The for-profits hit a nasty speed bump

     As a rule, Americans don’t like to think and they’re not particularly interested in conserving anything. They daily lend their tacit consent and even enthusiastic embrace to anything commerce spits out, no matter how thoroughly it reshuffles the social deck or how irreversibly it sends us into a brave new world of unknown nature.
     In this regard, arguably, so-called “conservatives” are scarier than liberals and progressives, for they happily embrace that loose cannon known as commerce, and they trust the alleged infallible benevolence of the “invisible hand” as though to do so were piety.
     In case you haven’t been paying attention, American education—and especially American higher education—is undergoing a transformation. This is occurring, not because some radical has persuaded us to adopt a new “paradigm,” but because of a confluence of mindless causes, including the failure of the academic world to keep its eye on the point and possibilities of being “educated.” By now, most citizens are academic barbarians. They watch "Three's Company" reruns. They'll tell you were they were educated, but somehow it just didn't take.
     There’s more to the transformation story, but a big part is the rise of the “for-profits”—the University of Phoenix, Kaplan College, etc.—which are quietly taking over college instruction. Meanwhile, by degrees, old academic institutions—the idea of the university and even the idea of the “professor” with academic freedom—are dying, replaced with notions and practices that seem more at home in the world of business. Students are increasingly referred to as "customers." Education is "delivered."
     Clearly, this country—excluding immigrants—is experiencing a kind of decline, a Fall. College students no longer study much. The idea that one must get a good college education to succeed is losing its grip on the population, or at least on the youth. People increasingly occupy their minds with trivia and irrational nonsense and vote as though ignorance and stupidity were a virtue. About half the country has doubts about the President's citizenship and birth. The dullard Sarah Palin is very popular among Republicans. Everybody wants to borrow my Ouija board.
     Because we really are quite stupid and unconservative, there’s no stopping this transformation in education. Our only hope is in all those people from somewhere else—immigrants and their families—who don’t drag decadence over here with ‘em. I see this all the time at the colleges. Increasingly, immigrants are the big achievers among students. They're the student leaders. Meanwhile, Sean and Buffy are at the beach with dad's new Beemer.
     Those immigrant kids are a ray of hope. They really are.
     The for-profits are a cancer and, naturally, because our educational institutions are democratic—America is unusual in its approach to education, leaving big decisions, not with highfalutin distant experts, but with local elected officials—morons and barbarians often oversee our colleges, and they promote their own kind, including for-profits boosters and ardent believers in the latest untested whiz-bangery.
     Hence it was that, overnight, the conniving and ruthless (but distinctly undereducated) Raghu P. Mathur went from being a chemistry teacher to the President of Irvine Valley College. He was picked by a crew of "fiscal conservatives" that had just been elected to the board, owing to a nasty backroom deal with the faculty union. And then, after Mathur experienced two massive votes of “no confidence” among faculty, the board fixed the hiring process to make the creep our Chancellor. He has endlessly promoted “distance ed,” something he can barely pronounce, and he has long been affiliated with the execrable Argosy University, where he still pontificates in evening classes about good management, “new paradigms,” and “team building.” He received his doctorate from Crack Jack Prize University, a.k.a. Nova Southeastern, which is really good at making money selling degrees to morons like Mathur who know that there’s money in higher degrees, no matter how phony or worthless. (Mathur was only recently ousted.)
     This is America, where the business of Americans is business, and nobody knows the name of their Congressperson, and so there’s no stopping the for-profits. They are the future. You should invest in 'em.

* * *

     But, for the time being, they’ve hit a nasty speed bump, ‘cause Democratic legislators have been all over ‘em lately. You see, it turns out that the for-profits rely on turning the heads of the most clueless among us, helping them to get big loans that they can’t pay back. They default on these loans bigtime. And so, what happens? That’s right: the taxpayer pays the bill. People are already calling this a “bubble.” It’s worse than that. It’s a tar bubble. When it pops, everybody will get gooed. We’ll stink. We'll sue BP. BP will prevail. No one will care.
     Yesterday, the New York Times described a small part of the aforementioned “speed bump”:

Kaplan Suspends Enrollment at 2 Campuses

     The Washington Post Company’s Kaplan Inc. unit suspended enrollment on Friday at its campuses in Pembroke Pines, Fla., and Riverside, Calif., where undercover investigators for the Government Accountability Office found deceptive practices by admissions officials.
     At a Senate hearing on Wednesday on recruitment at for-profit colleges, a G.A.O. report, accompanied by videos, described deceptive or fraudulent practices at each of 15 campuses visited, two of which were Kaplan campuses. At Kaplan College in Pembroke Pines, for example, an admissions officer told investigators posing as applicants that the college had the same accreditation as Harvard.
     Washington Post stock fell $31.05, or 7.6 percent, to close at $377.56 on Friday, its largest drop in more than a year, after the company said in its quarterly report that proposed United States Department of Education rules could have a “material adverse effect” on Kaplan’s higher-education operations. The higher-education unit’s $212 million operating income for the first half of the year made up almost 80 percent of the company’s overall operating income for the period.
     The Education Department’s proposed rules would tighten regulation of for-profit colleges’ recruiters and rein in programs whose graduates end up with more debt than they can repay.
     Melissa Mack, a Kaplan spokeswoman, said the company suspended enrollment at the two campuses pending an investigation of the G.A.O. findings, and meanwhile was working “to ensure that such incidents are not repeated anywhere at our 75 campuses or among our 16,000 higher-education employees.”
     Kaplan’s higher-education programs enrolled more than 112,000 students as of June 30. 

