Party Schools Exposed

We're sending too many students to the wrong kind of college

In a national debate begun by the Chronicle of Eduction and continued this week in the New York Times, the question is finally being raised: Are we sending too many students to college?

For me, the answer is that we are sending too many students to the WRONG KIND of college. We send too many unprepared, disengaged and academically challenged high school grads to four-year liberal arts colleges where they are in over their heads. Sending all those unprepared students to this kind of college is an open invitation to  dumb down the curriculum and inflate grades so that these students can purchase diplomas with their tuition money, even though they learn very little.

The real victims here are the students who really should be at this kind of college, roughly 10 percent, according to the National Survey of Student Engagement. These students want to learn but find themselves victimized by the party school majority who want to dumb things down, eliminate requirements and turn campuses into hedonistic country clubs. College administrators, interested in filling as many seats as possible to increase their operating revenue,  are only too happy to give their party crowd customers the dumbed down curriculum they say they want. 

While I agree with President Obama that every high school student should go to college,  "college" is not limited to four-year residential campuses where intoxicated adolescents are allowed to run wild. "College" also includes two-year community colleges and technical schools which prepare students for specific careers. From my dozen years working at a four-year party school, this is exactly what most of my students were really looking for. These students  weren't interested in academics, knowledge for its own sake or intellectual pursuits. They were interested in careers where they could make a living. They would have been much happier and much better off in a community college.

So why do so many of the 69 percent of high school graduates who go to college end up at four-year residential colleges where they spend six years drinking themselves into oblivion while running up huge student loan debts? I think it's really an image problem. The public believes that four-year liberal arts colleges are the cream of the crop, where the best children go to be educated to be the leaders of tomorrow. Community colleges, on the other hand, are thought to be where the kids went who couldn't get into a four-year school. 

National statistics, however, show how outdated that image is. In 21st century America we have many more four-year college grads than we have jobs for. We have taxi drivers and pizza deliverers with four-year degrees who can't pay off their student loans. The middle manager jobs that used to be available for recent four-year grads have been downsized or sent off shore. Instead, four-year graduates are locked into dead-end jobs in cubicles or temp jobs with no benefits, no job security and no future.

Community college graduates, on the other hand, can walk into well-paid  careers as medical records technicians, computer systems managers, registered nurses and car mechanics. These colleges train students for careers while four-year colleges teach students how to make Jell-o shots. And because their educations are a lot less expensive they don't have a high student loan debt to carry around for a decade or more.

What needs to change is the public's perception that four-year colleges are the Mercedes Benzes of higher education while community colleges are the Volkswagens.  What we need to do is make a better effort to match students' abilities, talents and educational engagement with appropriate forms of education. Not everyone needs or can afford a Mercedes. For most of us, a Volkswagen is a better choice. It costs a lot less, costs less to maintain and does a fine job of getting us where we want to go.

Parents sue fraternity and university over student's hazing death

One of the mysteries of academia that is explained in my book is why college administrators continue to tolerate,  endorse and even support financially the operation of fraternities, which are nothing more than deadly street gangs involved in gang rape, providing alcohol to minors, drug dealing and hazing deaths.

The latter was in the news this week when it was made public that the parents of Donnie Wade, a student at Prairie View A & M University in Texas, was suing the university and  Phi Beta Sigma fraternity for causing Donnie's death in an early morning hazing incident.

Readers of this blog know that this death is one of hundreds of similar deaths that have taken place over the last three years as part of fraternity hazing rituals involving forced consumption of alcohol, branding with hot coat hangers and forced exposure to hot and cold. These incidents only make the news when a student dies, but, believe me, they take place on campus all the time. And it's not just fraternities. Marching bands and athletic teams also haze their incoming members.

Hazing rituals, which are illegal in most states, are carried out by immature and irresponsible sadists who know that the college will let them get away with it. But why would administrators endorse and support organizations whose main functions consist of criminal activity and torturing students to death?

When I ask college administrators about this, they say that as long as fraternities maintain their ties to the college there is some hope of working with them to change their ways. Well, we can see how well THAT worked. If they suspended fraternities the brothers would simply move their illegal activities off campus where they would be beyond the college's reach, they say.

The real reason, however, is that fraternities serve an important function in party school culture. Many potential students whose purpose in going to college is to experience what Forbes magazine called the "country club campus" of non-stop hedonism, actually choose colleges because of the fraternities. At party schools, fraternities serve not only as illegal entertainment directors but as a potent anti-intellectual force reminding administrators and students alike that without drunken debauchery party school campuses would become ghost towns. Irresponsible students choose colleges for their entertainment value rather than educational standing and the more fraternities there are, the more likely it is to be a party school.

