A Millennial Complains About Student Debt

By Professor Doom

     There is much I love about working in higher education…and much I do not. I’ve mentioned things I don’t love about higher education “a time or two” in this blog, but one of the worst things is how my industry creates victims. When I first tried to get my book published, I tried to convince publishers that there were serious, grievous problems in higher education, but I could never convince the gatekeepers of our book industry of the many, many, victims being created by the student loan scam which has warped so much of higher education.

     The student loan scam has been creating these victims for years, and some are, at last, finally recovering from the hideous injury inflicted upon them by student loans. One has recovered enough to talk about it:

What Every Millennial Wishes You Understood About Student Loan Debt

     The victims of the student loan scam are complaining about what’s been done to them. I think the complaints are often quite justified, but some folks are tired of hearing of pain-in-the-ass kids complaining. The author of the above has a good reply to that:

You know what's really a pain in the ass? Practically owing my first born (and their first born) to Sallie Mae for my student loans.

     Education has been completely warped now. Allow me to list a quote from one of the great minds of humanity, Isaac Newton:

If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

    Newton’s genius did not come trivially. To stand on the shoulders of a giant, you have to climb, climb up the path of knowledge of those who have come before. It’s not easy, and education, real education, is not an easy thing. That’s what education used to be: very difficult, requiring years of study and effort by the student. It terms of money, it was cheap, even our most prestigious schools, a few generations ago, charged very little tuition (assuming you studied hard enough to pass the entrance exams).

     The student loan scam has changed all that. Now, “education” is now ridiculously expensive, and coursework has been defined down to nothing, in many classes. The student loan warped higher education from “much work, little money” to “little work, much money.”

     Now, many graduates stumble out of college after 6 years, with no ability to pay back a huge loan. The millennial explains how miserable this situation is:

There are only four main ways to discharge your student loan debt:
(1) Pay it off
(2) Pay on it for 25 years consistently then have it forgiven
(3) Work for peanuts for 10 years and have it forgiven
(4) Die

     Don’t get me wrong, “pay it off” is what should happen, but the loans are far too high, and jobs you can get with the typical “no work required” degree are out of proportion to the loan. 

     No, We Can't Work A Job And Pay It Off While In School

     Back when higher education was cheap (1950 Harvard tuition, for example, was $650, at a time when making $40 a week was quite achievable—minimum wage was $1 an hour), a summer full time job, combined with some work during classes and some parental support, was enough to pay for tuition at a top tier school.

      All the money flowing in from the student loan scam has driven tuition prices stratospherically—milk would be over $15 a gallon if it rose in price like tuition has. You can work full time while in school, yes, but you can’t make enough money to cover tuition that way, not at many schools, at least. The median year's pay barely covers average tuition today.

We Honestly Didn't Feel Like We Had A Choice

     The whole mythology of higher education is part of why there are so many victims created by this industry. These poor kids come out of high school thinking “college is what I must do next,” and unscrupulous college administrators (I’m not just talking about for-profits here) sign up these kids for crushing lifelong debt.

     An 18 year old cannot go into a casino and place a $5 bet on a hand of Blackjack. It’s the law, and it’s enforced. Casinos are punished if they take advantage of a kid that way.

     But, that same 18 year old, after the casino kicks him out, can walk over to a college and put himself into $20,000 of debt, in exchange for completely useless coursework of no value in any form. Neither the college nor the administrator who does this to the kid will be punished in any way…

     Again, yes, I think millennials have some legitimate complaints about how they’ve been victimized by the higher education industry.

     The millennial is right, we should not be heaping scorn on the victims of the student loan scam. On the other hand, on the schools, and Poo Bahs that run the schools, the scorn and derision should be very, very, high indeed.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

The Harvard Entrance Exam…and Common Core

By Professor Doom

     I want to talk about specific questions on the Harvard entrance examination, which reveals what an 18-year-old could do, in the 19^th century. Yes, the successful applicant probably came from the best prep schools, but no, this is not sufficient to explain the failure of our modern education system…we’ve had over a century to match the teaching skills that were “the best” we could offer back then. Keep in mind, back then a teacher was anybody that wanted to call himself a teacher…you didn’t need years of training and an Education degree to teach kids (truth is, you still don't, but that laws make it so).

