Party Schools Exposed

Arizona Takes on its Growing Reputation as a Party School

Colleges that try to toss their party school reputations by "remaking their image" are faced with the same problem as a farmer who puts lipstick on his pigs. In the end, they're still pigs.

While administrators at the country's most notorious party schools like Penn State and the University of Florida may say they want to change their images, the truth is that the party school moniker brings in tens of thousands of students who would rather down Jell-O shots than read any books. They know not to protest too much or the party animals they depend on to pay their tuition will go somewhere else.

When Penn State was named the top party school in the nation by the Princeton Review a few months ago, students celebrated by buying T-shirts that proclaimed "I go to the number one party school in the country!" and set up Facebook pages with the same name.

That's the context for the University of Arizona's efforts to counter its growing image as a party school, competing with Arizona State as the biggest party school in the state as reported here by the Arizona Republic.

Some of the University of Arizona's moves to counter a growing party school image are right on, such as removing fraternities and adopting tougher rules on drinking.  But UA administrators seem to be drawing the line at closing the "Zona Zoo" rooting section at athletic events. Getting tough on illegal drinking at sporting events is one of the real tests of how much UA wants to dump the party school image. Many colleges that strictly enforce their drinking rules most of the time, sit on their hands while students indulge from kegs in the stadium parking lot.

That seems to be what happens with the animals who inhabit the Zona Zoo, and the UA administration seems split on how far it should go. Some think that the zoo encourages "Animal House type behavior." Now gee, I wonder why that would be? You call a place a zoo and you expect the people to go there to act like scholars?

Getting rid of the party school image is sort of like trying to get people to ignore the scarlet letter A that is on your face. You can put lipstick on it, but you're still a pig.

The "reverse transfer" of 4-year students to community colleges

As the college tuition bubble at four-year subprime party schools grows ever larger, an increasing number of students are choosing to dump the expensive diploma mills and choosing the better and more-affordable alternative: community colleges.

This "reverse transfer" as it is called, involves students who have become wise to the problems inherent in the lower tiers of so-called four-year colleges, which  supply a very expensive but flawed product where the goal is not education but the five and six year parties. While many students looking to celebrate adolescent hedonism love these places, more dedicated students understand that without a rigorous and directed program their money is being wasted.

If you want to avoid the unemployment lines after graduation, they have figured out, you need to learn something other than the binge-drinking crime spree that is the norm at subprime colleges.

I have noticed this for some time, but now Inside Higher Education, an excellent site for news about higher education, has documented this phenomenon. You can read their story The New Reverse Transfer.

Some of these transfers are based solely on costs. A community college can cost less than half the cost of going to a party school, but if you look at the examples in this story you can also see another difference. The four-year colleges make wild career promises about what you can do after you graduate. At Keene State College in New Hampshire, where I used to work, students told me that advisors and counselors told them they could be movie actresses, film directors, novelists and psychiatrists, despite the fact that few if any graduates of the programs get those jobs. This is part of the false advertising claims that are rampant at subprime colleges. Look at the student in the article who was "sold" a pre-med program without any hint to how much it would cost and how hard it would be to get into medical school.

Community  colleges make much more modest claims that graduates can get jobs as nurses, computer specialists, construction project managers and such. These are more than just claims. They are proven career paths with connections to previous graduates. CC graduates can often walk off the graduation program and directly into a job. Party schools don't even come close. Once you pay your bills party schools quickly lose interest in you as a revenue generator.

If enrollment figures are any guide, parents and their children are beginning to understand that party schools are a fraud and that the smartest students should go to a serious four-year college, but that the majority of high schools graduates would be much better served at a community college where costs are lower and students can graduate without huge loans to pay off and with jobs ready and waiting for them.

 

Colleges manipulate YouTube results to "improve image"

Manipulating information to achieve a predicted result is considered fraud in the academic world. Think back to the scandal caused by the false reports of the development of "cold fusion" for example. The same thing also seems to have happened in the Bush administration when it manipulated information about global warming.

That's why it came as a surprise when I opened my Sunday paper and found the president of the local college, Keene State College in New Hampshire, congratulating herself that she had improved the college's image by urging a college computer expert to manipulate the results on YouTube. Her purpose was to focus attention away from the party school and riot videos that were the most popular results when you entered the college's name in the YouTube search engine.

