Party Schools Exposed

60% of Americans think colleges are only in it for the money

A nationwide poll released yesterday found that 60 percent of Americans think colleges are more interested in making money than educating their students and only 32 percent still think colleges are primarily interested in education.

The number of Americans who think colleges are just looking to make a fast buck increased from 52 percent in just three years. The survey was taken by Public Agenda and the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

You can read about it in the New York Times or the Chronicle of Higher Education or you can read the full report here.

One of the prime messages of my book is that college administrators have long since abandoned their mission to educate students and replaced it with retention of students as a way to improve their bottom lines. It looks like more and more Americans are figuring that out.

Why is that?  Start with tuition increases at two or three times the inflation rate, then add the fact that only 21 percent of revenues are spent on instruction, then add on the fact that colleges take kickbacks from predatory lenders and sell the names and addresses of their students to credit card companies. What do you get? Mistrust.

Then add the fact that colleges are wasting millions on things like state of the art dining commons, luxury condominiums, multi-million dollar student centers and other frills to attract party school students who don't care about education. Then add the fact that administrative salaries have been climbing at an alarming rate.

But that's not the end of it. It takes the average student six years to graduate from a four-year college adding 50 percent to the sticker price. And when they get out of college their dumbed-down educations don't produce the jobs students were promised. What they get instead is a lifetime of debt paying off $22,000 in student loans and $3,000 in credit card debt. Such a deal!

Unless colleges get their act together and focus more on education and stop ripping off their students, you can expect that 60 percent number to rise. You can only rip off millions of students for so long before the public starts to catch on, which they seem to be doing.

Don't be fooled. It's still "ZooMass," despite the lipstick

Colleges around the country are adopting "branding" as the way to fool the public into thinking they've changed and aren't really party schools anymore. The latest to try this is the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, well known in the Northeast as the prime destination for students who want to major in Jell0 shots and party bongs.

You can read about the UMASS branding project here.

Colleges spend millions hiring "branding consultants" whose prime missions are to cover over the reality that nearly half of the students don't give a damn about education and are there for the five-year party. The reason branding doesn't work is the same reason that putting lipstick on a pig doesn't work. When you get done, it's still a pig.

If Umass was really interested in putting the ZooMass image away for good it would have to do something it would never do: cancel the party. It could set new standards and refuse to tolerate the slackers who give it a bad name. It would advertise itself as "the UN-party school, where serious students go to study." So why don't they do that? Simple economics. The ZooMass image brings in thousands of students looking for a place to party and all those slackers pay the bills that keep the college functioning. Get too serious with the party animals and lose the zoo image and you are out of business.

When a college makes serious  efforts to dump the party school image the students get royally pissed off. Take a look at this article from the Phoenix New Times about students at Arizona State University who reject the president's reform efforts and are threatening to transfer to colleges that have more student riots and public couch burnings.

The spokesperson for the Get the Party Rolling Again movement is ASU sophomore Chelsea Frank and here's what she told the newspaper: "I'm thinking of transferring next year, because it's just not the experience I was hoping for," she says. "I hear about these riots at WVU, UF, SUNY Albany, Maryland, UCSB etc. -- people burning couches in the streets, screaming off their balconies, running into the middle of a lecture doing a beer bong and then running out -- shit like that."

It's good to know that the education money that Chelsea's dad saved up for all his life is being put to a good use.