     Don’t worry. Kaplan will be fine. Washington Post will make lots of money.
     The following article appeared two days ago in the always-excellent Inside Higher Ed. It gives you a pretty good idea what’s going on:

Shellacking the For-Profits

     Senate Democrats made it clear Wednesday that their examination of for-profit higher education has only just begun, and that they plan to pursue legislation aimed at reining what they see as the sector’s dishonest – if not fraudulent – practices.
     At a hearing on the “student recruitment experience” at for-profit colleges that began Wednesday morning and carried on through the mid-afternoon, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, outlined plans to hold more hearings on the sector, to collect broad sets of information from for-profit colleges, and to begin drafting legislation aimed at cleaning up the sector.
     “Education is too important for the future of this country,” he said. “Facing the budget problems we have in the next 10 years, we just can't permit more and more of the taxpayers' dollars that are supposed to go for education and quality education … to be going to pay shareholders or private investors.”
     Much of Harkin’s motivation came from the findings of a Government Accountability Office “secret shopper” investigation of recruiting practices at 15 for-profit campuses, the results of which – including a powerful videotape visible below – were officially released at the start of the hearing. The probe identified “fraudulent, deceptive or otherwise questionable marketing practices” at all 15 institutions, and inducements to commit fraud on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid at four institutions. Coupled with a former recruiter’s account of his experience on the job, the evidence presented at the hearing depicted an industry aggressively and universally going after “leads” and “starts” with the institutional objective of securing federal financial aid dollars.
     "GAO's findings make it disturbingly clear that abuses in for-profit recruiting are not limited to a few rogue recruiters or even a few schools with lax oversight,” Harkin said. The evidence was collected from some of the nation's largest for-profit colleges, including the University of Phoenix and Kaplan College.
     Though the U.S. Department of Education is expected to publish regulations intended to guard against abuse of the Title IV financial aid program by Nov. 1, Harkin said he was “not certain regulations will suffice.” Rather, he said, “I believe and I think where we’re headed is very clear cut legislation that can’t be overturned by another administration, that can’t put in ‘safe harbors’ and say it complies, but really tightly designed legislation to correct these practices.”
     Harkin promised more hearings on for-profit colleges in September, November and possibly December – including one on accreditors’ oversight of for-profits – and also announced plans to collect data on sector outcomes and practices. His office will today send requests to 30 for-profit colleges – all of the publicly traded companies, plus a mix of privately held institutions – asking them to provide information about their graduation and loan default rates, plus internal recruiting documents and details about their use of third-party companies, like lead generators that help with recruiting. “We’ve got to get to the bottom of this,” he said.
     Sen. Mike Enzi, of Wyoming, the senior Republican on the panel, acknowledged “aggressive and inappropriate recruiting practices” at the colleges visited by GAO investigators, but said he wanted to see the Senate’s scrutiny of higher education reach to nonprofit institutions as well. “In focusing only on for-profits, we are not being objective and we are ignoring the bigger picture of what is happening across all of higher education.” (That approach seems unlikely so long as Democrats have the majority and nonprofit colleges wield the clout they enjoy among many lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.)
     Also on Wednesday, Sens. Jim Webb (D-Va.) and Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) sent letters to Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki asking for detailed data on how tuition assistance money for members of the military and for veterans is being spent.
     “[W]e have heard reports that some for-profit institutions may be aggressively targeting service members and veterans, signing them up for educational programs that may bring little benefit to future employment opportunities, low graduation rates and high default rates,” they said. With the passage of the Post-9/11 GI Bill, they added, “we have heard concerns about excessive tuition being charged at some of these institutions.”
     Democrats Tom Carper (Del.), Kay Hagan (N.C.), Claire McCaskill (Mo.), Russ Feingold (Wisc.) and Harkin also signed on to the letter.

