Party Schools Exposed

61% of college students admit cheating on tests

A story in yesterday's New York Times focused on the high-tech services colleges are using to detect cheating on tests -- spy cameras, web sites that detect plagiarism, even ways to locate cheat sheets on baseball cap brims. Check the story out here.

But buried in the story is the crucial question. Why are a majority of students so morally bankrupt that they think cheating is okay?

When I first became a college teacher in 1995 I was pretty naive and didn't think cheating was really a problem. I assumed that college students who wanted to become journalists had an honor code and that they were above cheating on something as unimportant as a classroom test. Boy was I wrong!

In the next few years I found that my students were inventing interviews for their stories, making up whole stories, handing in stories written by someone else, using their cell phones to cheat, using the classroom computers to send out emails asking friends to give them the answers, and the old fashioned copying answers from the guy next to them. I even found students were cheating on the attendance sheet, writing in the names of their friends who were not there.

When I found suspicious looking stories I posted them into Goggle and as likely as not the original story, written by someone else, would pop up. Students had to be dismissed from the student newspaper for this.

So there's no question it is going on, but the crucial question is why. Why do these students think the penalties of flunking the class or losing your job at the student newspaper are worth the risk? Part of it, of course, is the fact that adolescents' brains don't fully mature until age 25 and the last part to develop is the frontal lobe that helps people make these kinds of decisions. Work on my paper or steal one and hope the professor doesn't find out? Most adults would not make that choice, but many college students do.

When I caught a cheater I would always bring her or him into my office and ask why. Often they seemed to have no real excuse. Others said "everyone does it," which is at least 61 percent true. But digging deeper I found a moral bankruptcy that was kind of frightening, especially for journalists, who need to have a well tuned moral compass to have the proper contempt for official malfeasance. But the really scary ones insisted that they had done nothing wrong, that they would not hesitate to do it again. The only crime was getting caught.

These are the leaders of tomorrow and one can only hope that a sense of honor develops inside those frontal lobes at age 25 as well. Or am I sounding old fashioned?

Colleges become front men for companies seeking earmarks

When the House of Representatives banned earmarks last week they probably figured that American companies would find a loophole to get around it, but who would have thought that American colleges and universities would be the ones to help them do it?

Earmarks are the $150 million thank-you notes that members of the house use to thank big companies for their generous campaign contributions by directing no-bid government contracts their way.  It's just one of the many ways that special interests use to gain access to taxpayer money.

The real news -- as explained in a New York Times article over the weekend -- was that in many cases it was colleges and universities who were now being awarded the contracts and then passed them on to local companies to spend. You can read the Times article here.

For example, General Electric Company would get as much as 80 percent of a $2-million earmark proposed by Pennsylvania State University for research on clean-burning locomotives. The proposal gets around the ban by listing the university as the lead player in the collaboration instead of GE, a faculty member told the Times.

This is technically legal, but ethically it is bankrupt. At the very least it is an abuse of colleges' tax-exempt status and it certainly violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the law. Is this really where we want our colleges and universities to be?

Responsible faculty members should protest these deals and demand that colleges return to more ethical activities.

College students' brains not fully mature until age 25

One of the foundations of college administators' attitudes about their students starts with the idea that they are "adults" and should therefore be free to make their own decisions without the influence of faculty, staff or safety officers.

This is one of the foundations of the "student friendly" concept of college campuses. You can do whatever you want! Have a ball! This has nearly entirely erased the old idea that colleges were "in loco parentis" - substitute parents - who could be held responsible when students decide to drink themselves to death or open fire on their classmates. The idea that students are adults exempts colleges from some nasty lawsuits over behavior.

Now, however, new research into the brains of adolescents show that in loco parents had it right all along. It turns out that students' brains are not fully mature until the age of 25 - long after they have graduated from college. And what is the last thing to mature? The decision-making process. The very thing that prevents most adults from thinking that it might be fun to drink yourself into unconsciousness or charge a trip to Cancun on your credit card.

Laurence Steinberg, a psychology professor at Temple University, in a paper prepared for the U.S. Supreme Court, said that adolescent brains are like  souped-up cars heading down the road at a hundred miles an hour without very good brakes.  Adolescents are just not mature enough to see the consequences of the bad decisions they make and are vulnerable to negative influences and peer pressure.

You can read a well-written article on this by AP writer Malcolm Ritter here.

So what are colleges to do when the basis for their ways of dealing with student behavior turns out to be built on sand? The answer, I think, is for them to become more like high schools.

High school administrators know that students will misbehave any chance they get and would scoff at the whole idea of "student friendly." College students need to be supervised so they don't harm and kill each other. Classroom selection needs to be more controlled so they don't take six years to complete their programs. Class attendance needs to be mandatory with clear penalties for absences, since many students seem to think it's okay to skip the expensive educations they are paying for.

In my experience, students actually WANT more restrictive rules. The combination of hundreds of hours of free time and the lack of any supervision is just too much of a temptation to engage in dangerous behavior, especially when peer pressure all goes in one direction: let's party!

