Party Schools Exposed

At party schools, administrators are part of the problem

By turning their backs and throwing up their hands in despair about student binge drinking, college administrators are contributing to the problem. Colleges that have strong anti-drinking policies and enforce them tell students that it's not okay to abuse alcohol on their watch. On the other hand, many administrators only pretend to have any concern about the problem.

Why would they do that? In an age when colleges are more concerned with "retention" than providing a safe environment for learning, getting tough on alcohol abusers is just poor business practice. Scaring away binge drinkers is the last thing they want to do.

A study released last year by Harvard's School of Public Health Alcohol Study found that colleges that have a "strong drinking culture" and lax enforcement actually encourage more students to drink. There's no mystery about why this happens. High school binge drinkers actively seek out campuses where binge drinking is common. Like seeks like. Binge drinkers and subprime colleges exist in a symbiotic relationship. The binge drinkers need a safe place to party and subprime colleges need paying customers who are not too picky about academics or attendance policies.

On the other hand, colleges that send out the opposite message, by banning alcohol from the campus and dealing out tough penalties for alcohol abusers are a red flag to high school bingers. What bingers are looking for are campuses with a nearby student "ghetto" with parties every night, lots of fraternities and sororities to sponsor the parties and "slap on the wrist" penalties like being "sentenced" to participate in an "education" program.  "Oh no!" you can hear the bingers scream, "Please not the education program!" It's like Lindsay Lohan going to rehab. You know it's only a PR stunt and the bird is not going to change her spots.

Colleges that expel persistent binge drinkers could find themselves with empty seats, at least temporarily.  But I suspect that there are a lot of parents who would rather know their children are safe from the rape, sexual abuse, assault and noise that go hand in hand with drinking on party school campuses.

So parents have a key role to play here. It's their job to do a little research before they sign the admission papers. Ask the local police if the school is a party school. Make a visit to a freshman dorm and check out the bathrooms. Or, best of all, just ask a student at random. "Is this a party school?" In my experience the students will tell you truthfully what you need to know. It's worth paying a little bit more in tuition to protect your children from the dangerous places that party school campuses have become.

Not to mention the fact that going to school with fellow students who really want to learn something makes it much easier for your child to take full advantage of the opportunities provided by higher education. Cheap, dumbed-down party school campuses provide diplomas but employers have become wise to the fact that their graduates can be functional illiterates who can't understand a credit card bill. They will however know how to make a Jell-O shot and shotgun a beer.

Party on class of '09, for tomorrow the loan bills come due

I've spent some time over the past few weeks looking at all those newspaper photos of happy students at commencement exercises and wondering what on earth they are so happy about. Either they are still high from the previous night's graduation party or are completely ignorant about the state of the economy.

Do they have any idea what they are in for? Do they really think there are jobs out there for the approximately 1 million students who will obtain diplomas this month?  

The numbers were bleak even before  the current recession. Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute estimated in 2006 that there were 7 million bachelor degree holders working at jobs that did not require a college degree. According to his estimate, 14 percent of jobs that did not require a college degree were held by college graduates.

The epidemic of disappointed college graduates is described in detail in books like Tamara Draut's Strapped and Anya Kamenetz's Generation Debt. There you will find page after page and story after story of young people with high hopes and wonderful dreams that were dashed when they couldn't find the good jobs their colleges promised them. They had to settle for "crap jobs." The college graduates who work as clerks, pizza deliverers and waiters can tell you all about  their crippling levels of student debt. For them, a four-year college degree looks more and more like a scam.

Many of the members of the class of '09 are aware of these issues. But their solution? Why, go off to graduate school, they say, to "wait it out" until things get better. The problem is that things are NOT going to get better. All these misguided graduate students will get is more debt.

All of this was worked out by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics as far back as 2006, when it projected where jobs would be created in our economy through 2016. Of the 25 jobs with the most openings, only six required a bachelor degree and one required an associate degree.

The reason for this is that our economy no longer requires the kind of white collar workers it did when the economy was booming. Many of the jobs that college prepares students for these days have already been shipped off to India and other countries. They have been eliminated, downsized or shipped out to save money. Colleges are either out of touch or else don't really care as long as the tuition money rolls in.