'Deceptive or Completely Questionable' Practices

     Presenting the findings of the GAO investigation was Gregory D. Kutz, the office’s managing director of forensic audits and special investigations at the Government Accountability Office. In testimony made more powerful by the brief undercover video clips that punctuated it, Kutz detailed “deceptive or completely questionable” practices at all 15 institutions.
     The colleges the GAO visited were not a totally random sample, Kutz said, but they were not institutions where his office or the Education Department were already aware of fraud. “It gives you an indication that this is much more widespread than a few bad actors.”
     Though Kutz’s written testimony didn’t identify the campuses the GAO examined, he did, at Harkin’s request, release a list of the institutions. They included campuses of the University of Phoenix in Arizona and Pennsylvania, Kaplan College in California and Florida, Everest College in Arizona and Texas, as well as privately held institutions including ATI Career Training and Medvance Institute.
     Manny Rivera, a spokesman for Apollo Group, which owns the University of Phoenix, said the company has “strict policies in place to protect students during the enrollment process and throughout their tenure with the university, and when we discover any violation of this policy, we take immediate and decisive disciplinary action up to, and including, termination of the employees involved.”
     Jacquelyn P. Muller, vice president of public relations at Education Management Corporation, which owns Argosy University in Chicago – one of the institutions visited – said that “every employee within our organization is held accountable for upholding the highest moral, ethical, and legal standards at all times.”
     Kutz said that though corporate leaders may try to dismiss his investigation’s findings as problems with individual employees, “I expect anybody who would have walked in... and that was trained a certain way in marketing was going to the same script.” Institutions may say “‘that was a rogue employee,’ but I suspect in some of these cases that is absolutely not true.”
     Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), reinforcing what has become Republicans’ standard way of addressing problems uncovered at for-profit colleges, said: “I know we’ve got people doing bad things, but I know we’ve got a lot of people doing it right and they’re going to be under a cloud unless we begin to separate the wheat from the chaff.”
     Joshua Pruyn, a former recruiter for a Westwood College, who testified at the hearing, said he didn’t think the kind of dishonest behavior that he saw and was encouraged to emulate while working at a Colorado campus resulted from a few “rogue” employees violating his institution’s code of ethics, but rather a pattern of behavior encouraged by corporate leaders.
     Harkin, too, said he believed the encouragement to aggressively and dishonestly pursue students came from higher up. Showing a recruitment training PowerPoint slide from the University of Phoenix with the header “Creating Urgency: Getting Them to Apply NOW."
     Harkin said he thought inducements to recruit aggressively were coming from company executives. “That doesn’t come from some employee,” he said. “That comes from the top.”
     During the HELP committee's June hearing on for-profits, Harkin voiced concern that formerly good actors in the sector had been “lured into the vortex of bad practices” that might, only a few years ago, have been the domain of only some. The findings of the GAO investigation, he said, were “evidence [that] points to a problem that is systemic … to the for-profit industry,” with a “recruitment process specifically designed to do whatever it takes to drive up enrollment numbers, more often than not to the disadvantage of students.”
     The fallout from the hearing isn’t likely to be positive for the for-profits.
     Jerry W. Hartle, senior vice president of government and public affairs at the American Council on Education, said he couldn’t “say for sure that it’s the most devastating Congressional hearing I’ve ever seen, but it’s in that league.” Harkin’s statements at the hearing, Hartle said, indicated that he “is fully engaged and is emotionally committed to this issue.” The findings of the GAO investigation, in particular, “seemed to really get Sen. Harkin’s attention.”
     The stocks of most publicly traded for-profits, including those visited by GAO investigators, closed down for the day on Wednesday afternoon.

     You’ve got to hand it to the current crop of GOP leaders. They’re amazing. They represent everything that’s wrong with this country.
     Democratically speaking, that’s good representation.

The old mandolin

Recently, I referred to my grandfather's mandolin, which he played with friends in his home town of Böblingen, Germany. He eventually gave the thing to my mother, who also plays the instrument somewhat.

Today, I asked her about it. I thought she'd have to dig it out of storage, but in fact it was standing in a corner in her bedroom. It looks pretty good, though there is some buckling on its face around the sound hole/pick guard.

The instrument was manufactured by Meinel and Herold, a very old musical instrument maker. The M&H plant was closed in 1973 by the East German government. I guess they weren't into music.

Today, my dad explained that, for a time, Opa played the violin, too, but he was forced to abandon the instrument because the sound it made caused my dad to vomit.

I assume this difficulty arose when dad was a baby.

But I didn't ask.

TigerAnn enjoys the good weather. She endlessly lobbies to be let outside.

Here she is giving me the stink eye earlier today.

She lives for hunting mice and lizards.

What're you gonna do? A cat's gotta do what a cat's gotta do.

She catches lots of 'em. Usually, she gives me the thing while it is still alive. At such times, she seems to think that she and I are hunting together. I play along, though my intent is to save the poor thing. I am usually successful.

I feel it is important never to betray one's cat.

I try to disguise the fact that I have rescued the mouse or lizard.

To be a friend to TigerAnn, it is important to be good at sleight of hand.

I think that I have succeeded in disguising my rescues, but in her own way she is suspicious. "Where," she seems to ask, "is my mouse? YOU had it last."

I immediately change the subject.
Women are complicated.

From the archives: Opa the Communist & mandolin picker

I came across some fine photos of my grandfather on my father's side—I always knew him as "Opa." Here he is on his Wanderschaft, a kind of wandering or bumming around that was sometimes expected of young men who had completed their apprenticeship (Opa was a woodworker who soon made models for an airplane manufacturer named Klemm). Opa is at left (c. 1928-30).

Opa's older brother, at the far left, was an ardent Communist. Opa, seen here in a dark coat, was also a member of the party. Here they are in Berlin, I think, with some of their comrades (note the fists: political gestures).

I'm not sure what this is about (c. 1930). Despite the presence of musical instruments, it could be a political gathering. Opa is on the far right. His wife, Louise, my grandmother ("Oma"), is on the far left. They married in 1932; my dad was born in 1933. The two loved to play music with friends in a local band that did traditional tunes. Opa eventually gave his mandolins to my mother, who still has it. I'll dig it up and take some pictures.

