Party Schools Exposed

4 Credits: Dumbing Down Classes by 25%

I've received a number of e-mails from parents asking about how colleges dumb down their programs. There are a number of ways that this happens, some subtle and some not so subtle. The very fact that students come to college less prepared than in previous years means teachers have to move back their "starting point." As a writing teacher I used to start with how journalism is different from essay writing. More recently I had to start with the parts of speech, with which most ofmy students were unfamiliar. Then I had to teach the difference among "their," "there" and "they're." I figured if I stayed a few years longer I would be teaching college students their ABCs.

Another source of dumbing down were direct orders from the administration, based on complaints from students that my course was too hard. Just before I resigned I was told by the dean to stop teaching grammar and show more movies, "because that's what the students want."

However, the most significant dumbing down that I witnessed was the great four credit swindle which suddenly made all the three-credit classes worth four credits. Until this change was made, students had to take 40 classes to graduate. After this change was made they only had to take 30. That's a 25 percent dumbing down in one fell swoop! 

Of course it was not presented that way. The original proposal was that it would allow students and teachers to spend more time together to engage in their topics more intensively. Another reason was that students complained that taking five classes per semester was too much work, even though this system had persisted for over 50 years. That was back in the day when students went to college to learn something, not for the five-year party. So, presto! Now junior only has to take four classes per semester to earn 16 credits instead of the old 15. What's not to love!

My bullshit detector went off immediately. The last thing most students want is more class time. It is well known that the attention span of an average college student ranges from 15 minutes to 20 minutes. The classes were currently an hour and a half long and many of my students zoned out long before the class was over. They'd go to the bathroom and not come back. They'd crank up their I-pods and tune out. So what sense did it make to extend the class duration from 1.5 hours to 2 hours?

The change meant nothing less than remaking every class and every department sequence, an incredible amount of work, yet professors in every department immediately set about doing this without any complaints. What did they know that I didn't know? Once the meetings on the change began there was no more talk of spending additional time with students. It was all about the number of "preps" that professors had to perform. Instead of four preps under the current system, they would now only have to do three. Since a "full load" for a teacher was 12 credits, they would have only three preps under the new system instead of four. This was what was discussed at these meetings and was the reason for their enthusiastic approval of the change. Hey why complain about doing 25% less work for the same pay?

The college even did a survey among students. They asked them, "Hey Dude, would it be okay with you if you only had to take 30 classes to graduate instead of 40?" Of course there was an enthusiastic approval. However, my journalism students asked the question a different way. "Hey, Dude, how would you like all of your classes to be 25 percent longer?" Predictably the response was just the opposite.

I only taught one semester under the new system, but the results were what I expected. After an hour and a half the students packed up their books and were ready to leave. When I told them there was still a half hour to go there was massive grumbling and a revolt. Some of them just walked out. They not only refused to participate, but shot back the information that their other teachers were letting them leave early.

"Our other teachers don't make us stay the whole two hours," they said. "They make the last half hour optional," others said. "We only have to stay if we want to." Others said they were allowed to do their homework during that last half hour or even play on the computers.

I actually found this hard to believe, so I did a little investigation and walked around the campus during that last half hour to see how many classes were still meeting. There were some classes in operation, but there weredozens of classrooms that were empty, where classes ended long before the end of their allotted time.

So the net result, which I suspected from the beginning, was a 25 percent reduction in class time. The students loved it. The teachers loved it. Just like the "disengagement compact," less time in class meant more fun for everyone. So for the same price, students were actually getting only 75 percent of the education they got before. And all of this was allowed to happen far from the people who were paying for it: parents and state legislators. It's the best kind of scam where the mark doesn't even know he's been taken. Perfect, as long as you don't give a crap if students actually learn anything.

Party School Grads Pay a Heavy Price

Louis Lavelle, a blogger for Business Week, did us all a favor earlier this month by calculating the average lifetime earnings for a party school graduate and a graduate of a more serious college. You can read his brief report and some excellent charts here.

The difference between going to a party school like Florida State compared to Dartmouth, for example, works out to about $2 million! 

Of course the problem with these reports is that they don't even mention what happens to the bottom-feeding subprime colleges that gave up teaching long ago. Instead, they offer kindergarten entertainments. game shows and classes modeled after popular TV shows.  These are the graduates who hang their degrees in their pizza delivery vans or in the bedrooms in their parent's houses, where they will live until they are 35 so they can pay off their college loans.

