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?

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.

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!

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!

Sorority "formal" includes vandalism, theft and public urination

When they learn that their daughters are attending a sorority "formal" event, parents probably imagine ball gowns, corsages and escorts in tuxedos. They are not aware that times have changed as newspaper reports from Ohio found last week.

What goes on at a sorority "formal" in the age of party schools? Public urination, public sex, leaving piles of feces on the carpet, tearing sinks off the bathroom walls and jumping over the bar to steal alcohol. One student was stopped as he was attempting to urinate on an exhibit at the National Underground Railroad Museum.

You can read the New York Daily News article here and a longer piece by the local newspaper here. It should be an eye-opener for parents who think their tuition money is being used to educate the youth of tomorrow. This kind of behavior is beyond childish and more like barnyard animals.

And what punishments do the colleges dole out for this behavior? The sororities were suspended for two years. I bet they are all shrinking in fear. The reality is that these suspensions are often reduced to time served once the media attention goes away. Colleges are not about to turn away paying customers just because they act like animals. This kind of behavior is quite common among college students, but colleges are experts at keeping it from the public.

Any other kind of organization would boot these imbeciles out the door. Can you imagine if a group of accountants, public servants or Boy Scouts acted this way? How long would they last? The message that Greeks get from these minimal punishments is quite clear. Go right ahead and have fun!  Just make sure your tuition is paid and we'll cover for you.

The administrators quoted in these articles say they are embarrassed and shocked by the stories and apologize profusely, yet there is nothing new about these reports and what rock have they been hiding under for the past decade while these reports eventually leak out to the public? Are they embarrassed by their students' behavior or embarrassed that the press reported them?

And what of Greeks themselves? Take a look at this quote:

“I don’t think their actions were responsible at all,” said Katey Clark, a 2006 Miami graduate and Alpha Xi Delta member. “But they’re making it sound like they burned the place down ... with the hype it’s getting. This has been going on for years now. I just didn’t appreciate how these two sororities were targeted. They acted like these students were criminals.”

Earth to Katey Clark: vandalism is a crime, defecating in a museum is a crime. People who commit crimes are called..."criminals" even if it has been going on for years now and party school students think they are entitled to this kind of behavior. If you can gone to a real college, Katy, you would have learned that in your classes.

Cops to crack down on drug-friendly Oregon college

Reed College in Oregon has long had an unofficial reputation as a stoner's paradise where students are free to enjoy their favorite illegal substances in peace without interference from college officials.

This unofficial "smoke 'em if you got 'em" policy has come under attack this month from Oregon prosecutors after two Reed students died of heroin overdoses over the past two years. Federal prosecutors have threatened to crack down on the college and take away its  federal funds unless the college adopts a "zero-tolerance" policy against drug users, a policy that would piss off a majority of Reed students who chose the campus for its pro-stoner policies. 

The procesutors plan to send undercover drug agents to the campus' annual Renn Fayre festival this weekend, an event at which public drug use has been on display.

You can read the Portland Oregonian story about this here.

Of course there is nothing in Reed's official documents, view books or college policies that allow drug use. This policy is unofficialy promoted in conversations and e-mails from college  students to high school students. Parents interested in finding out if the college they are considering for their children is a drug haven in disguise should take a look at the punishments handed out for drug violations.

Some colleges still expel students for illegal drug use, but judicial boards at drug-friendly colleges dole out sentences that include "mandatory drug education programs" or the writing of 5oo-word essays on "why drugs are bad." Even a high school student can understand that these kinds of punishments are really no punishments at all and do nothing to discourage the abuse of dangerous drugs.

In fact, colleges with "drug-friendly" reputations are really part of an underground marketing strategy to attract student customers willing to pay high tuition rates to enjoy their dangerous lifestyle choices.

It will be interesting to see how this confrontation plays out over the next few weeks.

Who is guilty of date rape on today's college campuses?

I recently had a chance to testify before a state committee looking into the number of crimes committed on college campuses and how colleges were covering them up. Nothing was more controversial than the number of rapes that take place.

The same day I testified a former U.S. attorney testified that while investigating a drug ring on a local campus he found by accident a number of rapes that were never officially reported to campus authorities. I testified about the ridiculously low numbers of officially reported rapes on campuses and how colleges deliberately underreported rapes to protect their images as "crime-free" zones. Colleges rarely report more than one or two rapes per year even though rape counseling centers see a dozen victims a month.

A national survey a few months ago found that 95 percent of campus rapes were never reported.

This week, a column written by an American University student for the student newspaper created a firestorm when he suggested that a woman who gets drunk at a fraternity party and walks home with a guy has actually agreed to have sex with him and is not a victim of date rape even if she is forced to have sex. You can read a Washington Post news story about the column  and the original column here.

The controversy here is over the concept of "consent" which is what separates hooking up from rape, but the real fly in the ointment here is alcohol, which tends to make the whole idea of "consent" somewhat nebulous. In New Hampshire, where I live, an intoxicated woman is incapable of giving consent and therefore anyone who has sex with her is guilty of date rape.

Anyone familiar with a party school campus, knows that nearly half of the women are legally intoxicated at any one moment and a lot of sex takes place on and off campus. So are there hundreds, possibly even thousands of rapes taking place every weekend? Legally, I think that is the case.

But these are crimes in which neither the perpetrator nor the victim may be aware that a crime was committed.

At SUNY Albany, where I used to be a reporter, there was an effort by feminists on campus to get women to sign a written consent form before they had sex. The feminists also collected a list of women who had sex "but wished afterwards that they had not," and sent out a news release that said that thousands of students were rape victims. This attracted national attention, but was such poor public relations for the college that the public relations people forced the feminists to retract their statement.

Coming up with a solution to this problem won't be easy, particularly when colleges like Keene State and Franklin Pierce insist before the state committee that no rapes take place on campus. None. Zero. Nada. Educating students about rape and consent and alcohol would help, perhaps, but I think it will take more than that to fix this problem. But covering it all up, which is what most colleges do, helps no one and merely perpetuates the rape culture on campus where female students are victims and perpetrators know there is little chance of being caught or punished.

College considers the ultimate student perk: a brewery on campus

Readers of this blog are aware of the outrageous perks on which colleges spend millions to attract students who aren't all that thrilled about education.

There are giant hot tubs, climbing walls, indoor golf ranges, water parks, condo-like  residences, food courts and, at High Point University, a free ice cream truck and concierge services.

But when students are asked what else would make them happy, there is always one thing on the top of the list that colleges dared not even consider for fear that students' real purpose for attending a party school would be exposed. But now, that final barrier, the place where no college has gone before, the ultimate student perk, has arrived.

Louisiana State University if considering building a brewery on campus.

Read the story here.

Now how on earth will any other college compete with that? But you can see the logic. Why allow all that student money to go off campus to the townie bars when we can do it better right here? Let's cut out the middle man and allow the students to get shit faced right on campus! We can schedule classes right in the brew pub!

You can see the advertisements they have ready to go:

LSU where credit hours are happy hours!

LSU We party in our own dive!

L.S.U.  Liquor Served Universally

You can bet that if they get away with this, other colleges will be forced to follow in their footsteps and campus breweries will become as common as libraries. "Give the Students What they Want," a motto adopted by many college administrators eager to increase enrollment,  may soon become their death knell.

Thank you to BP for sending me this gem!

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.

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.