The third myth of college

 

“You pay your fee and get your B.”

--description of less than reputable schools in my area

That's not the myth, though. Here it is:

"College degree holders earn a million dollars over a lifetime."

 

     This myth was posted on the walls at my college and, I suspect, is posted at many institutions. Money is a powerful motivator, for learning or anything else, so the intentions are good by posting it…but this is a deceptive myth. There’s nothing wrong with viewing a college degree as a financial investment, any more than viewing a college education as a source of personal growth. Unfortunately, institutions are not above using the myth of making so much more money with a degree to justify the ever increasing cost of tuition, and, in turn, the likewise increasing loans taken on by students.

     This myth is far more damaging than the others, and people honestly believe that because they’ll be ultimately making more money, it’s worthwhile to take out loans.  There’s a grain of truth to this insidious myth, but only a grain. If you subtract “super-earners” from the college graduates (the upper 1% of the top 1% of college degree holders), the rare souls that earn a great many millions or even billions, the actual average would drop substantially, but the true deception is the “over a lifetime” part of it. Allow me to write something that terrifies my students, and many administrators: let’s do some math!

      The average annual income for a janitor is $25,000 (and there aren’t any “super earner” janitors). Consider the six years it takes an “above average” student to get a degree. If, instead of going to college, an 18 year old coming out of high school worked for six years as a janitor ($150,000), took that money and invested it for forty years, at 4%, compounded annually, he’d have over $720,000. (As an aside, most incoming students, even with a calculator and the formula directly in front of them, cannot perform this calculation.) If this janitor could get 5% annually, he’d have over a million dollars and still not be 65 years old, better off than a college graduate, according to the myth, and with another decade or so of life still to live!

      The math says most people are financially better off being janitors than going to college, and yet going to college is presented as economically a good idea for everyone.

     Think about that: many a college graduate would be better off financially if he had just scrubbed toilets instead, and that’s not even factoring in the student loan, or accounting for those that don’t graduate. I’ve left off life expenses as a janitor, but life expenses for a student are probably no more than for a janitor. Granted, in the 2012 economy making a secure 5% a year is not a given—but with over half of college graduates unable to find a relevant job in the current economy, scrubbing toilets is still a better deal than being un- or under-employed with a vast student loan to pay off. If children were told a more honest myth, that “People that go to college generally don’t do as well financially as janitors,” would so many be willing to sacrifice years of their life and enter eternal debt slavery to go to college?

     Particular jobs (engineering, for example) do require a college degree, and those jobs tend to be higher paying. If you’re specifically going to college for the specific degree for exactly one of these jobs, and you can get that degree, and that job, then college and a loan does make financial sense. But to extend the favorable risk/reward calculation for these particular jobs to all degrees, even those in such generally unprofitable fields as Ufology, is foolish.

     To repeat the myth of how much money there is to be made just because of having a degree, any degree, is to repeat a lie. For institutions to rationalize raising all tuition for all coursework on the basis of higher salaries for a few jobs based on a tiny minority of that coursework is unethical at the very least, and just pulls in suckers.

The first myth of college

There's a mythology to college, created over centuries of higher education. Alas, these are now myths, though in the past there was some truth to them.

 

Myth #1: “You need good grades to get into college.”

 

“I hate math. I failed this course four times in school, why do I have to take it again?”

--typical complaint from my students.

 

    Decades ago, college or university admission was not a certain thing, and high school graduates would eagerly await the mail, hoping to get an acceptance letter. Applying to college was nearly pointless unless the prospective student took “college preparatory” courses in high school—what educational institution would accept a student who had not already troubled to acquire the basic skills of higher learning? A student with good grades, and having the appropriate coursework in high school, still could not be certain of acceptance, and would almost certainly also need high scores on standardized tests like the SAT and ACT. Even all these put together might not be enough to assure acceptance, and students wishing to improve their chances of acceptance still further would engage in extracurricular activities like charity, volunteer, and honor society work.

     Those days are long gone, because policies have changed. Now, “open admission” policies are common at most public and many private institutions. Online, accredited graduate schools like Capella require nothing from their applicants besides a check that doesn’t bounce. Grades and transcripts mean nothing in an era where grade inflation and widespread cheating scandals in high schools barely make the local news. Around half of students enter college unprepared on some level, requiring a semester, a year, or more of “developmental” courses before they can even take actual college courses. The amount of remedial coursework required by many students means the majority of incoming students won’t receive a four year degree within six years of admission. Standardized tests are no longer relevant to admission, instead serving to determine where in the remedial course sequence a student should go. Extracurricular activities are completely irrelevant.

 

    “Fill in this application form. Check this box if you’re a degree seeking student so that you can qualify for student loans.”

--the primary means of getting into many institutions of higher learning.

 

     Decades ago, having a child accepted into college was a point of pride for a family, since it served as validation of that child’s hard work. Today, getting into a college is about as significant an achievement as purchasing a refrigerator, and about as much effort. If the check clears, you’re in…and ultimately that’s all you need to get into college or buy a refrigerator. A far more accurate myth is “Any college will take your money, no matter what.” This hardly sounds better than those easy credit loan schemes by businesses of questionable integrity that are often advertised on TV, and for good reason, as we’ll see later.