Forbes magazine recently referred to these colleges as "country club campuses" because of their hot tubs, luxury condominiums and state-of-the-art sports complexes. The magazine asked experts if the current economic meltdown might encourage subprime colleges to tighten their belts a little and focus on education. Not a chance.

"If a college decides we're not going to have fancy dorm rooms or build a shiny new gym, students are not going to that college," said Sandy Baum, senior policy analyst for the College Board. "People are not choosing the lowest price college, and that's a consumer issue, not a public policy problem."

Really? Well we'll see about that.

How to Choose the Best College for your Child

It's easy to buy a diploma for your child, but buying an education is much more difficult.

 If all you care about is the piece of paper, just pack your kid off to a subprime party school where he can drink himself into unconsciousness five nights a week, spend five or six years in classes so dumbed-down you don't have to read any books or write any papers and take out crippling loans from predatory lenders. When he finally emerges he will be $25,000 in debt and still be so functionally illiterate he won't be able to read a newspaper editorial or understand the directions to hook up a TV set. But what the hell. You get what you pay for.

The market is so saturated with holders of bachelor degrees who aren't able to learn how to run a cash register that half of them have to move back in with their parents. Their loan payments are the size of mortgage payments, so forget about buying a house. But hey, college was certainly a good time, wasn't it?

Sending the wrong child to college is just as bad as not allowing an intellectual student to attend one.

Parents have to make some tough decisions around the 11th grade. They have to honestly evaluate their children and help them choose the correct path in life. This "sorting out" based on your child's abilities, talents and skills means doing an honest assessment and blocking out advice from high school guidance counselors who try to send 90 percent of high school students to college. That is just insane.

Part of the problem is that our culture glorifies the four-year college choice and denigrates other, equally valid, career paths that are more appropriate for some children. This is nothing more than elitist discrimination. The world needs plumbers, electricians, small business owners and computer repairmen just as much as it needs white collar office workers. Making fun of car repairmen may be fun until your car breaks down and you really need one.

Let's take a look at two children, both 17-year-old high school juniors deciding which career path to pursue.

Elizabeth is always reading something. She enjoys going to school and is curious about the world. She has high SAT scores. She's always asking questions and plans to become a doctor or lawyer. It would be a crime not to send her to college, but it would be an awful mistake to send her to a subprime college where most of the students major in alcoholism and sexual abuse. She would be disgusted to have to wash the vomit out of a dorm room sink every morning.  She would not be challenged by the dumbed-down classes and functionally illiterate classmates.

It's Elizabeth parents' job to get her into a good college with a challenging academic program, excellent teachers and like-minded classmates. It's worth taking out some loans to support her, if necessary, but most good colleges love to get students like Elizabeth and might be able to cough up significant amounts of student aid.

John, however, hates school and complains every day about attending. He has mediocre grades and test scores, never reads books, gets into trouble a lot, spends most of his time with his friends going to parties, watching television and video games. He may have been arrested for underage drinking or petty crime.

He's a prime candidate for a subprime college and he would fit right in. He would have no problem getting in and would, from the very first day, become engulfed in the drinking culture, the sexual abuse culture and the anti-intellectual non-reading culture. If he made it through freshman year and came up with the money he would get a diploma, but he would be just as functionally illiterate as the day he arrived. He would not be able to land anything other than a menial job as a pizza deliverer, waiter or clerk while paying off his $30,000 in student loans.

A better choice for John and his parents would have been for him to choose a different path more directly connected with a career. His parents could have enrolled him in a trade school or community college where he could have learned to be a computer repairman,  plumber, electrician, nurse, medical records technologist or any of a hundred different careers. Because he could continue to stay at home, his parents could keep him from getting into trouble and, when he graduated after only two years, there would be a job waiting for him that would use the exact skills he learned.

Four years out from high school graduation John would be loan-free and set up on a career path that he enjoys rather than working as a pizza deliverer. Why don't more parents choose this path? More of them are doing so as they learn about the culture of subprime party schools, which award worthless diplomas to students who didn't do any work or learn anything.

