the parent invests a great deal of time raising them.

      Now, this idea need not be the defining factor of all individuals in a species—certainly, zoos have noticed that some individual animals make more attentive parents than the others, even as the inferior parent animals have plenty of children.

     So, while humans tends towards the K-selection strategy of preserving the species, some parents are more inclined to having a few children and raising them well, while others are fine with having many children with little sense of parental responsibility for those children.

      One of the many experiments unleashed upon humanity, or least American citizens, in recent times is the Welfare State: no matter how many kids you have, you and they will be taken care of. This started most glaringly with the New Deal, with a clear doubling down with the Great Society, giving an important message to those who would listen: breed all you want, and let government take care of educating, feeding, or whatever else your children might need.

My grandfather, to judge: “I gotta feed these young’uns somehow!”

--My grandfather used to transport moonshine, back when it was illegal. He had his reasons, as my mother had 10 siblings.

     Granted, in agrarian societies, having many children was encouraged, because having many helpful hands on the farm was a good thing. It was nevertheless understood that the farmer still was responsible for feeding his children, and in turn those children were responsible for the parents once they were too old for hard work. In these societies, it was the smarter, better, and more resourceful farmers who would have more children, because they could afford to be responsible for them.

     Today, being irresponsible means having lots of children, the opposite of what it used to mean. We’ve inverted our social norm in this grand experiment.

     Now, government will feed your kids and even takes responsibility for your retirement. We’ve had around 4 generations of this huge social experiment, this huge inversion of morality, a morality which, pre-inversion, allowed humanity to dominate the planet. Despite the inversion, we kept freedom of choice, where individuals get to decide if they want to go with r-selection, or K-selection, for their offspring. 

My father: “I pay my tax dollars to send some kid to public school, and on top of that I’m supposed to pay to send my kids to private school?”

--my father still sent me to private school, even though he hated paying effectively double what his responsibility should be, paying for the r-selection people. I only have 1 sibling.

     Freedom of choice meant everyone was ok with this, but there is one obvious problem here: we make our decisions as a democracy. The people who chose to have few children, and care for them, are typically outvoted now, and get to watch as their tax dollars go to pay for endless programs for the children of the people with many children. The K-selection people who only have the children they can care for are now a minority, and I suspect it’s by a wide margin.

    The US government has now run this selective breeding program for about a century. Often when you selectively breed an animal for one trait, you get other traits as well. German shepherds weren’t bred for hip problems, they were bred for intelligence...and so now some owners have the misery of watching their intelligent pet suffer with every step. 50 years is more than enough time to breed wild foxes to be as tame as puppies…with many other “bonus” traits as well.

      It’s no great stretch to think selective breeding works with humans. Our bountiful social programs have been breeding humans to be r-selection favored. Perhaps the r-selection followers are also bred to be less inclined to study (I’ll not suggest the more obvious idea), as this trait is less common amongst the K-selection followers who are more willing (again, I’ll not suggest “able”) to consider the consequences of having children, and thus do what they can to limit their breeding to what they can personally be responsible for.

     Could it be that the immense collapse in the caliber of our high school graduates despite all we’ve (supposedly) learned in Education as a field is neither due to the complete failure of Education, nor due to the immense corruption and incompetence of our “leaders” in higher education, but simply a result of our government’s eugenics program regarding its citizens?

     If so, how do we reverse this? Can we reverse this? Dare I even ask if we should reverse this? I believe it’s better if humans can know things but I like to consider: before changing things, I want to make sure the change would be a good thing. If we’d asked questions like that a century ago, perhaps we’d have more people interested in, and capable of understanding, the answers today.

      I lean towards reversal, however, as we’ve compensated for the decay by erected an incredibly corrupt community “college” system where over 90% of the coursework is identical to what we teach in our (generally debased) high school system. I would prefer "college" to mean college, after all.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com