Read The Five-Year Party Online
Authors: Craig Brandon
The Five-Year Party (9 page)
Given that most countries in Europe and Australia provide much more assistance to higher education than the United States does, the tuition students pay there is significantly lower. So when an American college student studies aboard, the difference between American tuition and the foreign tuition can be significant. If the student had set up his or her own study abroad program, the student could have saved thousands of dollars. When they book these programs through the college, however, it’s the college that gets to keep the difference. Some colleges even tack on an additional study abroad fee to pay for the costs of setting up the programs.
In January 2008, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo sent subpoenas to fifteen universities seeking data about how they determine the costs of study abroad programs and whether they receive cash bonuses, junkets, or other perks for steering students to particular programs. It turned out, he said, that there was a scam involved that was very similar to the student loan scam. Packagers of study abroad programs were handing out kickbacks, free trips, and other assorted goodies to administrators to sweeten the deals.
Wheaton spokesman Michael Graca said there was nothing illegal about what the college was doing. It charged all students the same price, he said, even though some courses were much more expensive than others. Everything evened out in the end. But at other colleges, such as Middlebury College, students pay the foreign colleges directly and the money does not go through the college, which can result in much lower costs.
When Brady offered to pay for the study abroad program for his daughter directly, he said, the college refused his offer and demanded that his daughter pay full tuition, room, and board even though she did not attend for that semester. If he tried to do it himself, he was told, the credits earned in South Africa would not be accepted towards graduation. “I think that’s holding the credits hostage,” Brady said.
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Cuomo said he became involved in the investigation because he was concerned that colleges had made improper “affiliation agreements” with study abroad packagers who marketed their programs to colleges. This came after a study abroad professional organization, the Association of International Educators, released a report listing “potentially questionable financial arrangements between colleges and program providers.” Cuomo and an association of international educators later came up with a “code of conduct” to regulate the programs.
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Because they have not been informed that Diploma Inc. party school administrators have taken over, parents still cling to the outdated notion that colleges will protect their children and keep them safe during the nine months of the year they spend on campus. Nothing could be further from the truth. As this chapter has shown, college administrators are hoodwinking parents and systematically fleecing their children. They sell their students out to predatory lenders and credit card companies that leave students so deeply in debt that it takes them decades to recover.
At the same time, they employ high-pressure sales tactics, deceptive marketing, and elaborate public relations programs to convince parents to pay the exorbitant costs of college tuition. Only one tuition dollar in five is used for what parents think they are buying—instruction. In reality, parents are paying for the very programs and people who are cheating them. For party school administrators, parents are nothing but chumps who are paying higher and higher prices for less and less education.
3
How Education Became Optional
T
he campus of Western Kentucky University, located sixtyfive miles north of Nashville, sits on top of a hill overlooking the city of Bowling Green, so there’s no mystery about why its sports teams are called the Hilltoppers. The college’s sports mascot, Big Red, is a furry Muppet-like character who encourages fans at sporting events to wave red towels in recognition of E.A. Diddle, a semi-legendary former basketball coach. A former teachers’ college, WKU offers eighty-eight academic majors to its seventeen thousand undergraduates, who pay $3,600 per semester in tuition. So in many ways it is a typical subprime college.
he campus of Western Kentucky University, located sixtyfive miles north of Nashville, sits on top of a hill overlooking the city of Bowling Green, so there’s no mystery about why its sports teams are called the Hilltoppers. The college’s sports mascot, Big Red, is a furry Muppet-like character who encourages fans at sporting events to wave red towels in recognition of E.A. Diddle, a semi-legendary former basketball coach. A former teachers’ college, WKU offers eighty-eight academic majors to its seventeen thousand undergraduates, who pay $3,600 per semester in tuition. So in many ways it is a typical subprime college.
Among WKU’s best teachers is Brian Strow, an assistant professor of economics who won the college’s 2004-2005 Teacher of the Year Award. He’s also a city commissioner, a former candidate for mayor, and an enthusiastic Chicago White Sox fan. He began his working career as a paperboy and has also spent time as a farm-hand, a projectionist, and a phone-a-thon caller. He’s married to another economics professor at the college. In other words, he is everything parents and students could want in a teacher.
Strow allowed a Public Broadcasting Service film crew into his classroom and the resulting footage was used in the 2005 documentary,
Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk
, to demonstrate what goes on these days inside a typical college classroom.
Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk
, to demonstrate what goes on these days inside a typical college classroom.
Like most college professors at subprime colleges, Strow has to deal with students from a wide range of socioeconomic groups, academic abilities, and levels of engagement. A few students choose his “Introduction to Economics” class because they are interested in economics and want to learn more about it, but most of his students, he admits, are only interested in earning some credits to fulfill a graduation requirement. The vast majority of his students want to do as little work as possible. In that way, his class is typical of thousands of classes in party schools across the nation. Dealing with this wide variety of students in the same class can be a real challenge.
“I have students in that class who I’m confident would excel at any Ivy League college all the way down to students that I’m surprised they let out of high school,” he said. He has had to dumb down his class extensively over the years to compensate for increasingly disengaged and poorly prepared students. The textbook, which used to be mandatory, is now optional. He tells his students that those who want to learn can buy it. Those who don’t care if they learn anything or not can get by without it. Most of his assignments don’t come from the book but from a magazine,
The Economist.
Even when his students were informed ahead of time that they would be featured in a PBS video, many of them arrived late and slept through his class. None of them asked questions or engaged in any form of discussion.
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The Economist.
