Party Schools Exposed

Missing from college curriculum: How to get a job 101

They've spent an average of six years at college and don't know much about grammar, civics or math, but today's college graduates spent tens of thousands of dollars to buy a diploma and now they're ready for the workforce, right?

Wrong, according to researchers at York College in Pennsylvania. 

You can read the NPR report "College Grads Unprepared for Workplace." 

Their study found that recent college grads went to interviews wearing shorts and sandals. The first question they asked? "How much vacation time do I get?" They refused to do menial jobs and would only consider jobs at top pay. 

This sense of entitlement is encouraged by college administrators who have bought into the "student friendly" curriculum where there are few rules, anything goes and students get to decide what grades they want and when they will go to classes. Education is optional and administrators are eager to bend over backwards to make them happy.

The world of work, unfortunately, does not work this way. You have to do what you are told. You have to suck up to your boss. You have to dress up. You have to show up on time. These are all skills that are not taught at today's colleges.

Good luck class of 2010! And remember: don't bring a beer to your job interview.

Why send kids to college when most of them drop out?

An article this week in the New York Times spells out what I have been writing in this blog for two years now. We're sending too many unprepared and disengaged students to college for all the wrong reasons.

You can read the article here: Plan B: Skip College.

It wasn't that long ago that only the best and the brightest went to a four-year college, which prepared them to be the leaders of tomorrow. The rest of the high school graduates went to work or signed up for a trade school to learn a profession

Today, however, we send the below average and mediocre students to college as well and the result is that most of them drop out, leaving them with the student loan bills with nothing to show for them. In fact, 69 percent of high school graduates now go to college, up from 5 percent a century ago.

In fact, many college administrators think every student should go to college, a fantasy that defies any kind of logic. These people seem to think that auto repair workers should be discussing Proust in the lunch room or burger flippers should review Einstein's theory of relativity while dolloping mustard on the Big Macs. Completely out of touch with reality.

But these administrators have done an excellent sales job of convincing parents that not sending little Johnny to college is a form of child abuse. At the same time, these administrators have dumbed down their courses, inflated grades and turned their campuses into adolescent playgrounds where binge drinking is not punished and every possible perk from climbing walls to gourmet food courts to luxury condominiums are part of the sales package. Kids go to college not to learn anything but to have the time of their lives at a summer camp that lasts for six years.

If we sent only the bright kids to college, the students who are really interested in learning for learning's sake, we could afford to send them to college for free. It would be a great benefit for our country. But sending mediocre and anti-intellectual slackers to college is a waste of money and resources that reduces the required rigor and cheapens the value of a diploma. Everybody loses except the administrators who continue to add their friends to the payroll and push up their salaries into the quarter to a half million bucks a year range. That's the real reason they want to send everyone to college. More students equal more tuition which means higher salaries. It's a no-brainier!

Why don't students study anymore?

A new study by two economists has found that the number of hours students spend studying each week declined by 10 hours between 1961 and 2003, but does not explain why that happened.

Never fear, Tom Bartlett, one of the best writers for the Chronicle of Higher Education, offers his own suggestions here. Among the reasons he suggests are that students are lazier these days, classes are easier and students have more distractions today.

All of that is true, but the biggest reason is that colleges no longer require hard work to obtain a degree. That was back in 1961 when colleges' prime mission was "education." Today "education" has been replaced by the buzz word you hear every day at academic meetings: "retention."  And the two are mutually exclusive.

Making students study makes them unhappy and encourages them to drop out rather than hit the books. In 1961, students who said they would rather not study were shown the door. Today, students who don't want to study simply complain to the administration that the classes are too hard. They are then dumbed down in the name of retention so you don't have to study. Grade inflation helps a lot too!

Studying and working hard used to be what college was about. Today, college is an adolescent theme park where only chumps waste time studying, or even reading the textbook or even buying the textbook.  Students text their way through classes while listening to their Ipods and if the professor dares give them anything lower than a B, they complain to the administration that the professor is not playing the game by the modern rules. Sooner or later the professor gets the message: dumb down or die.

