Party Schools Exposed

College president files fraudulent expense reports -- for 10 years

Readers of this blog should not be surprised that college administrators often get caught with their hands in the cookie jar. After all, their quarter-million-dollar salaries and free housing makes it hard for them to make ends meet. Besides they can always just jack up the tuition price whenever they need some extra cash.

But Karen Pletz seems to be in a category all her own.  

The former president of the Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences, who was fired last year under mysterious circumstances, is now being sued by the college for fraud and making millions of dollars worth of false claims on her expense account.

The college is asking Pletz to return millions of dollars of fraudulent claims, many for meals with people that she never shared with anyone. This includes $10 lunches at McDonalds all the way up to expensive eateries.  About 70 percent of her claims over the past decade were found to be fraudulent.

You can read the full story in the Kansas City Star.

The reason this happens over and over again is that too many people think college administrators are essentially altruistic individuals who put their personal integrity above personal gain. Unfortunately as colleges turned themselves into businesses, the CEOs transformed themselves into Gordon Gekko. "Greed is Good" is the new college motto.

Unfortunately, no one is keeping an eye on these crooks and they get away with robbing the store year after year. States need to step in and audit the books of colleges and their administrators. But part of the blame also goes to the members of the press, who seem to have taken higher education off their lists of things to check. Instead of "keeping them honest" as Anderson Cooper likes to say, newspapers have declined to do even the most basic reporting about how much college administrators get paid and how the numbers of administrative jobs  skyrocket each year.

Are college presidents really worth their $436,000 paychecks?

The news this week from the Chronicle of Higher Education's annual report  is that the huge pay raises doled out to college presidents are beginning to level off -- at least for now. Still, in an age where parents take out second mortgages and raid their retirement accounts to come up with tuition money, it's hard to justify the top guy bringing home enough cash to cover the tuitions of a whole classroom full of students.

The job descriptions of college presidents show they have very little to do with learning, running the college or setting priorities. Those jobs all fall to vice presidents. What college presidents do can be summed up in two words: raise money.

They spend a lot of their time hobnobbing with the rich and famous on golf courses and fancy parties and make deals like promising to name a campus building after a local tycoon if he will take a moment to sign a million-dollar check. For this, presidents get to live in a college-owned mansion, often with a corps of servants. The college buys them a car and in some cases even provides an airplane. They get golden parachute plans when they leave.

Presidents justify these luxuries by producing a bottom line sheet showing that for the $436,000 they bring in ten times that much in donations and there is no denying that. But why can't these expensive executives take a lead in fixing the serious problems in higher education that this blog has described?

College presidents could be powerful voices against the relentless dumbing down of classes and grade inflation. They could overhaul campus justice systems that refuse to deal honestly and openly with the campus crime wave. They could be leaders for the reforms necessary to restore rigor and professionalism to campus life. It's hard to believe they are not aware of these things, yet they do nothing. Why is that? I can only suppose that calling any kind of attention to campus problems would reduce their effectiveness in raising cash. Who would want to give money to a dysfunctional  institution?

The way this could be done, however, is for presidents to start a fund raising effort specifically to address campus problems. Why not start the "Program to Restore Credibility to College Degrees" or the "Campaign to Eliminate Grade Inflation" or "Project to Protect Students from Rape"?

I don't really expect that to happen, but as the public becomes aware of how dysfunctional and dishonest colleges have become, it might be possible in the future.

We're sending too many students to the wrong kind of college

In a national debate begun by the Chronicle of Eduction and continued this week in the New York Times, the question is finally being raised: Are we sending too many students to college?

For me, the answer is that we are sending too many students to the WRONG KIND of college. We send too many unprepared, disengaged and academically challenged high school grads to four-year liberal arts colleges where they are in over their heads. Sending all those unprepared students to this kind of college is an open invitation to  dumb down the curriculum and inflate grades so that these students can purchase diplomas with their tuition money, even though they learn very little.

The real victims here are the students who really should be at this kind of college, roughly 10 percent, according to the National Survey of Student Engagement. These students want to learn but find themselves victimized by the party school majority who want to dumb things down, eliminate requirements and turn campuses into hedonistic country clubs. College administrators, interested in filling as many seats as possible to increase their operating revenue,  are only too happy to give their party crowd customers the dumbed down curriculum they say they want. 

