Poo Bah Napolitano Caught Looting $175 Million

By Professor Doom

     Usually when I talk about the looting of our higher educational system by the Poo Bahs “leading” it, I focus on their amazing pay and ridiculous perks. But there’s more, so much more to it, from huge construction kickbacks (honest, the mad building spree in higher ed exists for a reason) to pedophilic coverups (Hi Penn State, sure hope no other campus thought I was talking about them instead) to systematic academic corruption (Hi UNC, and I know you’re not alone).

      The gentle reader might think these scandals are rare events, but I assure the reader this is not the case. The reason we only get a huge scandal every few months or so is because there’s no system of checks and balances. I’m not saying we need more government regulation, but the student loan scam has flooded our campuses with money, and that money attracted a plundering caste of administrators, who ruthlessly took over the system.

      And, usually when I talk about California, I talk about the endless insanity on the campuses there, but this time around I get to look at truly breathtaking fraud, as the Poo Bah there is involved in a scandal of epic proportions:

UC President Janet Napolitano Caught With Her Hands in The Cookie Jar

     Now, I’ve certainly caught quite a few Poo Bahs stealing a few million here and there, but Napolitano’s antics were over the top:

Former Obama DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano now serves as president of the University of California system, and a new audit has alleged that under her leadership, $175 million was hidden away as the system struggled. Not only that, Napolitano’s office reportedly interfered with the audit, rendering it unusable.

--emphasis added.

    

      It used to be that the people who ruled over our campuses were stewards, protectors of the institution and guardians of the university’s mission of education and research. They made their decisions always with these goals in mind, granting a level of permanency to the institutions.

      Now, a plundering caste of self-styled titans of industry, calling themselves leaders, control our campuses. Their goals have nothing to do with higher education, and instead their focus seems to be to direct as much student loan money as possible into their own pockets.

      It used to be a few million or so per leadership action, but now we’re looking at $175 million vanishing. The amount of money flowing onto campus is amazing, it’s bizarre that our campuses are always struggling for more money when consistently these kinds of sums disappear in the plethora of fiefdoms on campus. It’s even more amazing when you consider that even our universities supported by tax dollars just can’t seem to get by no matter how much money is thrown at them.

       Napolitano was no different than any other Poo Bah in this regard:

About $32 million of the $175 million that Howle’s audit found in the secret reserve came from campus assessment fees — money that the auditor said could have been spent on students and should be returned to the campuses.

Even as it accumulated the campus fees, Napolitano persuaded the Board of Regents to increase those fees in two of the four years audited, Howle said.

      My brain always aches every time a Poo Bah cries about how the campus is running out of money. How? Tuition rises, the number of students on campus rises, and the number of professors on campus drops, to be replaced by adjuncts earning 25% or less pay than professors. And yet I hear time and again how the campus is about to go bankrupt.

     Most of the deluge of money flows into administrative positions. While campuses in general are suffocating under the weight of administration, Napolitano’s leadership is worse than most, as she requires many helpers to lead the campus into bankruptcy:

      Look how wildly those numbers vary…how come nobody is asking obvious questions like “Why does Florida have 50% more students than Texas, but only requires less than 1/10 the high-administrators and 1/25^th the budget?” And, of course, California just blows away everyone else—30x times as many staff as Florida and 80x the budget, with FEWER campuses and FEWER students.

      And so Napolitano has to cry about how the system needs even more money, in addition to the student loan money and in addition to the taxpayer support already given. I guess it’d be gratuitous to throw in that these students are mostly just getting indoctrination anyway? It’s not like California campuses don’t have a pretty hefty reputation for fascist behavior now, right?

     In addition to huge numbers of administrators, these guys are paid grotesque amounts, as the LA Times is happy to disclose:

Administrative salaries amounted to $2.5 million more than the maximum annual salary ranges for comparable state employees, auditors found.

An information system manager can make $258,000 with UC, but $150,000 with other state agencies.

The audit said: “10 executives in the Office of the President whose compensation we analyzed were paid a total of $3.7 million in fiscal year 2014-15 — over $700,000 more than the combined salaries of their highest paid state employee counterparts.”