     All those years of “teacher training” and the highfalutin’ Education degree should produce results; our 21^st century students are the products of Educationist research, they should be way better than 19^th century students.

      We’ve had these Education departments spewing Educationist muck for decades now. We’ve poured money on crazy hare-brained “new methods of learning,” damning generations of our kids to illiteracy, innumeracy, and ignorance on many levels. The failure of Education as a research field is fully exposed on that exam.

      Yes, the Harvard exam was intended for the best educated high school graduates of the 19^th century…but the simple fact that all our Educationist “research” now cannot produce even a handful of students able to perform at this level is very revealing at just how completely Education has failed as a field.

     To put this failure in comparison, imagine if the field of Aeronautics, flying machines, was started in the 19^th century, when the best we had were hot air balloons. In order for this field to have failed as badly as Education, our best 21^st century flying machines would be hot air balloons that can’t even stay aloft, and must be released at the top a cliff, to glide down, crashing in flames about half the time...

     And that’s what we have now, right? Oh, no we don’t. We even have space rockets that land by themselves nowadays. So, Aeronautics is apparently a legitimate field with much success to be proud of. Education? Obviously not. Obviously, obviously, obviously.

     So, the test. It begins with an extensive and detailed list of questions involving translation into Latin and Greek, with hints for obscure vocabulary words. I concede Greek and Latin aren’t as important to the 21^st century as the 19^th, but now our high school graduates can’t answer many of the test questions in proper English, much less any non-English language, even more much less do so with precision like “form a noun denoting the masculine agent from” and “Give the rules for the Subjunctive…” 

     And the Harvard applicant, 90% of the time, can answer these questions in two different languages, in addition to English. Educationists have removed foreign language from our childhood education, as well as English, and replaced this knowledge with…nothing.

     There’s more to the test than language skills, however.

Bound the basin of the Po, the Mississippi, of the St. Lawrence.

--yes, that’s a question from the exam. Try phrasing that as a “fill in the bubble” question, which is how our students demonstrate knowledge today.

   Next comes some history and geography. Again, there’s a focus on ancient history, and I’ll concede perhaps this isn’t as important now as then. But, “man on the street” interviews reveal most college students are deeply, deeply, ignorant of basic current events, rudimentary geography, or even recent history. Our Educationists have removed the old material of history and geography and replaced it with…nothing.

     Ok, so Education with its highfalutin’ “new ways of learning” gobbledigoop has removed iffy stuff like language skills, history, and current events. Maybe it covers the other topics on the test?

     Half the Harvard test is mathematically related, knowledge that I firmly believe is worth knowing because it stands the test of time. Again, Educationists have eliminated this sort of knowledge in our public schools (I often dealt with students who, in their first year of college, hadn’t taken a math class in 3 or more years), and on our campuses (where degree programs often require 5% or less of the coursework to be mathematically related).

    One more time, it’s very clear: Educationists have removed this material, mathematics, and replaced it with…nothing.

     I’m pleased to say that most of my third year mathematics students—i.e., specialized students who are dedicated--would do well on these mathematical “entrance exam” questions…but I probably should point out about half of those students were born in a different country than here (mathematical knowledge is universal, after all).

     Let’s look at some specific questions:

“One meter is 39.37 inches. Compute from this datum the value of 4 miles in kilometers.”

     Some questions, like the above, do require some local knowledge (not everyone on the planet knows how many feet are in a mile), but most of the questions really are what used to be high school level material, at least with a calculator. Granted, the Harvard students didn’t have calculators…but 90% of them could answer the questions all the same. Today’s students can’t answer those questions even with a calculator. That sort of mathematical knowledge has been removed from the curriculum, and replaced with—you guessed it!—nothing.

