Party Schools Exposed

Out-of-Control College Students Riot in Two Cities

The formula is pretty simple really. Take a few thousand immature college students, fill them up with gallons of alcohol, add some hot weather and presto! Instant riot!

That's what happened in two cities over the weekend as students started 12-foot bonfires in the middle of city streets and tossed in doors and sofas to keep them going. Then they turned over a few cars. When the police and fire trucks arrived and attempted to restore order they were pelted with rocks and bottles. Police had to use rubber bullets and tear gas to restore order.

You can read about Kent , Ohio here and Minneapolis here,  but the formulas are remarkably similar. Too many shit-faced students with too little to do. After all,  for seniors completing their sixth year on the S.S. Party Barge it's their last chance to show off their maturity before they get to pay back the tens of thousands of dollars they borrowed to attend the party. 

The comments on these stories are quite enlightening. The city residents are terrified by the disorder while college students dismiss it as "just letting off a little steam."

The police, I think, showed remarkable restraint, staying out of the way until real damage became evident. What about the overturned car and the flames that threatened to burn the power lines?

The Kent State riot recalls that other riot in the spring of 1970, when four students were killed by the National Guard. Then, of course, the students were demonstrating against the war. This year's riots were just for the fun of making complete fools of themselves and giving all college students a bad name. Just read the comments on the above stories.

My students looked into the so-called spontaneous riot that broke out at Keene State College when the Red Sox beat the Yankees a few years ago. It turned out that students had planned the riot for weeks, deciding exactly where it would be held and sending out invitations over the Internet. So perhaps its not a secret that these two riots happened at nearly the same time. Imagine what would happen if these students had taken the time to organize something useful? Consider the costs of calling out dozens of police and the SWAT team during a time of austerity and you can figure out the high cost the public has to pay so that these clowns can set up riots to entertain themselves.

Most of the high cost of tuition doesn't go for instruction

There is new evidence this week that most of the soaring tuition rates students and parents are required to pay for college don't go towards instruction. Most of the cost, as has been reported here before, goes sdministrative salaries and construction and maintenance of all those fancy college buildings.

Now we can add unproductive and superfluous college managers and work forces to the list of things that parents are being asked to pay for, even when they think they are paying for instruction.

The Center for College Affordability and Productivity released a major report this week showing that the number of college managers and support staff has doubled in the 20 years from 1987 to 2007.  As the number of college students has grown, the growth in the number of managers has increased even faster,  much more than the number of instructors. And all of those salaries, of course, ultimately help push up tuition rates.

Daniel Bennett, the author of the report, said the higher education work force has "increasingly resulted in unproductive use of labor resources."

Colleges' secrecy obsession turns deadly for Jason Wren

It's too late to save the life of Jason Wren, a 19-year-old University of Kansas student who drank himself to death on March 8, but the incident should be a warning to all parents about the deadly results when colleges withhold important information from parents.

The University of Kansas, like many colleges and universities around the country, is so obsessed with keeping information from parents and the public that it hides behind the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. When Jason's father called the school several times to make sure that Jason was not getting into trouble because of his drinking problem, he was told what many parents are told. Sorry, we can't tell you that. Federal law prevents us from disclosing that information.

That is total bullshit.

Here are the facts about FERPA:

1. It was never intended to apply to disciplinary records, only to educational records. To make this perfectly clear, Congress amended the law in the early 90s to make it even more clear. FERPA does NOT apply to disciplinary records. What could be clearer than that!

2. Students who are claimed as dependents on their parents' tax returns are not covered by FERPA. Those parents can see all of their children's records.

3. Students can sign a simple release form to surrender their rights under FERPA and allow parents access to their records. Many colleges include this release form in the information they send parents and actually urge them to get it signed. Others never mention it. Certainly the University of Kansas never mentioned it to Jason's father. How responsible is that? 

So why do colleges and universities still insist that this law covers something that it does not? Because they don't want parents and the press meddling in their affairs. They don't want anyone to find out how little learning takes place, how out of control the students are and how little time they spend studying.

Colleges and universities pretend to be deathly afraid that if they violate FERPA  they will lose their federal funding. But in the 35 years since the FERPA law was passed, guess how many colleges have had the law enforced against them? Zero! In fact, the U.S. Department of Education has never even threatened to enforce the law. The entire thing is a big lie used over and over to keep parents out of the loop.

The results have been deadly. Parents are not informed when their children attempt suicide over and over. The first call comes only when the student is dead. An obvious nutcase like the shooter at Virginia Tech was known to hundreds of people on campus for years, yet his parents were never informed of his repeatedly bizarre behavior. And now, of course, we have a father, desperately trying to find out about his son's health, locked out of the system until his son is dead.