Even when his students were informed ahead of time that they would be featured in a PBS video, many of them arrived late and slept through his class. None of them asked questions or engaged in any form of discussion.
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At the end of each semester, Strow faces a dilemma. The best students, the ones who took the class because they were interested in economics and who took the time to read the textbook, score 94 or 96 on the tests, which is obviously an A. No problem there. The slackers, however, the majority who didn’t give a hoot about economics, didn’t read the assignments, and didn’t pay attention in class, scored only in the 40s and 50s, which you would think would be a solid F.
When Strow adds up the grades for assignments and exams, the average for all the students in the class is about 55 out of 100. If he used the raw numbers and the traditional grading standards, he would have to flunk more than half his class. But flunking large numbers of students is considered a bad business practice at America’s party schools, where administrators are constantly chanting the “retention, retention” mantra and keeping students happy is more important than maintaining educational standards. Failure, the administrators insist, is no longer an option. It discourages students, makes them unhappy, and encourages them to drop out or transfer to another college.
Flunking a student sets up the professor for hours of angry confrontations with students who think they are entitled to at least a B just for showing up and who have learned that it’s much easier to cut a deal with the professor for a good grade than to study and do well on the tests. Unhappy students can mercilessly savage professors on their year-end evaluations of them, setting up additional confrontations with administrators, which could put the professor’s job on the line.
So, reluctantly, to make everyone happy and to keep the peace, Strow has invented a wonderful magic wand that he waves over his grade book to transform slackers into scholars. One wave of his wand and failing grades disappear and nearly everyone gets an A, a B, or a C. He calls it a “pretty big curve,” a mathematical formula that adjusts students’ grades significantly upward.
“A 40 magically becomes a C,” he said. “It’s retention, retention, retention that we focus on and for valid reasons. Most of our students are the first ones in their families to go to college.”
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Gary Ransdell, the president at WKU, not only defends this blatant dumbing down of class content and grade inflation but insists upon it to keep the college’s wheels turning efficiently. “The Commonwealth of Kentucky tells President Ransdell that your budget will be based on how many students you enroll, retain and graduate,” he told his PBS interviewer. “If he (Strow) wants to get paid he’s going to retain students. It does us no good and it does the Commonwealth of Kentucky no good for students to enroll and then leave.”
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Randsell talks about enrollment, retention, and graduation but leaves out the word that used to be the most important mission of colleges and universities: education. The justification for the dumbing down of America’s party schools only works if you conveniently forget that education is the reason colleges exist in the first place. If you leave education out, the whole process becomes a simple exercise in certificate purchasing. Students pay tuition to buy the diploma that the college is selling. You can learn something if you want, but if you’d rather not bother, that’s okay. They’ll sell you a diploma anyway.
Cooking your grade book to give students passing grades they do not deserve is so common at party schools these days that faculty and administrators don’t even think twice about doing it. The practice, as Strow says, is so essential to the operation of colleges in the twenty-first century that they simply could not function without it. Without grade inflation and dumbing down of classes, many colleges would be facing nearly empty classrooms and professors would have to be laid off. When a college’s retention policy conflicts with maintaining academic standards, as they do in Strow’s classroom, academic standards lose every time. Strow’s students’ raw grades show that most of them don’t know very much about economics, but Strow’s legerdemain grading formula pretends that they do. Although his students’ transcripts say they passed “Introduction to Economics,” the reality is that most of them didn’t really learn very much and are nearly as ignorant of economics as when they entered his class.
What happens in Strow’s class is repeated in tens of thousands of classrooms in hundreds of party schools throughout America. I have spoken to more than a hundred professors who have faced exactly the same dilemma: do you give the students the grades they really deserve and thereby anger your bosses and sentence yourself to hours of confrontations or do you simply make a few adjustments to ensure that students and administrators are happy?
While there are still a few holdouts who cling to the out-of-fashion idea that students who refuse to learn should fail, the vast majority of professors choose to give the students what they want. Strow’s grading curve is only one of the ways this works. Sometimes students who failed the tests and blew off assignments are awarded “extra credit” by generous professors. More commonly, the entire class is simply dumbed down to elementary school levels from the start so that every student can pass the tests without studying or even reading the textbook.
When I asked professors how they could justify this, many of them replied, as Strow did, that given that these students are the first ones in their families to go to college, professors need to cut them some slack. But this argument only makes sense if you believe that going to college in and of itself carries some kind of benefit, even if you don’t do any work, read any books, or pay attention in class. It seems to imply that knowledge can be absorbed by students from the college atmosphere.
What is actually taking place is a form of widespread fraud: certifying that students have learned something that they have not learned. If you probe deeper, professors who advocate this kind of grade inflation see it as a form of social engineering to increase the number of college graduates and hopefully increase their earning potential. Eventually, party schools grant diplomas to students who have not learned anything approaching what used to be required of them.
This widespread fraud allows party schools to collect the tuition money that keeps the wheels of Diplomas Inc. happily turning and avoids angry confrontations with its student customers. Everyone gets to go home happy by pretending that those high grades really mean the students learned something.
A generation ago, students who refused to read assignments and earned a score of 40 on the tests would have received the grade they really deserved: an F. Eventually, they would have flunked out. But in the twenty-first century, thanks to the influence of the new breed of CEO-wannabe party school administrators, higher education is less interested in education and more interested in keeping students happily paying their tuition bills, which increases their revenues. Failing students, no matter how little they have learned or how little effort they are making, is considered a poor business practice. After all, why drive paying customers away? Why ruin these students’ future by flunking them out of college?
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