(Click on the images to enlarge them.)

Again, don't know what this is about. That's Opa second from left. C. early 30s. He was also active in a wilderness appreciation/protection league/club. My dad has no clue about the activities in many of these old photos. It seems likely that Opa made an effort to hide his former political activities as things grew darker in the 30s. But he couldn't keep his mouth shut and eventually did get into trouble. Friends in town quickly got him into the Wehrmacht, despite his age.

Previously shown picture. Opa is second from left. The flag seems clearly Communist ("We're ready!" with fist emblem). These pictures are likely all pre-Hitler. Communists and Nazis were, of course, mortal enemies and soon faced off in the bloody Spanish Civil War.

Here are my grandmother (left), Opa's sister, and my dad, still a baby, c. late 1933.
The sister's husband died in the war less than ten years later; he was a paratrooper. Young men died like flies. One of my dad's aunts, Frida, lost two husbands during the war! After that, she took up dogs. They lived longer.

College study time: low priority

Declining Study Time Signals Falling Standards, Report Says (Chronicle of Higher Education)

The amount of time spent studying has fallen drastically among full-time students in all demographic groups, whether they work or not, at all types of four-year colleges, according to a report released on Thursday by the American Enterprise Institute. The report, "Leisure College, USA," cites data from various national surveys to show that the average student studied 24 hours a week in 1961 and 14 hours a week in 2003. Colleges' "standards for effort have plummeted" as they cater to students' preferences for leisure, the report says, a shift that may slow economic growth. But there's good news: "College is cheaper than most people think." Modern college students' time savings, the report says, more than compensate for increased tuition.

Graphs from "Leisure College, USA"

We’ve long carped about this particular phenomenon. We last did so two months ago: More absurdo-scandalosity: for-profit universities and credit inflation

The SOCCCD board pulls an agenda switcheroo: IVC dean position approved

     I just realized that the board had at some point revised the agenda for yesterday’s special meeting. The following item had been added:

     I’ve been told that the discussion yesterday was very heated and that, in the end, there were four votes in favor of the dean position (i.e., it was approved). I don't know, but, based on the discussion of the July 26 meeting, it would seem likely that the vote would have been Wagner/Padberg/Jay/Milchiker in favor with Fuentes/Lang/Williams against.
     At last week’s board meeting, the discussion of this item became quite ugly. The item (actually, a portion of a larger item) was tabled. See "I would urge caution".
     Assuming that the board followed the Brown Act, this agenda revision illustrates one of the weaknesses of that law. I had assumed that the originally posted agenda was final. If I had known they were going to discuss the dean position, I would have attended the meeting. Sheesh.

The “student recruitment experience” at for-profit colleges: my, my, my

Shellacking the For-Profits (Inside Higher Ed)

     Senate Democrats made it clear Wednesday that their examination of for-profit higher education has only just begun, and that they plan to pursue legislation aimed at reining what they see as the sector’s dishonest – if not fraudulent – practices.
     At a hearing on the “student recruitment experience” at for-profit colleges that began Wednesday morning and carried on through the mid-afternoon, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, outlined plans to hold more hearings on the sector, to collect broad sets of information from for-profit colleges, and to begin drafting legislation aimed at cleaning up the sector.
     “Education is too important for the future of this country,” he said. “Facing the budget problems we have in the next 10 years, we just can't permit more and more of the taxpayers' dollars that are supposed to go for education and quality education … to be going to pay shareholders or private investors.”
     Much of Harkin’s motivation came from the findings of a Government Accountability Office “secret shopper” investigation of recruiting practices at 15 for-profit campuses, the results of which – including a powerful videotape visible [above] – were officially released at the start of the hearing. The probe identified “fraudulent, deceptive or otherwise questionable marketing practices” at all 15 institutions, and inducements to commit fraud on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid at four institutions. Coupled with a former recruiter’s account of his experience on the job, the evidence presented at the hearing depicted an industry aggressively and universally going after “leads” and “starts” with the institutional objective of securing federal financial aid dollars….

Oops

At the OC Fair

Good

(Image from OC Weekly)

Read the ruling, courtesy of the New York Times.

The Conclusion:

"Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite sex couples are superior to same-sex couples. Because California has no interest in discriminating against gay men and lesbians, and because Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis, the court concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional."

(From the OC Register)

Cal State Fullerton raises admission standards for nonlocal community college students

CSUF makes it tougher to gain admission (OC Reg)

     Due to uncertainty in state funding, Cal State Fullerton has required higher admission standards to limit enrollment and decrease its student population.
     The campus will have approximately 1,000 fewer students in the fall than the year before, and around 2,500 fewer students from fall 2008, said Ed Trotter, acting associate vice president for undergraduate programs.
. . .
     For this school year, CSUF has announced that it has received far more applications than it can accommodate and has, therefore, required supplemental applications and higher admission standards for nonlocal applicants to limit enrollment.
. . .
     CSUF received a record 56,132 undergraduate applications for the coming fall, a 32 percent increase from last year.
     For non-local community college students who wanted to transfer to CSUF, their minimum grade point average requirement is 3.7, up from 2.5 last year, [assistant vice president of enrollment services Nancy] Dority said. Traditionally, a 2.0 GPA, which is the minimum required for local applicants, would have sufficed.
. . .
     Because of fewer course offerings and professors, Trotter said CSUF will have more crowded classrooms in the fall than last year.
     CSUF has nearly 200 fewer professors this year than last year, most of whom are part-time faculty or lecturers whose annual contracts were not renewed by the university….