Colleges get away with this because parents are unaware that they are being lied to about this law. They trust colleges to tell them the truth. Parents need to take a much closer look at where they are sending their children and how much colleges really care about their welfare. It's not too late to stop this. Jason's father, who said he would have pulled his son out of college if he had been aware that Jason was tossed out of the dorm for repeated alcohol violations,  should bring a wrongful death suit against the University of Kansas. At the very least it would bring the lies colleges tell about FERPA out into the open and perhaps prevent another senseless death.

"Shut up, professsor. We pay your salary!"

John MacLane, the city manager of Keene, N.H., the city in which my office is located, recently had a rude awakening in the fascinating world of party schools.

MacLane moonlights as an adjunct professor in the political science department at Keene State College, where one day he noticed that many of his students were texting and twittering in his class while he was trying to lecture. When he asked them to stop twittering and pay attention he got his lesson about who's really in charge.

The students told him to mind his own business and told him "We pay your salary," a mantra that is becoming increasingly common in party school land. Students understand that schools obsessed with "retention" won't take any action against them -- as long as they pay their bills, of course! So students have become increasingly arrogant, empowered and foul-mouthed about  enforcing their rights to do whatever they please in class. What they really need, of course, is a good spanking.

For a better understanding of why students think this way,  try this column by student Mike Flatt, published in the student newspaper at the University of Buffalo.  It has the same title as this blog: "We Pay Your Salary."  His argument is that professors should shut up when a student arrives late to class, since it's none of their business.

The "We Pay Your Salary" line of reasoning only goes so far, of course. Imagine what will happen when Mr. Flatt is stopped for speeding and tells the policeman, "You can't give me a ticket! I pay your salary." Or later, when Mr. Flatt tells the judge, "You can't put me in jail! I pay your salary!"

This reminded me of one of the last exchanges I had with a student after I had handed in my resignation in 2007. A student came in during "slacker week" the last week of classes, when students use coercion, blackmail and outright threats to get better grades. When I said I would not change the student's  grade she called me a "fucking asshole."

Now I have been called much worse by better people. Journalists tend to develop a thick skin, but since by then I knew I was writing a book about party schools, I decided to do a little experiment. I wrote up the incident and filed a complaint with Mark Schmidl-Gagne, the college's dispute coordinator, and he scheduled a hearing with the offending student.  But, of course, she never showed up, and as we waited we discussed student conduct. He put his tape recorder on the table to record every word of our conversation. My own tape recorder was in my pocket.

So what will happen to this student who has refused to come to her own disciplinary hearing? Mark was a bit vague here, saying my complaint would go into her file. When I asked what would happen then, he talked about a point system, but was not very clear about how many demerits a student got for calling a teacher a "fucking asshole" or how many points it would take for a student to be dismissed. "We look at it on a case-by-case basis," he explained.  It was clear to me, of course, that the college was not about to toss out a perfectly good paying customer who was preparing to start her sixth year at the college. A real money-maker for the college! A cash cow! Maybe in this case we could go for seven years!

However, I do wonder about what is going to happen when this student finally gets a diploma and goes out looking for a job to pay off her $25,000 in student loan debts. What happens when she arrives 15 minutes late for work and her boss mentions it to her? Her likely response, to call her boss a "fucking asshole," won't result in a disciplinary hearing that she can conveniently avoid. No, I'm afraid Miss arrogantly empowered is going to be on the sidewalk on her ass.

Colleges under fire from the right...and the left as well

It's no secret that American higher education has been under attack from the right for at least two decades. The American Enterprise Institute, for example, has made it a favorite whipping boy with AEI stalwarts like Charles Murray and Richard Vedder on their front lines.

Some of the criticisms, such as the complaint that colleges have dumbed-down  programs and lowered standards to advance the "everyone should go to college" agenda, are undeniable. Other criticisms, that colleges are refuges for a worldwide leftist conspiracy, for example, are less valid.

What is new in 2009 is that colleges are increasingly coming under fire from the left as well.

Ralph Nader, for example, has come out strongly against the debt-for-diploma scam that college administrators and predatory lending companies put together to systematically fleece college students and leave them in debt for decades.

"The corporate lawyers who conceived this self-enriching system ought to get the nation's top prize for shameless perversity," he said. Andrew Cuomo and Hillary Clinton have also come out strongly against the scam.

Just this week, however, the stalwart progressives at the Nation published an article called Higher Education Takes a Hit, in which colleges have come under fire for the shameless treatment of adjunct professors, who do exactly the same work as tenured professors but are paid a third as much with no benefits.  The percentage of these "contingent faculty" have increased from 43 percent to 70 percent in 30 years.

The article also exposes the great lie that tuition has been increasing at two to three times the inflation rate because of the rising cost of instruction. The truth, as the article points out, is that instruction costs have remained relatively stable. What that additional money is used for is "ballooning administrative costs, positions and salaries, venture partnerships with corporations and the construction of costly, extravagant facilities that critics say have more show value than instructional utility." Amen!

The article also quotes long-time lefty advocate Cary Nelson, president of the National Council of the American Association of University Professors.