     I’m not saying I should be paid more, but it’s just so irritating that I can’t get a 2% pay raise over the course of a decade because there’s no money in the system, even as my bosses get 10% more each year. Another irritation is how I have to give money if I want to attend departmental get-togethers, while the bosses can party hard for free:

“The Office of the President also spent more than $2 million for its staff’s business meetings and entertainment expenses over the past five years—a benefit that the State does not offer to its employees except in limited circumstances,” the audit said.

      But the above are just run-of-the-mill everyday abuses in higher ed, let’s get back to that $175 million looting. How was it found? Well, the employees seeing the looting had the opportunity to say something was wrong in surveys. How’d that work out?

When we compared the prescreened versions of the surveys to the versions the campuses subsequently submitted to us, we discovered trends that concerned us. Specifically, we found that the survey responses were changed in ways that made the Office of the President appear more efficient and effective. The most extensive changes were in the open-ended comments that campuses provided in response to our broad questions.

     Surveys, surveys, surveys. I filled out many dozens of the things before I realized they were pointless. Oh, I’d make my helpful suggestions, I’d type up my comments (so that my handwriting could not be recognized) to the effect of “the frauds going on in the admin building are too big not to notice, why isn’t something being done?” and nothing would come of it no matter how large the font I used.  

   

     The reason, of course, is the surveys go to admin, and admin simply tosses, or in this case, changes the surveys so that complaints vanish (sure never seems to happen when students complain, however…).

      It’s always the cover-up that gets you. The leader Napolitano knew she was doing wrong…otherwise why change the surveys? The poor leader just didn’t realize that, by a mere fluke, the regulator got copies of the original surveys so they could see the changes being made.

      Even though they have two sets of surveys, and know what’s going on, they’ll just toss the surveys because they’re “invalid.” So, the leader Napolitano will be off the hook for obvious skullduggery. Looking in the ol’ crystal ball, I see she’ll get no jail time for this fraud, nor will anyone else, and, in a year, probably less, she’ll resign and get a sweet golden parachute.

      Anyone want to take bets against my crystal ball? The crystal ball also tells me there will be some changes in how the surveys are administered, but not in a way that will prevent future frauds. Anyone want to bet in future investigations of universities, there won’t be original copies of surveys to compare to the ones altered by admin?

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

What Faculty Would Love To Tell Admin

By Professor Doom

     It’s so funny watching higher education in the UK slide into the pit, embracing the same failed structures that did so much harm to higher education in the US. Wasn’t anyone paying attention?

     It seems every time I read an article about the failure of higher education in the UK, it’s familiar to me: it’s always something I saw with my own eyes in the US, a decade ago if not earlier.

       A recent article talks about how workers in higher ed would love to be able to communicate to the administrators ruling the place:

I work in a university. Here's what I secretly want to tell senior management

      Secretly? This is one of the problems with higher ed: you cannot talk to your boss, you cannot prevent your boss from making a huge mistake, you cannot prevent your school from doing terrible things to the students…the best you can do is make random, secret, comments. If you go public, you’ll be fired and your career destroyed. So, let’s see what faculty would like to tell the Poo Bah in the UK today (and by extension, what faculty in the US would have liked to have told their Poo Bah’s ten years ago). They will say these things anonymously, of course:

Lecturer: “Universities are the playthings of people who think they’re businessmen”

      I remember when the first boatload of self-proclaimed “titans of industry” first waddled on campus in their fancy suits to force the student-as-customer foolishness down our throats. They uttered their pronouncements about how things were to be done “going forward,” how resources were to be “utilized,” about “metrics” and “dashboards” in their diabolical corporate-speak.

      They honestly acted like the growth of the universities was their doing, that bringing a school from 1,000 students to 10,000 students required every bit as much talent as creating a successful business from scratch.

      I sure would have loved to explain to these fatheads that all the growth in higher education’s student base was due to a student loan scam that gave money to anyone willing to ask for it…no talent required at all, and certainly no need for all the corporate pabulum.

But, in my experience, senior management are usually looking to their own careers, rather than to their institution. There’s a cycle of innovation and hype every couple of years as a new batch of managers come in and decide how to leave their mark.

      This is the key change to higher education. In years past, the administrators actually were promoted from the school’s faculty (and often returned to that status after a few years). They were invested in the school and weren’t there to sell out as much of the school’s reputation as possible before moving on to bigger acts of plunder at other schools.

