Policy Changes That Will Help Shut Down the Five-Year Party
As taxpayers, the millions of parents of college students have significant lobbying power to force legislators to make the kinds of changes necessary to force college administrators to get out of the entertainment business and return to their rightful role in education. The following are policy changes that parents should encourage their lawmakers to enact. Even nonparents will benefit from these changes to ensure that their tax money is being spent on education and not the five-year party.
1. Cap college tuition increases at the inflation rate.
There is no reason colleges can’t operate under strict budgets the way most government departments and organizations do. The cost of higher education has increased 439 percent since 1982, faster than health care or gasoline. Only 21 percent of this money is spent on anything directly connected with education. The other 79 percent is spent on building elaborate palaces with little to do with education and on administration salaries. Many colleges actually inflate their tuition rates to enhance their prestige. It’s past time to get this under control.
State and federal governments could accomplish this by requiring colleges to cap their tuition rates or lose their state and federal aid. This would force colleges to be more efficient and use their funding more creatively. They could also use more of their endowment funds for operating expenses. The current system that allows colleges to increase their sticker prices at two or three times the inflation rate is devastating to families and forces them to accept high levels of debt. Cutting the sticker price would make it much easier for students to attend and reduce the need for student loans.
In 2009, Pennsylvania began looking into setting up a no-frills, back-to-basics college campus with no sports teams, no gourmet food courts, no condominium-like dorm rooms, and no student center. It was expected that tuition could be reduced by as much as 75 percent. Colleges should be encouraged to follow this example.
Another idea that should be considered is a three-year bachelor’s degree program. Hartwick College in New York began offering this as an alternative in the fall of 2008. Students take eighteen credits in the fall, four in a special January term, and eighteen credits in the spring, to complete the 120 credits for their degrees. This simple change can result in a tuition savings of $40,000.
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2. Require students who need remediation to get it before college.
A recent study found that 43 percent of community college freshmen and 29 percent of four-year college freshmen required remediation in math and reading, which cost $2.3 to $2.9 billion per year.
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The fault lies with high schools, of course, which granted diplomas to students who had not yet reached the required levels of proficiency. The best solution would be to stop the practice of graduating high school students who cannot meet basic standards. It should not be the college’s job to bring these students up to speed.
Using college classrooms and professors to teach high school algebra, reading comprehension, and basic grammar is a very expensive waste of time. Worse yet are colleges that ignore the problem and dump students in need of remediation into the general population without any preparation at all. Many of these students just get further and further behind until they drop out or flunk out, with debts as high as $50,000 and nothing to show for it.
A better way would be for states to set up special remedial programs at high schools for college-bound students in the summer before they go to college. Because the second semester of twelfth grade is often wasted, it would be the perfect opportunity to try again to re-educate these students in the basics. The high schools, which are often underused in the summer, would be the perfect location for these classes. It would even be worthwhile for parents to pay a part of the cost. That would still be a lot cheaper than college tuition. There should be rigid requirements and specially trained remediation teachers to deal with students who missed the basics the first time around. Colleges should administer a test to make sure incoming freshmen are up to speed and refuse admission to students who cannot pass it.
This would ensure that students entering college have a solid foundation on which to base their further studies, without worrying about their reading and math levels. It would guarantee that all college freshmen begin with the same basic skills and start out in the same place. Without this, many students enter college behind their peers from day one and never catch up.
3. Repeal FERPA and replace it with legislation that encourages parents to participate in their children’s college educations.
It takes a family to build a college graduate. In the 1950s and early 1960s, colleges took much more interest in the personal lives of their students. There were enforced quiet hours, curfews, and rules about guests of the opposite sex. Students who didn’t conform to specified moral standards could be expelled. Men and women sitting on a sofa, for example, were required to have at least three feet on the ground at all times. More seriously, colleges restricted what students were allowed to say and do on campus, which in the 1960s was justifiably found to violate their First Amendment rights. The idea of colleges acting as substitutes for parents dates back to English common law and is referred to by its Latin name,
in loco parentis
.
No one wants to go back to the repressive days of the 1950s, but clearly colleges have shifted too far in the opposite direction, taking little interest in what students do as long as they don’t interfere with other students or the college. This “anything goes” attitude towards student behavior, which colleges refer to as
student empowerment
, has been a major contributor to the development of party schools. As was described earlier in this book, high school students who had their behavior carefully monitored in high school are suddenly dropped off at the campus and find that no one is watching them. The result is like a wild animal suddenly released from a cage. They go wild and often end up injured, in jail, or failing to attend any classes at all.
The majority of these students are simply not mature enough or wise enough to make decisions for themselves. Faced with the choice of attending a party or studying for a test, they make the wrong decision. Faced with the choice between drinking themselves into unconsciousness or stopping after one or two drinks, they make the wrong choice. Often, these wrong choices are dangerous, not just to the students themselves but to others. Clearly, what is needed is more guidance, control, and discipline, yet colleges claim their hands are tied by federal regulations that protect students’ rights. Students treat this as permission to break all the rules with impunity.
