Party Schools Exposed

Administrator steals money from his own college

One of the goals of this blog is to convince non-academics that just because someone has a lot of letters after their names it doesn't mean they actually know anything. A lot of PhDs are as dumb as kindergarten dropouts. College administrators are notorious for putting themselves on a pretty high pedestal and parents often feel intimidated when they suspect them of lying, cheating and robbing them blind.

While most college administrators are decent, honest people, there are a lot of bad apples in the academic barrel. Just click on the "Wacky Administrators" link. I have described college presidents who drink and drive, college presidents who think nothing of spending $200,000 on a garage and college presidents who award fake diplomas to politically connected students.

Today's lesson is about Jamal Nayhef, associate dean of engineering at Central Florida University, who seems to be as dumb as dirt and as arrogant as a Wall Street banker. Nayhef, who makes a cool $181,000 per year, not including perks, decided to buy himself a Christmas present last month. He got a $40,000, state-of-the-art home entertainment system and had it installed in his home. He put it all on his college credit card, which is supposed to be used for college expenses.

This guy has had his job since 1990, but apparently in all that time no one ever explained to him that college accounts are regularly audited. It took only weeks for him to get caught and then, instead of confessing, he handed in an altered receipt to hide what had actually been purchased. So let's see...theft, altering documents, lying. Yup this guy belongs on Wall Street!

You can read the whole sordid story here in an article by the Orlando Sentinel and even look at the guy's photo. But remember him the next time an administrator tells you with a straight face that all that tuition money is necessary for education. Or tells you why the college sold your kid's personal information to a credit card company or tried to steer you toward a "preferred lender."  Remember that caveat emptor applies to colleges as well. Don't be intimidated by a few letters after someone's name because they just might spell "CROOK."

Pennsylvania to try a "no frills" college program

It seems to have taken a major economic meltdown for education officials to get the message, but there are clear signs that some of them are hearing it. "College costs too much money!"

Pennsylvania seems to be listening closely to consumers and has approved a plan to separate a college education from the very expensive perks that colleges have insisted have to go with it. That's right! No more sports teams, no more concierge services, no more wide-screen cable TV, no more gourmet food courts, no more work-out rooms and no more condo-like dorms. Just education! What a concept!

No word yet on how much this is going to save in tuition money, but I would guess it will be at least a 50 percent reduction and perhaps more. And to sweeten the pot a little more, students will attend all year round so they can get their degrees in three years or less.

While the reason for this innovation is to make colleges more affordable, this will certainly create places that are less vulnerable to the "party school mentality." Students at these no frills schools are going to have to work hard to get their work done and there won't be as much time for "getting fucked up" as students so wonderfully describe it. The party clowns will certainly not line up to be a part of schools like this. You can't party at a no frills school. That will make them havens for students who really want to learn something. What a concept!

While I fully expect this trend to catch on, it can really only be a stepping stone to the ultimate transition to on-line college classes. Once colleges find out it is possible to teach students without workout rooms and concierge services and once parents find out how much they can save, it's only a small step forward to eliminate the college campus entirely and move the entire program online.

Students want their courses online, where the hours can be so flexible that they can watch a videotaped lecture at 4 a.m. if they want to. In an age when every book is available online there is no need for a brick and mortar library just as there is no need for architecturally spectacular food courts and state-of-the-art student centers. Many of these fancy campuses will be ghost towns within another decade.

So congratulations Keystone State! We'll be eagerly watching to see how it works out, but we think you are way out in front of the curve on this one.

 

Colleges manipulate YouTube results to "improve image"

Manipulating information to achieve a predicted result is considered fraud in the academic world. Think back to the scandal caused by the false reports of the development of "cold fusion" for example. The same thing also seems to have happened in the Bush administration when it manipulated information about global warming.

That's why it came as a surprise when I opened my Sunday paper and found the president of the local college, Keene State College in New Hampshire, congratulating herself that she had improved the college's image by urging a college computer expert to manipulate the results on YouTube. Her purpose was to focus attention away from the party school and riot videos that were the most popular results when you entered the college's name in the YouTube search engine.

In the online community this manipulation of the number of page views a site receives is also considered bad form. When it involves advertising payments based on the number of page views it is also seen as a form of fraud.

It's one thing to do it. I suspect a lot of colleges do this kind of thing in the cutthroat competition to attract students, but it's highly unusual that they would admit it, even brag about it on the fr0nt page of the local newspaper!  Most of the article consisted of quotes from the president and the college's director of online communications praising each other for doing such a fine job of manipulating the search results in their favor.

In the president's view, the original results were "totally skewed," yet assuming the results were not deliberately changed by someone else, these results came from the actual practices of surfers who searched under the college's name. I would argue that the very practice the college employees were engaging in was deliberately skewing the results.