      And, that’s what faculty in the UK are seeing now. I imagine soon someone there will figure out that the Vision for Excellence plans that each school slaps together anew every few years are rubbish…but yeah, I’ve been there, done that.

Universities are the playthings of people who think they’re businessmen, but who don’t actually have the skills.

     Yeah, no kidding. How many times have I pointed out the breathtaking incompetence of our rulers in higher ed? I suspect in a few years there’ll start to be an outcry over how these buffoons’ careers skyrocket no matter badly they screw up. But, yeah, been there, done that.

They’ll increase student recruitment as far as possible, and then cut services and sack staff. In my university, when academics tried to call a halt to student recruitment, we were overridden by management. They do not listen to us. They have completely different priorities and don’t have to live with the consequences.

     Poor guy, he just doesn’t get it: admin are there to increase student enrollment, nothing else. They move up by stepping on your face, so, yeah, they’re going to step on your face. Every time. “Don’t have to live with the consequences” is key, because this is why admin do such horrible things. They’ll just be moving on to another school soon, so cares if the place becomes a joke? Only the people left behind will feel the shame. Again, if we drew, and kept, administrators from, and on, campus, this wouldn’t be such a problem.

      Trouble is, there’s an end game: soon most all campuses are jokes. Granted, at this point administrators will have golden parachutes, but for the people with integrity working at the schools, this isn’t a fun end game. It might well be a decade or two, but the ridiculous student behavior and bizarre riots that are everyday occurrences on American campuses will make their way to the UK at some point, I guarantee it.

“…by virtue of your position, you’re entitled to boss people around. But you have to govern by consent – you don’t get far by shouting at people.”

      While I lean Libertarian, one of my issues with it is the lack of empirical success, and more importantly, the empirical success of non-Libertarian activities. “You don’t get far by shouting at people” is basically a Libertarian theory—sounds good, but the reality is everyone in the US’ higher education has been victimized by an entitled boss who, yes, rules through fear and intimidation.

       So, empirically, you do go far in higher ed by shouting at people. That quote above doesn’t appear in a vacuum, after all. I again point out these complaints and observations are being made anonymously.

I think there can be some short-sightedness because they’re not here on the ground, talking to students and engaging.

     So much confusion and misery by workers on campus could be avoided if we’d just be honest about what the administration is there to do: sucker people into coming on campus by any means possible. No, it’s not their job to talk to students and engage, so stop wasting time thinking things will be better if admin does it. Short-sightedness is a feature, not a bug, in an administrator. It’s always about looting the school as quickly as possible, as many tales in this blog have demonstrated.

The university doesn’t appear to be short of money. There’s a lot of building work going on and increasing numbers of senior staff are highly paid.

      There’s been an ongoing insane building spree on US campuses for decades now, building and building and building and building, palace after palace for those highly paid senior staff. I know I’ve pointed out a fiefdom or two with a dozen or so Vice Presidents of Something Or Other And Diversity, making quadruple or more what any actual academics make…absolutely, ten or twenty years ago every faculty on a US campus would have loved to be able to tell the Poo Bahs to stop building palaces and stop creating so many Vice President positions.

     And in a few years when tuition in the UK skyrockets and total student debt soars to ridiculous levels…nobody who works on campus in the US will be the least bit surprised.

In the old days, people rose to the top of the pile. Being a vice-chancellor would be your last job at the end of your career. But now people are vice-chancellor for a bit and then they change institutions,

     It’s the same complaint, but from a different person. We know there’s something wrong with this system of hiring pirates to come in and plunder and move on, we all saw it years ago in the US, and they’re all seeing it in the UK.

      Is there truly no way to stop this cycle from happening again?

      I’m sure the gentle reader is wondering how the serfs know about all the administrators coming in and going out…I mean, these guys have nothing to do with education, or students, and there being so many of them, faculty couldn’t possibly keep track of it all, right?

      I wish. A commenter explains why faculty know about all these rulers whom they never see or talk to:

I love getting the emails about how sad we all are that someone I've never met in a role that appears to have no relevance is leaving to be replaced by someone else I'll never meet. Thanks for cluttering my inbox with that.

