Party Schools Exposed

Grade Inflation Goes Wild at America's Colleges

Stuart Rojstaczer has been a hero of mine for a long time now. A former professor of geophysics at Duke, he has gone full time into exposing how inflated grades have damaged higher education in America.  He is a muckraker and true heretic of the first order, forcing colleges to look closely at the awful problem they have created for themselves. He was one of the people who passed on his heresy to me.

So it was with great anticipation that I read his op-ed piece from the March 24 Christian Science Monitor, and I was not disappointed. Many college administrators, of course, deny that grade inflation really exists at all. How could they accept something that reminds them that their entire industry has been cheapened by professors unwilling or unable to flunk anyone because the new academic buzz word is"retention"?

I urge you to read the whole thing, but here are some excerpts from his latest update on the "everyone gets an A" school of college grading.

"When students walk into a classroom knowing they can go through the motions and get a B+ or better, that's what they tend to do, give minimal effort. Our college classrooms are filled with students who do not prepare for class. Many study less than 10 hours a week."

Or how about this:

"Paradoxically, students are spending more and more money for an education that seems to deliver less and less content. With so few hours filled with learning, boredom sets in and students have to find something to pass the time. Instead of learning, they drink."

Right on, professor Rojstaczer!

Judicial Boards: Secret Courts Behind the Ivy Walls

If you mention a college judicial board to parents they will call up an image of a friendly group of college officials assigning fitting punishments for students who cut in line or plagiarize a term paper. The truth is that on many campuses judicial boards are actually alternative criminal court systems that try students for felonies like arson, rape and burglary.

So what? Well, it helps if you understand that everything these courts do is in secret. The charges, the witnesses, the hearings and the sentences are all carefully hidden using the Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) as cover.

Contrast this with the regular court system where nearly every stage is open to the public and reported on by the news media. There are a lot of reasons why this is a good system. It assures the public that the police and courts are doing their jobs and it also provides the transparency the public needs to ensure that there is no hanky panky going on.

Judicial boards use a different model. They are, in fact, similar to the courts run by dictators. The accused is summoned to appear before a secret tribunal. The charges are read and a sentence is passed. Some students are never informed of their right to have a lawyer. The prosecutor, judge and jury are often the same person and there is little or no oversight.

The U.S. Department of Education has amended the FERPA rules so at least the results of these tribunals are supposed to be made public, but across the country student newspapers are being illegally denied access to them.

All of this would seem pretty strange unless you realize that colleges are absolutely possessed with an obsession about bad publicity. Although they are required to report crimes to the education department, only 37 percent do this properly. Judicial boards are part of the process that allows them to cook the books. If they can convince a rape victim to withdraw her complaint then the crime doesn't go on the books. If they can convince a burglary victim not to press charges then the crime disappears. And all of these courts have a built-in conflict of interest. How can you dole out justice if your main concern is keeping campus crimes out of the newspapers?

It seems pretty clear to me that colleges have no business prosecuting felonies. After all, the maximum penalty a judicial board can impose is suspension from school. In the criminal courts a felony conviction can mean a decade or more in the slammer. What if Wal-Mart or the Chamber of Commerce suddenly decided to prosecute crimes "in-house?" There would certainly be an outcry. Colleges need to get out of the criminal justice system and concentrate on what they are supposed to be doing: educating students.

Record number of drunken college students taken to the ER

For those who think I am exaggerating the suicidal binge drinking culture at colleges or those who think the ridiculous "alcohol education" programs at colleges are working comes this statistic: shitfaced college students are being taken to emergency rooms to have their stomachs pumped at record numbers.

This article from the Gant Daily in State College, Pennsylvania, reports that 558 inebriated Penn State students made the ambulance trip in 2008, up from 304 in 2005. Even more interesting is that the average blood alcohol level of these young scholars rose from 0.234 to 0.252 during the same period. That's more than three times the legal limit in Pennsylvania. 

What's remarkable about this story is not the tragic waste of young lives, but the fact that these numbers were released at all. Most colleges would rather lose a major football game than part with any information about the increasing number of students who are drunks and the problems they create in college communities. When my students asked for these numbers for the student newspaper they were told they did not exist.

Remember that according to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, some 1700 college students die each year as a result of binge drinking, and, as these statistics show, the numbers are only getting worse. Students are dying all over the country, as this blog has chronicled.