In the online community this manipulation of the number of page views a site receives is also considered bad form. When it involves advertising payments based on the number of page views it is also seen as a form of fraud.

It's one thing to do it. I suspect a lot of colleges do this kind of thing in the cutthroat competition to attract students, but it's highly unusual that they would admit it, even brag about it on the fr0nt page of the local newspaper!  Most of the article consisted of quotes from the president and the college's director of online communications praising each other for doing such a fine job of manipulating the search results in their favor.

In the president's view, the original results were "totally skewed," yet assuming the results were not deliberately changed by someone else, these results came from the actual practices of surfers who searched under the college's name. I would argue that the very practice the college employees were engaging in was deliberately skewing the results.

The actual example they cited was moving down the list a video of a campus riot that occurred after the Boston Red Sox won the World Series and moving up a video of Dr. Anastasie Gasogo of the National University of Rwanda speaking at the college. (I swear I am not making this up!)  Now, of course, Dr. Gasogo is probably never going to be a star on YouTube, no matter how much the college manipulates the results. And riot videos are always going to attract the curious. It seems like a futile waste of time to me.

The real question, of course, is should colleges be engaged in this kind of deliberate fraud? Paying an employee to manipulate the Internet seems like a silly waste of funds and is unlikely to have any impact on the college as a serious party school. Local residents who live near student housing are asking the city to crack down on such delightful student activities as public urination and unconscious students blocking the sidewalks.  There's no doubt the college has a pretty bad public image, but instead of fraud they need to change their practices if they really want to improve their image. There really isn't any short cut.

The value of a bachelor's degree is vastly over-rated

While I don't agree with everything he has to say about higher education, I think Charles Murray is on the right track in his book "Real Education" and in his recent op-ed piece in the New York Times.

Higher education, liberal education and the bachelor degree were designed for a previous generation in which only students who were really interested in learning went to college. Today those serious scholars have to share the classroom with the majority of party animals who are there for the five-year cruise on the SS Party Barge.

When you give the party animals and the scholars the exact same degree you are merely creating confusion for employers, who increasingly require a bachelor degree as a minimum price of admission, even though there are thousands of illiterate BA holders out there these days. The degree is no longer a guarantee that the holder knows anything at all.

That's why Murray's idea of individual certificates for particular skills makes a lot of sense. Employers, I think, would welcome someone who had a certificate in computer programming over someone with a BA who majored in "computer science." The latter could mean that the holder studied things like "How to use your Facebook account" and "Fun with I-Pods" in college.

In my own field, I think a job candidate with a journalism certificate verifying his credentials in grammar, fairness, ethics, civics and political science would have a leg up against someone with a BA in journalism.

What was discouraging was the reaction to Murray's essay, which took up most of a page a few days later. While a few professors congratulated him on his courage in speaking about about how far standards have fallen, the nearly universal complaint was that he was elitist and wanted to keep poor kids out of college. He was actually saying nothing of the sort, but that is the problem faced by anyone wanting to reform the system.

 

Why parents should avoid "honors programs"

Even at the worst subprime colleges there are always about 10 percent of students who are well above average. The National Survey of Student Engagement (NESSIE) calls them "fully-engaged" and I call them the one-in-tens.

These intelligent and motivated students who must swim in an ocean of mediocrity would often visit me in my office, where I would listen to their tales of harassment and intimidation from the bedimmed and inebriated majority. I would often ask them why on earth they had not gone to another college. In fact, I urged them to stop wasting their time and go somewhere else.

There were really two basic reasons they gave for attending "college-lite." Either they didn't have the money or they were from the local area and didn't want to move too far away.  Attention parents: This is the WORST decision you can make. If you have a smart kid it's worth the extra cash to send him to a real college. Sending a kid like this to a party school is worse than not sending  her to college at all.

Subprime colleges are aware of this problem as well. But they would never dream of asking the smart kids to transfer to a real college.  Instead many of them have set up "honors programs" to separate them out from the intoxicated clowns who have signed up for a six-year pleasure cruise on the SS Party Barge.