College Administration Crooks Hide Behind Caps and Gowns

Because the world's attention during the past few weeks was focused on the world economy meltdown, you may have missed some fairly significant cases of criminal academics in the news. These incidents are part of my thesis that higher education has been transformed from an altruistic institution dedicated to the welfare of students into a $375 billion industry with the same moral values at Wall Street bankers. In other words, take everything you can get and lie when you get caught.

Readers of this blog already know about college presidents and their booze-soaked lake cruises and presidents who get caught drunk driving in their Porsches. Now we are going to talk about more serious crimes.

First there is the case of Dr. Thomas Meredith, the Mississippi Commissioner of Higher Education, who was forced to resign last week, along with the president of Mississippi State University, when a state auditor found that the college had spent $12,333 planting state-owned trees at Meredith's home. This is, I think, one of the oldest corruption schemes known to man. When I was a cub reporter, mayors had to quit after the public found out the street pavers had used a little "extra" asphalt to pave the mayor's driveway. It's a stupid, selfish kind of corruption and you would think that the state's highest ranking academics would be smarter than that. Don't count on it. We need to watch these guys just like we do any other corrupt officials.

The more serious, and much more creative case, was that of Robert D. Felner, former dean of education at the University of Louisville, who set up a fictitious research project and received $2 million in federal aid, which he then diverted into his personal bank account. Quite a nifty operation which shows how lax academia is in overseeing all those millions of dollars it collects for research. You can read the whole sordid story here. Notice that according to the news reports, Felner owns four houses, worth a total of $3 million. Hey, who says an education career doesn't pay off?

There are two points I would like to make here. First of all, the academic community suffers from the same problems as Wall Street --  lot of money rolling around and no one much interested in what happens to it. We desperately need some oversight over how colleges spend that $375 billion. Second, it's time the public got rid of the idea that academics are somehow more moral and ethical than the rest of us. They are a business like any other and like Gordon Gecko famously said "Greed is Good."

 

Colleges Lie about how Dangerous their Campuses Are

It will come as no surprise to long-time readers of this blog but there is new proof today that colleges lie to the federal government and the public about how dangerous their campuses are.That's right, our institutions of "higher learning," which we count on instill ethics into a new generation of American leaders, engage in outright and deliberate falsehoods to protect their precious reputations and market shares.

The latest evidence comes from no less a person than the controller of New York State, Thomas P. DiNapoli, who issued a press release yesterday based on an audit he conducted of the records of the 29 campuses of the State University of New York. A full two thirds of the campuses underreported the number of crimes that took place on their campuses. In many cases their official reports differed substantially from their own internal reports. So, like gangsters and robber barons, they kept two sets of books. One was for their own use and the cleaned up distorted version was for the public, which might decide not to send their kids there if they really understood how dangerous they are.

The fact that only about a third of colleges accurately report their crime statistics is nearly exactly the proportion that the watchdog group Security on Campus has been reporting for four years now. Only 37 percent of colleges accurately report their crime rates. The majority cover them up so parents won't find out.

DiNapoli found that college campuses failed to report serious crimes like sexual assault, burglaries and drug offenses. The offending colleges covered up between 20 and 40 serious crimes each year. In response, the campus safety offices told the auditors that they "did not understand the reporting requirements" and "had not received any formal training."

Don't you believe it! How hard can it be to take your crime reports and add up the number of sexual assaults? This is not rocket science. And why were the public reports always lower than the private reports? Make no mistake about it, this is not a mistake but a deliberate cover up, used by colleges around the country, to make campuses appear safer than they really are. 

Why? Think about the worried father choosing a college for his daughter. Would he be more likely to choose the a college with one sexual assault case or a college with 40 sexual assaults? That is why we have this problem. Colleges would rather lie than risk losing any paying customers. The problem, as DiNapoli reported is that "not telling the full story on crime is not going to make crime go away" and giving students and parents a false sense of security about the safety of their campuses can only make them less likely to take precautions and more likely to become victims.

Colleges put Money First, Education Second

There are a lot of academics, professors and parents who think higher education took a wrong turn somewhere around the year 2000 and is now a lot more interested in selling diplomas, raising tuition to preposterous levels and turning classrooms into playgrounds that keep students entertained for six years.  

It's rare, however for a undergraduate student to make these kinds of charges. After all, students are supposed to be the ones who drink the Kool-Aid. They are sold the  shoddy bill of goods and are running up tens of thousands of dollars in loans from predatory lenders. They'll be paying these off from their pizza delivery jobs until they can go on Social Security. But who cares? Let's party! They are the ones who are supposed to believe all this horseshit that buying a diploma for $100,000 is your ticket to become a master of the universe. 