     The next question really caught my eye:

“Prove the formula for the cosine of the sum of two angles.”

     Some questions, like the above, require a level of sophistication that simply no longer exists in our kids. I had a “Prove this” question on a recent final exam, a far simpler proof than the above, one I went over the day before the test. While I grant not all my foreign students can prove things, not one “native born” American could this year, and that’s a typical year. I catch heat for asking students, advanced students, to prove things, but there really was a time when an 18 year old could think clearly enough to do that sort of thing, right out of high school. You can’t do that anymore, not even when tossing in two years of college.

      It is clear that following Educationist ideas has led to the intellectual castration of our children. They are no longer capable of reproducing rational thought. 

“Find (a – b)⁶ by the Binomial Theorem.”

     The above question really is high school level algebra (because I remember doing it in 10^th grade, and I wasn’t in an AP class)…but I wouldn’t dare ask that in a so-called “College Algebra” course today. I do ask something comparable in a 3000 level course, however, and most students can do it. Thanks to all that  Educationist teaching, it takes two years of specialized coursework in higher education to match what a general high school graduate could do in the 19^th century. 

     Does this really sound like we’ve improved our teaching methods? Let me state clearly the takeaway from the Harvard entrance exam of over 150 years go:

     Education as a field has devoted over a century to the study of teaching human beings. We’ve applied the methods of Education to our kids, and now we’re much, much, worse off than if we had done nothing.

     Two questions keep coming up as I look at this 19^th century test, and consider tests of today. How much evidence do we need to understand that Educationists have done absolutely nothing to improve the education of our children despite decades of their “research”? How much evidence do we need to understand that Education as a field of study has made education worse? 

      For me, the evidence is very clear that Education departments of all forms should be shut down, Education as a field should be reduced to the status of Phrenology, and Educationists should be viewed with all the scorn of TV Preachers.

      As a final shot: with the Educationist track record of complete failure, why does anyone suspect Common Core will really be an improvement? The Harvard test makes it very clear that if we simply abandoned everything Education as a field has taught us and reverted to 19^th century teaching methods—including using teachers completely untrained in Education--we’d be far better off. 

      I’ve been remiss in asking a question of my gentle readers. Allow me to do so now:

      Outside of Education, what other field of knowledge has gone so far wrong that it’s obvious, if we reverted to our 19^th century level of understanding, we’d be much better off? I’m hard pressed to come up with an answer, although Economics (at least, Keynesian Economics) is a possibility.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

The 1870 Harvard Entrance Exam…And Student Loans

By Professor Doom

     Every few months it seems, an old 8^th grade exam makes the internet rounds. The questions on the exam generally blow away high school graduates of today, and usually the difficulty of the exam is hand-waved away—“oh, it was mostly just local knowledge” and “nobody really passed it, or was expected to.”

     Old tests are a surprisingly valuable historical resource. Old textbooks aren’t nearly as reliable for indicating what students learn, since it’s never a sure thing that any particular topic in the book is actually covered. Heck, today’s community colleges are so unhinged that it’s common enough for almost nothing of the textbook to be used, and we know this because we can look at the tests and see with our own eyes what students are expected to learn. This blog might not even exist but that I looked at tests I gave over a decade ago, and realized “if I gave tests like this today, I’d end up failing the whole class.”

      A 19^th century Harvard entrance examination surfaced recently, and it’s a nice artifact of what people knew back then. About 90% of students that took this test, passed it. We really need to bring back entrance examinations, so that only people who are interested in learning actually end up in college. Old accreditation actually mandated entrance exams, but “modern” accreditation got rid of that, because it cut into growth—anything that gets in the way of those sweet, sweet, student loan checks has been removed from higher education.

     Because Harvard had such a “difficult” exam, weeding out the bottom 10% of applicants, it kept its reputation as a fine school into the 20^th century. Instead of spending its time on teaching students basic material anyone with an interest could learn in a few months, Harvard classes were allowed to focus the knowledge that made humanity great.

