Party Schools Exposed

This blog has moved to a great new home!

The Party Schools Exposed Blog has moved to the Five Year Party main page. You can follow all the great story lines there. Make sure you update your links to the new page.

Check out all the fun new features! And look for the book. It's scheduled to be published on Aug. 10. It should be in your favorite book stores, or you can buy it from one of the online stores connected to the new page.  Thank you for reading the blog during the past two years!  Craig Brandon

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http://www.thefiveyearparty.com

61% of college students admit cheating on tests

A story in yesterday's New York Times focused on the high-tech services colleges are using to detect cheating on tests -- spy cameras, web sites that detect plagiarism, even ways to locate cheat sheets on baseball cap brims. Check the story out here.

But buried in the story is the crucial question. Why are a majority of students so morally bankrupt that they think cheating is okay?

When I first became a college teacher in 1995 I was pretty naive and didn't think cheating was really a problem. I assumed that college students who wanted to become journalists had an honor code and that they were above cheating on something as unimportant as a classroom test. Boy was I wrong!

In the next few years I found that my students were inventing interviews for their stories, making up whole stories, handing in stories written by someone else, using their cell phones to cheat, using the classroom computers to send out emails asking friends to give them the answers, and the old fashioned copying answers from the guy next to them. I even found students were cheating on the attendance sheet, writing in the names of their friends who were not there.

When I found suspicious looking stories I posted them into Goggle and as likely as not the original story, written by someone else, would pop up. Students had to be dismissed from the student newspaper for this.

So there's no question it is going on, but the crucial question is why. Why do these students think the penalties of flunking the class or losing your job at the student newspaper are worth the risk? Part of it, of course, is the fact that adolescents' brains don't fully mature until age 25 and the last part to develop is the frontal lobe that helps people make these kinds of decisions. Work on my paper or steal one and hope the professor doesn't find out? Most adults would not make that choice, but many college students do.

When I caught a cheater I would always bring her or him into my office and ask why. Often they seemed to have no real excuse. Others said "everyone does it," which is at least 61 percent true. But digging deeper I found a moral bankruptcy that was kind of frightening, especially for journalists, who need to have a well tuned moral compass to have the proper contempt for official malfeasance. But the really scary ones insisted that they had done nothing wrong, that they would not hesitate to do it again. The only crime was getting caught.

These are the leaders of tomorrow and one can only hope that a sense of honor develops inside those frontal lobes at age 25 as well. Or am I sounding old fashioned?

Colleges become front men for companies seeking earmarks

When the House of Representatives banned earmarks last week they probably figured that American companies would find a loophole to get around it, but who would have thought that American colleges and universities would be the ones to help them do it?

Earmarks are the $150 million thank-you notes that members of the house use to thank big companies for their generous campaign contributions by directing no-bid government contracts their way.  It's just one of the many ways that special interests use to gain access to taxpayer money.

The real news -- as explained in a New York Times article over the weekend -- was that in many cases it was colleges and universities who were now being awarded the contracts and then passed them on to local companies to spend. You can read the Times article here.

For example, General Electric Company would get as much as 80 percent of a $2-million earmark proposed by Pennsylvania State University for research on clean-burning locomotives. The proposal gets around the ban by listing the university as the lead player in the collaboration instead of GE, a faculty member told the Times.

This is technically legal, but ethically it is bankrupt. At the very least it is an abuse of colleges' tax-exempt status and it certainly violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the law. Is this really where we want our colleges and universities to be?

Responsible faculty members should protest these deals and demand that colleges return to more ethical activities.

University of Illinois kills plans for $98,000 presidential sculpture

There may be some hope for college administrators after all, at least after the local newspaper takes them to task for their incredibly poor spending decisions.

Such is the case at the University of Illinois where the board of trustees voted to honor its current president by sponsoring a $98,000 sculpture of him. This comes, of course, at a time of national recession and calls for severe cuts in education spending. The U of I trustees, like many trustees around the country, seem to be so out of touch that they have no idea how this would play out there among the masses who have to struggle to pay the high tuition rates that the trustees set for them.