While I agree with President Obama that every high school student should go to college,  "college" is not limited to four-year residential campuses where intoxicated adolescents are allowed to run wild. "College" also includes two-year community colleges and technical schools which prepare students for specific careers. From my dozen years working at a four-year party school, this is exactly what most of my students were really looking for. These students  weren't interested in academics, knowledge for its own sake or intellectual pursuits. They were interested in careers where they could make a living. They would have been much happier and much better off in a community college.

So why do so many of the 69 percent of high school graduates who go to college end up at four-year residential colleges where they spend six years drinking themselves into oblivion while running up huge student loan debts? I think it's really an image problem. The public believes that four-year liberal arts colleges are the cream of the crop, where the best children go to be educated to be the leaders of tomorrow. Community colleges, on the other hand, are thought to be where the kids went who couldn't get into a four-year school. 

National statistics, however, show how outdated that image is. In 21st century America we have many more four-year college grads than we have jobs for. We have taxi drivers and pizza deliverers with four-year degrees who can't pay off their student loans. The middle manager jobs that used to be available for recent four-year grads have been downsized or sent off shore. Instead, four-year graduates are locked into dead-end jobs in cubicles or temp jobs with no benefits, no job security and no future.

Community college graduates, on the other hand, can walk into well-paid  careers as medical records technicians, computer systems managers, registered nurses and car mechanics. These colleges train students for careers while four-year colleges teach students how to make Jell-o shots. And because their educations are a lot less expensive they don't have a high student loan debt to carry around for a decade or more.

What needs to change is the public's perception that four-year colleges are the Mercedes Benzes of higher education while community colleges are the Volkswagens.  What we need to do is make a better effort to match students' abilities, talents and educational engagement with appropriate forms of education. Not everyone needs or can afford a Mercedes. For most of us, a Volkswagen is a better choice. It costs a lot less, costs less to maintain and does a fine job of getting us where we want to go.

Public college tuition is up 6.5 percent, despite decline in cost of living

It's a well-established rule of economics that the cost of living declines during a recession, so why is college tuition continuing its out-of-control surge at three times the inflation rate? Unfortunately, the reason is that uninformed parents continue to pay the predatory cost of a product that has lost its real value. 

The College Board released the numbers this week and you can read about it in this New York Times article, which quotes an official saying that the amount of debt that students and parents are taking on is "unsustainable." It's no secret that students are taking out ever higher levels of loans and parents are taking out second mortgages and raiding their retirement accounts to pay tuition bills.

When asked why the price of a college education continues its monumental climb into the stratosphere, Sandy Baum, the College Board's chief apologist for predatory college administrators, says its because states are cutting back their aid to education. But states are cutting back their aid to everything. At most organizations this results in cost cutting measures. It's only in state-supported schools that the cost is passed on directly to the consumers.

There are really two reasons why college tuition is spiraling out of control. The first is the non-stop campus construction frenzy that continues to add student centers, alumni centers, water parks, climbing walls, hot tubs, luxury condominiums and gourmet food courts. This is part of colleges' marketing efforts to attract students who are more interested in finding a place to party than a place to study. Just take a look at any state college campus and you are likely to see cranes and construction barriers busily adding the latest campus frill, which usually has nothing at all to do with education. The cost of all this is added directly to tuition bills.

The second reason is the spiraling cost of college administration. There are no national estimates on this, but at a few colleges where studies were conducted, in North Carolina and New Mexico, administrative costs were found to have increased over 30 percent in five years. This isn't just administrators using tuition money to build themselves million-dollar residences and finance their sports cars and their yachts. A lot of it goes into the hiring of ever more assistant vice presidents, deputy deans and directors of student entertainment to make the campus even more attractive to the party animals who pay the bills.

Who are all of these new college administrators who are bloating the payrolls of state universities? At a number of campuses they are the current administrators' friends who are out of work and looking for a comfy office in which to sleep for the next decade. Don't believe me? Then take a look at this article from North Carolina newspaper that found over 700 administrators that had been hired in the state without formal job searches.

Job searches are required in most states for regular jobs, but many states exempt top level jobs from this requirement. Nevertheless, a job search is the best way to make sure you find the best qualified candidates, not the ones on the vice president's Facebook list. Without a job search and national advertising, the jobs are unknown to everyone except those who are tipped off to the secret hiring process by administrators who want to extend their power by getting their buddies on the payroll.

So the university ends up with incompetent administrators and the students, parents and taxpayers pay the tab. All this is expensive, of course, but when you can raise your price to utterly ridiculous levels whenever you want to, knowing that parents and students will pay, why not have a little fun with your buddies?