     A child raised on this myth will, without good grades, enter early adulthood believing college is beyond his reach. This makes him particularly vulnerable when a recruiter tells him the truth: his grades count for nothing, a college will take him no matter how poorly he did in school. And so another student enters the college system, thinking he’s getting a “lucky break” by getting to go to college…when the reality is his poor grades in school were an indicator that academia is a poor choice for him, and that he’ll probably not learn anything that will help him pay off the loans that are paying for his classes.

      It’s little different than all the smiling customers P.T. Barnum fooled when he put up a beautiful sign, “This way to the Great Egress!” Ignorant of what an egress was, his customers cheerfully followed the sign to see the great thing. After exiting the circus, they were in no position to do anything about being tricked. If they really wanted to complain, they’d have to pay an entrance fee to get back in the tent. A few did so, to Barnum’s delight. Students likewise are completely helpless, years later, when the loans start coming due and there is no way to escape the loans. A few students, unable to pay their loans, take out more loans to go back to college. “There’s a sucker born every minute,” to steal another line from Barnum, and this myth is the first to creating many of the suckers in the higher education system.

     Every year I see swarms of students burying themselves in debt, learning nothing. It's no surprise that studies show even graduates often learn nothing, but realize that even the students who fail still have to pay exorbitant bills, often for the remainder of their lives.

The last myth

 

The Final Myth: “You need a college degree to succeed in life.”

 

“I had stuff to do.”

 

--Excuse given by a bright student for why he missed a test. I learned later he had a court hearing. He did graduate eventually, and is now a successful purveyor of recreational chemicals. I don’t imagine his coursework is all that relevant to his occupation.

 

     “You need a college degree to succeed in life” is the core myth, the one most responsible for so many people ultimately destroying themselves by going to college. Children are told in certain terms that they need a college degree, and this imposed need is why so many sacrifice so much for a degree. They need it, you see. Without a degree they are doomed to failure, or so they’ve been led to believe.

     I don’t imagine my generation is particularly special in this regard, and I’ve certainly encountered many students who firmly believe that to fail at college is to fail at life.  I remember one day when I was a child, and my father, not a jovial man, was visibly happy. I asked him why, and he said it was because he was now certain that he would have the money to send me to college: his son would have a chance of success. I was perhaps 12 years old, and he was happy to have achieved that goal for me. That’s what going to college meant to people of a generation or more ago. The entire purpose of pre-college education is to learn enough to get into and succeed at college, to succeed at life, or so we’ve all been told repeatedly. A look around at the real world shows how this cannot be true.

     Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are household names. Bill Ellison of Oracle is worth over $30 billion. Karl Rove’s political career will be in history books for generations. These extraordinarily successful people never completed college. Dave Thomas (founder of Wendy’s restaurants) never even went to college. From a business or political point of view, it’s very clear lack of a college degree or even entire lack of college education is not an impenetrable barrier to success. Alternatively, there are tens of thousands of MBAs, people with at least two degrees, who have not achieved any comparable success in their business or political ventures.

    Those success stories are of people that worked for themselves, self-made men at the very least. On the other hand, a student intending to work his whole life for someone else might still be well served by learning particular skills, very expensively, at a college, so that someone will hire him. While being someone else’s employee does grant a level of security, the risks there are much higher than you’ve been told—just ask employees of Enron (or most any Detroit auto-worker) how safe it is devote your lives and livelihood to a boss at the top who cares nothing for you. If the myth were “Get a college degree to go work for someone else and hope you don’t get your pension ripped off at the end,” I imagine a college degree wouldn’t be held in quite the same esteem, even though it’s every bit as accurate as the current myth.

     Perhaps my examples are all geniuses, congenital masters at what they do. Do you need to be a genius to work for yourself? Not at all, not even close. My karate instructor, at 71 years old, can casually beat me in a fight even though I’m much larger and faster than he is. He has worked for others, but he’s also been his own boss often. He’s had a barber shop, gym, rental properties, and, of course, dojo…done it all. He can barely write outside what is necessary to fill out government forms. Despte that, by any measure, this is a successful man. And yet, he too, succumbed to the siren song of a college degree, spending nearly 20 years of his life struggling to get one despite the fact that he has no real talent for academics and it never did him any good. I feel grief when I consider all the time and money extracted from this man in pursuit of a worthless degree in Criminology. At least he started before the “easy loan” craze that has harmed so many of the more recent students.

     My mother also has no college degree, and yet managed to run a very successful antique mall, sell real estate, and raise a family with my father (whose college degree helped him only marginally, as he quit working for others, retiring before he was 40 to run his own business). My mother never took a single college course. She also never did require an accountant at her antique business, which had millions in sales and many thousands of customers (my college, incidentally, even when it had less than a thousand students, still required multiple accounting professionals, many with advanced degrees, just to get by).