     It really is weird how every week I receive another notice about another admin leaving, another notice about a new admin arriving. They actually think the serfs care! We don’t, but we’re smart enough to understand the constant stream of shuffling means nobody in the administrative caste cares even a little about the institution.

     One of the many dirty secrets about higher ed in the US is how professors don’t really exist. Instead, most college courses are taught by minimally paid adjuncts. This, too, is now becoming part of higher education in the UK, even as there’s plenty of money for more palaces and vice presidents:

Student numbers going through the roof. But hourly-paid lecturing staff outnumber permanent lecturing staff by about 4:1. Stack 'em high and sell 'em cheap...

     The pattern here is impossible to miss. Assuming there’s anyone who can change things, I wish the folks running higher ed in the UK who care about human beings could take a peek or two at my blog.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Truth is a “Racist Myth”?

By Professor Doom

     I wrote earlier of how we’re being bombarded with false “facts” so obviously wrong that there’s little choice but for rational people to start considering what the fake media refers to as “alternative facts.”

      What happened to us as a people that we no longer can agree on even the most basic of concepts, like the meaning of the word “fact”?

      “We’re just one murder away from utopia!”

--the unofficial Leftist motto. There are swaths of the population that honestly believe that Stalin, Mao, and others of their ilk failed because they just weren’t willing to kill enough people. I’ve met them. They’re real. And they’re mostly on campus. Mostly.

     It’s clear that what happened here started in the schools, that the falsehoods taken to be truth were instilled in childhood. Childhood is a great time to present lies as truth. Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny are fine enough I suppose…but we stop reinforcing those lies after a certain point. Without the reinforcement, as the children get older they think things through and realize the toys and treats which appear on certain days are coming from the parents and not from supernatural creatures.

        Other lies get near constant reinforcement. I remember being taught “a little inflation is good for the economy” and “Democrats are the party of the working people” in high school, among other “facts” that are clearly rubbish, and these ideas were reinforced at least a little in college.

       In my day, such reinforcement was somewhat scattered (granted, I focused on mathematics coursework, so my opinion might be skewed), but now Marx is the most common author in college, dominating a variety of coursework. A student could literally be forced to read Marx four or more times even if his degree wasn’t in “Terrible things people thought of in the 19^th century.”

      For all its faults, the only country to embrace capitalism in the 19^th century managed to achieve a standard of living far beyond everywhere else in the world, despite the fact the rest of the world basically had a 2,000 year head start. And yet, in the face of this fact, our students are constantly told capitalism is terrible, and the best thing to do would be to follow Marxist ideas, and on top of that our students are forced to ignore the fact of just how much death Marxism causes.

     With such heavy reinforcement of lies, it’s only natural for our students to get the wrong idea about how facts work: they’re constantly being told that you can ignore facts just by saying whatever you want. It’s pure insanity, but unsurprising from students fed a steady diet of madness in their classes.

      The latest madness comes from Pomona college:

After outgoing Pomona College President David Oxtoby sent a school-wide email rebuking the actions of violent protesters attempting to shut down conservative journalist Heather Mac Donald's speech, three self-identified "Black students" triggered by the pro-First Amendment stance penned a letter to Oxtoby, condemning his words, and, yes, openly labeling "truth" a racist "myth." 

     Before going further, I really want to point out another reason our campuses are going bonkers: spineless administration. The Poo Bah above had ample opportunity to speak out against the madness before now, and was in a position of absolute power. He could have restored sanity, but waited until he was out the door to denounce the violence against free speech. If our other Poo Bahs would speak in unison, right now, against violence, and remove those who use it to prevent free speech on campus, it’d be at least a start towards restoring sanity in higher education. Instead they foolishly speak out against Trump. We really need to change how our leadership is selected, starting with picking stewards instead of leaders, but that’s for another post.

      The letter being referenced is well-written in terms of grammar, but rather weird in terms of logic:

Historically, white supremacy has venerated the idea of objectivity, …

     I presume the authors are against white supremacy, but venerating objectivity is actually a good thing, right? The logic is difficult to follow here, but nevertheless highlights the incoherence of the ideology, and where it inevitably leads.