In California, a revolt against well-paid college administrators

It's been said that California is America's future. What happens there shows where the country will be headed in five years, as the rest of us catch up.

If that's true, it's very bad news for the highly paid college administrators around the country, who have been jacking up tuition at three times the inflation rate to pay for skyrocketing administrative costs and expensive architecture. Getting college students to take out loans to pay for your bloated salary is nasty stuff, but in California, faculty and students are finally waking up and smelling the pork.

As California makes drastic cuts in higher education to balance its budget, college administrators, for the most part, avoided taking a haircut by raising tuition and demanding that faculty take pay cuts and furloughs.  It was as if the snooze alarm had suddenly been unpushed and everyone could see the naked emperors without their new clothes. After all, college administrators have been getting away with this for two decades now. Who would have thought anyone would ever notice?

You can read the New York Times story about the thousands of people protesting this week here.

Richard Vedders of Ohio University has estimated that only about 21 percent of tuition is spent on anything directly connected with education, such as classroom maintenance, faculty salaries and libraries. Instead, the additional money is spent on bloated administrative salaries and frivolous student magnets such as food courts, student centers, alumni centers, climbing walls and hot tubs. Few people seemed to be aware of this until California suddenly woke up this week.

For two decades students paid the soaring tuition increases without protest, encouraging administrators to jack the price up even more. Why not? They needed a better BMW. Faculty, who traditionally acted as watch dogs to keep administrators at bay, simply ignored the problem as long as no one cut into their research grants.

In my state, the New Hampshire Union Leader newspaper frequently lists the highest paid state officials by their salaries. The list last year was overwhelmingly flooded with administrators from the three public colleges, dozens of whom were paid more than the governor. It's not just the presidents who are paid at that level, but even the deans and the assistant deans. They got away with this for years because no one was paying attention. But now, suddenly, there has been a wake up call and angry faculty and students are taking it to the streets. It's about time!

Most of the high cost of tuition doesn't go for instruction

There is new evidence this week that most of the soaring tuition rates students and parents are required to pay for college don't go towards instruction. Most of the cost, as has been reported here before, goes sdministrative salaries and construction and maintenance of all those fancy college buildings.

Now we can add unproductive and superfluous college managers and work forces to the list of things that parents are being asked to pay for, even when they think they are paying for instruction.

The Center for College Affordability and Productivity released a major report this week showing that the number of college managers and support staff has doubled in the 20 years from 1987 to 2007.  As the number of college students has grown, the growth in the number of managers has increased even faster,  much more than the number of instructors. And all of those salaries, of course, ultimately help push up tuition rates.

Daniel Bennett, the author of the report, said the higher education work force has "increasingly resulted in unproductive use of labor resources."

Majority thinks higher education is too costly and inefficent

The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education Policy's annual survey made headlines  last week when it found that as more and more people thought college was essential for success, they also felt that access to it was becoming more difficult.

Hidden deep inside the report, however, was an interesting and little noted statistic: A majority of Americans think the cost of higher education is spinning out of control.

Here's a quote from the report:

Another marker of public distress is that more people seem to feel that college costs are spinning out of control at the same time that more Americans see college as a make-or-break factor in a person’s life. Sixty-three percent believe that college prices are rising faster than the cost of other items (up from 58 percent in 2007). Nearly 8 in 10 (77 percent) of those who think college prices are rising believe that they are going up as fast or faster than health care.

So why did all the national reports on this story leave this out? Isn't it rather significant that two thirds of Americans think a college degree is overpriced?  If you read the emergency measures that colleges are taking in reaction to the budget meltdown, nearly all of them are laying off workers, using their savings accounts or asking for more help from the state. Only a tiny minority are reducing their tuition and some of them are raising it significantly in a brazen attempt to squeeze even more money out of parents and students.

As the report warns, all of these trends cannot continue. Do we really want a system where only the rich can afford to go to college, even the hedonistic, narcissistic dolts who waste their time there? The answer is to ensure that all smart kids who really want an education be allowed to attend while the party school animals who are there for the free ride be encouraged to pursue other paths and not waste our higher education dollars.

 

 

 

Pennsylvania to try a "no frills" college program

It seems to have taken a major economic meltdown for education officials to get the message, but there are clear signs that some of them are hearing it. "College costs too much money!"

