Party Schools Exposed

University of Illinois kills plans for $98,000 presidential sculpture

There may be some hope for college administrators after all, at least after the local newspaper takes them to task for their incredibly poor spending decisions.

Such is the case at the University of Illinois where the board of trustees voted to honor its current president by sponsoring a $98,000 sculpture of him. This comes, of course, at a time of national recession and calls for severe cuts in education spending. The U of I trustees, like many trustees around the country, seem to be so out of touch that they have no idea how this would play out there among the masses who have to struggle to pay the high tuition rates that the trustees set for them.

They could have funded at least three major scholarships with this money, but they always seem to find an extra hundred grand floating around somewhere when they need to build a sculpture or two.

The president who was to be honored, Stanley Ikenberry, is actually the current interim president and served as president once before. What happened to the president before him? Oh yes, he was a victim of U of I's disgraceful process of providing a separate admissions process for the rich and powerful, allowing them to fast track through the system that the "small people"( as BP calls them,) had to deal with.

Ikenberry gets points for actually calling the whole thing off. Good for him! And thanks to the Tribune for looking into this!

But the U o f I trustees, already burned for their underhanded behavior with the secret admissions fast track still doesn't get it. They had to be scolded by the Chicago Tribune, which began looking into the statue issue and was asking some embarrassing questions about the no-bid contract to build it.  You can read the latest Tribune article with links to its previous coverage here: U of I backs off plan for $100,000 sculpture for Ikenberry.

The problems with these kinds of boards of trustees is that they are made up of robber barons and captains of industry who often ridicule the "small people" and like to wheel and deal with their fellow captains of the universe. Think of BP's response after its colossal boo boo. You would think they would hire someone to explain to them how it looks to the real people when they do stuff like this before the newspaper takes them to task.

Why not put parents on the board? What a difference that would make! Someone to remind them where all that money that they spend so lavishly actually comes from?

Q. How many minutes are in a credit hour? A. 'It's mushy'

You would think that the groups that accredit colleges would have defined long ago exactly what a credit hour is. After all, this is the basic unit of higher education that defines when a student graduates and how much that education will cost.

Yet this week the president of a college accreditation group testified before Congress that the whole idea of a credit hour is "a mushy concept" that varies from college to college and even changes over time. The new on-line courses have made the concept even more mushy, she said.

You can read the story about this in the Chroincle of Higher Education: Credit hours should be worth the cost.

I spent most of my life as a journalist, so when I became a college teacher I asked my colleagues and my superiors this exact question. What I was told was that a credit hour was the same as a "contact hour," and meant the amount of time I spent in the classroom with students. So for a three-credit class I was expected to be in the classroom for a total of three hours per week and students were expected to spend six hours per week working outside the classroom.

It didn't take long, however, for me to find out that this rule of thumb had become seriously fudged. The classroom hour was actually only 45 minutes long, to allow students time between classes. Also students would violently revolt if I assigned them six hours per week of homework. So there were actually only two and a half hours in the classroom and two hours out of class.

But how much of the time left is actually spent on instruction? If you leave out the time at the beginning of class waiting for students to filter in, leave out the time wasted taking attendance, leave out the time for taking tests, you are left with about one hour per week of genuine instruction time.

I only began to think about this when my college changed from three credit classes to four credit classes. While administrators claimed this was nothing more than reorganization of time, students made it clear to me that there was no way they were going to sit still in the classroom for four hours a week. No way! "Other professors let us leave early," I was told, or "other professors make the last hour optional," or "why can't we use the last hour to do our homework?" Some students simply left when they felt like it and others went on "bathroom breaks" from which they never returned.

I think Congress is on the right track in thinking this needs to be nailed down. But when students who aren't interested in learning team up with teachers who aren't interested in teaching, the 30-minute hour is the natural result.

Tufts president thinks 'face time' will cure binge drinking

Tufts University President Lawrence Bacow deserves high praise for finally going public with his concern about his binge drinking students. Apparently all it took was walking to his office at 3:3o in the afternoon and finding an unconscious student sprawled on his lawn before being taken to the hospital to have his stomach pumped.

Pretty hard to ignore! But why wasn't he concerned about the previous 15 of his students who made the same trip to the hospital for the same reason or the 60 - SIXTY! - students who made the trip by the end of the school year? Well, at least he finally got the message. Most college presidents simply sit on their hands and ignore it. 