      Without the concept of objectivity, how are we to determine right and wrong, or what is good and what is bad? Presumably, we’ll start with long shouting matches, but empirical evidence tells how this will end: mass murder. If we actually use “objectivity” as some sort of epithet, then the inevitable conclusion to resolve the shouting (and rioting) will be “just one more murder, and then utopia!”

      The letter continues to explain its point of view:

The idea that there is a single truth--’the Truth’--is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment, which was a movement that also described Black and Brown people as both subhuman and impervious to pain.

     This isn’t gibberish, at least, but ignores the fact that those people of the past, those seekers of objectivity, when confronted with the unpopular idea that “other” people were in fact human, didn’t respond with violence like kids on campus today.

      Instead, we realized that, yeah, the color of your skin doesn’t annihilate your humanity. That’s how it works, you see…you talk about things, you allow people to discuss their ideas, even if those ideas seem bizarre. It’s better than rioting and simply killing people with disagreeable ideas, honest.

The idea that the search for this truth involves entertaining Heather Mac Donald’s hate speech is illogical.

     I don’t even know this person so don’t know what her speech entails, but, yes, the search for truth means a willingness to look, and listen to things that might be uncomfortable to hear. There really was a time when it was radical to say slavery was an evil institution, but the culture these students are railing against allowed people to speak out against slavery.

      And these kids have been given the “fact” that the culture that freed them is evil and thus all the ideas of that culture must be wrong. On how many levels is wrong?

      Then comes the usual litany of slurs:

Heather Mac Donald is a fascist, a white supremacist, a warhawk, a transphobe, a queerphobe, a classist,

     Look, in the past, it was fact that slathering people with these names would hurt them, but now that basically everyone who dares to speak out against this ideology of hate gets called the same names…it doesn’t work. Facts can change, but not simply by yelling or killing whoever disagrees with you.

Advocating for white supremacy and giving white supremacists platforms wherefrom their toxic and deadly illogic...

     In addition to the ridiculous name-calling, the cry of “illogic” seems to come up often. These poor kids haven’t been trained in logic, but they do realize the word makes them sound more adult. Logic isn’t resolved by shouting or name-calling, you see, there are very precise rules for logic. If there was illogic, they could, if they understood logic, simply identify the error.

     As an aside, a grad student pointed out I was being illogical just a few weeks ago. I responded in the rational way (“Where exactly am I being illogical”), and she showed where I improperly took the contrapositive of a complex conditional. Hey, I made a mistake, it happens—I teach mathematics, not gender studies, I don’t punish students for telling me I’m wrong. I acknowledged the mistake, and then asked for a counter-example to further reinforce how I was wrong. She couldn’t do it, but I could after a few minutes. But that’s how logic works, if you’re wrong, it’s perfectly simple and unarguable to demonstrate as much.

       But we’re teaching our kids that you can shout at something as being illogical, and by some weird magic, it will become illogical. We really need to focus less on ideology on our campuses, and put more time into learning how to think rationally.

      The letter continues, but is fairly summarized as “we don’t like what you’re saying, therefore it is a fact you are illogical and wrong. And racist.”

     It’s  a shame the Poo Bah didn’t have the courage to do what needs to be done to help these kids while he was on campus, but maybe the next Poo Bah will put some effort into telling these kids “Facts aren’t racist. Go study something besides ideology.”

      Yeah, right.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

    

How Much Cancer Research is Fake?

By Professor Doom

     It seems every month or so there’s another “breathtaking breakthrough” in cancer research, with a miracle cure just around the corner. As a cancer survivor, I pay attention to such things, because nothing predisposes someone to cancer more than having already had cancer…one of those breakthrough treatments might be used on me, after all.

     Thing is, I was “cured” by a treatment protocol nearly identical to what I would have had 30 years ago…none of these amazing new breakthroughs ever seem to pan out despite the good press and published research. Seeing as I’ll probably need one of those breakthroughs, it worries me greatly that so many promising researchers with promising results end up with nothing in the end. What’s up here?

      Psychology as a research field was in the news some time back, because the bulk of the studies, even “landmark” studies by famous researchers, with results that supposedly changed fundamental ideas in psychology, cannot be replicated. Further poking around revealed some fraud, but most of the issues were dismissed—psychology is a “soft” science, after all.