They could have funded at least three major scholarships with this money, but they always seem to find an extra hundred grand floating around somewhere when they need to build a sculpture or two.

The president who was to be honored, Stanley Ikenberry, is actually the current interim president and served as president once before. What happened to the president before him? Oh yes, he was a victim of U of I's disgraceful process of providing a separate admissions process for the rich and powerful, allowing them to fast track through the system that the "small people"( as BP calls them,) had to deal with.

Ikenberry gets points for actually calling the whole thing off. Good for him! And thanks to the Tribune for looking into this!

But the U o f I trustees, already burned for their underhanded behavior with the secret admissions fast track still doesn't get it. They had to be scolded by the Chicago Tribune, which began looking into the statue issue and was asking some embarrassing questions about the no-bid contract to build it.  You can read the latest Tribune article with links to its previous coverage here: U of I backs off plan for $100,000 sculpture for Ikenberry.

The problems with these kinds of boards of trustees is that they are made up of robber barons and captains of industry who often ridicule the "small people" and like to wheel and deal with their fellow captains of the universe. Think of BP's response after its colossal boo boo. You would think they would hire someone to explain to them how it looks to the real people when they do stuff like this before the newspaper takes them to task.

Why not put parents on the board? What a difference that would make! Someone to remind them where all that money that they spend so lavishly actually comes from?

Q. How many minutes are in a credit hour? A. 'It's mushy'

You would think that the groups that accredit colleges would have defined long ago exactly what a credit hour is. After all, this is the basic unit of higher education that defines when a student graduates and how much that education will cost.

Yet this week the president of a college accreditation group testified before Congress that the whole idea of a credit hour is "a mushy concept" that varies from college to college and even changes over time. The new on-line courses have made the concept even more mushy, she said.

You can read the story about this in the Chroincle of Higher Education: Credit hours should be worth the cost.

I spent most of my life as a journalist, so when I became a college teacher I asked my colleagues and my superiors this exact question. What I was told was that a credit hour was the same as a "contact hour," and meant the amount of time I spent in the classroom with students. So for a three-credit class I was expected to be in the classroom for a total of three hours per week and students were expected to spend six hours per week working outside the classroom.

It didn't take long, however, for me to find out that this rule of thumb had become seriously fudged. The classroom hour was actually only 45 minutes long, to allow students time between classes. Also students would violently revolt if I assigned them six hours per week of homework. So there were actually only two and a half hours in the classroom and two hours out of class.

But how much of the time left is actually spent on instruction? If you leave out the time at the beginning of class waiting for students to filter in, leave out the time wasted taking attendance, leave out the time for taking tests, you are left with about one hour per week of genuine instruction time.

I only began to think about this when my college changed from three credit classes to four credit classes. While administrators claimed this was nothing more than reorganization of time, students made it clear to me that there was no way they were going to sit still in the classroom for four hours a week. No way! "Other professors let us leave early," I was told, or "other professors make the last hour optional," or "why can't we use the last hour to do our homework?" Some students simply left when they felt like it and others went on "bathroom breaks" from which they never returned.

I think Congress is on the right track in thinking this needs to be nailed down. But when students who aren't interested in learning team up with teachers who aren't interested in teaching, the 30-minute hour is the natural result.

Tufts president thinks 'face time' will cure binge drinking

Tufts University President Lawrence Bacow deserves high praise for finally going public with his concern about his binge drinking students. Apparently all it took was walking to his office at 3:3o in the afternoon and finding an unconscious student sprawled on his lawn before being taken to the hospital to have his stomach pumped.

Pretty hard to ignore! But why wasn't he concerned about the previous 15 of his students who made the same trip to the hospital for the same reason or the 60 - SIXTY! - students who made the trip by the end of the school year? Well, at least he finally got the message. Most college presidents simply sit on their hands and ignore it. 

But his solution to the problem, as outlined in this Boston Globe article, "Presidential sobriety check"  is so outrageously arrogant that it's hard to believe. After binge drinkers return from their sojourn in the emergency room, Bacow invites them into his office for a little one-on-one session where he will personally convince them of the error of their ways. He talks to them, he says, as he would talk with his own sons.

