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.

Are colleges taking kickbacks from health insurers?

By now it should be no surprise that colleges have been accepting kickbacks through their cozy relationship with predatory lenders, but yesterday was the first mention of a new scandal between colleges and those other scoundrels of our time: health insurance companies. 

The New York Times broke the story yesterday and it is still rather sketchy and still under investigation. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is asking for records from a number of colleges. According to the story, the problem is that students who have health insurance provided by their parents are being required to purchase additional health insurance by the colleges. 

The problem, as with the student loan scandal, is the payments that these health insurance make to the colleges in return for the business, are conflicts of interest. Once again, the old idea that colleges put the interest of students first, has come into conflict with the new reality: colleges are businesses that put profit first. 

Although it is really too soon to tell, this scandal would seem to fit right into some of the problems that this blog has reported about colleges that sell students addresses to credit card companies and the cozy relationships with predatory lenders. I'm sure we'll hear a lot more about this in the coming months.  The real problem is that no one really seems to be watching what colleges do with all their billions of tuition money.