The actual example they cited was moving down the list a video of a campus riot that occurred after the Boston Red Sox won the World Series and moving up a video of Dr. Anastasie Gasogo of the National University of Rwanda speaking at the college. (I swear I am not making this up!)  Now, of course, Dr. Gasogo is probably never going to be a star on YouTube, no matter how much the college manipulates the results. And riot videos are always going to attract the curious. It seems like a futile waste of time to me.

The real question, of course, is should colleges be engaged in this kind of deliberate fraud? Paying an employee to manipulate the Internet seems like a silly waste of funds and is unlikely to have any impact on the college as a serious party school. Local residents who live near student housing are asking the city to crack down on such delightful student activities as public urination and unconscious students blocking the sidewalks.  There's no doubt the college has a pretty bad public image, but instead of fraud they need to change their practices if they really want to improve their image. There really isn't any short cut.

What THE ...is going on at Florida State University?

This blog has had some fun with college's fiddling around with their names trying to get a leg up on the competition. They have spent tens of thousands of hours turning "colleges" into "universities" because it sounded better. And let's not forget the facelift that Beaver College got when it became Arcadia University.

At a time when colleges are facing serious problems with declining standards, inflated grades, predatory student loan rates, skyrocketing tuition rates, increasing need for remedial programs and students who are more interested in beer than books, what do they form a committee to work on? Why their name of course! "If we could just come up with the right moniker then everything will be fine, right?"

The latest fad is to add the definite article "THE" in front of the college's name to give it that perfectly aromatic je ne sais quois that makes students send in their application forms and alumni open their check books wide. Ohio State and the University of Texas started this trend and now the Florida State University is joining the club. You can read the story about it here.

I would love to read a transcript of the academics attending the meetings to discuss this! Angels dancing on the head of a pin would be serious scholarship compared to this. The professors of classics can quote Nero fiddling away while Rome burned and historians can discuss what tunes the Titanic band should have been playing as the ship headed for Davy Jones' locker.

If fact, it's hard to believe that anyone other than academics could waste time in this way. What if the media found out that Ford held a series of meetings to discuss what to name its new SUV while the bill collectors were at the door?

 

As college tuition increases, less is spent on education

As parents dig themselves ever deeper into debt to pay for their children's college tuition, new reports suggest that less and less of that ever-increasing cost actually is used for education. My investigations discovered that a year ago, but now independent think tanks are joining the cause.

A report issued just this week by the Delta Project on Higher Education Costs, Productivity and Accountability  found that while colleges increased their tuition by at least 12 percent from 2002 to 2006, few of the additional millions of dollars went into the classroom. So where did they go? Academic support, research and administration. You can read this story in the Chronicle of Higher Education if you can find a way around the block.

My research found that during the last decade colleges increased the number of administrators by nearly 25 percent, adding assistant deans, assistant vice presidents and "directors" of everything from student centers, graduation, diversity, honors programs and special events and adding hundreds of positions in Internet technology for everything from tracking down illegal file sharing to preventing student abuse.

"Academic support" also includes computer operations as well as health centers, centers for minority groups, women's centers, drug and alcohol rehab programs. Not mentioned in the report are other money-hungry programs like interscholastic sports, community arts programs and the millions spent on fancy buildings like dining halls that have nothing to do with education.

All of this is, in fact, part of the larger trend of colleges away from centers of "higher education" and towards "five year party central" where students who don't want to learn anything can celebrate hedonistic adolescent excess and get their parents to pay for it

The public is becoming aware of all this ever so slowly, but the day when parents and legislators wake up to this abuse cannot be far off.

How the "study abroad" scam works at subprime colleges

As a famous charlatan once said, the best scams are those where the mark doesn't even know he's been had.  Such is the case with students who participate in subprime colleges' "study abroad" programs.

These programs sound like a good idea. After all, many of today's college students know next to nothing about foreign countries and to actually pack them off for a semester abroad can only help to enlighten them, even if they are not very interested in studying anything.

The scam operates because nearly all foreign countries heavily subsidize higher education to keep the costs down for students. If our country was a little more enlightened it would do the same thing, but as it stands now, a semester's tuition here is thousands of dollars more costly than in other countries.

So when the U.S. college ships a student abroad for a semester, the cost paid to the foreign college is thousands of dollars less than the student pays here. So the student gets that money back, right? Not a chance! Every bit of it stays with the college.

Students could save this money if they temporarily withdrew from their American college and signed up on their own at the foreign college, but American colleges, of course, frown upon this practice, which deprives them of  all that free cash. I advised many of my students to take this route, but all of them have up with the college made it difficult for them. Why let the marks, oh excuse me, "students" get the benefit? They're laying out tens of thousands in student loans, what's a few more thousand to them anyway?

And what do these students do over there? Well, it should come as no surprise that the number one activity is drinking. Dozens of my students went on these programs and when they came back and I asked them what they did, the overwhelming answer was, "The drinking age is 18! Can you believe it! I spent all my time in the pubs! It was awesome!"

The value of a bachelor's degree is vastly over-rated

While I don't agree with everything he has to say about higher education, I think Charles Murray is on the right track in his book "Real Education" and in his recent op-ed piece in the New York Times.