The care and feeding of albatrosses

     Recently, I discussed, and readers asked about, the fate of ATEP, our district’s albatrossian “Advanced Technology and Education Park” in Tustin.
     The SOCCCD Board of Trustees has a special meeting today at 4:00. According to the agenda, the board plans a “Discussion of Plans for the development of" ATEP. (For details, see this post.)
     To peruse ATEP's "long-range" plans and the new "concept 3A" plan, whatever that is, go here.
     Late last month, ATEP issued a press release, declaring that the City of Tustin has approved the “concept plan” for ATEP:

     The Advanced Technology & Education Park (ATEP) received notification today at a City of Tustin Zoning Administration hearing that the Concept 3A Plan for expansion of the ATEP campus has been approved.
     The Concept 3A Plan provides guidelines for future development of the site for up to 305,000 square feet of facilities on 28 of the 68 acres of land in Tustin Legacy. The approval allows the South Orange County Community College District to proceed with planning and site configurations for the expansion of the Advanced Technology & Education Park with maximum flexibility for phasing of the construction. The Concept 3A Plan was approved by the South Orange County Community College District Board of Trustees in 2009.
     “The City of Tustin’s approval today is an important and critical step in the development the ATEP campus and demonstrates the City’s support and desire for this campus to be successful,” said South Orange County Community College District Acting Chancellor Dixie Bullock. “We look forward to jointly celebrating the groundbreaking with the City by our side.”
     Dr. Randy Peebles, ATEP Provost said, “ATEP is quickly outgrowing its existing facilities. This approval enables us to accelerate partnerships with business, industry and other educational institutions to build a campus that trains workers for high impact, technical jobs in our region.”
     ATEP will provide advanced technology programs and workforce training for students, professionals and business organizations in Orange County.

What does it all mean? Dunno. Perhaps things will become clearer by the next board meeting.

Why college websites suck

     There’s an interesting piece in this morning’s Inside Higher Ed about college websites and the fact that, mostly, they suck (No Laughing Matter).
     Popular web cartoonist Randall Munroe recently produced a particularly apt cartoon about the typical college website. It's a Venn diagram:

So Munroe’s the kid who’s calling the Emperor naked. But people are noticing this kid:

     …The punch line — that university website designers have no idea what their visitors actually want front and center — has hit close enough to home to create a lot of buzz elsewhere on the Web….
     …“The cartoon is right on target,” wrote Martin Ringle, CIO of Reed College, in an e-mail. “College website design typically focuses on what an institution wants to say, not necessarily what prospective students (and others) want to know.”
. . .
     The … cartoon was particularly apt in skewering three useless but nevertheless common features on a college’s home page, said Mark Greenfield, director of Web services at the State University of New York at Buffalo and an associate consultant at the major higher-ed consulting firm Noel-Levitz. Specifically: the statement of philosophy, the letter from the president or provost, and the campus news feed.
     Having those up there might seem like a good idea to the administrative committees that tend to dictate website content, Greenfield said, but they are rarely useful to the website’s most strategically important kind of visitor: the prospective student….
. . .
     So what accounts for this apparent disconnect between what some colleges choose to include on their home pages and what visitors actually want to find there?
. . .
     …[S]ome colleges' home pages are saturated with features that do not so much reflect guesses at what visitors need, but what various campus interests want. Greenfield said “home page politics” – different departments and personalities jockeying for position – have a strong influence on what an institution’s site ends up looking like. After all, he said, if a president says he wants a letter and a mission statement out front, what Web administrator is going to say no?
. . .
     “Personally, I think an institution’s website is a reflection of the organization,” says Terry Calhoun, director of media relations at the Society for College and University Planning.
     “It’d be interesting to rate them and try to guess who ‘controls’ each one.”

Check out our colleges’ websites and tell us what you think!

Irvine Valley College website
Saddleback College website
ATEP website

See also

For College Newspapers, Prepackaged Online Versions Are Yesterday's News (Chronicle of Higher Education)

An undercover investigation of for-profit colleges' recruiting tactics

• Congress's 'Secret Shopper' (Inside Higher Ed)