    The average person doesn’t need college to succeed. Yes, it can help, but the vast majority of degree fields will not financially help in the slightest, and a person absolutely doesn’t need to start adult life four years older and much deeper in (inescapable) debt than he would be without college. Only a sucker could be talked into disadvantaging himself so, a sucker raised from childhood being told he needs it.

 

“It’s not that I’m the oldest student that bugs me. It’s that all the professors are younger than me, too.”

--comment from a non-traditional student, nonetheless receiving financial aid. If all goes perfectly well, she’ll get her teaching certificate just as she hits 65. For the vast majority of students, all does NOT go perfectly well.

 

     Institutions now aggressively pursue “non-traditional” students. This is not an officially defined term, but usually applies to students over the age of 24. Certainly, 24 is young enough to re-tool for a new career, but I find it troubling how often I see students 50 years and older in my remedial courses,  “FA” (“Financial Aid”) marked by their name, showing that they’re being loaned money to learn material they haven’t seen since they were in the 8^th grade, thirty or more years ago.

     I see no reason to restrict older people from learning whatever they want but…if they’re truly seeking a degree for a financial purpose, why hasn’t someone done the math for them? It’ll take at least five years for them to complete the degree (assuming the very unlikely event that they pass every course on the first try), and they’ll only have a few more years after that to get any use out of the degree in the workforce. Going into debt just makes no financial sense, particularly when these older students, the few that have actually thought about picking an actual field of study, say they’re going for degrees in fields (for example, psychology) that have few job prospects, much less prospects where paying back the money is even slightly possible. Many of them quit their jobs or reduce their income for the privilege of going into debt—so now the lost wages should also factor into the cost of education at this age. It’s painful to watch these nontraditional students bury themselves in years of debt and college, because they were told as children that “good jobs” only went to those with degrees, so they believe they need the degree to be a success in life, and are willing to sacrifice everything to satisfy that need.

     Even more frightening for these older students is the little known detail that the Federal government can recover its loan money through social security payments. There were a mere 54 cases of social security being withheld due to student loans in 2000, but that’s shot up quite a bit in the last decade. In the first eight months of 2012, there were 115,000 retirees that saw their benefits reduced due to student loans⁸ People aren’t just mortgaging their homes to pay for a college education, they’re risking their retirement as well. While most of these people are at least paying for their own student loans, some of them are having social security payments reduced because of loans they took out for their grandchildren’s education.

     It’s difficult to comprehend the raw power of the myth of “You need a college degree to succeed” to overcome what should be obvious. Grandparents are destroying themselves to give a college education so their grandchildren can “succeed in life,” even as the grandparents in many cases have already demonstrated you don’t need a college degree to succeed in life. Even social security isn’t safe from the destruction of student loan debt. As the younger generation holds more student debt than ever in the history of the world, this probably will only get worse as the years go by.

      Anyone past the age of 50 and employable in any capacity, should think long and hard about going back to school and taking on debt for it, as it is seldom a wise career move. They should also be made aware of the risks they take when they support student loans for their children and grandchildren. Loan money changes college from a life fulfillment issue to a financial issue. Institutions won’t, of course, warn older people against the trap they’re entering, instead encouraging them to “just click the box saying you’re a degree seeking student.”

     Should people get a college education for personal growth? Sure, if that’s what they want. But putting loan money on the table makes education a different matter entirely.

     The pervasiveness of these myths in American culture created a whole population believing that college is ultimately desirable for everyone. These myths might have been true at some point, but college administration introduced policy after policy, snuffing each myth out while creating ever more suckers for the system.

      Of course, many people pulled into the system really aren't ready for college. For them, there's "remediation", which merits a look next.

The second myth of college.

Myth #2:  “You’ll have to work hard to get through college.”

 

HEY I HAVE CAME UP WITH A MAJOR PROBLEM AND I NEDD YOUR HELP PLEZ….MY MOTHER WAS DIGNOSED WITH CANCER AND IM DA ONLY CHILD AT HOME AND I HAVE BEE MISSIN ALL MY SCHOOL AND I WAS WONDER WOULD YU BE KINDA ENUFF TEW HELP ME REPLACE ALL MY MISSIN GRADES AND ASSIGMETS PLEZ!!!

 

--actual e-mail from a second year student at my college, yes, it was in all capital letters, and not the first semester where such an excuse was offered by this student.

 

     Having achieved the precious admittance to college, further prestige is granted to the student for staying in college, even if a college drop-out in times past didn’t have nearly the stigma of, say, a high school drop-out. “Dating a college boy” was a prestigious goal for a high school girl of decades ago, or at least was often presented as so in films of the era.

    The reality is quite different today. A full time course load at most institutions is 12 credit hours, which represents 12 hours a week of sitting in a classroom. Actually, it’s more accurate to say 10 hours, since a class that meets for “an hour” really only meets for 50 minutes. At my college, more than a third of students spend less than 5 hours a week studying alone, and only a minority spend more than 10; the overall average time studying is less than half what it was decades ago.

    Think about that: the vast bulk of full time college students spend less than 20 hours a week on college work; more than a third spend less than 15 hours a week. That’s little more than what a serious hobbyist might spend on his weekends building model trains or the like. Half of students report they’ve never read more than 40 pages a week in a course—that’s perhaps the equivalent of reading a few newspapers a week…again, less than what many people do in their spare time. Similarly, about half of students didn’t write a paper of at least 20 pages in a given semester. The first three entries of this blog you’re reading now represent more writing than many degree-holders have ever done in a single semester, a few graduates probably didn’t do so much writing their whole career. How can students be to blame for not being able to read or write meaningfully when they’re not asked to read or write meaningfully?

     Dropping out of college now is quite an achievement, probably more so than getting into college years ago. Failing college courses in the past was certainly grounds for academic probation, and failing courses in multiple semesters could easily get a student removed from college. Certainly, students could get in over their head by signing up for a course beyond their ability, so many institutions had “withdraw” policies where a student could drop a course a week or two into the semester, after he’d had time to see if he could handle the material. While available, withdrawing like this was frowned upon in the past:  there was often a financial penalty, and a student could only exercise this option a limited number of times throughout his entire college career (the limit was three at my alma mater). Under these conditions, staying in college was an achievement—the college student was clearly working towards his goal, progressing towards a degree, and had no opportunity to waste semesters taking and dropping courses.

      Today, the withdraw rules are very different, because polices have changed. A student can withdraw as many times as he wishes, and the last day to withdraw from a course is well past the halfway point in the semester. Under these conditions, it’s all but impossible for a non-comatose student to fail a course, and it’s no surprise that students commonly take six years or more to get their four year degree. What prestige can there be to staying in college when ultimately this just means the student drops courses repeatedly? Consider the student quoted above: taking and withdrawing from courses semester after semester, learning nothing but getting student loans all the same. If the myth were “A good way to waste four to six years of your life and be in debt forever is to go to college,” would people be quite so willing to indebt themselves for a degree?

 

Excerpt from student paper: “…a new double barrow shotgun. Like Doom, Doom II offers Multiplayer support…”

--This particular passage, with its odd typo, allowed me to find the old web page a student had cut-and-pasted from, and submitted as her writing assignment. The thought of a shotgun that fires great mounds of dirt, burying an enemy, was amusing, but I hardly knew how to respond to this level of plagiarism. I asked administration for advice. Response:

Administration: “Please allow this student to re-submit the assignment. She needs this course to graduate.”

 

    The other way to get expelled from college, cheating, is a relic. Even extravagant cases of cheating on tests or plagiarism often mean little more than a slap on the wrist; worst case scenario is an F in the course, but the student can retake the course for a higher grade. He probably won’t be caught cheating the second time around, and even if so, it’s still highly unlikely he’ll be expelled for it.

     While the first myth pulls students into the system, the second myth, that college is supposed to be hard work, traps students into staying in a system far past when it was clear they should leave. It’s such a pleasant surprise when the student finds out how many classes are complete blow-offs requiring no effort at all, and the looks of pride and respect from family and friends at being “in college” surely help the student to remain as well. Yes, there are a few courses that take some effort, but those can be easily avoided, or dropped if the student, through some accident, finds himself enrolled in one.

    To avoid taking anything too difficult, most institutions’ course catalogues have pages and pages of “elective,” content-light, courses to fill out that schedule, to keep students coming on a full time basis. And so the student stays on for years, long past the point where he knows he’s not going anywhere, with everyone proud of his “hard work” taking courses in Women’s and Gender Studies,  Human Sexual Behavior, The Learning Environment, Creative Expression in Early Childhood Development, Language and Literacy in Early Childhood, Child Psychology, Adolescent Psychology, Social Psychology, Abnormal Psychology, Contemporary Social Problems, Marriage and Family, Criminology, Human Relations, Fundamentals of Speech, Techniques of Speech, Personal Communication, and others (those are all courses on my tiny campus, just a sampling, and larger schools have much more to offer in introductory courses).

     I know, as a mathematician I’m a bit biased in what I think is useful, but it isn’t (entirely) the subject matter of these courses, it’s how little these courses build on each other or lead to anything else. They’re all introductory dead ends, or nearly so.

     How does the student take these courses, go to an eventual employer and say “My degree took 6 years to get, and most of the material was subject matter that anyone could master in three months with no prior skills needed, and I don’t know it now because none of it was needed for anything else. Now will you hire me because I’m educated and have a huge loan to pay off?” These courses with minimal entry requirements lead, quite often, to nowhere, and offering them really facilitates students not having to work much to stay in college, facilitates retention. I’m all for electives, students should be allowed to experiment with knowledge…but the system is trivially exploited to the student’s detriment (and the college’s advantage).

     The myth of “You need to work hard to get through college” traps the student, who thinks it’s an achievement to stay in college, even though often all it does is just allow ever larger student loans to pile up while the student takes pointless courses, considering himself lucky (or smart) at not having to work as hard as he thought would be necessary to stay in college. He’s not being clever by staying in college…he’s being a sucker, racking up more money for the institution.