So where will the jobs be between now and 2016? Retail sales, food servers, office clerks, janitors, home health care aides, waiters, child care workers, groundskeepers, receptionists, carpenters, medical assistants, maintenance workers etc. So, it seems to me, if high school graduates really want a job they have two choices. They can choose a career right out of high school or they can go to college and get a degree and then work at the very same job while paying off a$23,000 student loan debt.

Community colleges and trade schools are much more in tune with the real world on this and prepare students for the jobs that are actually available and not fantasy jobs that no longer exist.

It's not a pretty picture, certainly not as pretty as those college brochures that tell students they can be oceanographers, film directors or software engineers, but it is, unfortunately, the true state of employment -- and underemployment -- in America.

'Tis the season to celebrate fraudulent grade reports

It's that time of year again. All the young scholars have flown away from my little college city and there is a strange stillness, especially at night. Not a single terrified scream or cackle of laughter and no more incessant booming of Hip Hop from car windows with a rapper bragging about all the ho's he's beat up so far that evening.

You can walk down the sidewalk for block after block without having to step over a passed out scholar or worry about an adolescent urinator aiming at your shoes. Beer cans, red Dixie cups, the odd bit of cast off clothing, all gone.

But, for parents, it's also the time of year when they get a chance to examine that creative work of fiction called the student grade report.  Wait, don't tell me. Your kid got an A or maybe a B, right? In every class? And that means little Johnny and little Sally are doing great in school, right?

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but, believe me, dear parents, every party school student gets an A or a B on just about every assignment in every class these days. A well-publicized study that came out last year found that students thought they deserved a B just for showing up! Although there are 26 letters in the alphabet, only two are used for student grades in our era of student entitlement, dumbed-down classes and inflated grades. Try to give a student a C these days and you will create a tempest of resentment and you can expect a series of meetings with angry administrators yelling at you about "retention." Give out a few C grades and your job could be at risk.

In colleges run like businesses, giving anything other than an A or a B is like serving a bowl of soup with a big ugly fly right in the middle. The customers get upset and complain and threaten to take their business elsewhere. Keeping students happy is now rule number one at party schools. Everyone seems to know that except you, dear parents.  Foolishly you think that a B means "good," when it has come to mean second rate. Colleges and students count on keeping you in the dark about all of this.

Professors have learned the hard way that the letters C, D and F are no longer in the academic alphabet. Only those out-of-touch parents aren't aware of that.

The losers here are the students themselves, who think they have gamed the system when they wasted five or six years to purchase a very expensive diploma that's not worth the paper it's printed on. They may have a degree and their grade report may be peppered with grades of A or B, but they can't hide their functional illiteracy for long, nor their inability to balance a checkbook. Their lack of knowledge of civics, history, geography, science and economics means they must spend their lives in a haze of ignorance, entirely unaware of how the world works. But hey, they had a good time in college and that's what they paid for. 

Unemployed graduates, deep in debt, could burst the tuition bubble

With graduates forced to pay off student loans that reach up into the $50,000 range, it's time that we took a second look at the financial benefits of going to a four-year college. The old, outdated cost-benefit analysis was that  a college education meant a $1 million increase in lifetime earnings. But that was calculated before the skyrocketing cost of tuition was figured in, plus all the lost income from spending six years in college. Every year it takes a little longer for college graduates to catch up to their friends who ended their educations at high school.

Now there are increasing numbers of graduates who can't find jobs at all in our economy and are either unemployed or so underemployed in crap jobs that they can't make their payments. So they move back in with their parents and get them to make the loan payments.  You can read all about this in this story from the New York Times.

When stories like this start to get around, you can bet parents and students are going to think twice about going deeply into debt, cleaning out their retirement accounts or taking out a second mortgage to pay for junior to attend the five-year party that subprime four-year colleges have become. 

The best investment in these times are inexpensive two-year programs with direct connections to jobs, such as the ones offered at community colleges. Or, even better yet, the new "no frills" colleges that offer an education without all those high priced buildings, expensive administration salaries, sports teams and student centers that drive college costs up out of sight.

There are plenty of people who have seen the beginnings of a new age of thrift, when value is more important that frills. Colleges are still building monumental palaces along college row and inflating administrative costs as if they were Wall Street bankers. A day of reckoning cannot be far off and like other inflating bubbles, it's likely to explode any time without warning.