Since the negative publicity that hazing deaths create for colleges doesn't seem to be doing the trick, perhaps the blood money that Prairie View is now going to have to cough up to reimburse the Wade family for killing their son will have some impact.  After all, money remains on of the few things that college administrators care about these days.

Party school campuses have their own bizarre social rules

Party school campuses operate under some rather bizarre social rules that would be entirely out of place in the outside world. They are, for example, the last places in America where being publicly intoxicated is accepted as normal behavior.

They also operate under the "stop snitchin" rules of urban gang culture where cooperating with police or other authorities can lead to social ostracism, a fate considered worse than death. This came up last week in the case of the UConn football player who was stabbed to death. There was an organized campaign to keep students from cooperating with the investigation. Thankfully, at least in this case, a number of students came forward to tell what they knew.

In most cases, students' refusal to cooperate in crime investigations combines with the colleges' efforts under the FERPA law to keep all campus crime under the radar to keep the public from finding out exactly how dangerous college campuses have become. Rapes, assaults, drug dealing and alcohol violations occur nearly daily, but the culture of silence and the colleges' secret judicial boards keep the public from finding out about these crimes.

Every once in a while, however, party school culture comes into conflict with the real world and can lead to some fascinating results. That seems to be what happened when Binghamton University's student leaders showed up last week for a meeting with other SUNY college leaders.

You might think that Binghamton, which is in the news nearly every day due to the antics of its basketball program and the president's wacky obsession with sending a team to the NCAA finals, would be on its best behavior these days, with the spotlight shining on it so intensely.  Not so, apparently.

The student leaders from Binghamton showed up at the SUNY meeting with some unusual refreshments: glasses of beer. While they all were apparently over 21, and therefore above the drinking age, they apparently thought that packing away a few frosty brewskies during the meeting was a good way to pass the time. Hey, we're college students, man! This is what we do, dude! Lighten up!

The students from the other SUNY campuses were not amused and voted to dismiss the three Binghamton students from the meeting. So it goes in party school land. Remember these are not some slackers, these are Binghamton's official student leaders. You know, like the leaders of tomorrow? God help us!  Thanks to MK for sending me this story about it from the Binghamton Press and Sun-Bulletin.

Public college tuition is up 6.5 percent, despite decline in cost of living

It's a well-established rule of economics that the cost of living declines during a recession, so why is college tuition continuing its out-of-control surge at three times the inflation rate? Unfortunately, the reason is that uninformed parents continue to pay the predatory cost of a product that has lost its real value. 

The College Board released the numbers this week and you can read about it in this New York Times article, which quotes an official saying that the amount of debt that students and parents are taking on is "unsustainable." It's no secret that students are taking out ever higher levels of loans and parents are taking out second mortgages and raiding their retirement accounts to pay tuition bills.

When asked why the price of a college education continues its monumental climb into the stratosphere, Sandy Baum, the College Board's chief apologist for predatory college administrators, says its because states are cutting back their aid to education. But states are cutting back their aid to everything. At most organizations this results in cost cutting measures. It's only in state-supported schools that the cost is passed on directly to the consumers.

There are really two reasons why college tuition is spiraling out of control. The first is the non-stop campus construction frenzy that continues to add student centers, alumni centers, water parks, climbing walls, hot tubs, luxury condominiums and gourmet food courts. This is part of colleges' marketing efforts to attract students who are more interested in finding a place to party than a place to study. Just take a look at any state college campus and you are likely to see cranes and construction barriers busily adding the latest campus frill, which usually has nothing at all to do with education. The cost of all this is added directly to tuition bills.

The second reason is the spiraling cost of college administration. There are no national estimates on this, but at a few colleges where studies were conducted, in North Carolina and New Mexico, administrative costs were found to have increased over 30 percent in five years. This isn't just administrators using tuition money to build themselves million-dollar residences and finance their sports cars and their yachts. A lot of it goes into the hiring of ever more assistant vice presidents, deputy deans and directors of student entertainment to make the campus even more attractive to the party animals who pay the bills.

Who are all of these new college administrators who are bloating the payrolls of state universities? At a number of campuses they are the current administrators' friends who are out of work and looking for a comfy office in which to sleep for the next decade. Don't believe me? Then take a look at this article from North Carolina newspaper that found over 700 administrators that had been hired in the state without formal job searches.