The first of many things to do to fix to higher education

By Professor Doom

 

Administrator: To address the problem of students failing College Algebra, we now have an Explorations in College Algebra course which can be substituted for the original course. It doesn’t have the material the students have no use for.

Faculty: What differentiates this new course from College Algebra?

Administrator (without shame): It’s algebra without the algebra.

--another year, another administrative plan to improve retention.

 

For months now, I’ve laid out the extraordinarily thorough corruption of higher education, explaining how it can be that a college degree no longer is a guarantee a person can read, write, or do ‘rithmetic at anything like an educated level. It is time to address each aspect of the corruption, and offer some suggestions that can allow education to return to its status of just a few decades ago. Many of these concepts are interrelated, but will be addressed as sequentially as possible.

 

Tell the Myths, But Tell the Truth, Too

 

 “If I get a B, I will die.”

--student complaint, in all seriousness, from early in my career. While this used to be an “every semester”-type complaint, I haven’t heard the like from a college student in at least a decade.

 

 “You need to pass me. If I fail another course, I might lose my scholarship for being a good student.”

--the most common student complaint at a CC.

 

     Earlier, I detailed myth after myth after myth after myth of higher education, and if the reader isn’t familiar with these myths, please, click on the links. Without the myths of college and higher education, the corrupted higher education system would not have had nearly as many victims to exploit. There is nothing wrong with a mythology that inspires a people to aspire to higher things, but the myths of college, spread so liberally in primary and secondary school, need to be corrected and clarified, instead of ruthlessly exploited.

     Higher education, particularly liberal arts education, needs to no longer be identified as a source of great wealth. The posters of “college graduates make a million more dollars” need to be ripped down and replaced with “people that work hard to get degrees in engineering, accounting, and some sciences make a million more dollars over a lifetime.” It’s the hard work and acquisition of in-demand technical skills that are responsible for the money, not the degree. Some may argue that such posters may not be much more accurate, but the current situation of students pouring into campus, indebting themselves for tens of thousands of dollars getting degrees in poetry, art, psychology, or “general studies” (yes, there’s a degree in that) and then being puzzled that they are not being showered with money after graduation, while administrators laugh hysterically, needs to stop.

      For the sake of those that believe life choices should be about money, and I’m not making any judgment on that, then high school counselors need to stop instilling awe into students about the financial glories of higher education. The high school graduate who fixes my car makes more money than I do with my high falutin’ degree, as does my plumber, my roofer, and many other workers. Instead of the nebulous “over a lifetime,” students should be told in high school what the facts are regarding annual salaries, should be told that fixing cars, for example, is good and honorable work…and pays better than reading essays written a century or more ago. Someone who can recite a poem in 17^th-century French is not, as a matter of fact, a better person than someone who can “only” repair a carburetor. Both skills have their uses, and both should be respected.

     There will always be a certain minority of humanity that pursues various types of knowledge as an end, with money not a particular concern; at least, there always has been in the past. They are unlikely to be dissuaded by a high school counselor’s discussion of facts, and even if they are, they can always go to college after a few years of pursuing a fortune. This is a risk this country should be willing to take, in exchange for not pulling so many people into the college system, and tricking them into wasting years of their lives trying to acquire hideously expensive degrees pursued for the wrong reasons. Without the crowds of students blinded by the dollar signs in their eyes, these few seekers of knowledge as an end will have an easier time reaching their life goals, and those many that are there seeking nonexistent fat checks won’t be cheated and spend the rest of their lives in poverty.

      There are many jobs or fields of knowledge where degrees are necessary. These are the degrees where money is to be made, but this money comes from supply and demand—there are relatively few people that can master the technical skills of aeronautics or medical equipment design. Money thrown at such fields must be done carefully—a massive glut of even engineering degrees can lead to a glut of degree-holding waiters, much like today. It may be a national priority to support these people, but it should be done through targeted scholarship, not blanket provision of loans and “scholarships” for anyone that wants to poke their nose on campus to “study” any topic they wish for years on end in support of vague promises that “you’ll make more money with a degree.”

     Outside of the sciences, it doesn’t actually take degrees to achieve greatness. The great novels of the 20^th century, for example, have not been written by Ph.D.s, and only a few doctorate holders have been candidates for sainthood. It’s a big world, liberal arts education is not the only way to succeed in life, and students need to be told as much. Often.

     In short, the myths don’t really need fixing, they just need to be supplemented with a heavy dose of truth. Additionally, higher education needs to do what it takes to make the myths true again, through the fixes relating to the other issues. Doing so will reduce the number of souls willing to sacrifice everything they have for college degrees of questionable value. We’ll discuss those other issues soon.

 

Remedial Education, an Introduction to the Reality of College Today

The Myth of Remediation

 

A student came to me for my developmental math class, and passed, with hard work. He took me again for College Algebra, and Trigonometry, passing both. He graduated, off to a local university. Two years later, he came to me for help in his latest math course, Differential Equations.