      On the other hand, the student loan scam got rid of entrance exams at many institutions—there was just way, way, too much money on the line. Sure, you could have an entrance exam, but that meant no administrative palaces or gigantic salaries. Not having an exam meant the Poo Bah could count on a salary and benefits package of a million dollars or more. Educators were fine with entrance exams, but it was administration that got to decide whether to have them or not, and well, we can see how that decision went.

     Entrance exams are gone, on many campuses, and anyone who wants checks can come to campus and get them. Getting an education, however, is not an option at many campuses.

     Now, on many campuses, 90% of the material taught is high school level, 8^th grade level, even 3^rd grade level material. Something like 25% of our “higher education” resources now go into 6^th grade level or lower coursework, assuming the course has any work at all in it. The student loan scam provides money for “college credits,” not education, and so colleges offer loads of useless coursework, producing at best, graduates with no measurable skills, and, more likely, dropouts…degree or not, they exit college with student debt, while the administrators  nigh give themselves hernias from laughing so hard at the suckers as they leave.

      We’re told colleges that have such exams are elitist, but the gentle reader should consider the following:

Just to the left of that admission in the Sept. 27, 1870, newspaper — a Tuesday — another frequent advertiser, Columbia College, was spreading the word in its ad that spots could still be had in its freshman class when classes resumed on Monday, Oct. 3. Candidates for admission, it stated, would “be received” at the college that Friday and Saturday, no appointment necessary.

 …students without plans in September could find themselves ensconced in a top-flight university by October…

      You could walk into top schools before the student loan scam, and you didn’t have to jump through hoops a year or more in advance just to have a slight chance of being accepted for the “privilege” of going deep into debt…you just had to know things. The cost of tuition was minimal…if you could do the work. We now give out piles of student loan money, and those top schools are inaccessible to all but the very wealthy. The kids that know nothing are free to deeply indebt themselves forever while going to schools that, well, are the opposite of “top.” This, regrettably, is the only “benefit” of the student loan scam.

     So what’s the takeaway from the Harvard entrance exam?

     That exam could only exist in a world without the student loan scam. The student loan scam has warped education, and instead of allowing anyone who wanted an education and was willing to work for it to get it, we now allow anyone foolish enough to sign up for debt servitude to get that, instead.

     That’s our first takeaway from the Harvard entrance examination. Next time, I’ll talk about the implications of the Harvard exam for Common Core, because it’s even more disastrous than the student loan scam.

     Much more disastrous, by far.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

The NFL And Accreditation

By Professor Doom

“We exist explicitly to rip off students as brutally as possible and we will deliberately provide no education in any form.”

--this could be the corporate model and official slogan of many schools, and accreditation would have no problem at all with it, as per their written policies.

     It’s been a while since I’ve talked about how even incredibly corrupt academic institutions are allowed to keep their accreditation, their seal of legitimacy that lets them rake in huge sums of student loan money, trapping millions of our young people into a lifetime of debt slavery…without even a slap on the wrist from accreditation.

     I’ve gone over, line by line, the accreditation rules showing how ridiculous accreditation is, how it has nothing at all to do with what people think accreditation does, which is verification of legitimacy of an institution. Accreditation doesn’t do that, and never was about legitimacy. Accreditation began as a voluntary association, the institutions involved became accredited because they were already legitimate, and had good faith going in that they were going to follow accreditation’s guidelines to become better schools.

      The Federal government changed that, by making accreditation mandatory for eligibility for student loan/grant money. There was no longer any reason to have good faith in an institution wishing to become accredited. An institution could literally have “We exist explicitly to rip off students as brutally as possible and we will deliberately provide no education in any form” as the institutional motto and seek accreditation…and still become accredited. Naturally, it might be best to look legitimate until accreditation is received, but after that point, accreditation would absolutely have no issue with such an institutional motto. Allow me to explain why.

