Posted on 12/04/2019 3:50:12 AM PST by Kaslin
This year's education scandal saw parents shelling out megabucks to gain college admittance for their children. Federal prosecutors have charged more than 50 people with participating in a scheme to get their children into colleges by cheating on entrance exams or bribing athletic coaches. They paid William Singer, a college-prep professional, more than $25 million to bribe coaches and university administrators and to change test scores on college admittance exams such as the SAT and ACT. As disgusting as this grossly dishonest behavior is, it is only the tiny tip of fraud in higher education.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2016, only 37% of white high school graduates tested as college-ready, but colleges admitted 70% of them. Roughly 17% of black high school graduates tested as college-ready, but colleges admitted 58% of them. A 2018 Hechinger Report found, "More than four in 10 college students end up in developmental math and English classes at an annual cost of approximately $7 billion, and many of them have a worse chance of eventually graduating than if they went straight into college-level classes."
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, "when considering all first-time undergraduates, studies have found anywhere from 28 percent to 40 percent of students enroll in at least one remedial course. When looking at only community college students, several studies have found remediation rates surpassing 50 percent." Only 25% of students who took the ACT in 2012 met the test's readiness benchmarks in all four subjects (English, reading, math and science).
It's clear that high schools confer diplomas that attest that a student can read, write and do math at a 12th-grade level when, in fact, most cannot. That means most high school diplomas represent fraudulent documents. But when high school graduates enter college, what happens? To get a hint, we can turn to an article by Craig E. Klafter, "Good Grieve! America's Grade Inflation Culture," published in the Fall 2019 edition of Academic Questions. In 1940, only 15% of all grades awarded were A's. By 2018, the average grade point average at some of the nation's leading colleges was A-minus. For example, look at the average GPA at Brown University (3.75), Stanford (3.68), Harvard College (3.63), Yale University (3.63), Columbia University (3.6), and the University of California, Berkeley (3.59).
The falling standards witnessed at our primary and secondary levels are becoming increasingly the case at tertiary levels. "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses" is a study conducted by Professors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. They found that 45% of 2,300 students at 24 colleges showed no significant improvement in "critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years."
An article in News Forum for Lawyers titled "Study Finds College Students Remarkably Incompetent" cites a study done by the American Institutes for Research that revealed that over 75% of two-year college students and 50% of four-year college students were incapable of completing everyday tasks. About 20% of four-year college students demonstrated only basic mathematical ability, while a steeper 30% of two-year college students could not progress past elementary arithmetic. NBC News reported that Fortune 500 companies spend about $3 billion annually to train employees in "basic English."
Here is a list of some other actual college courses that have been taught at U.S. colleges in recent years: "What If Harry Potter Is Real?" "Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame," "Philosophy and Star Trek," "Learning from YouTube," "How To Watch Television," and "Oh, Look, a Chicken!" The questions that immediately come to mind are these: What kind of professor would teach such courses, and what kind of student would spend his time taking such courses? Most importantly, what kind of college president and board of trustees would permit classes in such nonsense?
The fact that unscrupulous parents paid millions for special favors from college administrators to enroll their children pales in comparison to the poor educational outcomes, not to mention the gross indoctrination of young people by leftist professors.
Conservatives are smart enough to know that the system is “gamed”. Look at the distribution of liberal to conservative teachers (I’ve seen the ratio placed as high as 12-1). Who picks what teachers will be hired to fill openings?
The system is too broken to be fixed. The only workable solution is to give fed, state and local funding directly to the parents of students at all levels and to let them pick and pay for school that they want their child to attend (including home schooling).
True competition will drive reform and improvement.
College professors do not belong to teachers’ unions, which are for k-12 teachers only. And I haven’t heard about any college profs walking off the job. Might help to read the title “Fraud in *Higher* Education”.
The government grants and loans are the economic base of the scam. Without that, college applications would collapse and colleges would have to shape up in order to survive.
I read the headline and I also read the article. Most of the kids being accepted have to take remedial classes.......because of the FAILURE of the K-12 teachers who are members of unions. They don’t teach critical thinking.
I agree that most all the focus has been on the parents’ arrests and court proceedings. I’ve heard little or nothing about the college/university officials providing the services. It seems to me their actions are much more serious. Weren’t they personally profiting from the selling of college admission access? Isn’t this similar to drug users and drug dealers in the court system? Aren’t the dealers dealt with more seriously? While here we see nothing happening with sellers (college officials)
Am I missing something?
REally?
My experience was "here's the material; you learn it. I'm going on sabbatical."
Bookmark
Oh, but they do, have for years. From the AAUP-CBC site:
Consistent with its articulation and defense of professional standards, the AAUP formed the Collective Bargaining Congress (AAUP-CBC) in 1976 to help organize and strengthen the efforts of AAUP collective bargaining chapters throughout the nation. Since then, collective bargaining chapters of the AAUP have developed a distinctive kind of unionism that responds to the missions of American colleges and universities.You see?
GI bill is not student aid. It is payment back to you for the time and sacrifices you made to serve your country.
Exactly correct. And that is why there should be no government student aid.
I would never consider the GI Bill as “aid”, it was an earned benefit. “Aid” goes to people who couldn’t or wouldn’t earn it.
That's a lame excuse to avoid even trying. I got hired in LOS ANGELES and I am conservative. I give the kids articles from Breitbart to read. I teach no left wing crap at all. I was on FR 6 years before I even became a teacher. And I'm former military and it was in my resume, so they knew who they were getting. No, this lame, sorry, crying "they're too much for us" BS is not flying with me.
PING!
Thanks for clarifying that; it wasn’t apparent in your original post.
and a TREMENDOUS cut back in the NON-student kind as well!
Right. But the problem is cultural We now have a culture of watching film, video, TV, and the ever-present phones. No one reads or reads to kids.
It’s a vast medium change and we have lost the enormous power of the printed word, which can be absorbed at one’s own pace and reread if necessary.
That is a crazy reply.
Kinda like Fahrenheit 451 without the flames
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