But his solution to the problem, as outlined in this Boston Globe article, "Presidential sobriety check"  is so outrageously arrogant that it's hard to believe. After binge drinkers return from their sojourn in the emergency room, Bacow invites them into his office for a little one-on-one session where he will personally convince them of the error of their ways. He talks to them, he says, as he would talk with his own sons.

Forget the counselors the college has hired to do this. Forget the decades of research on this problem that have been conducted a few miles away at Harvard. Forget all the efforts to meddle with the drinking age and to change the social norms of campus life. Dr. Bacow will personally solve this problem all by himself, as he tearfully told the Boston Globe reporter.

Forget it, Dr. Bacow. You can bet those kids will be right out in the streets with their red plastic cups as soon as they get the chance. Talking will not change the campus drinking culture. It took years for colleges to be recognized as a place where binge drinkers can safely practice their lifestyle with no fear of interference. In-the-know high school drinkers know they can count on colleges to cover for them while they drink themselves into oblivion.

The solution to the binge drinking problem is very simple one. Just say no! Just toss them out! The same students that Bacow singles out for his therapy sessions are the ones the president should throw out the door. Then announce what happened and why. Then add the message that if you want to engage in this kind of behavior you will have to do it somewhere else. Not here!

Why don't colleges adopt this simple solution? It's because college administrators are so concerned about "retention" of tuition paying customers that they are afraid to take any action that would damage the bottom line. Tossing out paying students, even ones that are dangerously immature, is just not an option. What if the college got a reputation as "unfriendly to drinkers"? What would that do for enrollment?

College presidents need to take a hard line on this. Until they do they can expect the problem to continue with all the dead students and failed lives that result from it.

Party school diplomas don't save students from poverty

A generation ago it was common knowledge that a college diploma was an excellent investment that assured a lifetime of financial success. It's a tough sell to convince people that in these days of party schools, education optional colleges, outrageously high tuition rates and crippling debt that the cost of a college degree can ruin students' lives.

However, the information backing up that theory continues to increase by the day. Graduates have $100,000 in student debt. College alumni work in temp jobs, delivering pizzas and working as clerks. In the latest blow to the party school industry is the revelation of how many people living in poverty have a diploma hanging on their walls. 

The Institute for Higher Education Policy found that 47 percent of young people living in poverty had attended college and 11 percent had graduated.

You can read the New York Times story about it here: "Many Young Adults in Poverty Have a College Degree."

The report said poor students go to college academically unprepared, and, amid competing family and work obligations, they accumulate debt "that could have been avoided by pursuing a different type of degree or a credential."

There it is folks! Paying off those college loans is putting alumni in the poor house! These students should never have been sent to college, the report says, because they are unprepared for the work and most of them eventually drop out, leaving them with no diploma and a big bill.

Who's to blame for this? Colleges enroll as many students as they can because it helps their bottom line. Freshmen are stacked into dorms like cord wood, four students to a room designed for two. They know most of these kids won't make it, but they don't care. These are students ready to take out big loans to pay the excessive costs of higher education. That's money in the bank to greedy college administrators.

What sense does it make to send 70 percent of high school grads to college when half of them drop out? Add to that the crippling levels of debt and you have the makings of a crisis. Or a bubble about to burst.

Student jourrnalist describes grade inflation

It's been my opinion all along that students are perfectly aware of the breakdown in higher education that is going on all around them. They know which schools are party schools. They know when classes are being dumbed down. They know that administrators will bend over backward to make excuses for them in the name of "retention."

But until now I was not aware of a student who understood the reasons and methods of grade inflation. Then someone sent me a column by Evan Helmuth, a writer for the University News at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. Helmuth has the whole thing all figured out. If he understands this, why aren't parents able to grasp the idea that a grade of  A is pretty meaningless when, as Helmuth says, "professors hand out A's like candy."

The especially tragic thing is the impact on the hardworking students who usually lived in A land all by themselves. If everyone gets an A anyway, where is the incentive to work hard to earn it? Helmuth understands this as well.

You can read Helmuth's column here "Grade inflation rampant."

And check out his Matt Drudge imitation photo!