What followed was a series of meetings at which the college’s communication professors lined up on my side and the student affairs administrators lined up on the students’ side. As an institution of higher learning, my colleagues said, our first responsibility was to teach students how to act responsibly and ethically. At the very least, students should be required to follow federal regulations. Howard Stern, we claimed, had no place within the academic community. The student affairs administrators were not moved and continued to maintain that students should be allowed to do what they wanted. These meetings reached all the way up to the vice presidential level, with the vice president of academic affairs agreeing with me and the vice president of student affairs backing the students. Because the two vice presidents had equal power, we were at an impasse and I resigned as the station’s advisor rather than allow students to break federal regulations.
What I didn’t know then was that the seemingly bizarre position of the student affairs administrators—that college students should be allowed to do whatever they wanted on campus—was the first of many encounters I’d have with what has come to be known as the “student empowerment” movement.
During the late 1990s, college administrators throughout the $600-billion-per-year higher education industry were beginning to reject the old model where colleges’ primary mission was to educate students and teach them how to act ethically and responsibly. The new, modern ethos was to treat higher education as a business, where the students were the customers and the primary role of administrators was to keep them as happy as possible and to bend over backwards to ensure that unhappy students didn’t transfer to a more student-friendly college that would try harder to satisfy their needs. Educating students, which used to be the primary role of colleges, became secondary to the new campus catchword:
retention
. Colleges that took a hard line against student misbehavior risked losing students to less rigorous colleges that had already adopted the “anything goes” philosophy. Colleges that refused to adopt this student-friendly attitude would lose students and soon go out of business, the theory went. Telling students things they didn’t want to hear, setting high academic standards, and grading students fairly had all become secondary to the prime directive: retention.
During the next few years, I watched as this “retention at all costs” policy crept into the academic side of the college. The vice president of academic affairs who had defended me on the radio station issue was forced to resign and was replaced with a younger and much more hip administrator who listened carefully to what students wanted and gave it to them, even if it was not in the best interests of education.
In a public memo, he told students that plagiarizing information from the internet for their term papers could be defended as a trendy “mash up.” At a college that used to value multi-culturalism, he dropped the foreign language requirement because students told him they didn’t like it. He reduced the number of classes students were required to take to receive a diploma from forty to thirty. Classes that used to earn three credits were magically transformed into four credits each and extended by a few minutes, even though the average student attention span was widely acknowledged to be only about twenty minutes. Students loved the guy.
But it didn’t end there. The period of time that students had to drop a class was extended by several weeks, until the deadline was right before final exams. This pretty much eliminated the very unpopular practice of failing students who didn’t show up or failed tests. Students could now simply withdraw from classes right before the final exams. And because students said it made them uncomfortable to ask their professor to sign the withdrawal form, my signature was no longer required. Students simply disappeared from my class and I didn’t even know about it until I got my final grading sheet. And if, despite all these changes, students still weren’t able to drop the class successfully, the student just got an “administrative withdrawal form” from an administrator.
This seemed like a curious practice, allowing students to drop a class rather than fail it, until a wiser and more knowledgeable professor explained it for me. Students who fail a class might get discouraged and leave, he said, but allowing a student to drop a class simply erased it from his record. Everything was set back to zero, except for one thing. The student still had to pay the tuition money for the class.
At about this time, I first heard the expression
super senior
for students who were in their fifth and sixth years at a four-year college. Many of these students had dropped dozens of classes over the years; therefore, they did not have enough credits to graduate at the end of their senior years. Other students were so poor at choosing classes that they had not signed up for courses that were required for graduation. This seemed like a crisis to me, but other professors explained it for me. Students who take six years to graduate from a four-year college, which is how long it takes at the average college these days, represent a financial benefit for the college, which receives 50 percent more tuition money for each student. “They want students to drop classes because it means they take in more money,” he said.
The idea for this book dates back to that conversation and listening in faculty meetings as the new vice president of academic affairs praised the business model of higher education, which catered to its student customers, and criticized the old model, where education was the prime mission of higher education. That old-fashioned way of running a college, he said, was the “Mom and Pop store model,” hopelessly outdated.
As I said, the students loved him, but many of my faculty colleagues began to whisper that the world as they had known it seemed to be coming to an end. Each year, freshmen arrived in our classrooms less prepared and more poorly educated than the year before. They were also much less engaged in the education process and less willing to work. Unlike the students of just a few years before, they seemed to have little interest in learning anything but were forthright in their demands that they be given high grades simply for showing up. It became clear to faculty that failing students was no longer an acceptable option. Increasingly, students refused to do homework, refused to read the textbook, and refused to participate in class, yet reacted angrily when they received a grade lower than an A.
In the late 1990s, it was still considered ethical to flunk students who failed tests, refused to do their work, and were not interested in learning. During the years from 2001 to 2005, however, these disengaged students gradually became a majority, increasing their power in the classroom and at the college. Professors who continued to post honest grades and refused to cave in to student demands were terrorized in their written, year-end evaluations by students. Administrators whose primary mission has shifted from education to retention were listening to those complaints and taking them seriously, fearful that unhappy students would move their digs and their tuition money to a more lenient college. It became clear to professors that their jobs depended on making students happy. That meant dumbed-down classes, easy assignments, little or no work, and high grades.
This was, of course, a major topic of discussion among the faculty, and I spent many hours over lunch and in the gym griping with them about it. Everyone understood what the problem was and why it was happening, but it was also understood that speaking about it at public meetings would be a career killer. Many of my colleagues’ views ran completely counter to the “retention at any cost” ethic that the administration was spouting. Even professors with tenure knew that they would be punished for speaking out, so they remained silent. Professors who told me in private that “My students are so dumb I don’t know how they find their way to classes” or “Of course I can’t give her the grade she really deserves,” simply refused to deal with the problem in public. The prevailing attitude was that the academic emperor’s nakedness was not to be acknowledged publicly.
My colleagues from the national College Media Advisors, most of whom, like me, were former journalists, discussed by e-mail the phenomenon of colleges that no longer cared if students learned anything. Over drinks and dinners at national conventions in Washington, Kansas City, St. Louis, and Dallas, we agreed it was one of the great untold stories of the decade. Although little pieces of it appeared from time to time in stories about how illiterate college graduates were, the skyrocketing tuition rates, and grade inflation, no one had as yet strung all the parts of it together to deliver the inconvenient truth: most American college campuses had been transformed into something closer to adolescent resorts than institutions of higher learning.
By 2005, when I first watched John Merrow’s groundbreaking PBS documentary
Declining by Degrees
, exposing the true conditions on college campuses, I had collected a cabinet full of notes, newspaper and journal articles, e-mails, and copied documents. I also tape-recorded and wrote down exchanges I had with students, administrators, and faculty at my college. I assigned my journalism students to look into some of the abuses. The students often had to use the Freedom of Information Act to gather information the college did not want made public.
I began to see how college administrators were misusing laws meant to protect students’ privacy to cover up abuses that they didn’t want the public, the press, or parents to know about. