Party Schools Exposed

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!

 

When the plagiarism experts plagiarize about plagiarism

The millennial generation has absolutely no respect for intellectual property. They have been stealing digital music all their lives and when they need to write a term paper, nearly all of them cut and paste from the Internet. When you catch them at this, they think you are being silly. Why can't I just take it off the Internet?  It's free! They think you are picking on them when you write them up for plagiarism.

Faced with the time-consuming prospect of prosecuting thousands of cases of plagiarism each year, you can't blame college administrators for throwing up their hands and declaring the whole process of citing your sources as hopelessly uncool, like the provost at my school did, dismissing it as a "mashup" from various sources and somehow creative.

When you consider that after graduation most of these students will become pizza deliverers and clerks, what difference does it make if they know how to cite literary sources or not?  I was a stickler for this because citing your source was a major tenet of journalism.

But as if we need further signs that the entire intellectual process has broken down at subprime colleges, we have this interesting tidbit from the Chronicle of Higher Education showing that at the University of Southern Illinois, the plagiarism committee, the college's resident experts, were asked to formulate a plagiarism policy. It turns out, however that most of it was nicked from a similar policy at the University of Indiana. In fact, nearly all of the 139-word definition was stolen directly from the other college with no attribution.

Okay, so if the plagiarism experts can't even do this right, what hope is there of convincing undergraduates that copying and pasting isn't an ethical replacement for thinking things out for yourself?

Underachieving college students are proud of it

One of the prime spokesmen for the Millennial generation is Bart Simpson, that annoying yellow wise guy who wore a T-shirt to school proclaiming “Underachiever and Proud of it!”

 

It was perfect in a lot of ways, particularly the way generations responded to it. Principals at real life high schools banned the shirt because it was a bad influence and parents were appalled, but students found that it expressed perfectly their attitude toward life. Why waste the effort to achieve something when it was a lot less work to happily embrace mediocrity?

 

After a decade of studying the behaviors and attitudes of undergraduates at the bottom rung of academia I can tell you that the majority of students I came into contact with didn’t seem to understand that college students were supposed to be learning something. The entire idea that college is for learning is foreign to them. For them, college is a place where grades are awarded based on your negotiating skills with the teacher and diplomas are purchased for a set price.

 

So what is the problem with this picture?  Parents take out second mortgages, pile up huge loan debts and raid their retirement accounts to send their children to college, but when their children get there they can’t be bothered reading the textbooks or coming to class.

 

A diploma from a third-tier party school is, of course, no longer what it once was – a guarantee that the holder has achieved an elevated level of expertise. Employers are aware that the holders of college degrees can’t be counted on to be able to read or write or even understand basic facts about the world. In fact, all it shows is that someone provided the money to purchase it.

 

In fact, college students often come out much worse off than when they went in. After five years of intense peer pressure to drink themselves into unconsciousness, skip classes, not read books and engage in the hedonistic lifestyle that prevails, college graduates are simply not able to make the transition into a job that insists that they show up on time, treat customers with respect and learn the ropes from their mentors.

 

Of course there are many college students who have not signed on to the underachiever gravy train, but at the subprime level they are always in the minority and constantly harassed. If you don’t believe me, sign on to Facebook and check out the group “Stop Raising Your Fucking Hand – Nobody Cares,” which does an excellent job of explaining that asking a question in class tends to make the class longer and that students who do it are to be ostracized until they conform. Again this is the rampant anti-intellectualism that pervades.

 

So, parents, are you really aware of what you are purchasing when you send your children to these places?

What purpose does an "anti-intellectual" college serve?

anti-intellectualism

antagonism to learning, education, and the educated, expressed in literature in a conscious display of simplicity, earthiness, even colorful semi-literacy. — anti-intellectual, n., adj.

 

I am starting out with the definition here because it was clear to me that nearly all of my students didn’t understand what this meant. They thought that I was calling them stupid. Many critics of higher education make this mistake, including Mark Bauerlein in his best-seller The Dumbest Generation. Intelligent quotient statistics are remarkably stable over time and have not declined recently.

 

Clearly, today’s college students are not stupid. The problem is that they are absolutely opposed to any kind of education, which they see as stupid people attempting to force them to adopt ideas they don’t consider valid. When I tried to teach them the “rules” of third-grade grammar, for example, they felt that I was imposing my opinions on them and that their way of doing it was just as valid as mine.

 

When you talk with them they freely admit they are anti-intellectual, even if they don’t know what that means. They think college is a place where dumb teachers try to impose their opinions on them and make them read boring, pointless books and literature and their role is to resist these attempts to impose opinions on them because they are already perfect.

 

There are many in-depth descriptions of this problem, including this essay by Paul Trout of Montana State University and this one from Wikipedia. Perhaps the best description of where this attitude comes from is in Jean Twenge’s Generation Me, where she tracks the problem back to the self-esteem movement in elementary and secondary schools. When teachers endlessly praise your work, even when it is of poor quality, it enforces the attitude that you know everything already. So why bother studying? Anyone who criticizes your work in any way must by nasty or ignorant or both.

But take a moment to look at how entirely ridiculous it is to send anti-intellectual students to college. How do you teach someone who is opposed to the very idea of education? Many of these students admitted to me that they didn’t plan to learn anything in college. They were just there to purchase a diploma. What they wanted out of college classes was not education but entertainment.