In my hometown of Keene New Hampshire, the city has finally begun collecting payments from the college to offset the cost of transporting drunken students to the hospital, which accounts for more than half of their total calls. I recently had a chance to talk with an EMT at the Diluzio Ambulance Service and he detailed the many calls for students overdosing on not just alcohol but heroin and cocaine as well. He told me about a drunken girl they found in a parking lot who had frozen to the ground and would have frozen to death if they had not arrived.

This, dear readers, is your tax dollars at work. These problems will continue until parents and taxpayers wake up to what is really going on at our nation's party schools.  Reading books? Nah! Writing papers? Nah? Studying? Nah. Partying? Toga! Toga! What a waste!

Dumbing down college participation with "classroom clickers"

For more than 2,000 years, higher education consisted of things like seminars and lectures where students gathered around wise instructors, asked questions and made comments. Today, of course, that is way too much work for millennials who don't have time to read the book or think about anything other than their immediate needs.

To accommodate these non-reading, non-thinking students we have "Classroom Response Systems" or "clickers" as most professors and students call them. They are handheld electronic devices on which students register their responses to professors' questions.

Gee, when I was in college, we had a non-electronic version of this called "raising your hand."  What's wrong with that?

Well, according to Derek Bruff, assistant director of the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt, "students are hesitant to answer questions independently." Oh the poor darlings! Much too nerdy for the young Bart Simpson imitators who belong to the Facebook group "Shut up and put down your fucking hand, no one cares." So we come up with an electronic gadget so kids won't be embarrassed about participating in class. That, of course, is progress.

It turns out that Bruff has written an entire book about these gadgets.  Yes, but who is going to read it since these devices are obviously made for the illiterate? In the PBS special "Declining by Degrees" you can see a clicker class in action. If the idea is to keep kids awake, it's a success. If it's an attempt to educate them, it's a dismal failure. The things you are supposed to learn in college are much too complicated to be taught by multiple choice clickers. 

It dumbs everything down into multiple choice questions. It kills discussion and any kind of interaction.  In fact, if you have ever seen the program "Who Wants to be a Millionaire," you know how this all works. Kids agonizing over four possible answers to questions like "What on earth are you doing in college if you can't even bother to read the textbook?" In class however, you don't get to use a lifeline to call your mother.

But popular?You bet! Sure beats learning!  But how would you feel if one of these students became a doctor in the emergency room after your hand was cut off in a terrible accident? The millennial doctor, calling up his trusty IPod screen, calls up the possibilities. A. Give him an aspirin  B. Glue it back on with Elmer's C. Call in someone who knows something.  D. Go out to dinner.

Note to parents: If your kid is assigned to a "clicker class," cancel your membership in the party school and transfer your kid to a real school.

College freshmen spend more time drinking than studying

The results of this recent study will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with college campuses today. But it's nice to have my observations proved accurate by an official study of 30,000 freshmen.  Here are the results:

College freshmen spend 8.4 hours per week studying.

College freshmen spend 10.2 hours per week drinking.

So there you have it folks. This is the reason students flock to party schools with those condominium-like dorms and fancy food courts, with the hot tubs and the climbing walls.  They aren't there for an education.  In fact, they hate going to classes. They are there for the five-year cruise on the S.S. Party Barge. College campuses are like a drinking Disneyland, designed from the bottom up for the best bottoms up!

Of course a lot of students drink themselves to death. And that's unfortunate for colleges because they won't be getting any more tuition money from dead students. But should they shut down fraternities just because they kill a student or two? Nah, too much trouble.

Last year I wrote about Johnny Smith who died in a fraternity house. Earlier this week I wrote about Arman Partamian who died at a fraternity house called PIGS. Today a friend sent me this link to a student who died at the University of Kansas.  The student's father says a fraternity killed him. Gee, now where have I heard that before?

This is getting to be quite a body count and hard to ignore since the press is waking up to the fact that college campuses are among the most dangerous places in the country, that they are no longer places of higher learning but gigantic playpens for immature, spoiled and narcissistic Millennials.  It's about time they paid attention!

Arman Partamian, outstanding student, killed by "PIGS" fraternity

The unofficial college drinking club known as PIGS in Geneseo, N.Y. should be shut down immediately as a public menace. Its house should be burned to the ground and on the vacant lot the community should erect a monument to the 1,700 people who die every year at the hands of intoxicated college students.