       It’s not just psychology, though, at long last we’re finally looking at our intensely bureaucratic peer review system and realizing that something has gone horribly, horribly wrong. There’s been far too much trust placed in a system with no oversight, and much like checks for cheating in a college classroom often reveal a majority of fake students, we’re starting to see it’s about the same in “research.”

     But cancer research is different, right? I mean, it can literally be a matter of life and death here…surely when we look for fraud here it won’t be so bad, right?

      Alas, no:

107 cancer papers retracted due to peer review fraud

     Before going further, I need to explain why “peer review” is valued. I suspect the gentle reader has been led to believe the reason is because a paper reviewed by peers is a better paper, as other scholars have looked at the results and research methods and determined them to be valid. It has long been presented as the gold standard of scientific research.

     Rubbish.

     The gentle reader has been misled. The reason why peer review is “the way” for academics is because administrators with no education themselves took over education.  Since these guys know nothing, they decided “peer review” could take the place of having actual scholars working with scholars. The only way to advance, even survive, in higher ed as a researcher is to successfully publish peer reviewed research, as administrators have no capacity to understand scientific research, even on a rudimentary level (note: this link discusses what actually goes on in 8000 level research courses in Administration doctoral programs).

      But administrators with no education still get to decide if the research is worthy. Since they know nothing, it’s a simple matter to set up a fake peer review system every bit as corrupt as the (extensive) cheating systems many of our students use…no admin could figure this out.

       While administrators don’t have the acumen to detect fraud, journals are starting to double check the system, instead of relying on good faith. The results have been dismal:

The journal Tumor Biology is retracting 107 research papers after discovering that the authors faked the peer review process. This isn’t the journal’s first rodeo. Late last year, 58 papers were retracted from seven different journals— 25 came from Tumor Biology for the same reason.

     How do these journals get fake reviewers? Well, they asked the researcher to suggest a reviewer. This is not unreasonable, research topics can be pretty arcane, and you can’t just ask a random stranger to analyze a paper on variations within the DNA of the red-toed Hungarian centipede and expect him to know exactly what to expect.

     So, the researcher provides fake contact information, and possibly a fake name (or even the name of a real person, but the e-mail address is for someone else). The scheme is good, but eventually the journal caught on, because the peer reviewers behaved suspiciously:

“When a lot of the fake peer reviews first came up, one of the reasons the editors spotted them was that the reviewers responded on time,”

      Reviewing a paper sucks—it’s a completely thankless unpaid job (when scholars were in control of education, there was gratitude for scholarly work like this, but now, admin doesn’t respect it because there’s no benefit to admin), and if you’re going to do it right, it’s going to take time. So, “real” reviewers generally have to be harassed into doing it at all, much less on time.

      So, the fake reviewers were suspicious, because they acted like spending a great deal of time on a thankless, unpaid, job was really fun and interesting work. Now, the journal intends to weed out these fake reviewers, but this really is just the barest of tips of how bad the fraud goes…once you’re willing to accept the reality of how higher education works today, how desperate our generally untenured researchers are to get published, and how a higher education system that is jammed with fraud and corruption at doesn’t motivate an academic researcher at the bottom to be particularly honest in dealing with it. I mean, if admin lies and takes advantage of you nearly every day, how much sleep will you lose about lying and taking advantage of admin’s ignorance?

     They found some completely fake reviewers for papers they were about to publish, and that’s nice. What of papers published in previous years? Comparably garbage, one could reasonably suspect.

       Moving forward, even if we get rid of completely fake reviewers, what’s to prevent collusion? “I promise to review your research paper and approve it if you promise to review my paper and approve it” is not a difficult arrangement to make, especially with a colleague just as desperate as you are, with massive student loans to pay off, no job security, and needing to publish right away.

      That’s just at the researcher level, what about at the editor level? Editors at different journals can decide to swip/swap fake papers. The gentle reader should know that many papers are, after publication, read by a dozen people or less. I’m really not joking how goofy the system is; a colleague who I worked with at a minor institution started to game the system at maximum level, publishing well over 100 papers a year, year after year, using methods I’ve only touched on.