 

I thought of this recently when I saw a program on HBO called “Assume the Position 201 with Mr. Wuhl.” Wuhl is a comedian, not a professor, but his show takes place in a college classroom with students at their desks. But this is a Millennial’s dream of a perfect college classroom. The entire class is an illustrated trivia game with sound effects, scantily dressed models bringing in the prizes and suitcases full of sight gags. What is interesting to me is this is nearly exactly what students described for me when I asked them what they thought an ideal college class would be like.

 

Many professors have been asked to take acting classes so their classroom lessons would become more like this. Fun, yes, but educational? Ah, sorry. Higher education is increasingly pointed in this direction. It keeps the kids happily entertained, paying their bills and coming back for more. But what kind of a society are we creating?  The Wikipedia article cited above makes a clear connection between anti-intellectualism and totalitarianism. It was a basic step in the Nazi plan to take over Germany, for example. All of that sounds pretty scary to me, and that's why I wrote my book, but most of the American public isn't even aware that it is going on.

Lying, cheating students drive out another college teacher

The latest college teacher to throw in the towel and declare her students un-teachable is Shelle Stormoe of Little Rock, Arkansas, who after years of dealing with students who lied, cheated, thought they knew more than she did and tried to con her into better grades, handed in her resignation recently.  

She was a creative writing teacher and you can read her statement of unconditional surrender in this article she wrote for Salon.

 

It's a story I can certainly relate to. Attempting to teach students who are anti-intellectuals who hate any kind of learning is more of less like hitting your head against the wall. Like me, she was attracted to the profession because she thought she would have a lot of spare time to write. Like me, she entered the profession hoping to be able to help students who wanted to become writers. Like me, she soon found out that the only thing students wanted was a diploma. Learning was not part of the bargain.

 

Here is some of what she had to say:

“I didn’t expect every failing student to start questioning not just their grades, but my competence. I didn’t expect them to look me straight in the face and tell me they know more about writing than I do.  Students came right out and asked me if I would just bump up their grades. They showed up, after not turning in a single assignment all semester, demanding a passing grade.  It was common practice for students to plagiarize if they could get away with it.  Well over 50% of college students regularly cheat, and I’m pretty sure the number on my campus is much higher.  None of this was unusual, either.  It was normal, standard practice, the way my students thought the world ought to work.”

Well said!  Now if only parents and legislators could begin hearing more of this something could be done about the millions of dollars being wasted on “higher education,” that is really nothing more than baby sitting and degree purchasing.

 

What kind of insanity is it to pay thousands of dollars to send anti-intellectual students to college? Do we expect somehow for them to simply inhale knowledge?

 

The students’ attitudes, nurtured by years in the self-esteem movement, is that they are perfect little snowflakes who can do whatever they want without expending any energy or learning anything. Why improve yourself when you are already as perfect as can be?

 

If you failed the test, obviously it must be a poor test. If you get a bad grade something must be wrong with the teacher. If you failed the class it’s because the teacher doesn’t like you. I heard all of those excuses over and over. Somehow the idea that college is supposed to challenge you to learn something so you can become a more knowledgeable person has been tossed out when no one was looking.

 

Colleges that use their viewbooks to advertise all the fun things about college life and leave out all that nasty classroom stuff are partly to blame. When you advertise college as one big party, who’s to blame when the students take you up on it? They aren’t there for an education. They’re there for the party. But guess who picks up the tab?

Nearly 30% of college freshmen can't read, write or calculate

While I am writing mainly about higher education here, there is no denying that the problem begins with high schools that allow students who cannot read, write or calculate to graduate. When these students arrive on campus they are already behind the curve.

So what is the college to do? An article from this week’s Denver Business Review found that Colorado taxpayers are forced to pick up the tab for $14.6 million in remediation and an additional $13 million in lost tuition revenue.

Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter pointed out that if high schools were doing a better job of preparing students for college all of the funding that now goes to remediation -- like teaching college students third grade grammar -- could be spent on things like additional financial aid.

 

So why is it so hard for high schools to make sure that students have mastered the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic during the nine years between third grade and twelfth grade?  Much of the problem stems from the focus put on retention. High schools have severely dumbed down their programs to prevent students from dropping out. Students with major skill deficiencies are simply passed on from grade to grade without learning these essential skills.

 

Also, the so-called “self-esteem movement” insists that students receive high grades and generous pats on the back even when they don’t know a verb from a noun or know how to construct a simple sentence. Their policy is that school needs to be fun and entertaining and that means movies, computers and learning games instead of reading books and writing papers.

 

As expensive as it is, remedial education is a far better solution than the policy at Keene State College, where I used to work. There was no remedial education there. All of the illiterate students were thrown into the same freshman classes as the fully prepared students. The result was damage to both groups. The illiterates simply stared off into space and zoned out for 90 minutes, while the prepared students were bored to tears by the dumbed-down classes that lacked the rigor and challenge they expected from college work.

 

High schools should be doing the remedial work, not colleges. There should be a set of written minimum standards based on the skills required for a successful freshman year. High schools should not graduate students until they meet that standard. Colleges should do their own tests and refuse admission  to students who fall below that standard.

 

Sure that would reduce the number of students who go to college, but at 70 percent there are too many students going to college anyway.