That's why it was refreshing to come across this column by Wes Hunt, a student at the University of Florida at Gainesville, who is still getting ripped off by his college, but at least he knows the score. He thinks colleges should stop feeding students the big lie that "You can't put a price on education." If colleges were truly honest, he says, they would tell students "Give us your money. We'll give you four years of drinking, sex and a meaningless piece of paper employers will love." Wow! Only for most students, make that SIX years.

College, he says, is just "a bigger, more expensive version of high school...It's nothing I couldn't have handled when I was 16." The number of students admitted to colleges has more to do with the number of dorm rooms available than it does with SAT scores.

"In the quest for greater education for everyone, we've squandered the most important intellectual resource our nation had: smart people. By pushing more and more people into colleges,  we've increased the overall intelligence of average Americans and destroyed the potential learning of the American intellectual elite."

I could not have said it better, but let me just add a few statistics. The percentage of high school graduates who go to college is now 69 percent. A century ago it was 5 percent. The market is flooded with college degree holders who are unable to work a cash register or read the instruction manual for a television set. They get jobs as pizza deliverers, waiters and clerks and have to move in with their parents because they can't pay off their $23,000 in student loans. College administrators are aware of all of this but they continue to enroll students in their subprime programs because parents and students have not yet found out that for most students college is a scam.

Subprime colleges hide their low brow students

Most of the time it's pretty easy for subprime colleges to hide their low brow, anti-intellectual, functionally illiterate students behind the facade of higher education. After all, the campus is an enclosed community with infrequent contact with the outside world which still believes students come there to learn something, not to party nearly continuously.

There are really only two places where the college world and the outside world intersect. One is when the intoxicated clowns overflow the campus from Thirsty Thursday to Besotted Sunday, engaging in bouts of public vomiting and urination while endangering the public with assaults and sexual abuse.

The other is when outsiders come to campus events like lectures and look around to find the place devoid of any audience member under 30. On campuses filled with students who never read books, magazines or newspapers and don't give a hoot about current affairs, public controversies or informed ideas, there is little chance of them coming to see a poet, an intellectual or a world leader. Remember the majority of these students study three hours or less a week.  

Still, it's pretty embarrassing for the college when this happens. So colleges have come up with a solution: they force students to attend these events! At Keene State College, where I was formerly employed, whenever a faculty group sponsored a speaker, they would send out a mass e-mail message to the entire faculty, urging them to "require" student attendance at the event. What this meant was that faculty were supposed to award "extra credit" or require attendance under penalty of a grade reduction. To prove that students actually attended the event they were asked to write a brief summary of what the speaker had to say.

While this tended to prevent empty lecture halls, it created some interesting phenomena. For example, what were speakers to make of it when all the students walked out en masse a half hour into the talk? What were they to make of students who signed the attendance sheet at the door and then left? Forcing students to "pretend" to be intellectual doesn't really fool anyone.

Remember, for students, the primary function of college, to remain in a drunken state from Thursday afternoon through Sunday night, is not a privilege but a right and they are not going to give up their right to get shit-faced for anything. After all, they know their rights! And when the students get to choose their own speakers, when the campus activities council uses their money for a speaker, who do they get? At Keene State the most popular speaker, hired year after year, was a hypnotist who put students under and then made fun of them. Decidedly low brow. The surveys my students conducted about who they would like to have speak at the college showed a high preference for celebrities, rock stars and entertainers. Speakers like Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and Justin Timberlake were high up on the list.

Dr. Phil and the Campus Rape Crisis

I don't usually watch the Dr. Phil show, but when I saw a promo for a show called "Campus Crisis,"I felt I had to tune in. The show was about Megan Wright, a student at Dominican University in Orangetown, N.Y. who told police she was gang raped in her dormitory by four men in May 2006. Police investigated, but like many of these cases, no charges were filed. A few months later Megan committed suicide

The failure to prosecute rape cases is a common occurrence on college campuses because they have a conflict of interest. While they say they are committed to protecting students, their prime interest is keeping sexual attacks out of the media because of the damage they can do to their marketing position. Just one high-profile rape case can be devastating to the admissions office.