     A government report detailing the findings of an undercover investigation of for-profit colleges’ recruiting tactics reveals admissions and financial aid officers engaged in unethical and sometimes illegal practices, all in the interest of persuading students to enroll and obtain federal financial aid.
     The report, along with an accompanying video of undercover footage, is the culmination of a three-month effort by the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s investigative wing, to determine whether and to what degree for-profit colleges are engaging in “fraudulent, deceptive or otherwise questionable marketing practices.” A copy of the report is available here.
     Both the report and the video will be released Wednesday morning at the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee’s second oversight hearing on the for-profit sector, where Gregory D. Kutz, GAO’s managing director of forensic audits and special investigations, is set to testify.
. . .
     Undercover investigators posing as students found that employees at all 15 for-profit colleges visited for the investigations made “deceptive or otherwise questionable statements” to students about accreditation, graduation rates, employment outcomes, program costs or financial aid.
     At four institutions visited, admissions or financial aid officials encouraged students to submit fraudulent financial information in order to qualify for federal aid, the GAO says in its report.
. . .
     …Some institutions were chosen because the Education Department reports that they receive at least 89 percent of their revenues from the Title IV federal student aid programs, while others were chosen based on their location in a state that was among the top 10 recipients of Title IV money.
     Because the investigators visited an admittedly specific group of institutions that were already raising red flags for the Title IV program, advocates for for-profit colleges will almost certainly challenge the report’s findings (as they have done in response to many newspaper reports and other investigations), arguing that the GAO cherry-picked institutions where data from the U.S. Department of Education already hinted at potential improprieties, and that the institutions cited represent “bad actors,” not the sector’s norm.
     The investigators also submitted contact information for four prospective students with fictitious identities to “lead generation” websites that supply colleges with names of interested students, and encountered aggressive behavior, they said. Some students began receiving marketing calls from colleges within five minutes of submitting the information and, over the course of a month, one received more than 180 calls. Some came as late as 11 p.m.
. . .
     More damning than aggressive calls are instances in which college employees encouraged prospective students to commit fraud, or conveyed incomplete or false information about the institution’s costs and student outcomes.
     The GAO sent two prospective students using fictitious identities to each of the 15 colleges it investigated -- one with income and assets low enough to qualify for a Pell Grant and the other with $250,000 in savings and annual income too high to qualify for any aid other than unsubsidized loans.
     At four privately-owned colleges, the agency said, undercover students encountered admissions or financial aid officers who encouraged them to submit false financial information to improve their chances of eligibility for federal financial aid.
. . .
     At all four institutions where college employees encouraged applicants to commit fraud, the applicants reported having just received an inheritance of $250,000 – enough to pay full tuition without any grants or loans – and yet were, in all four instances, encouraged to take out loans and offered assistance in altering their financial information to become eligible for federal grants and subsidized loans. But, the report said, “[I]t was unclear what incentive these colleges had to encourage our undercover applicants to fraudulently fill out financial aid forms given the applicants’ ability to pay for college.”
     Not all colleges encouraged prospective students to commit fraud, but all were found to have made “deceptive or otherwise questionable statements” during the recruitment process, the GAO report said.
. . .
     At all but two of the colleges visited, college employees offered deceptive or questionable information about graduation rates, exaggerated likely earnings, or guaranteed applicants jobs after graduation….
     At six colleges in four states, according to the GAO, admissions representatives told undercover applicants that they could not speak with financial aid officers or find out what aid they qualified for until they completed the college’s enrollment forms and paid a small application fee.
     Two colleges told undercover students they could earn rewards like a gift card or an MP3 player by recruiting other students – a practice that could run afoul of a federal statute on “incentive compensation,” depending on the monetary value of those items….

• See also Undercover Investigation Finds Widespread Deception in Marketing by For-Profit Colleges (Chronicle of Higher Education)

• California Dreamer (Inside Higher Ed)

     Much of the news surrounding the University of California system has involved whether the network of universities will be able to survive its current budgetary crisis without shrinking in size or quality. In that context, it is no surprise that Christopher Edley Jr.’s plan to use online education to expand the university’s footprint “from Kentucky to Kuala Lumpur” has turned some heads – and churned some stomachs.
     Edley, dean of the law school at the University of California at Berkeley, has been using his position as co-chair of the education and curriculum working group for the UC Commission on the Future to advocate for an ambitious expansion of the system’s online arm that could eventually include fully-online bachelor's degree programs designed to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars.
     California is not the only state eyeing online education as a way to increase access and cut costs. But while many states are looking to use the popular medium to reach adult learners or save money at non-elite institutions, the University of California is a top-shelf research university that boasts one of the country's most competitive undergraduate programs. If the system does end up offering an online bachelor's degree, it would be a big step for online education.
. . .
     Members of a union representing graduate student-instructors at UC, finding Edley’s plan for “squadrons” of teaching assistants serving on “the frontline of online contact” more than a little dystopic, showed up to a regents’ meeting in May wearing patches that read “Dean Edley = Class(room) Enemy.” Edley’s goals for online education at UC were primarily profit-driven, they argued in a statement, and would “undoubtedly end in the complete implosion of public higher education in the embattled state of California.” Some professors and media outlets have expressed similar concerns.
. . .
     But some UC professors, like the graduate students' union, remain skeptical. The Berkeley Faculty Association — a group of about 300 professors — put out a report in May that did not condemn the pilot but voiced concerns about where Edley wants it to lead.
     The association was particularly unnerved by the idea of graduate student-instructors being the “frontline of contact” with online students, as Edley put it. For some, that sort of talk evokes a model many for-profit institutions have used to keep payroll expenses low and administrative control high: have full-time faculty put together the syllabus, then hire less-expensive adjuncts to deliver it. Faculty resistance to this sort of University of Phoenix-inspired arrangement was a major factor in last year’s implosion of the University of Illinois Global Campus, a similarly ambitious online effort….
     Wendy Brown, a political science professor at Berkeley who co-authored the Faculty Association report, told Inside Higher Ed that she has no qualms with a pilot going forward. What she worries about is the way Edley has been framing it as a first step toward something larger and perhaps more controversial. Inferring from Edley's idea of graduate student-instructors forming the "frontlines of contact" with online students, Brown says she worries the law dean's proposed cyber-campus would contribute to the displacement of full-time faculty members with adjuncts — a perennial concern among traditional faculty everywhere, given the decline of tenure and the popularity of the Phoenix model. “This is absolutely part of a larger set of proposals referred to by the Commission on the Future that describe the necessity of shrinking the letter-rank faculty and increasing part-time faculty,” says Brown….