Arman Partamian, an eagle scout and promising sophomore at SUNY Geneseo, was found dead in the PIGS house last week. While police aren't giving an official cause of death, Partamian had a blood alcohol level of between 3.9 to 5.5. The lower number is four times the drunk driving limit.  The higher number is rarely found among anyone with a heartbeat.

Who's to blame? The college has been battling the PIGS for years and the police were called to the house five times this year. Yet the PIGS continued their swinish behavior, despite loud outcries from neighbors. No one wanted to get involved. They thought students should be able to have a little fun, that "students will be students" and that  "getting a little drunk sometimes" was just a friendly part of college life. That's total bullshit and a formula for just the kind of senseless disaster that took place here.

It's time that everyone woke up to how dangerous binge drinking is to students and everyone around them. College is a place where you are supposed to study, not drink yourself into an early death. The whole attitude needs to change. When bright kids like Partamian fall into the grips of the PIGS, it's time to shut down the PIGS and other college fraternities that are nothing more than dens of death, rape and drug abuse. In a saner world the PIGS would be charged with murder.

Fraternities are nothing more than street gangs. Their sole reason to exist is breatking the law. Prisons should have special cell blocks where frat boys can wear their fancy Greek letters while practicing their daterape moves and toga parties with their nice new prison girlfriends.

College presidents are also to blame because time after time they run up the white flag and say there is nothing they can do. Take a look at the Geneseo president's statement below. "Hey, it's not our fault! It happened off campus!" In fact, the reactions of college presidents when students drink themselves to death are so similar  that it has to be the product of a college workshop: "How to avoid bad publicity when one of your tuition payers blows the big .55."

 They hold a press conference to say they are "really really sorry." They schedule a candle light memorial serivice. They write a nice note home. "Dear Mom and Pop, thank you for your support of our college. Here's your kid back in a box, but look at the bright side, you don't have to pay us any more tuition money."

If Geneseo President Christopher Dahl really cared about his students and if he had any balls at all he'd buy a crate full of sledge hammers, ask for volunteers and head over to the PIGS sty and level the place right down to the ground. Who on earth would blame him? Then he'd expel every one of the young oinkers and order them never to set foot on his campus again. Now THAT would create some great publicity!

College presidents shouldn't wait until a student dies to get tough on drunken students. Sentencing students to "education programs" is a useless waste of time. Presidents need to bite the bullet and get tough. Expel drunken students, if only to save their lives and the lives of others who are tempted to fall into this abyss.

Set an example. It's much more important that the currently popular "retention" programs. Remember that a dead student isn't going to pay tuition anymore, either. Think of booting out drunken students as part of your precious "retention" program, if you must. Just don't let another student die in a senseless tragedy.

Geneseo President's lame statement

Medical Examiner's Report and 911 Call 

Rochester Democrat and Chronicle Story 

D&C Comment on off campus Binge Drinking

College lectures are chopped down into sound bites

" A minute's success pays the failure of years." -- Robert Browning, Apollo and the Fates (1886)  

Just when you think things can't get dumbed down any further at subprime colleges, comes the latest hot trend: college lectures that are gone in 60 seconds! A number of colleges are offering professors training in how to trim all the useless fat out of those deep lectures and turn them into one-minute sound bites that students can play on their I-pods.

You can read the Chronicle of Higher Education story here.

I have absolutely no doubt that students love this! After all, psychologists tell us adolescent  attention spans are barely 15 minutes long. So the young scholars on Red Bull  could attend one of these lectures and still have 14 minutes left when they could ask questions before their minds return to the usual mashup of sex, drugs, rock and roll and, of course, getting shit-faced.

Education by soundbite might well be the trend for our times. No time for students to ask "Is this going to be on the test?" and not even time to sneak out to the bathroom. Just 60 seconds of the best education they can buy for their $30,000 per year investment.

Professors are being asked to create small videos of these lectures so students can watch them over and over again, post them on YouTube and share them with their friends.

Of course all of this comes with a certain loss of detail. You try to explain photosynthesis in 60 seconds, or the sources of Shakespeare's history plays, or the Supreme Court cases that shaped our modern libel laws. If you don't think you can do it, just take out all the unnecessary stuff. You have to think like a Millennial.

So here, is my 60 second lecture on the history of the United States, pared down into a sound bite.