Job searches are required in most states for regular jobs, but many states exempt top level jobs from this requirement. Nevertheless, a job search is the best way to make sure you find the best qualified candidates, not the ones on the vice president's Facebook list. Without a job search and national advertising, the jobs are unknown to everyone except those who are tipped off to the secret hiring process by administrators who want to extend their power by getting their buddies on the payroll.

So the university ends up with incompetent administrators and the students, parents and taxpayers pay the tab. All this is expensive, of course, but when you can raise your price to utterly ridiculous levels whenever you want to, knowing that parents and students will pay, why not have a little fun with your buddies?

Foundation Money Provides Slush Fund for College President

In what has become a familiar story to readers of this blog, yet another corrupt college president has had his personal financial dealings investigated by a newspaper and the resulting controversy has led to his resignation.

This time it's way up in Fargo, North Dakota where Joseph A. Chapman, president of North Dakota State University, handed in his resignation this week saying it "just isn't fun any more" to be a college president amid what he called "distractions."

These "distractions" include a $2 million dollar personal residence for the high rolling pres., a $22,000 trip to Washington on a charter jet with his extended family and the revelations that his wife, Gale, has a $50,000 job with the college foundation, the same group that approved the expenditures. That's on top of his $411,000 annual salary that includes a car allowance and the new college residence, the price of which ballooned from $900,000 to $2 million during the course of construction.

All of this was revealed through an investigation by the Forum newspaper, which examined the expenditures of the college foundation. You can read about it here and here.  

"Many of the events that have come to light in recent weeks are difficult, if not impossible to explain," said John Q. Paulsen, a trustee of the foundation and one of the people who were supposed to keep an eye on where the funds were going. Okay, let me spell it out for Mr. Paulsen: "C-O-R-R-U-P-T." Your president was misusing his office to enrich and amuse himself and you were picking up the tab, dummy.

The trip to Washington to attend President Obama's inauguration included Chapman, his wife, his children and even his daughter's fiancee. Because the president's personal airplane was being repaired they chartered a jet, stayed in first class hotels and charged the tab to the foundation. Compare this $22,000 junket to that of North Dakota's other president, Robert Kelley of University of North Dakota. He made the same trip, but was not too proud to purchase a regular airline ticket.  His trip cost only $2,176!

All of this comes at a time when college tuition is spiraling out of control. Parents are taking out second mortgages and emptying out their retirement accounts to pay the bills and students are going deeply into debt.  How come nobody thought of using some of the president's slush fund to hold down the cost of tuition?

The answer is that party schools like North Dakota State treat students like cash machines who do little more than provide the operating funds to allow corrupt administrators like Chapman to ride high on the hog, living like robber barons on money that was supposed to be used for eduction.

According to the Associated Press, Chapman plans to write a book about his experiences. We have a suggestion for a title: "Greed is Good: How I hoodwinked parents and taxpayers into paying for my lavish lifestyle."

Professor refuses order to fix grades for crackhead hoopster

One of my new heroes is Sally Dear, an adjunct at Binghamton University in New York, who took a stand against corrupt college administrators who ordered her to fix the grades of a college basketball player with a spotty attendance record who was later arrested for selling and using crack cocaine.

With 11 years of experience teaching human development, Sally didn't set out to be a whistle blower, but when the New York Times asked her the question, she decided to answer it honestly.  Yes, she said, she had been ordered to give the athletes higher grades than they deserved. As a result of telling the truth, she was fired.

"I'm being fired for being ethical," she told the New York Times. "I have no doubt about that whatsoever."

While Binghamton claimed her dismissal was due to "budget cuts," absolutely no one is falling for that whopper. Now that the door is open, Sally is spilling the beans that many of Binghamton's athletically gifted but academically challenged hoopsters were funneled into the human development program because it was known to favor the basketball program. According to Sally, the department has not been holding the hoopsters to the same standard as other students. Hoopsters who were not passing were given "independent studies" to carry them through, she said.

As a former college teacher, I can tell you that "independent studies" are a well-known dodge to keep students in school who are too dumb to pass the regular courses or who have serious attendance problems caused by failure to get up before noon.

Now the SUNY chancellor has ordered Sally to be reinstated and ordered an outside investigation to focus on issues of "academic integrity" in addition to an ongoing investigation of the collapse of the team after six players were dismissed. The athletic director also resigned.