So in our century only half of colleges graduates are literate enough to understand the difference between opposing newspaper editorials. In an age of deliberate data falsification on television, these leaders of tomorrow are going to have a very hard time deciding whether or not space aliens control the government or if their president is really a socialist born in Africa. Being able to read should be the bottom line for elementary school graduates, high school graduates or even college graduates. But that attitude is so 1961.

Keene Party School Anthem: "Livin' up your college dream...NOT!"

For nearly two years now I've been attempting to describe in this blog what life is like for students on a party school campus, and now two freshmen have done it in just four minutes! This is definitely a must see for anyone considering sending children to a subprime party school. Check it out:

Keene Anthem by Lauren Foley and Dylan Welch freshmen at Keene State College in New Hampshire.

Lauren and Dylan are obviously creative and talented young people who need a little guidance about libel and invasion of privacy, but the tune is catchy and the lyrics are spot on in describing the empty lives of students at a party school campus where students spend their time "runnin' around that party scene" that consists of frat parties, chicken patties, anonymous sexual hookups, drugs, "drink all night" and professors that get drunk with their students.

The repeating chorus is:

"Keene, you know what I mean, runnin' around that party scene,

Keene, you know what I mean, living up your college dream....NOT."

And what do they have to say about classes, which their parents think are the reason they are there?

"Yo it's Keene State, time for class,

You gotta be retarded if you can't pass."

Then goes on to say the writer has straight A grades without doing any work. In other words, as I said, spot on.  Since they are freshmen, however, they probably do not yet understand that spending five years at this anti-intellectual adolescent resort can leave them $25,000 in debt and unable to get a job using their party school diplomas, which employers understand are worthless pieces of paper.

Just a couple of weeks ago I met one of my former students named Mallory in the Keene Friendly's Restaurant. The waitress job was her second job. She was also employed as an "executive assistant" (secretary) and was working to pay off her college loans. I nearly choked when she told me she owed $30,000! I tried to calculate how many tips she would need to raise that amount of cash. She said she chose Keene State because it was a party school, even though she was accepted at other colleges. Bad idea.

So what we have here is a simple bait and switch.  The college administrators lure these kids to the five-year party so they can participate in the lifestyle described in the video and set them up with predatory lenders. They tell the kids they can "be anything you want to be" and give them the loan application forms. Then, after graduation, they get to work at Friendly's for 30 years paying back the loans. Instead of being anything they can be they get to be the one thing colleges like this prepare them for...a life of poverty.

But Lauren and Dylan don't know about that part yet.

Ironically, this video is likely to attract thousands of applicants to Keene State. There are tens of thousands of high school students who can't wait to sign up for the five-year party. The college may have to hire some additional admissions people to handle the onslaught. But admitting even more party students, as profitable as that is, will only increase the college's well-earned reputation as a place where education is only a side show.

Two years ago the college hired a consultant to try to eliminate the number of hits received by a student-produced video about campus riots after the aRed Sox won the World Series. The college taped interviews with students and posted them on You Tube. But Dylan and Lauren have already trumped that effort. Their video has been up less than a month and already has nearly 2,000 hits and the previous audio-only version has nearly 2,000 more. Time to hire another consultant or just throw in the towel and admit that hell yes, we supply the party. Show up and have the time of your life!

If you know someone who is considering sending a child to a party school, please send them this video. You can also ask them to take a look at the 2005 PBS video called "Declining by Degrees," which deals with the same problems without the music. You will be doing them a tremendous favor and save them tens of thousands of dollars.

Glossary for people who are not from Keene:

DC - the dining commons

Wilson Street - the "student ghetto" just outside the campus

Randall - the dormitory where freshmen live

dmb - The Dave Matthews Band

Mailcruiser - the college-run e-mail system, which students hate

PMD - the campus fraternity that most resembles Animal House

Lloyd's - a campus eatery

Roids - steroids

Camp Co - Campus Convenience - a store just off campus

Blackboard - a college computer program used to communicate with students who don't go to classes.

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.

Colleges’ class drop policies encourage irresponsible students

Back in the day, midterm grades served a very useful purpose. For good students it was reassurance that they were on the right track and learning what they were supposed to be learning. For failing students it was a wake up call. "You better wake up, mister, or you could fail this class." It was effective and straightforward and put the pressure exactly where it belonged -- on the students.