--A rare success story for me. At one institution, not one student in four years went from developmental math to successfully passing Calculus I, much less Differential Equations, which is taken after Calculus III.

 

     A great scam needs suckers, and the more suckers, the better. It didn’t take long before administrators realized that the big, big money was in broadening the market, dragging remedial students into the pool of victims.

     The easily acquired and plentiful student loan scheme means anyone can go to college, but what if the student has little in the way of academic skill or interest? A popular TV commercial hawking college education has the would-be student sing about not doing great in high school—enough to keep a student out of college, years ago, and evidence the myth is still alive. It’s not just late night TV commercials that target these potential students (or should I say victims?) for enrollment, although there has always been some option for remedial classes at college or university. Only a few such classes were offered, since “in the good old days,” only a few students lacking in basic skills could nonetheless gain admittance to an institution.

     No matter the era, no matter the subject, no matter the class, there are always going to be some students weaker than others. Both faculty and administration were against students being in classes beyond their capability, albeit for different reasons. Even a few weak students force the teacher to slow down, and reduce course content, and that harms the prepared and hardworking students, who need that content to succeed in later courses…and the weaker students still fail. This lowers passing rates, which administration cannot tolerate.

Answer: “The Rapist.”

Question: “How does a remedial psychology student pronounce the word ‘therapist’?”

--Campus joke.

 

     An aberration emerged from the unholy alliance between faculty and administration: institutional remediation. The weaker students, the ones more likely to fail, would be identified and shuffled off to special classes, so that faculty wouldn’t have to deal with them in the “regular” courses. Administration could still claim a large student base, and better course passing rates as well. This is a win-win situation, in theory, and absolutely there needs to be an option for students that legitimately have reasons for not knowing basic material, material they’ll need to know if they want to learn the concepts of higher education. As long as the numbers of students requiring remediation are small, the system was fairly effective at giving borderline students a chance to prove they really could excel in a college environment, despite a rough start.

     In today’s college environment, entrance restrictions are minimal, so most anyone can get accepted into an institution of higher learning. Student loans are not strictly acquired by people who “want to learn,” even if they don’t know all that much to begin with. Instead, student loans are granted to anyone who can “check a box saying you are a degree seeking student.” Administrations at many institutions have become very successful at talking people into checking that box, and remediation has come to dominate “higher education” now, with a great number of incoming students requiring one or more remedial courses before beginning a real college education. There would be many more remedial students, a clear majority even, but administration has “defined down” college material over the years to keep this from happening.

     Even institutions with admission standards still admit remedial students. To take a college math course the student might need to score 250 on a placement test, while the admission “standard” requires the student to score 200 to get admitted to the college. While one has to chuckle at a college “standard” that admits students not ready for college, such is quite common. Having a great number of students going into remedial courses looks bad for institutions of higher education, but administration tirelessly works to fix this problem, but not in a way that a person of integrity might think:

 

“We’re going to reduce the score necessary on the placement test to get into College Algebra so that even the weakest students will be told they can skip developmental courses if they want to. They’ll still be competitive.”

 

--Administrator, explaining a clever plan to reduce the number of students taking remedial courses. Until I heard this, I had no idea that getting an education was a competition. This change in policy led to several disastrous years in the entry level mathematics courses.

 

     When a student tries to enroll for an entry level course, often he’ll take some sort of placement test to see where he fits as far as reading, writing, and mathematical skills. There are many sorts of tests, each with their own special scoring system, ultimately translated into either “good enough for a college level course” or “should take a remedial course.” Amongst the many choices, most institutions favor some form of standardized test, paying a dollar or two per student for the privilege of having an independent company quickly grade and administer the test online. These tests are far from perfect, but have been around for decades, with constant improvement by many private corporations legitimately interested in providing a better, more accurate product. They are quick, cheap, and about 95% accurate for determining which mathematics course a student should take next. Quick and cheap are important factors—the days of real “entrance examinations” for incoming college students are long over, students want to be admitted quickly, and administration complies. The advantage to online grading is there’s no need to wait for faculty to come in to grade the test; even if no faculty are around, the test can be administered and graded in a matter of minutes, an hour at most and often less. The 95% accuracy might sound very good, but it means that in every classroom of at least 20 students, you’ll expect one student was misdiagnosed by the test.   

     I admit that’s high, but institutions have no choice in the matter: they really need way to figure out where a student belongs. It’s not feasible to administer to every student a 3 hour comprehensive test and hand grade it (this would be around 99% accurate, and costly, assuming an incoming student would take such a test). A fast, cheap test that costs almost nothing to administer is a fine solution, and this as good a way as any to determine the extent of mathematical education a person received in 12 years of public school. To get around the “low” accuracy of the test, any student who complains bitterly enough can take any course he wants, going into remedial if the test says he should be in College Algebra, or vice versa. This event is rare, but happens, usually to the detriment of the student—at some point you have to let a person make his own mistakes.