And, as the watchdog group Security on Campus has reported, only 38 percent of colleges accurately report their crime statistics, as required by federal law.

Megan's case does have some interesting twists, as reported by the Lower Hudson News and the New York Post. One is that the rapists held up a sign for the dormitory security cameras allegedly signed by Megan saying "I Want Sex." Another is that the detective who investigated the case turned out to be a college employee. He determined there was no evidence that a rape occurred, even though Megan want to the hospital the next day and the nurses there determined that she had been raped. While the college isn't talking about this, there is evidence that Megan had been drinking and that qualifies her for the excuse that many of my students told me was used in cases they knew about. If you are drunk you cannot testify, they are told by police. Of course, that means it is open season on every female student who gets drunk. The college is all but encouraging the male students to go at it.

The mother has hired high profile attorney Gloria Allred to sue Dominican College for $10 million.

What bothers me about these cases is why the women students and faculty tolerate this. You would think they would be up and arms, protesting these attacks on women and the efforts by colleges to cover them up. Yet I have never heard of a college professor getting involved

Dr. Phil's website states that one in four female college students are sexually assaulted. There seems to be no source for that, but it is similar to estimates by the National Organization for Women.

The New York Post article cited about also claims that the four alleged perpetrators were all football players, which also fits into the profile of colleges protecting their athletes over their women students. No college wants to repeat Duke lacrosse team story.

The most important point here is that parents have no idea how dangerous college campuses are. As I have said before, they are as dangerous as inner cities, with crimes that go unreported despite a federal law that requires them to post them on their web sites. With 44 percent of students binge drinking there are daily cases of assaults, sexual abuse and drug and alcohol abuse. The fact that colleges deliberately cover this up makes it even worse because students assume that their campuses are safe and fail to take precautions. This perfectly sets them up to be victims.

The failure to prosecute rape cases is a common occurrence on college campuses because they have a conflict of interest. While they say they are committed to protecting students, their prime interest is keeping sexual attacks out of the media because of the damage they can do to their marketing position. Just one high-profile rape case can be devastating to the admissions office.

And, as the watchdog group Security on Campus has reported, only 38 percent of colleges accurately report their crime statistics, as required by federal law.

Megan's case does have some interesting twists, as reported by the Lower Hudson News and the New York Post. One is that the rapists held up a sign for the dormitory security cameras allegedly signed by Megan saying "I Want Sex." Another is that the detective who investigated the case turned out to be a college employee. He determined there was no evidence that a rape occurred, even though Megan want to the hospital the next day and the nurses there determined that she had been raped. While the college isn't talking about this, there is evidence that Megan had been drinking and that qualifies her for the excuse that many of my students told me was used in cases they knew about. If you are drunk you cannot testify, they are told by police. Of course, that means it is open season on every female student who gets drunk. The college is all but encouraging the male students to go at it.

The mother has hired high profile attorney Gloria Allred to sue Dominican College for $10 million.

What bothers me about these cases is why the women students and faculty tolerate this. You would think they would be up and arms, protesting these attacks on women and the efforts by colleges to cover them up. Yet I have never heard of a college professor getting involved

Dr. Phil's website states that one in four female college students are sexually assaulted. There seems to be no source for that, but it is similar to estimates by the National Organization for Women.

The New York Post article cited about also claims that the four alleged perpetrators were all football players, which also fits into the profile of colleges protecting their athletes over their women students. No college wants to repeat Duke lacrosse team story.

The most important point here is that parents have no idea how dangerous college campuses are. As I have said before, they are as dangerous as inner cities, with crimes that go unreported despite a federal law that requires them to post them on their web sites. With 44 percent of students binge drinking there are daily cases of assaults, sexual abuse and drug and alcohol abuse. The fact that colleges deliberately cover this up makes it even worse because students assume that their campuses are safe and fail to take precautions. This perfectly sets them up to be victims.

Colleges Treat Adjunt Professors Like Scum

College administrators would like the public to believe they are highly intelligent progressive thinkers way ahead of the curve when it comes to social justice and humanitarian issues. But to find out what they really think, just ask them about adjunct professors.