     He’s in the ivy league now, earning bank and still gaming the system with a ridiculous, positively ridiculous, number of papers published each year. You’d think an administrator would ask “how is this guy publishing 6 months’ worth of research every 2 weeks?” but admin gets credit for being at an institution with many publications, so isn’t about to ask an obvious question like that…the answer might cut into his bonus. This stuff is so out of control for the same reason we have community college campuses with 40% or more fake students on them, students that never come to class, but nevertheless get those loan checks and increase the enrollment numbers. Admin just wants numbers, and doesn’t care how to get them.

      I completely understand how the reader might think this is just some colossal joke amongst the pointy-headed academics, and, considering how much of it would be worthless even if legitimate, I can see the reader’s point. Seriously, thousands of papers on Shakespeare are published every year, and it’s obvious that none of those papers are life-changing, or will influence humanity in any way (but you gotta get those things published if you want to keep your job…). In science, particularly medical science, it’s rather important for the papers to be legitimate.

     While I grant that most of this gigantic systematic fraud can be ignored safely enough…someone (me, for example) might need one of those papers to be legitimate at some point.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

18 Straight Years of Increasing Student Debt

By Professor Doom

     It’s so funny to hear the leaders of higher ed bleat about how hard they’re working to keep tuition down. It’s even funnier to watch them get a 6 digit signing bonus, and, for the Poo Bahs, a 7 digit parachute when they leave, and constant raises and luxurious benefits while they work.

       Then the leaders shrug as they increase faculty workloads and cut pay: no money in the system, you see, too bad, but we’re working hard to keep tuition down. Maybe next year, after the automatic administrative pay raises (“Those are policy, we can’t change those…”), there’ll be something left over.

      One of the many strange reasons justifying their insane pay and bonuses is that they work so hard. Even though in every other industry, the economy of scale that comes with growth usually makes it easier to keep prices down, our leaders in higher ed have perpetually failed to do what any mediocre manager in private enterprise can do.

       How badly have our leaders failed?

In 2016, total U.S. student debt hit a record high for the 18th year in a row. Trump thinks his loan forgiveness program can help.

     Tuition is tracked carefully, so administrators play a bit a shell game to keep tuition down, by raising all sorts of other costs and adding fees to the tuition bill. All this money is paid for by the student loan scam. No matter how you shuffle the fees around, the total fees still end up being paid by student loan debt. You can ignore whatever they say tuition is, and just focus on student debt to get an idea how well our leaders are working to keep education cheap.

      Bottom line, if student debts are increasing for 18 years in a row, it’s because the cost of higher ed has been increasing for 18 years in a row…our leaders in higher ed have failed, and failed spectacularly. The rational thing to do would be to flush these losers away and/or end the failed student loan scam.

      We probably should have done something about this years ago (hey, I would have, if given the power), but we just let the loans stack up, as though “debts don’t matter” (seems to work for the Federal government, I admit…though I do suspect it will work perfectly right up to the point where it doesn’t work at all).

     Anyway, the article cites an important clue that things are amiss:

As of the end of 2016, 11.2 percent of student loans were more than three months delinquent.

      Like most everything else in higher ed, the above fact is misleading once you look more closely. There are a host of options for students to put off making payments, without going into delinquency. The most common example is a student  taking just one cheap night course every year—you don’t have to make payments on the loan when you’re in school, you see, so by dragging things out you can avoid being declared delinquent. It’s almost impossible to believe but more than 40% of student borrowers aren’t making payments. That’s quite a bit more than 11.2%, and way worse than any other legitimate loan repayment. Seriously, compare the 40% defaults of student loans to the roughly 2.5% defaults of credit card or other loans.

     Rather than do the obvious and shut down a system that’s obviously failing spectacularly, the article I quoted from above appeals to Trump for help. Trump actually has a plan, but it’s just another shell game, shuffling things around while not addressing the real problem:

Trump’s proposal allows for borrowers to pay 12.5 percent of annual income to earn loan forgiveness after 15 years; REPAYE has borrowers pay 10 percent of their income over 20 to 25 years before qualifying for forgiveness. A CNBC analysis found that, under Trump’s plan, borrowers would pay down their student loan debt far faster than under REPAYE, even though they’ll end up paying more each month to do so. Under Trump’s loan repayment plan, you’re paying more to escape the crushing cycle of debt repayment faster than normally.