"These dudes sailed their boats to try to find some spices and crashed into the new world and these guys with like weird hats and funny shaped rifles came over and crashed into Plymouth Rock. It was like awesome! They killed some Indians and had a party and then they like thought, "Hey Man, how come we get taxed without representation? So they had like this huge war with guns and cannons and stuff and signed a big sheet of paper that said they had inalienable rights and dudes like George Washington and Ben Franklin signed it and after that there was a Civil War and the North beat the South and then there was World War I with even more awesome explosions and tanks and airplanes and stuff. Then there was a big depression and everyone lost their jobs and there were these dudes, so cool, who jumped out of windows and then the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor and the U.S. beat the shit out of them and Hitler and we dropped the big one, I mean the really big one (Kaboom)  on Japan and then there was Vietnam and Martin Luther King and George Bush like tanked the economy and we elected Barack Obama as the first black president."

So did I leave anything out? What else could kids possibly need to know?

Arkansas College Trustees got 80% Discounts on Kids' Tuition

I have nothing against giving scholarship money to help out students in need. No kid smart enough to go to college should be denied an education because of a lack of funds. But scholarships for the children of bank presidents and robber baron tycoons? No way!

That's why the Associated Press checked into complaints that the children of the college trustees at the University of Central Arkansas were getting 80 percent scholarships just because their parents sat on the board. There is no written policy on this and the AP had to file freedom of information requests to track this down.

It turns out that the children of five of the trustees received the discounts. College trustees, of course, are not middle class people generally and are usually expected to pay their own way. So instead of needy students, the college gave the benefits to wealthy, connected people who just happened to be on the college board.

You can read the story in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette here.  Apparently this is not illegal, but it is so unfair and unethical that the state's highest education chief said he believed the college should stop the practice.

The good news here is that the press is finally paying attention to the unethical shenanigans that go on at colleges because no one apparently pays much attention most of the time.  Like other kinds of public officials, they are often tempted to reach into the till and take home a little extra cash. What is needed is a watchdog to life up the lid and take a look at what crawls out.

All over the country reporters are finding high paid administrators with no-show jobs, nepotism in the ranks of administrators and all kinds of kickbacks. Not to mention, of course, the recent run of college presidents convicted of drunk driving. A reporter who took a few weeks off to report on this stuff could win a Pulitzer prize.

Why Spring Break always falls on St. Patrick's Day

Around about the year 2001, when the college I worked at was becoming a first class party school, I asked a college administrator how the date for Spring Break was set, since it seemed to change from the second to third week of March.

"It's always set so the students are gone on St. Patrick's Day," he told me.

When I gave him a questioning look as if to wonder what the patron saint of Ireland had to do with a student holiday he just smiled and added "I guess you have never had to clean up green puke!"

Suddenly I got it. St. Patrick's Day was one of those days that had a direct connection with alcohol -- as if students needed an excuse to get shit-faced. And enough janitors had complained that it was bad enough to clean up the nightly cascades of student vomit without the green dye that is added to beer to celebrate the holiday. Yech! So now you know why they ship these geniuses to the south where someone else has to clean up the vomit.

It used to be that places like Daytona Beach would do everything they could to prevent the students from taking over their cities during spring break. But those days are long gone as spring break towns welcome the young scholar  for the same reason colleges do. Students are flush with cash from student loans and they know how to spend it lavishly and quickly.

The question I have is why is it called spring "break?" What exactly is it a break from? During most of the school year the young scholars ingest large amounts of beer, hard liquor, Ritalin, Ecstasy, LSD, pot and Red Bull and then commit assaults, sexual abuse, public mischief, public urination and disturb the peace with loud parties. On spring break they go south and do exactly the same things! Perhaps it would be better off to call it Party South.

And students, of course, are easy prey for any kind of scam. The student newspaper used to run ads every year urging students to sign up for a week in Cancun including airfare for only $149. Of course the plane tickets were phoney and the reservations were for a non-existant hotel. The students would fall for this year after year and the student journalists continued to run the ads, even after they knew they were scams.

Of course the one-in-tens, the 10 percent of students who came to college for an education, are having none of this nonsense. They spend the time on something called Alternative Spring Break where they actually make themselves useful doing service work. What a concept! We applaud their efforts at self control.

This year a new wrinkle has been added. Mexico, one of the prime destinations because law enforcement is lax, has become so violent because of rival drug gangs that the State Department is urging students not to go there. You can read about that here.It sounds like a formula for disaster to me. Can you imagine a confrontation between a shitfaced college student and a drug cartel soldier? "Hey man you know where I can get some weed?" "Eh Gringo, give us your money or we shoot off your fucking head!" Wow! Now that would be a cool party. They could make a movie.