      A recent click-bait article really hit home to me how obvious it is that accreditation is completely bogus, and has no relevance to legitimacy in today’s higher education system. The article is on obscure rules in the NFL (warning: click-bait article, many pop-ups and ads). Like accreditation, the NFL has many rules to cover even obscure situations. Here’s a quick example:

Be careful if you're trying to ice the kicker. You can't call two consecutive timeouts in the same dead ball period. Something has to happen on the field before you can call the next timeout. If you don't, a 15-yard unsportsmanlike conduct penalty is called.

     Neat. Note how the rule is precisely defined. Let’s take a look at a rule from SACS accreditation:

“The institution has a governing board of at least five members that is the

legal body with specific authority over the institution…The board is not controlled by a minority of board members or by organizations or interests separate from it. Both the presiding officer of the board and a majority of other voting members of the board are free of any contractual, employment, or personal or familial financial interest in the institution…”

     Again, the rules are pretty clear here. The board has to be at least 5 members, you can’t get around this rule by having members “in name” while the board is controlled by a minority, and you can’t have conflicts of interest (HOLEE COW is that last part violated with impunity!).

      Does the gentle reader see the major difference between the NFL rule, and the SACS rule? It’s in the last line of the NFL rule: a penalty for violating the rules.

     There are lots and lots of accreditation rules, but there’s no penalty at all for violating any of them, which is why you can see schools violating them, and violating them almost to the point of in-your-face. The Academy of Arts can have wild conflicts of interest in its Board, as the school pays huge rents on properties rented from Chair…it’s a clear violation of clear rules, but there’s no penalty so it doesn’t matter. Sweet Briar can get their board controlled by a minority…again, there’s no problem about this being a violation of accreditation rules when the minority took control, and I suspect that control has something to do with the mysterious bankruptcy and large sum of money vanishing. I could go on with similar outlandish violations of other rules, but it’s all the same with regard to lack of penalties. This is the big issue with accreditation, you can do whatever you want and you won’t even get a slap on the wrist. And that’s for violating explicit rules.

     The NFL even has a catch-all rule, very vague, that allows for the inconceivable, as much as such could be conceived:

A Palpably Unfair Act: …a palpably unfair act is any illegal action that the officials deem has clearly and indisputably deprived a team of a score. That may sound vague, but it's deliberately put in the rulebook that way. The penalty has never been called in the history of the NFL, but should a player on the bench ever decide to tackle a runner in order to prevent a score, the deprived team would be awarded with a touchdown.

     Even with the rule being vague, the penalty is clear. The NFL hardly has a reputation for probity and wholesome business practices, but still understands how serious rules need to be written: every rule must have a penalty for violation, otherwise it’s meaningless.

     On the other hand, accreditation had nothing to say about Penn State’s wild violations going on in the locker rooms. It was so wrong that the word “wrong” doesn’t even cover it…but accreditation doesn’t care.

      One might say Penn State’s transgression wasn’t academic and didn’t really affect students, but what of UNC’s wild academic fraud, affecting thousands of students over nearly 20 years? A fraud involving cover-ups (still ongoing), harassment of whistleblowers, a fraud so institutionalized that students were encouraged at meetings to enroll in the fake classes? Nothing, beyond a very symbolic slap on the wrist.

     So, indeed, accreditation is irrelevant. Who wants to fund me setting up my own institution with official motto of “We exist explicitly to rip off students as brutally as possible and we will deliberately provide no education in any form.” I’m sorry to ask for money for this, but there is one accreditation rule that I’ve never seen violated: failure to pay the accreditation fees. 

    See, the only thing an accreditor could do to a violator, theoretically, is to deny accreditation…but then it wouldn’t get those very lucrative accreditation fees. Institutions pay those fees not for a seal of legitimacy, but for one reason and one reason only: to secure that sweet, sweet, student loan money. 

     Of course the fees are paid, the penalty for not doing so is very clear.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com