Honors programs assign the one-in-tens to live in their own dorms and attend their own special classes. They might even eat in their own section of the cafeteria. It's as if the honors students have to be quarantined from a communicable disease called "slacker virus." Too much contact and they could be persuaded to join the evil cult.

In primary and secondary schools they call this "tracking," and it is frowned upon in favor of "mainstreaming," with the idea being that the the smart kids will challenge and motivate the slackers.

Setting up a real college inside a subprime college makes a lot of sense if you are a teacher and really want to teach. I can image it must be very rewarding to teach an entire class of students who really want to learn something. How refreshing that would be!

The problem, however, is that by removing all the smart kids you are just making the regular classes even more dumb. No one will ever ask a question. No one will pay attention. I think this is exactly what colleges have in mind when they set up this kind of two-tier system. The regular classes can then be dumbed down even further.  You can show movies every day, set up a keg in the middle of the room and serve pizza and popcorn. Who is going to care? Certainly not the slackers, who will happily enjoy the show while they purchase their diplomas and move on at the end of their allotted six years.  And the college can use the smart classes when they are looking for kids to participate in the academic excellence conference and classes to show to parents on college tours.

Parents, if your kid's college attempts to place her in an "honors program" it's a sign you need to find a better college for your child to attend.

Party School Prof Bids Adios to Teaching

Several of my readers sent me this story and asked if I was the anonymous "John Smith" who was so fed up with the poor state of college teaching that he cashed in his cap and gown and headed out for more honest work in the private sector.

Nope, not me, but I certainly empathize with nearly every part of his essay published in Inside Higher Education. And I give  lots of credit to IHE for daring to print such heresy.

What is most interesting is how many critics of higher education feel they must hide their identities because the campus Thought Police who are in charge at politivcally correct colleges  might black ball them. Daring to voice the truth about what goes on in the crazy world of party school campuses means "you'll never work in this business again." And this is called "academic freedom." Some freedom!

Since I never intend to work in higher education again, I'm not afraid to say what is really going on.

Among "John Smith's" main points is that today's college students are "unnecessarily coddled," by parents and high schools and they demand the same treatment in college. College teachers are encouraged to "nurture" and "engage" students instead of teaching them. Students don't come to college to do any work and instead think college is "an overnight recreation center" that has little to do with reading books or writing papers. Too many of them, he said, think of college as "a four year cruise without a destination."  Hey, I like that, but someone should tell him only a minority of them spend only four years. The majority extend the cruise to six years!

But rather than blaming the students, he says, the faculty and administration are to blame for student lethargy. Too many teachers "dial in" their lessons by popping in a video or sitting outside in the sunlight telling each other how they feel rather than focusing on obtaining essential skills. They pander to student demands to dumb down the program and justify it by calling it "student empowerment."

Grade inflation, he says, is rampant and every student demands an A. If the A is not awarded it  must be the professor is a poor teacher. They choose the easiest courses so they can "lighten their load."

"This comfy zone of mediocrity extends beyond the classroom," he said, to anti-intellectual, mindless activities like "sensitivity day," instead of any kind of intelligent activity.

The result is "too many graduates having trouble finding work" because they are math-disabled and language-disabled.

When he refused to dumb down his courses, despite pressure from students, fellow faculty and administrators, there was nothing else to do but resign, the same decision I made just a year ago. Now I too am in the private sector hoping to expose for parents and state legislators that these colleges have been transformed into what Forbes magazine called "country club campuses," where the focus is all on entertainment and partying with parents and taxpayers picking up the tab and students taking decades to pay off the tens of thousands in student loans.

Welcome to the ex-academics, Mr. Smith!  If you read this, please send me your real name and address and I'll take you out for a drink!

Subprime colleges hide their low brow students

Most of the time it's pretty easy for subprime colleges to hide their low brow, anti-intellectual, functionally illiterate students behind the facade of higher education. After all, the campus is an enclosed community with infrequent contact with the outside world which still believes students come there to learn something, not to party nearly continuously.