Higher ed critic quotes from "The Five Year Party"

Mark Bauerlein, the Emory University English professor who wrote "The Dumbest Generation" is not the kind of guy to remain silent when party school emperors parade around with no clothes. He has shown over and over that he's not afraid to speak his mind when he finds college students who would rather party than learn how to read.

When my publisher asked me for a list of readers to send advance copies of my book to, he was right up at the top of the list. It's very gratifying to find that he not only read my book, but praised it and even quoted from it in his blog.

So let me step aside and surrender the podium to Professor Bauerlein while I sit on the sidelines blushing modestly while you read his blog post "Another Source of Disengagement" here.

Penn State, top party school, considers less student-centered policies

You have to feel sorry for Graham Spanier, president of America's top party school.

When Princeton Review named his school at the top of the list, it created a lot of publicity, but not the kind colleges crave. Students looking for a great place to party flocked to the place and that was good for admissions, but it hardly helps to attract the best qualified professors and administrators. Serious students also tended to stay away.

And like other top party schools from Florida to Arizona to UMass, Penn State is working overtime to prove to the world that it can do something else besides making Jello shots and taking unconscious students to the hospital to have their stomachs pumped.

Lots of people are offering him some assistance with his task, including Jeff Kern, a local columnist who offered this bit of advice.

Making colleges more "student-friendly" has been a tremendous disaster in the field of higher education. It's not that it's difficult to do. It's not. Dumb down the classes. Inflate the grades. Move the add / drop deadline to the end of the semester, fire teachers who want to maintain high standards, ignore any kind of alcohol rules, build a lot of water parks, climbing walls, luxury condos and gourmet dining courts. What you end up with isn't really a college any more but a kind of adolescent theme park. Exactly the kind of place that slackers want to stay for six years or so.

Bringing back 8 a.m. classes, requiring attendance, tossing out the binge drinkers, giving students the grades they really deserve, requiring students to go to class on Fridays instead of beginning the weekend on Thursday afternoon would piss students off to no end.

But in the end that may be exactly what we are going to have to do if colleges are ever going to be able to take themselves seriously again.

Lazy American college students aren't interested in learning

A very interesting op-ed piece in the Boston Globe this week shows exactly what happens in party school college classrooms. Students are texting away under the desk, making excuses about why their work is never completed and sleeping through their classes. I have been there, folks and this is all true!

What makes Kara Miller's experience at Babson College different, however, is that she also has a number of students from other countries to compare with her U.S. slackers. Unlike most of her American students, these students from other countries actually pay attention in class. Imagine that! They work hard on their assignments. They show up on time for faculty office hours. In short, they CARE about learning. It's like turning back the clock a few decades.

While she blames her slacker students on modern American culture's fascination with time wasters like video games, I think the real reason is American public schools' wholehearted adoption of what's called the Self Esteem Movement. Elementary and secondary teachers, in fear of damaging students' self esteem, give every student high grades, praise everyone's work equally and give gold stars to every student in the room. A cartoon a few years back caught the problem with this exactly. It was an entire room of students all wearing T-shirts that said "I'm the best student in the class."

When you reward students who work hard with the same grades and the same praise as students who do nothing it encourages students to do as little work as possible. Add to this the high school culture that glorifies stupidity and treats smart and talented kids as outcasts and you get exactly what Miller's article describes: anti-intellectual students who sign up for a five-year cruise on the SS Party School barge.

It's a serious problem at hundreds of party schools across the country and it will only change when brave teachers like Miller blow the whistle and force American parents to see how little education they are getting for their inflated tuition money.

Author of college secrecy law says colleges abuse it

A six-month investigation published last Sunday by the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch found vast differences in the way colleges interpret the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA.) While some colleges are very open and transparent about what they do, others slam the door shut against any kind of release of information.

Invariably, the colleges  reason this way: "We can't release educational records," they say. "It's against the law. We could lose our federal funding!" And what is an educational record you might ask?"Well, everything we do deals with education, so EVERYTHING is an educational record."

This "interpretation" of FERPA has led colleges to withhold from parents all kinds of important information that parents deserve to know, everything from suicide attempts to drug overdoses, to repetitive alcohol abuses to not showing up for class for weeks on end. Colleges make every effort to keep the three P's (parents the press and the public) out of the loop so they are free to do whatever they want with no oversight whatsoever.

Congress never intended to prohibit access to this kind of information and in the early 1990s it passed an amendment to FERPA that said, basically this: DISCIPLINARY RECORDS ARE NOT COVERED BY FERPA." What could be clearer than that? But, as the report shows, colleges are still "interpreting" the law as saying that they are.

The report shows that colleges use FERPA to cover up all kinds of crimes, from sexual harassment to bribery to illegal payoffs and violation of NCAA regulations. But perhaps the most interesting parts of the report are the comments by James Buckley, the former senator who authored the law. When he was told how colleges were using it, he said they had it exactly wrong and that it was never intended as a smokescreen to cover up wrongdoing. In fact, he said, Congress should act immediately to prohibit the law's being used in that way.

Colleges pretend to be terrified of violating the law and losing their federal funds, but this is also a part of the facade. In the 35 years since the law was passed in 1974, the federal government has never invoked it. Not once! Nor threatened to invoke it. The entire thing is an abuse to justify college's obsession with secrecy.

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.