 

In these days of dumbed down, party schools and sub prime colleges, however, college administrators have found an effective way to give irresponsible underachieving students a back door out of the process: the easy-out class drop form.

 

One of the significant changes I noticed during my 12 years as a college teacher was how the college made it easier and easier for students to drop classes. There used to be a $20 fee to drop a class, but it was reduced to $5. The college also gradually moved back the deadline for dropping a class from just after midterm to the week before classes ended. It used to require the teacher’s signature to drop a class, but by the time I left anyone in the department could sign the form. Often, the teacher didn’t even know a student had dropped. The student simply disappeared.

 

Why would the college make it easier for students to bail out? It was incomprehensible to me why the college would actually encourage students to quit rather than redouble their efforts to study and improve their grades.  Students had to be complete morons to fail a class when they could bail out the week before exams and not have a failing grade on their records.

 

But then I realized who benefited from these irrational policies:  the college. When a student dropped a class it disappeared from his or her record. It was like the student never registered for the class at ll. Except for one thing. There was no refund. The college got to keep the money. The real losers, of course, were the students who were required to pay for something that simply disappeared from their records. This was a prime reason why most students took six years to graduate from a “four-year college.” Many of them would drop one to three classes every semester.

 

Students who dropped classes often had poor attendance, sometimes disappearing for weeks at a time. Or they got so far behind they could never catch up. A decade ago these slacker students would have received Fs and flunked out of college. Nowadays, students can simply drop classes rather than fail them and end up right back where they started the semester. Then they can take the same classes or different classes. It’s a terrible waste of tuition money and, I believe, actually encourages students to act irresponsibly.

 

Students actually told me that dropping a class was a wonderful alternative to classes that required them to do some hard work. If you’re looking for a free ride through college, class drop forms allow you to bail out even if you take a challenging course by mistake. Once again, education and responsibility take a back seat to colleges’ mantra of “retention, retention, retention at any cost.”

 

I think all of this would stop very quickly if parents had to sign the drop form. After all, in most cases, it’s their money that’s being wasted. “Oh no, you’re not going to drop that class, young man,” I can hear them saying, “you’re going to hit the books and pass it or else!” But the attitude that you can easily quit, go back and start over is often a perfect match for irresponsible students and it’s an attitude that will not serve them well after graduation. After all, there are no “drop forms” in real life. The business world is ruled by contracts and commitments that must be lived up to. Once you are assigned a project you don’t get to drop it. Once you’ve signed a contract you must live up to it.

 

I suspect that many millennial college students are going to be looking for the drop forms in real life and are going to be disappointed to learn that there aren’t any.

"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.

Dumbing down college participation with "classroom clickers"

For more than 2,000 years, higher education consisted of things like seminars and lectures where students gathered around wise instructors, asked questions and made comments. Today, of course, that is way too much work for millennials who don't have time to read the book or think about anything other than their immediate needs.

To accommodate these non-reading, non-thinking students we have "Classroom Response Systems" or "clickers" as most professors and students call them. They are handheld electronic devices on which students register their responses to professors' questions.

Gee, when I was in college, we had a non-electronic version of this called "raising your hand."  What's wrong with that?

Well, according to Derek Bruff, assistant director of the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt, "students are hesitant to answer questions independently." Oh the poor darlings! Much too nerdy for the young Bart Simpson imitators who belong to the Facebook group "Shut up and put down your fucking hand, no one cares." So we come up with an electronic gadget so kids won't be embarrassed about participating in class. That, of course, is progress.

It turns out that Bruff has written an entire book about these gadgets.  Yes, but who is going to read it since these devices are obviously made for the illiterate? In the PBS special "Declining by Degrees" you can see a clicker class in action. If the idea is to keep kids awake, it's a success. If it's an attempt to educate them, it's a dismal failure. The things you are supposed to learn in college are much too complicated to be taught by multiple choice clickers. 