Higher education, liberal education and the bachelor degree were designed for a previous generation in which only students who were really interested in learning went to college. Today those serious scholars have to share the classroom with the majority of party animals who are there for the five-year cruise on the SS Party Barge.

When you give the party animals and the scholars the exact same degree you are merely creating confusion for employers, who increasingly require a bachelor degree as a minimum price of admission, even though there are thousands of illiterate BA holders out there these days. The degree is no longer a guarantee that the holder knows anything at all.

That's why Murray's idea of individual certificates for particular skills makes a lot of sense. Employers, I think, would welcome someone who had a certificate in computer programming over someone with a BA who majored in "computer science." The latter could mean that the holder studied things like "How to use your Facebook account" and "Fun with I-Pods" in college.

In my own field, I think a job candidate with a journalism certificate verifying his credentials in grammar, fairness, ethics, civics and political science would have a leg up against someone with a BA in journalism.

What was discouraging was the reaction to Murray's essay, which took up most of a page a few days later. While a few professors congratulated him on his courage in speaking about about how far standards have fallen, the nearly universal complaint was that he was elitist and wanted to keep poor kids out of college. He was actually saying nothing of the sort, but that is the problem faced by anyone wanting to reform the system.

 

Binge drinking college students engaged in "calculated hedonism"

College students who drink themselves into unconsciousness and then post pictures of themselves on social networking sites like Facebook are actually imitating their cultural heroes who publicly engage in the same kinds of behaviors, according to a new British study.

 

The club and rehab lifestyles of celebrities like Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and any number of popular athletes have become role models for an entire generation that sees public intoxication as extremely cool. While students understand that they are doing permanent damage to their bodies by excessive drinking, they think it is a fair price to pay to be cool.

 

For that reason, the authors argue, most anti-drinking campaigns are doomed to failure because they fail to address the cause of the problem. As long as intoxication is cool and sobriety is not, such campaigns will prove ineffective.

They point out that the media attention paid to the exploits of intoxicated celebrities have taught an entire generation that the hedonistic lifestyle is not only one to be admired but also to be emulated. Taking it away from them, they feel, is unfair treatment. In fact, such behavior is seen as part of the road to being successful.

Subprime colleges have turned education into "diplomas for sale"

This New Year’s Day story in the New York Times about colleges selling the names and addresses of their students to credit card companies should come as no surprise to readers of this blog. I documented this months ago based on a two-year-old story in Business Week. The Times, however, showed how extensive the practice is and how callous college administrators are about pushing their students into bankruptcy.

 

In the past decade there has been a paradigm shift in higher education, especially at the subprime level. College used to be a place where students went to learn. Now it’s become a shopping mall where students are fleeced to pay an outrageous price for a diploma. It’s not just administrators. Students increasingly buy into this mindset as well. They expect to be ripped off by the college through hundreds of fees and hidden costs, but see it as part of the price they pay for purchasing the key to success.

 

Under the “old school” model, students were expected to learn a certain set of skills and acquire knowledge about their shared culture. They were graded according to how well they met the high standards set by the college. Those who mastered the material were awarded with high grades and a diploma. Those who did not measure up flunked out. That system worked for hundreds of years.

 

Under the “new school” model, students don’t have to learn anything and the college really doesn’t care if they do or not. Students are actively opposed to education because they think it’s pretty meaningless. Instead, students want to be entertained for five years.

 

For the sake of retaining them as customers, the college forgives them if they flunk tests, lie, cheat, plagiarize, assault their fellow students, drink themselves into unconsciousness, fail to come to class, hurl insults at teachers, or refuse to read books or write papers. “That’s okay, junior. I’m sure you didn’t mean it and we’re sure you’ll do better next time.” It’s nearly impossible to flunk out.

 

There is, however, one offense that colleges absolutely will not forgive under any circumstances.” Just try it, junior, and you will be out of here so fast you won’t even have time to collect your I-pod or your cell phone! No excuses accepted. It’s our way or the highway.”

 

What is this terrible offense? Not paying your bill.

 

Students showed me letters from the college threatening to ban them from graduation because of an unpaid parking ticket. Remember, this is after five years and many tens of thousands of dollars paid to purchase this diploma. They took the classes. They earned the credits, but now, within inches of the goal line, they had to pay up or no touchdown.

 

It’s not just the outrageous tuition costs, which have been rising faster than health care and gasoline. It’s all the little hidden fees, not included in the college’s official “sticker price” that add up. Students must pay hundreds of dollars extra to park their cars, reimburse the college for dorm damage to common areas even if they had nothing to do with it, and even a “graduation” fee.

 

Students rarely protest any of these fees because they see them as part of the price they pay to purchase their diplomas. Stories like the one this week in the Times simply remind the public that colleges are no longer what they used to be and a diploma is no longer proof that you know anything. It’s merely proof that you were willing to go deeply into debt to pay your bill on time.