Mom in Germany: c. 1940-1950

Mom, walking with friends, c. 1949 (that's her on the right)

Mom left Germany for Canada, alone, in 1951, at age 17.

(Click on photos to enlarge them)

Yes, people really do sunbathe on the beach in Germany.

Mom c. 1950

UPDATE: she tells me that she often took her vacations at a coastal resort town north of Hamburg, on the Baltic Sea (Timmendorfer Strand). She usually went with some girlfriends, and sometimes with some old boy friends (i.e., town friends who happened to be boys and who regarded her virtually as a sister). It was all very innocent, she insists. They slept in tents at the beach. They had virtually no money. Mom seemed to know how to have fun.

Visiting the grave of her stepfather, c. 1941

I don't know what this is about. I'll ask!
UPDATE: mom tells me that, starting at age 14, she started training to become a kind of county clerk--a bureaucratic government worker. Her four classmates were all boys. Needless to say, she was popular with them and with the teacher. She was only three weeks away from completing her training when she set out for Canada in 1951. "The boys were all good at math," she says, "but not me. But they were always very willing to help me with that."

The era of über-cluelessness: most voters have no clue how clueless they are

     In my view, the moral of the “Bell” scandal isn’t that greedy and unscrupulous creeps have bilked the taxpayer; the more important lesson here is that most citizens wrongly imagine that, if evil or corruption or mismanagement is afoot in government, the “system” will detect it and take steps to deal with it. And so people are stunned by this crazy Bell fubar.
     They shouldn’t be. Our system is now such that shit happens in their city, county, state and federal government all of the time about which they haven’t a solitary clue. It's still pretty easy to get clued in. But people don't make the effort. They don't think they need to. They even think they are knowledgeable.
     They're deeply, f*cking clueless. They're über-clueless!
     The prevailing cluelessness of voters—admittedly, also encouraged by the decline of local newsreporting—is well illustrated by the SOCCCD. Our seven elected trustees oversee the expenditure of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. Do people understand this? Do they know who these trustees are and how they conduct themselves? Clearly not. Over and over again, trustee incumbents are reelected, even when they act badly and irresponsibly. Several of them have done so. For years.
     The SOCCCD comprises three campuses: Saddleback College, Irvine Valley College, and ATEP (the Advanced Technical and Education Park), in Tustin. Very big things have been promised at ATEP for many years—it’s the SOCCCD’s endlessly promised but albatrossian “Great Park”—and, despite the expenditure of many millions of dollars, all we have there so far is a dinky cluster of tin buildings, a few bewildered administrators, and a few hundred students.
     The board has been divided about ATEP, but its champions have generally prevailed, in part because of the ardent advocacy of former Chancellor Raghu Mathur, who saw the facility as his Mt. Rushmore. It seems to me that it was not unreasonable for trustees, all those many years ago, to pursue the property, which was part of the old Tustin Marine Corps Air Station, and to try to do something special with it. But, in part owing to some bad luck, things haven’t worked out.
     For several years now, it has seemed to many observers that we’re throwing good money after bad. In the meantime, money gets tighter and tighter, and important college services have been cut back or worse.
     Do citizens have any idea about this? Don’t think so.

* * *

     As it happens, one of our trustees, John Williams, is also the county’s Public Guardian/Public Administrator, a job that he has royally screwed up, or so said two Grand Jury reports and lots of unhappy people who work or have worked with the fellow.
     Williams eventually faced a kind of “day of reckoning” before the OC Board of Supervisors, but at least four of the five Supes are politically affiliated with Williams. Three of them decided essentially to leave Williams and his combined offices alone, despite the top-heavy management, the irregularities and unprofessionalism, the growing costs. It was outrageous and inexplicable (well, no, it was way explicable, I’m afraid).
     Does the community understand any of this? Clearly not. In the recent election, despite those “scathing” Grand Jury reports, Williams was reelected.

* * *

     Two important issues have come up in county politics very recently: redistricting and campaign finance restrictions. Things could have gone very badly, but that hasn’t happened yet. Do you think your neighbors know about this?
     Journalists do report these things. We’ve still got some excellent news media in this county. For instance, the Voice of OC seems so far to be doing a good job reporting on important local issues in politics. I've been a big fan from the start.
     Check out editor-in-chief Norberto Santana’s recent appearance on the Real Orange (KOCE). Again, important decisions are being made—or, more recently, have failed to be made—in county government. Santana lays it out.
     And don’t forget to read The Voice of OC online!