Forget the counselors the college has hired to do this. Forget the decades of research on this problem that have been conducted a few miles away at Harvard. Forget all the efforts to meddle with the drinking age and to change the social norms of campus life. Dr. Bacow will personally solve this problem all by himself, as he tearfully told the Boston Globe reporter.

Forget it, Dr. Bacow. You can bet those kids will be right out in the streets with their red plastic cups as soon as they get the chance. Talking will not change the campus drinking culture. It took years for colleges to be recognized as a place where binge drinkers can safely practice their lifestyle with no fear of interference. In-the-know high school drinkers know they can count on colleges to cover for them while they drink themselves into oblivion.

The solution to the binge drinking problem is very simple one. Just say no! Just toss them out! The same students that Bacow singles out for his therapy sessions are the ones the president should throw out the door. Then announce what happened and why. Then add the message that if you want to engage in this kind of behavior you will have to do it somewhere else. Not here!

Why don't colleges adopt this simple solution? It's because college administrators are so concerned about "retention" of tuition paying customers that they are afraid to take any action that would damage the bottom line. Tossing out paying students, even ones that are dangerously immature, is just not an option. What if the college got a reputation as "unfriendly to drinkers"? What would that do for enrollment?

College presidents need to take a hard line on this. Until they do they can expect the problem to continue with all the dead students and failed lives that result from it.

Party school diplomas don't save students from poverty

A generation ago it was common knowledge that a college diploma was an excellent investment that assured a lifetime of financial success. It's a tough sell to convince people that in these days of party schools, education optional colleges, outrageously high tuition rates and crippling debt that the cost of a college degree can ruin students' lives.

However, the information backing up that theory continues to increase by the day. Graduates have $100,000 in student debt. College alumni work in temp jobs, delivering pizzas and working as clerks. In the latest blow to the party school industry is the revelation of how many people living in poverty have a diploma hanging on their walls. 

The Institute for Higher Education Policy found that 47 percent of young people living in poverty had attended college and 11 percent had graduated.

You can read the New York Times story about it here: "Many Young Adults in Poverty Have a College Degree."

The report said poor students go to college academically unprepared, and, amid competing family and work obligations, they accumulate debt "that could have been avoided by pursuing a different type of degree or a credential."

There it is folks! Paying off those college loans is putting alumni in the poor house! These students should never have been sent to college, the report says, because they are unprepared for the work and most of them eventually drop out, leaving them with no diploma and a big bill.

Who's to blame for this? Colleges enroll as many students as they can because it helps their bottom line. Freshmen are stacked into dorms like cord wood, four students to a room designed for two. They know most of these kids won't make it, but they don't care. These are students ready to take out big loans to pay the excessive costs of higher education. That's money in the bank to greedy college administrators.

What sense does it make to send 70 percent of high school grads to college when half of them drop out? Add to that the crippling levels of debt and you have the makings of a crisis. Or a bubble about to burst.

Student jourrnalist describes grade inflation

It's been my opinion all along that students are perfectly aware of the breakdown in higher education that is going on all around them. They know which schools are party schools. They know when classes are being dumbed down. They know that administrators will bend over backward to make excuses for them in the name of "retention."

But until now I was not aware of a student who understood the reasons and methods of grade inflation. Then someone sent me a column by Evan Helmuth, a writer for the University News at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. Helmuth has the whole thing all figured out. If he understands this, why aren't parents able to grasp the idea that a grade of  A is pretty meaningless when, as Helmuth says, "professors hand out A's like candy."

The especially tragic thing is the impact on the hardworking students who usually lived in A land all by themselves. If everyone gets an A anyway, where is the incentive to work hard to earn it? Helmuth understands this as well.

You can read Helmuth's column here "Grade inflation rampant."

And check out his Matt Drudge imitation photo!

  

Party schools' parting gift: A lifetime of crippling debt

The story of Cortney Munna, who was profiled in a recent New York Times article about student loan debt is typical in some ways, but not to typical in others.