There are really only two places where the college world and the outside world intersect. One is when the intoxicated clowns overflow the campus from Thirsty Thursday to Besotted Sunday, engaging in bouts of public vomiting and urination while endangering the public with assaults and sexual abuse.

The other is when outsiders come to campus events like lectures and look around to find the place devoid of any audience member under 30. On campuses filled with students who never read books, magazines or newspapers and don't give a hoot about current affairs, public controversies or informed ideas, there is little chance of them coming to see a poet, an intellectual or a world leader. Remember the majority of these students study three hours or less a week.  

Still, it's pretty embarrassing for the college when this happens. So colleges have come up with a solution: they force students to attend these events! At Keene State College, where I was formerly employed, whenever a faculty group sponsored a speaker, they would send out a mass e-mail message to the entire faculty, urging them to "require" student attendance at the event. What this meant was that faculty were supposed to award "extra credit" or require attendance under penalty of a grade reduction. To prove that students actually attended the event they were asked to write a brief summary of what the speaker had to say.

While this tended to prevent empty lecture halls, it created some interesting phenomena. For example, what were speakers to make of it when all the students walked out en masse a half hour into the talk? What were they to make of students who signed the attendance sheet at the door and then left? Forcing students to "pretend" to be intellectual doesn't really fool anyone.

Remember, for students, the primary function of college, to remain in a drunken state from Thursday afternoon through Sunday night, is not a privilege but a right and they are not going to give up their right to get shit-faced for anything. After all, they know their rights! And when the students get to choose their own speakers, when the campus activities council uses their money for a speaker, who do they get? At Keene State the most popular speaker, hired year after year, was a hypnotist who put students under and then made fun of them. Decidedly low brow. The surveys my students conducted about who they would like to have speak at the college showed a high preference for celebrities, rock stars and entertainers. Speakers like Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and Justin Timberlake were high up on the list.

What Viewbooks Can Tell You About Colleges

View books are the colorful and flashy advertising brochures that colleges send out to prospective students. Like all advertising documents they are mainly designed to encourage consumers to open their wallets and feel good about buying the product. But they are also useful in determining what it is about their product that they think customers want to buy.

David L. Kirp used college view books in this way in his wonderful book, Shakespeare, Einstein and the Bottom Line, which describes how some colleges have deterioratedfrom refuges of higher learning to just another gaggle of salesmen trying to unload products you don't need.

If you are in the market for a college you have probably received a number of these books. If you haven't you can take a look at the one from my local college, Keene State College in New Hampshire. Because this one is online it was a convenient one for me to use for my analysis of what the college thinks parents and students want to buy.

I took a few minutes to count up all the photos. What I found were 10 photos of sports, 1 photo of people walking on campus, 15 photos of buildings, 5 photos of students sitting, 7 photos of teachers, one photo of graduation and two photos of students engaged in foreign travel. And then, all by itself, there was just one photo of students in a classroom. There was a section called "Beyond the Classroom," but no section on classrooms.

So what is one to make of this?  Kirp says it's no accident that the education program, the reason that colleges exist in the first place, is minimized in college advertising. The reason? That's not why students go to college anymore! Students aren't interested in that. They want the cushy dorms, the flashy student center, the gourmet food courts, the million-dollar fitness center, the hot tubs, the wide-screen cable TVs, the Wi-Fi centers. They don't want to be reminded that they might have to read a book, for example, or attend a class or two.

Looking at these view books one would think they were designed for a summer camp or a pleasure resort, a kind of Club Ed that caters to the needs to its guests with endless recreation activities. So, is it any wonder that when students arrive on campus that is exactly what they expect to find?  Is it any wonder that so many of my students said things like, "I love going to college, it's just too bad you have to go to all those classes!"

Is it any wonder that anti-intellectual teenagers who intensely dislike education pack themselves into these places and then refuse to read books, write papers or even attend classes? They see the entire education process as an unnecessary distraction from the stately pleasure dome the college created for them. In the topsy turvy world of subprime colleges, education is no longer the prime activity, but an unpleasant sideshow to the five-year party that they are paying a high admission price to enjoy.

What Defenders of Subprime Colleges Say

I had hoped that by now someone might speak up to defend subprime colleges, particularly at Keene State College in New Hampshire, which is the one I know the best since I taught there for a dozen years.