    As hinted at above, administration hates losing control of students to placement tests, and is always looking into ways to take back control. The most likely way in the future will be through PARCC, a placement test that will allow students to place out of placement tests. It probably will be more accurate, as some parts will be hand-graded, making it harder for a student to look knowledgeable with just a few lucky guesses. A planned trial on 20 million tests will take place soon. It doesn’t take a calculator to see the amount of money being poured into re-inventing the placement tests is huge. Administration clearly wants this control, and a reasonable person might wonder how well they could be trusted with this power.

     A student that does poorly on a placement test, no matter how poorly, is never turned away. “No problem,” says college admissions, “you’ll just need to take a developmental course or two and then you’ll be fine!” Years ago, these types of courses were called “remedial,” and this is a more accurate word, since it indicates a correction of something deficient, in this case deficiency of skills and knowledge that should have been gained in public school. “Remedial” became something of a slur, so they started calling them “developmental,” which administration insists means the same thing, just not a slur. Whatever the name for these courses, administration certainly never tells students that fewer than 1 in 10 remedial students will get a 2 year degree within 3 years¹ That’s above a 90% failure rate…these are not good odds for making a low-interest loan. That’s just getting the degree, even with a degree it’s not at all certain the graduate will get a job that pays sufficiently to address the loan.

     And those are the successful students! 40% of students that start in remedial never make it out of remedial courses. Of course, the college gets the loan money, while the student gets the debt, so the college has no reason to tell the student such depressing information…he might change his mind about going to college, and there goes that sweet check.

 

“Someone’s making a lot of money off this. Not us.”

--Mathematics department head, at another daylong meeting addressing ways to improve remediation.

 

     Another dirty little secret of remediation is the sheer size of it. College remediation is a 3 billion dollar industry, and over half of incoming community college students will require remedial coursework (around 20% of university students will require remediation, but this is a little misleading since most weaker students get directed towards community college). Keep this in mind when a community is being sold on opening up a community college for “higher education”: the majority of the students there will be learning high school level material—material the community already paid for their children to learn in high school. Universities even have tried to justify rising tuition costs due to all the additional remediation they do. If remediation were truly that expensive, the university could just, well, not admit the remedial students in the first place, although administration would never turn down a warm body.

      Actually, to call the material high school level is rather generous. It makes sense to look at remedial courses in some detail, to make it easier to see what’s going on in this critical stream of institutional revenue. I’ll focus on the math courses since I know them well, although the situation is only a little different in the English courses. We'll start with 'College Algebra' next time.

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

    

The Black Secret of Higher Education

Something of a rerun, but it really can't be emphasized enough:

The Black Secret of Higher Education

By Professor Doom

 

 

     A great scam needs suckers, and the more suckers, the better. It didn’t take long before administrators realized that the big, big money was in broadening the market, and student enrollment has more than doubled since the 80s.

 

     In today’s college environment, most anyone can get accepted into an institution of higher learning. Student loans are not strictly acquired by people who “want to learn,” even if they don’t know all that much to begin with. Instead, student loans are granted to anyone who can “check a box saying you are a degree seeking student.”

 

     The easily acquired and plentiful student loan scheme means anyone can go to college, but what if the student has little in the way of academic skill or interest? A popular TV commercial hawking college education has the would-be student sing about not doing great in high school—enough to keep a student out of college, years ago, and evidence the myth is still alive.

 

     It’s not just late night TV commercials that target these potential students for enrollment, although there has always been some option for remedial classes at college or university. Only a few such classes were offered, since “in the good old days,” it was rare for students lacking in basic skills to nonetheless gain admittance to an institution. A student without basic reading, writing, or arithmetic skills could get in, but thirty years ago, if he didn’t catch up quickly, the university would prevent him from destroying his finances and life. Nowadays there are many sections of remedial courses taught each semester, often more than sections for “college” courses. These courses generally move slower than normal courses, since administration thinks when a student is behind, he’ll catch up by slowing down. These poor souls spend years wandering from one remedial course to another, only to get destroyed by the pace of real college courses when they finally make it.

       

     Administrations at many institutions have become very successful at talking people into checking that box, and remediation--administration likes to use the word “developmental”, but I’ll stick with the correct word, “remedial”--has come to dominate “higher education” now. Around half of incoming students require remediation. It would be a clear majority, but college material has been defined down quite a bit (the first year courses I took in the 80s are now second or third year courses, and even some graduate courses are little different than what used to be first year courses).

 

     College student population has more than doubled…but most students are remedial. It follows then that the growth of the student base in higher education has been due to the elimination of standards.

 

     Even institutions that still have admission standards still admit remedial students. To take a college math course the student might need to score 250 on a placement test, while the admission “standard” requires the student to score 200 to get admitted to the college. While one has to chuckle at a college “standard” that admits students not ready for college, such is quite common. Having a great number of students going into remedial courses looks bad for institutions of higher education, but administration tirelessly works to fix this problem, but not in a way that a person of integrity might think:

 

 

“We’re going to reduce the score necessary on the placement test to get into College Algebra so that even the weakest students will be told they can skip developmental courses if they want to. They’ll still be competitive.”