"It's no secret to anyone that the president's desire to get to the NCAA championship trumped everything else," Sally told the Chronicle of Higher Education. "I got caught right in the middle of it."

So one lowly adjunct tells the truth and the whole corrupt system falls apart. College presidents like Binghamton's Lois B. DeFleur who care more about NCAA championships than they do about academic standards are exposed for the unethical creeps that they really are. Binghamton administrators are no doubt staying up late these days feeding the paper shredders to cover up the truth.

Sally thinks there are hundreds of professors like her around the country who are fed up with the dumbed down classes and inflated grades that administrators are forcing on them in order to improve their retention rates and keep the millions in tuition money flowing from student loans into the college coffers.

"They're not willing to talk to anyone," she said. "They're scared of their jobs."

When an industry that brags about its academic freedom intimidates its employees by punishing those who speak out about abuses, its time for a full scale housecleaning.   We could start by kicking out corrupt, overpaid college administrators like Lois B. DeFleur.

Getting your kid into college is easy if you're on the "clout list"

It's no secret that parents spend hundreds of hours trying to figure out the right combination of SAT scores, high school grades and community service credits to get their kid into a good college. There are even paid consultants to provide assistance (at a high price, of course.)

So when the news broke last summer that the University of Illinois had been caught putting the sons and daughters of the rich and powerful on a fast-track admission "clout" list it must have been pretty discouraging. Imagine, those PhD-laden, high-falootin college administrators gaming the system to help out their buddies in government and industry. Is nothing sacred?

Actually, as readers of this blog know, college administrators sold their souls to the devil long ago. They accept kickbacks from predatory loan companies to send a little business their way. They sell the addresses of their students to credit card companies for millions of dollars. They charge students sky-high tuition rates and use the money to build elaborate buildings and increase their own salaries and add on additional administrators.

But for some reason, the University of Illinois scandal has caught and held the attention of the media and the public and refuses to let go. The result has been a nearly complete sweeping out of the crooks who set up the clout list. Most of the governing board is gone and recently B. Joseph White, the president of the three-campus system announced that he was resigning Dec. 31.

If you have a subscription or don't mind paying the user fee, you can read the Chronicle of Higher Education's story on this here.

Like many of the new breed of college administrators, White's degree is in business administration, where the steal everything that's not nailed down school of ethics prevails. In the business world, exchanging favors with the rich and powerful is an ethical practice. Screwing the little guys who try to earn entrance to a college is no worse than screwing the little guys who try to get mortgages. It's all in a day's work.

There may be some hope for White, however, since he decided he didn't deserve the $475,000 retention bonus that he could have claimed under his contract. Perhaps there is some decency in the man after all.

Under the infamous "clout list" system set up by Richard Herman, chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, students whose parents had the right political connections were given a "Category 1" status, the highest ranking of potential admissions. The system was exposed last May by the Chicago Tribune, setting off a chain reaction that led to the replacement of nearly the entire board of trustees.

Of course none of that will help the students who couldn't get into the University of Illinois because the son or daughter of some political hack got the space instead. It does make you wonder how honest the admissions process is at other colleges that have friends who want to make an under the table deal.

In California, a revolt against well-paid college administrators

It's been said that California is America's future. What happens there shows where the country will be headed in five years, as the rest of us catch up.

If that's true, it's very bad news for the highly paid college administrators around the country, who have been jacking up tuition at three times the inflation rate to pay for skyrocketing administrative costs and expensive architecture. Getting college students to take out loans to pay for your bloated salary is nasty stuff, but in California, faculty and students are finally waking up and smelling the pork.

As California makes drastic cuts in higher education to balance its budget, college administrators, for the most part, avoided taking a haircut by raising tuition and demanding that faculty take pay cuts and furloughs.  It was as if the snooze alarm had suddenly been unpushed and everyone could see the naked emperors without their new clothes. After all, college administrators have been getting away with this for two decades now. Who would have thought anyone would ever notice?

You can read the New York Times story about the thousands of people protesting this week here.

Richard Vedders of Ohio University has estimated that only about 21 percent of tuition is spent on anything directly connected with education, such as classroom maintenance, faculty salaries and libraries. Instead, the additional money is spent on bloated administrative salaries and frivolous student magnets such as food courts, student centers, alumni centers, climbing walls and hot tubs. Few people seemed to be aware of this until California suddenly woke up this week.