Cortney, a 2005 graduate of New York University, has $100,000 in student loans to pay off and the burden is an albatross around her neck that influences many aspects of her life. She's been taking night classes that allow her to defer her payments, but how long can you stay in school for this reason? Eventually she is going to have to start making payments and has a lifetime of poverty to look forward to.

You can read the article "Placing the Blame as Students are Buried in Debt. "

Among the questions raised in the story is why New York University's student aid office allowed her to rack up this future-killing debt. Why wasn't she warned about how deep the doo doo was getting?

The article suggests that colleges should be required to discus the debt issue with students before they sign the papers.

But as Andrew Cuomo's investigation of the student loan business has found, predatory lenders and college financial aid offices are working together in what Cuomo called "the unholy alliance." College financial aid officers, he found, owned stock in student loan companies and accepted kickbacks for placing the companies on "preferred lender" lists.

Colleges make millions of dollars from students like Cortney, encouraging them to take out these life-killing loans by telling them that they will pay them off easily after they get their high-paying, post-graduate jobs. As Cortney found, those jobs often do not show up, leaving alumni with no way to make the payments.

Why would colleges warn the students that they are about to fleece? Colleges raise their prices each year and the cost of higher education is increasing faster than health care or gasoline. College financial aid offices act like loan shark front men, handing out the loan forms and forcing students into a life of servitude. Few students see the cliff they are about to fall off of until it is too late. No one is warning them.

Parents and students who want to know more about how this works should read the book "The Student Loan Crisis" by Alan Michael Covigne or wait two months for my book, The Five-Year Party, which details exactly how student financial aid offices routinely fleece students like Cortney who have no idea that they are becoming victims of a scam.

Missing from college curriculum: How to get a job 101

They've spent an average of six years at college and don't know much about grammar, civics or math, but today's college graduates spent tens of thousands of dollars to buy a diploma and now they're ready for the workforce, right?

Wrong, according to researchers at York College in Pennsylvania. 

You can read the NPR report "College Grads Unprepared for Workplace." 

Their study found that recent college grads went to interviews wearing shorts and sandals. The first question they asked? "How much vacation time do I get?" They refused to do menial jobs and would only consider jobs at top pay. 

This sense of entitlement is encouraged by college administrators who have bought into the "student friendly" curriculum where there are few rules, anything goes and students get to decide what grades they want and when they will go to classes. Education is optional and administrators are eager to bend over backwards to make them happy.

The world of work, unfortunately, does not work this way. You have to do what you are told. You have to suck up to your boss. You have to dress up. You have to show up on time. These are all skills that are not taught at today's colleges.

Good luck class of 2010! And remember: don't bring a beer to your job interview.

College president allows suicidal student to purchase a knife

In the category of "having a bunch of letters after your name doesn't mean you know anything" we have to make room for Darrel L. Hammon, president of Laramie County Community College in Wyoming for turning a study abroad trip to Costa Rica into a genuine nightmare.

When a troubled student became suicidal on the trip, Hammon refused to send her home or get her any kind of counseling. Instead he asked other students to take care of the woman during the 10-day trip. The student was a "cutter" who had to have sharp objects taken away from her, the students said in the report. Despite this,  Hammon allowed her to purchase a knife from a souvenir shop.

"After some negotiation and compromise and against better judgment, I allowed her to purchase the knife for her collection," Hammon wrote in his letter to the group conducting the investigation.

Yes, parents, this guy runs an entire college! Apparently having any kind of common sense is not a requirement for that job. Would he allow students to purchase guns for their collections? What about explosives?

And to top it all off, Hammon tried to prevent the local newspaper from writing about the report on the incident after it was leaked. He cited "privacy concerns." Readers of this blog know all about how colleges abuse the FERPA law whenever there is bad news to cover up.  This time, a judge ruled that the privacy concern was baseless or else we never would have heard about this unbelievable tale of college administration bumbling.

You can read the local news report here and look at a photo of the presidential perp. Or you can read the Chronicle of Higher Education story here.