Pennsylvania seems to be listening closely to consumers and has approved a plan to separate a college education from the very expensive perks that colleges have insisted have to go with it. That's right! No more sports teams, no more concierge services, no more wide-screen cable TV, no more gourmet food courts, no more work-out rooms and no more condo-like dorms. Just education! What a concept!

No word yet on how much this is going to save in tuition money, but I would guess it will be at least a 50 percent reduction and perhaps more. And to sweeten the pot a little more, students will attend all year round so they can get their degrees in three years or less.

While the reason for this innovation is to make colleges more affordable, this will certainly create places that are less vulnerable to the "party school mentality." Students at these no frills schools are going to have to work hard to get their work done and there won't be as much time for "getting fucked up" as students so wonderfully describe it. The party clowns will certainly not line up to be a part of schools like this. You can't party at a no frills school. That will make them havens for students who really want to learn something. What a concept!

While I fully expect this trend to catch on, it can really only be a stepping stone to the ultimate transition to on-line college classes. Once colleges find out it is possible to teach students without workout rooms and concierge services and once parents find out how much they can save, it's only a small step forward to eliminate the college campus entirely and move the entire program online.

Students want their courses online, where the hours can be so flexible that they can watch a videotaped lecture at 4 a.m. if they want to. In an age when every book is available online there is no need for a brick and mortar library just as there is no need for architecturally spectacular food courts and state-of-the-art student centers. Many of these fancy campuses will be ghost towns within another decade.

So congratulations Keystone State! We'll be eagerly watching to see how it works out, but we think you are way out in front of the curve on this one.

 

As college tuition increases, less is spent on education

As parents dig themselves ever deeper into debt to pay for their children's college tuition, new reports suggest that less and less of that ever-increasing cost actually is used for education. My investigations discovered that a year ago, but now independent think tanks are joining the cause.

A report issued just this week by the Delta Project on Higher Education Costs, Productivity and Accountability  found that while colleges increased their tuition by at least 12 percent from 2002 to 2006, few of the additional millions of dollars went into the classroom. So where did they go? Academic support, research and administration. You can read this story in the Chronicle of Higher Education if you can find a way around the block.

My research found that during the last decade colleges increased the number of administrators by nearly 25 percent, adding assistant deans, assistant vice presidents and "directors" of everything from student centers, graduation, diversity, honors programs and special events and adding hundreds of positions in Internet technology for everything from tracking down illegal file sharing to preventing student abuse.

"Academic support" also includes computer operations as well as health centers, centers for minority groups, women's centers, drug and alcohol rehab programs. Not mentioned in the report are other money-hungry programs like interscholastic sports, community arts programs and the millions spent on fancy buildings like dining halls that have nothing to do with education.

All of this is, in fact, part of the larger trend of colleges away from centers of "higher education" and towards "five year party central" where students who don't want to learn anything can celebrate hedonistic adolescent excess and get their parents to pay for it

The public is becoming aware of all this ever so slowly, but the day when parents and legislators wake up to this abuse cannot be far off.

How the "study abroad" scam works at subprime colleges

As a famous charlatan once said, the best scams are those where the mark doesn't even know he's been had.  Such is the case with students who participate in subprime colleges' "study abroad" programs.

These programs sound like a good idea. After all, many of today's college students know next to nothing about foreign countries and to actually pack them off for a semester abroad can only help to enlighten them, even if they are not very interested in studying anything.

The scam operates because nearly all foreign countries heavily subsidize higher education to keep the costs down for students. If our country was a little more enlightened it would do the same thing, but as it stands now, a semester's tuition here is thousands of dollars more costly than in other countries.

So when the U.S. college ships a student abroad for a semester, the cost paid to the foreign college is thousands of dollars less than the student pays here. So the student gets that money back, right? Not a chance! Every bit of it stays with the college.

Students could save this money if they temporarily withdrew from their American college and signed up on their own at the foreign college, but American colleges, of course, frown upon this practice, which deprives them of  all that free cash. I advised many of my students to take this route, but all of them have up with the college made it difficult for them. Why let the marks, oh excuse me, "students" get the benefit? They're laying out tens of thousands in student loans, what's a few more thousand to them anyway?

And what do these students do over there? Well, it should come as no surprise that the number one activity is drinking. Dozens of my students went on these programs and when they came back and I asked them what they did, the overwhelming answer was, "The drinking age is 18! Can you believe it! I spent all my time in the pubs! It was awesome!"