Adjunct professors, or "gypsy scholars" as they choose to call themselves, do essentially the same job as tenure track professors. The difference? Adjuncts have no job security, are paid less than the minimum wage. they get no benefits, have no offices and aren't welcome at department meetings or college events. Because they have short-term contracts that last for as little as a semester, they are incredibly vulnerable to bad student evaluations. They get bumped from their teaching assignments at the last minute in favor of the full-time faculty. They aren't even listed in the college catalog.

So what difference does this make to parents? One of the top ten dirty little secrets that colleges won't tell you is that for most students and most colleges, adjuncts teach all of their classes right up to the end of the sophomore year.  All of those full-time professors listed in the catalog rarely teach anything except juniors and seniors.

Remember "equal pay for equal work?" Well, forget it at institutions of "higher learning" where there is a two-tier system that should be illegal. Tenure track professors make three or four times what an adjunct makes to do exactly the same thing. These adjuncts are lured to colleges with the promise they will be hired for a regular job at some point, but that is rarely the case. So college administrators actually lie to them?  Of course, where have you been?

This is why it came as such a breath of fresh air yesterday when a fan of this blog sent me a link to a story about a college administrator who dared to compare adjunct professors to WalMart employees. The difference? WalMart employees are paid over the minimum wage, have some benefits and job security and are invited to staff meetings.

“Wal-Mart is a more honest employer of part-time employees than are most colleges and universities,” said A.G. Monaco, senior human resources official at the University of Akron, and yet academics are “the ones screaming about how bad Wal-Mart is.” Academics “have to stop lying” about the way non-tenure-track professors are treated, he said.

Wow! Saying this at a meeting of college administrators certainly counts as speaking truth to power, saying that the emperor has no clothes and speaking the heresy all at one time. A.G. Monaco is my hero of the week! I just hope he still has a job.

The reality is that graduate schools turn out so many academics that there are not enough full-time jobs for them in academia. Colleges prey upon this overload of academics by making adjuncts work for slave wages. In most colleges, nearly HALF of the classes are taught by these unacknowledged teachers who aren't official college employees. So how many parents realize that when they are paying those insanely inflated tuition bills their children will be taught by someone who makes $5 a hour and doesn't even have an office or a name in the catalog? Is this not fraud?

What Viewbooks Can Tell You About Colleges

View books are the colorful and flashy advertising brochures that colleges send out to prospective students. Like all advertising documents they are mainly designed to encourage consumers to open their wallets and feel good about buying the product. But they are also useful in determining what it is about their product that they think customers want to buy.

David L. Kirp used college view books in this way in his wonderful book, Shakespeare, Einstein and the Bottom Line, which describes how some colleges have deterioratedfrom refuges of higher learning to just another gaggle of salesmen trying to unload products you don't need.

If you are in the market for a college you have probably received a number of these books. If you haven't you can take a look at the one from my local college, Keene State College in New Hampshire. Because this one is online it was a convenient one for me to use for my analysis of what the college thinks parents and students want to buy.

I took a few minutes to count up all the photos. What I found were 10 photos of sports, 1 photo of people walking on campus, 15 photos of buildings, 5 photos of students sitting, 7 photos of teachers, one photo of graduation and two photos of students engaged in foreign travel. And then, all by itself, there was just one photo of students in a classroom. There was a section called "Beyond the Classroom," but no section on classrooms.

So what is one to make of this?  Kirp says it's no accident that the education program, the reason that colleges exist in the first place, is minimized in college advertising. The reason? That's not why students go to college anymore! Students aren't interested in that. They want the cushy dorms, the flashy student center, the gourmet food courts, the million-dollar fitness center, the hot tubs, the wide-screen cable TVs, the Wi-Fi centers. They don't want to be reminded that they might have to read a book, for example, or attend a class or two.

Looking at these view books one would think they were designed for a summer camp or a pleasure resort, a kind of Club Ed that caters to the needs to its guests with endless recreation activities. So, is it any wonder that when students arrive on campus that is exactly what they expect to find?  Is it any wonder that so many of my students said things like, "I love going to college, it's just too bad you have to go to all those classes!"

Is it any wonder that anti-intellectual teenagers who intensely dislike education pack themselves into these places and then refuse to read books, write papers or even attend classes? They see the entire education process as an unnecessary distraction from the stately pleasure dome the college created for them. In the topsy turvy world of subprime colleges, education is no longer the prime activity, but an unpleasant sideshow to the five-year party that they are paying a high admission price to enjoy.