But since no one has undertaken that task (even though I know that lots of people at KSC are reading this) I will do my best to play devil's advocate and take their side for a moment. I can do this because I have had many conversations with them, including one with a KSC administrator at  a book signing for another book.

Instead of subprime colleges, they prefer the term "non-elite colleges," to differentiate them from places like Yale and Harvard. However, non-elite colleges make up about 90 percent of the institutions of higher learning in America and this is not the group I am writing about. Instead I am talking about the third and fourth tier colleges, the ones that accept the nation's underachieving students in the lower half of their high school graduating classes.

Defenders of subprime colleges maintain that because they accept students who are the first generation to go to college they are providing them with an opportunity to break the cycle of poverty and qualify for jobs that were out of reach of their parents. College administrators see their role as a a kind of social work, bringing the fruits of knowledge to disadvantaged and impoverished students.

I actually think this worked as recently as a decade ago, but back then the students who misused the opportunity to learn flunked out. Today, as colleges have transformed themselves into businesses with their eyes on the bottom line, the focus has shifted from educating students to retaining them at any cost. Instead of pushing students upwards to meet high standards, colleges have lowered their standards to meet the level of the incoming students. In many cases we are talking about elementary school levels to meet the needs of students who are functionally illiterate.

Handing college diplomas to illiterate students worked for a while. Employers assumed that a diploma meant that students had met a minimum level of competency. During the past decade however, employers came to understand that diplomas from subprime colleges meant nothing except that the student had somehow managed to come up with the tuition money to attend.

And for the students the process has been devastating. These schools take students from the lower middle class, keep them entertained for five or six years, award them a diploma and send them out into the world with crippling levels of debt. The graduates have little hope of ever paying it back because they are limited to the same jobs they would have been offered if they had NOT gone to college. These students are, in fact, victims of colleges that fleece them to finance a system that is over-burdened with highly paid administrators and elaborate building programs.

It's 8 a.m. Where are the slackers?

One of the constant concerns of college teachers is how to attract the good students to your classes and avoid the anti-intellectual drudges who truly believe that college is a cash transaction in which they are the customers and deserve to be catered to in every way possible.

Believe me, nothing can be as downright depressing as to finish conducting a brilliant demonstration of a complicated issue using Power Point, carefully prepared handouts and brilliant chalkboard work only to finish by asking the always dangerous question. Does anyone have any comments or questions? Usually, nothing happens. No reactions. Not even a glint of comprehension. But every once in a while a hand goes up, even from the wild and unexplored regions at the back of the room where the slackers dwell. There, believe or not, a hand went up one day and my heart leaped with joy that perhaps, despite all previous attempts, I had actually reached one of them!

So I called on the student and he asked, "Hey, prof, is any of this going to be on the test?"

There were guffaws from throughout the back of the room and my heart sank. It is in moments like this that all the wonderful benefits, the three-month summer vacations, the month off at Christmas and the like seem not at all worth it. Why on earth am I even bothering to beat my head against the wall, when all I needed to do to cause a thunderous round of applause would be to say something like this: "I'm done teaching. Everyone gets an A and class is canceled for the rest of the semester." Now that would generate first class evaluations!

With that in mind, teachers came up with some strategies to decrease the number of slackers in their classes. One of the most brilliant was to limit their teachings to classes that begin at 8 a.m. While I never actually did this, one of my colleagues tried it and sang its praises. Because 8 a.m. is when slackers go to bed, there is no chance they will ever sign up for an 8 o'clocker. In fact, even many of the good students thought getting up at this hour was inhumane. The result, however, was a small class full of the 10 percent of the student body who actually came there to learn something. There were even intelligent discussions, he claimed. He got all his work done and was out the door before lunchtime!

But like all good things, the college attempted to eliminate this loophole. How? By offering tuition discounts to students who -- you guessed it -- took classes at 8 a.m., the graveyard shift of higher education. You can read a student newspaper article about this idea. It never actually amounted to anything, however. Actually I doubt that this would have much impact on the slackers but would actually work as a kind of bonus to the good students who are so engaged in the education process that they don't mind getting up to learn.