Clueless feds, clueless youth—clueless freakin' everybody

Puppies do not plagiarize; nor do they offer poor theistic arguments

FBI Admits It Tracked Howard Zinn (Inside Higher Ed)

     The Federal Bureau of Investigation on Friday admitted that it tracked Howard Zinn, the noted historian and political activist who died in January, from 1949 to 1974, and the bureau released 423 pages of records from the monitoring of Zinn. Salon noted that this monitoring took place "despite having apparently no evidence that he ever committed a crime." And TPM noted that the records indicate that a senior official at Boston University, where Zinn taught, tried to have him fired in 1970. (If you are wondering if that official might have been John Silber, the long-time BU president with whom Zinn had many disagreements, it wasn't, as Silber hadn't been hired at the time.)

Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age (Trip Gabriel, New York Times)

     At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site’s frequently asked questions page about homelessness — and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.
     At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.
     And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.
. . .
     [T]hese cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.
. . .
     “Now we have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t seem to have an author,” said Teresa Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University. “It’s possible to believe this information is just out there for anyone to take.”
. . .
     …[Th]e number who believed that copying from the Web constitutes “serious cheating” is declining — to 29 percent on average in recent surveys from 34 percent earlier in the decade.
. . .
     A University of Notre Dame anthropologist, Susan D. Blum, disturbed by the high rates of reported plagiarism, set out to understand how students view authorship and the written word, or “texts” in Ms. Blum’s academic language.
     She conducted her ethnographic research among 234 Notre Dame undergraduates.
     “Today’s students stand at the crossroads of a new way of conceiving texts and the people who create them and who quote them,” she wrote last year in the book “My Word!: Plagiarism and College Culture,” published by Cornell University Press.
     Ms. Blum argued that student writing exhibits some of the same qualities of pastiche that drive other creative endeavors today — TV shows that constantly reference other shows or rap music that samples from earlier songs.
     In an interview, she said the idea of an author whose singular effort creates an original work is rooted in Enlightenment ideas of the individual. It is buttressed by the Western concept of intellectual property rights as secured by copyright law. But both traditions are being challenged.
     “Our notion of authorship and originality was born, it flourished, and it may be waning,” Ms. Blum said.
. . .
     At the University of California, Davis, of the 196 plagiarism cases referred to the disciplinary office last year, a majority did not involve students ignorant of the need to credit the writing of others.
     Many times, said Donald J. Dudley, who oversees the discipline office on the campus of 32,000, it was students who intentionally copied — knowing it was wrong — who were “unwilling to engage the writing process.”….

Philosophy and Faith (Gary Gutting, New York Times)

     …The standard view is that philosophers’ disagreements over arguments about God make their views irrelevant to the faith of ordinary believers and non-believers. The claim seems obvious: if we professionals can’t agree among ourselves, what can we have to offer to non-professionals? An appeal to experts requires consensus among those experts, which philosophers don’t have.
     This line of thought ignores the fact that when philosophers’ disagree it is only about specific aspects of the most subtle and sophisticated versions of arguments for and against God’s existence…. There is no disagreement among philosophers about the more popular arguments to which theists and atheists typically appeal: as formulated, they do not prove (that is, logically derive from uncontroversial premises) what they claim to prove. They are clearly inadequate in the judgment of qualified professionals. Further, there are no more sophisticated formulations that theists or atheists can accept — the way we do scientific claims — on the authority of expert consensus.
     In these popular debates about God’s existence, the winners are neither theists nor atheists, but agnostics — the neglected step-children of religious controversy, who rightly point out that neither side in the debate has made its case. This is the position supported by the consensus of expert philosophical opinion.
     This conclusion should particularly discomfit popular proponents of atheism, such as Richard Dawkins, whose position is entirely based on demonstrably faulty arguments. Believers, of course, can fall back on the logically less rigorous support that they characterize as faith. But then they need to reflect on just what sort of support faith can give to religious belief. How are my students’ warm feelings of certainty as they hug one another at Sunday Mass in their dorm really any different from the trust they might experience while under the spell of a really plausible salesperson?
     What sort of religious experience could support the claim that Jesus Christ was God incarnate and not just a great moral teacher?. . .
     But how can religious experience sustain faith in a specific salvation narrative, particularly given the stark differences among the accounts of the great religious traditions? What sort of religious experience could support the claim that Jesus Christ was God incarnate and not just a great moral teacher? Or that the Bible rather than the Koran is the revelation of God’s own words? Believers may have strong feelings of certainty, but each religion rejects the certainty of all the others, which leaves us asking why they privilege their own faith….

From the archives

Mammoth Mountain

(Click on photos to enlarge them)

Sunny Girl and her two kittens (Kathie took this one)

North of Morro Rock

Bishop sunset

Felix, cat ("Fat Thing")

Santiago Oaks Park

My good pal Buster, cat

The magnificent Ildy Pie

Sunny Girl again

The elderly, wonderful Ildy