"Higher education has become a corrupt institution facing financial crisis," he said. "There is a race to market campuses to yuppies with expansive building projects, to increase the leisure value of a campus." Wow! Could not have said it better!

So, it seems, the higher education reform movement has some very strange bedfellows indeed with Charles Murray and Cary Nelson on the same side! Exactly how these reforms will come about is not yet clear, but the defenders of the existing higher education system seem more and more to be crying in the wilderness.

Academics forced to limit wine purchases to $75 per bottle

Hey, times are hard! Auto company presidents are leaving their corporate jets at home. On Wall Street, bankers who lost 80 gazillion dollars last year have to settle for million-dollar bonuses.

That's why the University of California at San Francisco, which is facing record declines in state aid and a 9 percent increase in tuition, has put its collective foot down. From now on, faculty and administrators will have to limit their college-reimbursed wine purchases to $75 a bottle. No more Mr. Nice Guy!

You can read the story, which was on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle, here. 

Doug Levy, a spokesman for the college said overdoing it on the wine list doesn't happen very often but "every now and then people forget that it's university money." What Doug doesn't mention is that this money comes from stressed-out taxpayers and parents who are taking out second mortgages and raiding their retirement funds to pay the tuition to send Junior to college. I bet they are greatly relieved that colleges are now spending their money wisely.  

I think this is another sign that college administrators just don't get it. It's like the AIG executives who took handouts from the government and then went to luxury spas for some down time. To those of us working stiffs who can't afford $75 bottles of wine, this sounds a lot like "Let them eat cake!" Only, in this case, it's more like "Let the students pay for it. All they need to do is take out more loans!"

Thanks to T.K for sending me this little gem!

College administrators take kickbacks from predatory lenders

People often ask me, "Could college administrators really do all this nasty stuff to the students that parents trust them to take care of?"  Now, thanks to Alan Michael Collinge, I can simply hand them a copy of his new book, The Student Loan Scam,  and let them read the gruesome tales for themselves.

Collinge himself is part of the story. After graduation he was caught up in the student    loan trap and defaulted on a loan. The loan sharks at Sallie Mae soon jacked up his rates and hit him with penalties until he was being asked to pay more than he made at two jobs. Unlike most students caught up in this scam, he fought back, setting up a lobbying group and writing the book.

It's a real page turner! Collinge shows how the predatory student loan companies made contributions to highly placed Republicans like John Boehner and Buck McKeon. What the legislators did in return was remove student loans from all the protections that Congress placed on other kinds of loans, like the Truth in Lending act. Then they changed the bankruptcy regulations so students could never escape their loans, even if they declared bankruptcy. With crippling rates and even worse penalties, students became slaves to the loan sharks. Collinge even found some who attempted suicide and ran off to other countries to escape the bill collectors.

And then they made some deals with college administrators. Describing this part of the scam takes an entire chapter called "The Corruption of the Universities" and corruption it is. In exchange for colleges endorsing the predatory lenders as "preferred lenders," college administrators were taken on elaborate vacations and given gifts like golf vacations, expensive wine and dinners. Then there were the good old fashioned kickbacks where cash was simply given to the administrators in exchange for their immortal souls.

The administrators sold the colleges' logos to the predators and set up call centers for them. When parents would call a university with a question about loans, the college would transfer them to a salesman from the loan companies, who would pretend to be a college official. All pretty neat and it would continue to this day except for investigations by Congress and the attorney general's office in New York State.  Half a dozen college administrators were forced to resign. Were these obscure, out-of-the-way colleges? Nope. How about the University of Texas, Columbia and Johns Hopkins. 

"By 2000, " Collinge wrote, "it became apparent that some schools had all but abandoned even the pretense of concern for students' financial well-being and were entering into agreements with lenders for the purpose of making additional money from students."  In other words, Goodbye Mr. Chips. Hello Tony Soprano.

The colleges "viewed their preferred lenders lists as bargaining chips, using them not only to secure payments for the universities, but also to reap their own personal benefits." It became impossible to tell where the universities ended and the predatory lenders began. 

And the problem continues today. In 2007 the U.S. Department of Education revealed that students at 1,412 universities had 85 percent of their student loans from a single lender. Hmmm could be a coincidence?  I think not. Of those colleges. 531 were found to have 100 percent of their student loans through a single lender. And hey, what do you want to bet that these are the "preferred lenders?" Nice touch!

So, if you are planning to send a kid to college or have a kid in college or know anyone who is sending a kid to college, this book is essential reading. Spending $22.95 could save you tens of thousands of dollars. Also, you will never be able to look a college administrator in the face the same way again. If they are willing to sell your kid into student loan hell, what other devious, greedy schemes are they hiding? I don't know about you, but when I meet with a college administrator, I always check my wallet before I leave.  Picture Tony Soprano with a Ph.D hanging on the wall. "Hey, youse guys, was in it for me?" Turns out, plenty!