 

--Administrator, explaining a clever plan to reduce the number of students taking remedial courses. Until I heard this, I had no idea that getting an education was a competition. This change in policy led to several disastrous years in the entry level mathematics courses.

 

 

     So what is a remedial student? When a student enrolls, often he’ll take some sort of placement test to see where he fits as far as reading, writing, and mathematical skills. There are many sorts of tests, each with their own special scoring system, ultimately translated into either “good enough for a college level course” or “should take a remedial course.” Most institutions favor some form of standardized test, paying a dollar or two per student for the privilege of having an independent company quickly grade and administer the test online.

 

     These tests are far from perfect, but have been around for years, with constant improvement by many private corporations legitimately interested in providing a better, more accurate product. They are quick, cheap, and about 95% accurate for determining which course a student should take. Quick and cheap are important factors—the days of real “entrance examinations” for incoming college students are long over, students want to be admitted quickly, and administration complies. The 95% accuracy might sound very good, but it means that in every classroom of at least 20 students, you’ll expect one student was misdiagnosed by the test. Not perfect, but good enough, all things considered.

 

     As hinted at above, administration hates losing control of students to placement tests, and is always looking into ways to gain more control. The most likely way in the future will be through PARCC, a placement test that will allow students to place out of placement tests. It doesn’t take a calculator to see the amount of money being poured into re-inventing and centralizing the placement tests is huge. Administration clearly wants this control, and a reasonable person might wonder how well they could be trusted with this power.

 

     A student that does poorly on a placement test, no matter how poorly, is never turned away. Never. “No problem,” says college admissions, “you’ll just need to take a developmental course or two and then you’ll be fine!”…as though a person that’s blown off education for twelve years is really going to make it all up in a few months.

 

     So higher education is mostly about remediation, but does it really help these people? The answer comes from the black secret of higher education today:

 

      Fewer than 1 in 10 remedial students will get a 2 year degree within 3 years¹.

 

     That’s above a 90% failure rate, achieved (sic) after the student has wasted 3 years of his life in school, quite possibly after the college soaks up $20,000 or more in loans. All the growth in “higher education” is in remedial students, and they’re being horribly abused by the system.

 

     If there were any integrity to higher education, administrators would look at the 90% victimization rate and say “we need to stop doing this.” Instead, the bar just gets lower and lower and lower…administration responds to failure by increasing the amount of failure. One might well conclude they just want the checks and don’t actually care about the students at all.

 

     Let’s compare this kind of abuse of the customer to another industry. Depending on various factors, around 20% of smokers get lung cancer eventually over the course of a lifetime…this rate is so high that the institutions which promote smoking, tobacco companies, are considered evil for creating so many victims.

 

      More than 90% of remedial students waste years of their lives and bury themselves in debt by getting sucked into higher education…what word describes the institutions that create a much higher rate of victims than tobacco companies?

 

Here’s a chart to put things in perspective for a remedial student:

 

 

>90% Chance of a remedial student wasting 3 years of his life with nothing to show for it

 

67% Chance of dying after a stab wound to the heart

 

52% Chance of dying after a stage 4 colon cancer diagnosis

 

30% Chance of dying within 5 years of a heart transplant

 

20% Chance of a smoker getting lung cancer

 

<10% Chance of dying after being hit by lightning

 

     Now, getting stabbed in the heart or struck by lightning are activities people should avoid…and yet remedial students are actually encouraged to go to college. There are surgeon general’s warnings on packs of cigarettes. Why aren’t remedial students warned about the disastrous side-effects of college loans?

 

     40% of students that start in remedial never make it out of remedial courses. Of course, the college gets the loan money, while the student gets the debt, so the college has no reason to tell the student such depressing information…he might change his mind about going to college, and there goes that sweet check.


 

 

“Someone’s making a lot of money off this. Not us.”

--Mathematics department head, at another daylong meeting addressing ways to improve remediation.

 

     Added to the high failure rate is a massive double-dipping factor. When a community is being sold on opening up a community college for “higher education,” or paying for a university to expand its capacity for students, it’s never mentioned that the majority of the courses will be high school (or lower) level material—material the community already paid for their children to learn in high school or earlier. The community’s tax dollars pay for the institution, which re-teaches (at best) the material that the students didn’t want to learn when they were children.

 

     The people building these institutions don’t warn about the double-dipping to the communities supporting them. Likewise, the remedial students will never be warned about the grim odds and disaster they face when they check the box asking for student loans.

 

     Higher education loan programs were sold to the American public as a great opportunity to advance into a higher class, but it’s turned into a massive scheme to take advantage of the most vulnerable members of the public, indebting them so deeply, so permanently, that they’ll never be anything but broke. Is this what higher education is supposed to be all about?

 

Think about it.

 

 

 

1.       See Remediation: Higher Education's Bridge to Nowhere, available online; the results come from looking at data from millions of students. Everyone in education has known for years that remediation is a disaster, but here’s a study that shows it unarguably.