It dumbs everything down into multiple choice questions. It kills discussion and any kind of interaction.  In fact, if you have ever seen the program "Who Wants to be a Millionaire," you know how this all works. Kids agonizing over four possible answers to questions like "What on earth are you doing in college if you can't even bother to read the textbook?" In class however, you don't get to use a lifeline to call your mother.

But popular?You bet! Sure beats learning!  But how would you feel if one of these students became a doctor in the emergency room after your hand was cut off in a terrible accident? The millennial doctor, calling up his trusty IPod screen, calls up the possibilities. A. Give him an aspirin  B. Glue it back on with Elmer's C. Call in someone who knows something.  D. Go out to dinner.

Note to parents: If your kid is assigned to a "clicker class," cancel your membership in the party school and transfer your kid to a real school.

College lectures are chopped down into sound bites

" A minute's success pays the failure of years." -- Robert Browning, Apollo and the Fates (1886)  

Just when you think things can't get dumbed down any further at subprime colleges, comes the latest hot trend: college lectures that are gone in 60 seconds! A number of colleges are offering professors training in how to trim all the useless fat out of those deep lectures and turn them into one-minute sound bites that students can play on their I-pods.

You can read the Chronicle of Higher Education story here.

I have absolutely no doubt that students love this! After all, psychologists tell us adolescent  attention spans are barely 15 minutes long. So the young scholars on Red Bull  could attend one of these lectures and still have 14 minutes left when they could ask questions before their minds return to the usual mashup of sex, drugs, rock and roll and, of course, getting shit-faced.

Education by soundbite might well be the trend for our times. No time for students to ask "Is this going to be on the test?" and not even time to sneak out to the bathroom. Just 60 seconds of the best education they can buy for their $30,000 per year investment.

Professors are being asked to create small videos of these lectures so students can watch them over and over again, post them on YouTube and share them with their friends.

Of course all of this comes with a certain loss of detail. You try to explain photosynthesis in 60 seconds, or the sources of Shakespeare's history plays, or the Supreme Court cases that shaped our modern libel laws. If you don't think you can do it, just take out all the unnecessary stuff. You have to think like a Millennial.

So here, is my 60 second lecture on the history of the United States, pared down into a sound bite.

"These dudes sailed their boats to try to find some spices and crashed into the new world and these guys with like weird hats and funny shaped rifles came over and crashed into Plymouth Rock. It was like awesome! They killed some Indians and had a party and then they like thought, "Hey Man, how come we get taxed without representation? So they had like this huge war with guns and cannons and stuff and signed a big sheet of paper that said they had inalienable rights and dudes like George Washington and Ben Franklin signed it and after that there was a Civil War and the North beat the South and then there was World War I with even more awesome explosions and tanks and airplanes and stuff. Then there was a big depression and everyone lost their jobs and there were these dudes, so cool, who jumped out of windows and then the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor and the U.S. beat the shit out of them and Hitler and we dropped the big one, I mean the really big one (Kaboom)  on Japan and then there was Vietnam and Martin Luther King and George Bush like tanked the economy and we elected Barack Obama as the first black president."

So did I leave anything out? What else could kids possibly need to know?

Cheating is part of the curriculum for MBAs at business schools

In the millions of words being written about how Wall Street bankers brought down the world economy, perhaps none are more interesting than those of a Rutgers professor who found that business students cheat more often than any other students and that that their professors usually look the other way.

Research conducted by Donald L. McCabe found that 56 percent of graduate business students admitted to some form of cheating, compared to 47 percent of non business students. It's likely, he said, that students who cheat in college are likely to cheat their customers as well, especially if it results in personal gain for themselves or their organizations. The Chronicle of Higher Education report on this is available here.

What's worse, however, is that colleges and professors are aware of this cheating and allow it to continue. Some faculty members told McCabe that sending a cheating case through the college disciplinary process took too much time away from other things. And if they do report it, colleges often fail to act either because they are afraid of a lawsuit from parents or because parents might withhold donations.

So we are back to the same old issue I have written about many times now. It's all about the money. Why discipline a customer when you can look the other way pretend everything is fine. Who cares if we don't teach the kids any ethics and let them know that cheating isn't okay? Well, just look around us and you can see the answer!