For two decades students paid the soaring tuition increases without protest, encouraging administrators to jack the price up even more. Why not? They needed a better BMW. Faculty, who traditionally acted as watch dogs to keep administrators at bay, simply ignored the problem as long as no one cut into their research grants.

In my state, the New Hampshire Union Leader newspaper frequently lists the highest paid state officials by their salaries. The list last year was overwhelmingly flooded with administrators from the three public colleges, dozens of whom were paid more than the governor. It's not just the presidents who are paid at that level, but even the deans and the assistant deans. They got away with this for years because no one was paying attention. But now, suddenly, there has been a wake up call and angry faculty and students are taking it to the streets. It's about time!

College administrator clueless about student drinking parties

Party school administrators have to walk a fine line when it comes to student drinking parties. For the thirsty young scholars the message is "Don't worry, we don't give a damn what you do as long as you pay the tuition on time." But for parents, the press and the general public there is a different message "We are doing everything we can to get tough on student bingers."

Talking out of both sides of your mouth like this is not an easy task and sometimes the messages get crossed and then there is hell to pay.  This happened last week at Castleton State College in Vermont where a local police officer omplained that she had spent most of her weekend breaking up student parties with about 100 student drinkers. It took her five hours to clear each of these incidents.

On Friday night she broke up one party and found the same students at a party the next night. "They were back at it the very next day," she said. "They don't care. It's like you're a babysitter for some of these college kids. They have no respect for anybody." Of course a party with 100 drunken students can easily get out of hand and set up victims for more serious crimes like homicide, assault, rape and arson, as they have at other colleges.

You can read the story from the Rutland Herald here. It was written by one of my former star journalism students so I can vouch for its accuracy.

But the really interesting comments in this story come from Dennis Proulx, the absolutely clueless dean of students at Castleton. When asked about these parties where hundreds of students break the law each weekend, he told the reporter he was unaware of the problem! He wants us to believe that the problem of drunken college students, which has been publicized in the popular press, in academic journals, on television and blogs and Internet sites, comes as a complete surprise to him. He is shocked, SHOCKED that his students drink alcohol and party. "We expect our students to act as good neighbors," he said.

Well, Dr. Proulx, it's time you woke up and smelled the vomit. Your students are not good neighbors. The town manager has had so many complaints about noisy dangerous student parties that they are considering new laws to clamp down on them. The police officer in the story told about one of your students who was so drunk he broke into a private home thinking it was his dormitory. "Even after we woke him up he didn't know where he was," she said, "that's how drunk he was." 

A few more drinks and that student would have been one of the 1,700 college students who die each year because irresponsible college administrators look the other way and refuse to take any serious action because it might hurt their bottom line. When that happens at Castleton, Dr. Proulx, maybe you get to the be the lucky administrator to write home and tell the parents that your college killed him through neglect and irresponsibility. Or you can just grin and say "sorry, no one told me this was going on."  

Arizona Takes on its Growing Reputation as a Party School

Colleges that try to toss their party school reputations by "remaking their image" are faced with the same problem as a farmer who puts lipstick on his pigs. In the end, they're still pigs.

While administrators at the country's most notorious party schools like Penn State and the University of Florida may say they want to change their images, the truth is that the party school moniker brings in tens of thousands of students who would rather down Jell-O shots than read any books. They know not to protest too much or the party animals they depend on to pay their tuition will go somewhere else.

When Penn State was named the top party school in the nation by the Princeton Review a few months ago, students celebrated by buying T-shirts that proclaimed "I go to the number one party school in the country!" and set up Facebook pages with the same name.

That's the context for the University of Arizona's efforts to counter its growing image as a party school, competing with Arizona State as the biggest party school in the state as reported here by the Arizona Republic.

Some of the University of Arizona's moves to counter a growing party school image are right on, such as removing fraternities and adopting tougher rules on drinking.  But UA administrators seem to be drawing the line at closing the "Zona Zoo" rooting section at athletic events. Getting tough on illegal drinking at sporting events is one of the real tests of how much UA wants to dump the party school image. Many colleges that strictly enforce their drinking rules most of the time, sit on their hands while students indulge from kegs in the stadium parking lot.

That seems to be what happens with the animals who inhabit the Zona Zoo, and the UA administration seems split on how far it should go. Some think that the zoo encourages "Animal House type behavior." Now gee, I wonder why that would be? You call a place a zoo and you expect the people to go there to act like scholars?

Getting rid of the party school image is sort of like trying to get people to ignore the scarlet letter A that is on your face. You can put lipstick on it, but you're still a pig.