      I’m not a forgiving person by nature, but I feel the vast majority of student loans should be written off, rather than just write and re-write repayment schemes. The bottom line, most of these loans were fraudulently given, most of the money went to the failed plunderers who rule higher ed.

      Don’t create a new repayment scheme, while pouring more easy student loan money on the table to create a new generation of high school graduates to be taken advantage of by the vicious crocodiles who run our schools…fix the problem:

     Shut down the student loan scam, cancel the degrees of the students who paid so much for them (and, any student who thinks the degree is worth the money will get the option to keep the loan and the degree), and then claw back the money from the schools/administrators who took it.

       Even if the last part of my plan isn’t feasible, it still makes far more sense than just ripping off more kids. The mainstream media generally presents any Trump plan in the worst possible way, but it turns out he’s actually considering (finally!) trying to fix the student loan scam:

But in changing the current parameters of loan forgiveness, Trump has also favored reforming the student loan business in the first place — reforms that may cause long-term problems. In a May interview with Inside Higher Ed, Trump campaign co-chair and policy director Sam Clovis floated the idea of getting the Department of Education out of the student loan market and allowing private banks to issue loans, a system the Obama administration abandoned in 2010…

     Absolutely, get the Federal government (and taxpayer) out of the student loan scam business…if private lenders want to assume the risk, they can do so, that’s at least a start to reducing all the hot money pouring into higher education. Naturally, this can only work if the Feds can stop giving so many protections to the lending banks, and instead protect the kids who will otherwise still be victimized by this system.

      Oh wait, the article mentions “long term problems.” What might those be?

…would likely exacerbate existing socioeconomic and racial disparities in the student debt crisis.

     But…this is what we have now. It’s no secret that the biggest ripoffs and scams are for-profit and community colleges, and likewise it’s no secret that these vicious predators target the low-income and minority markets. The system is already hurting the most vulnerable, and we need to stop that.

      Ultimately, the simple fact is student loans have been rising for 18 consecutive years, and that means 18 consecutive years of failure. All the tweaking of the system we can possibly do won’t alter that established track record of failure, a track record that in a sane world would lead to only one conclusion:

      Shut the student loan scheme down completely.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

A Quick Thought on the Kathy Griffin Thing…

“Mrs. [Jones] is a piggy pig pig…”

--8 year old me wrote this on Big Sister’s homework for her teacher, Mrs. [Jones] (can’t recall her name). I’d never met Mrs. [Jones], but I’d often heard my sister and her friends calling the teacher this name.

    So, comedienne Kathy Griffin professionally made a video and shot some photos of her proudly holding a mock severed head of Donald Trump. She’s apologized in a rather lame fashion—she says she didn’t expect the reaction. Whatever…this isn’t just about her.

     Once again, there’s a dog not barking which bothers me: this didn’t happen in a vacuum. The photographer didn’t say “Uh, Kathy, you know holding the president’s severed head like this is a bit creepy, and it’s not even Halloween,” and nor did anyone else on her production crew for the video indicate that such an act of hatred might be inappropriate in a country where half the population voted for Trump a few months back.

      It is very clear there is a distinct hate-filled subculture that lives in a bubble, simply unaware of the reality in this country. It wouldn’t be such a big deal, except this hate culture is very embedded in our media. Much as my hatred of Mrs. [Jones] as a child was an ignorant hatred borne from what I’d been told, I can’t help but suspect, very strongly, that quite a few people hate Trump not from any real knowledge of Trump, but merely from what they’ve been told, by a caste of media people so filled with hate that nobody down the line in the production of Griffin’s “comedy” noticed there was anything remotely odd about holding a bloody effigy of Trump’s head.

     I’m not exactly a fan of Trump but I find it sad how many have been swayed by the “two minute hate” sessions of Trump that the media creates, over and over again.

     I never did apologize to Mrs. [Jones], but in my defense I was an ignorant child, and never did meet her (sadly, she died of cancer before I was old enough to be in her class)—I did get in trouble for vandalizing Big Sis’s homework, of course.

     What possible defenses can Griffin and the media which have created this environment of mindless hatred provide?