A major step towards fixing the problems would be to change the regulations to require colleges to keep their students under control or share in the consequences of their students’ actions, just as parents do. When a student is arrested for drunk driving, for example, the college should be required to immediately put the student on probation, inform the parents, and require psychological counseling. If the college is aware of a problem student and does nothing about it, the college should be held legally responsible for negligence. Students who repeatedly break the rules should be expelled.
An important part of this change in direction would be the repeal of FERPA, which keeps parents out of the loop in the college disciplinary processes. Parents, many of whom are picking up the educational bills, have a right to know what their children are doing in school and should have a right to see grades, speak with teachers and administrators, and look at the records of all disciplinary and medical matters concerning their children. At the age of eighteen, students may be legal adults, but most of them are unable to make mature decisions about their own behaviors until they are well into their twenties. James Buckley, the author of the FERPA law, has himself called upon Congress to revise the law to prevent its widespread abuse by colleges that have misinterpreted it.
Parents have eighteen years of experience in dealing with their child and know what motivates him or her. Why shouldn’t colleges be allowed to use that experience when planning students’ educational programs? One of the major powers parents have is that of the purse string. If the child misbehaves, the parent can threaten to stop writing the tuition checks and require the student to leave the party and find a job. That is a powerful, simple tool that students would not be able to ignore.
Of course, Diplomas Inc. would fight this change because it would make their jobs much harder. The current laws allow them to do pretty much whatever they want because the entire process is conducted behind closed doors. This should also be changed. Just as the law requires municipalities to make their arrest and court proceedings open to the public and the press, colleges should be required to do the same. The outcomes of these proceedings would serve, as they do in the outside world, as a deterrent to other potential criminals. If there are three students per semester who are expelled for repeated alcohol abuse, that would serve as a great incentive for other students not to follow in their footsteps. Disciplinary processes conducted in secret have no deterrent value at all.
4. Get colleges out of the criminal justice business.
Allowing colleges to investigate, prosecute, and determine guilt or innocence for felonies like assault, rape, arson, and burglary is clearly a conflict of interest. Colleges’ first priorities will always be protecting their reputations from the outside world. Obtaining justice for victims and punishing wrongdoers will always be secondary considerations as long as party school administrators are in charge. Why do we need a separate criminal justice system just for colleges? It’s one thing to deal with issues like plagiarism and cheating on tests in this way, but it’s quite another to deal with serious crimes like this. Communities in which colleges are located have police forces, district attorneys, judges, and juries whose main functions are to deal with crime. Why not use them? What sense does it make to treat the same crimes differently depending on which side of the college gates they are committed? And why should colleges be allowed to cover up crimes by keeping all information about them secret? Does this serve the needs of the victims or the college’s interest in protecting its reputation?
College crime victims, especially rape victims, have been complaining for decades that it is difficult to obtain justice from a college judicial board where everything is done in secret, including the final verdict and the punishment. Community courts perform most of their activities in the open, where they can be covered by the press and included in community and national crime statistics. It’s time to prevent colleges from covering up crimes in this way.
5. Require that colleges give parents honest information.
Readers of this book should no longer be surprised that Diplomas Inc. does its best to hide what goes at college campuses and to cover up damaging information. This should not be tolerated, especially at public colleges, which are subject to the freedom of information statutes. Even the campus crime reports, which are specifically required by federal law, are often a lot more fiction than fact. What would help parents make better decisions about colleges would be a uniform set of statistics that would immediately separate the party schools from the serious schools. There should be serious penalties for reporting erroneous information, such as placing the school on a special list for the dishonest for a year or two.
The information parents need would include honest statistics on how many students die each year, how many graduates are working in jobs in their chosen majors, the average salary level for each major, how many students were dismissed by judicial boards, how often the college awards grades of A and B, student scores on standardized tests, the results of the National Survey of Student Engagement, high and low and median SAT scores, number of graduates who are currently unemployed, average college loan debt and credit card debt at graduation, percentage of students who took out student loans, average administrative salary, number of administrative positions, and the amount of budget spent on instruction.
Now that would make identification of party schools pretty easy! They would stand out from prime colleges like a sore thumb.
6. Reform the process by which colleges and universities are accredited.
Colleges and universities are proud of their regional accreditation and often proclaim it right on their web pages. For outsiders, it seems to mean that experts have examined the college thoroughly and determined that it does what it says it does. But what does accreditation really mean? Not much, it turns out. The regional accreditation organizations that are supposed to evaluate the quality of education at our colleges and universities seem to have been soundly sleeping as the colleges dumbed down their programs, inflated grades, and turned themselves into entertainment centers. They are like Securities and Exchange Commission watchdogs, fiddling with forms while corporate raiders fleeced millions of Americans and Bernie Madoff set up his Ponzi schemes.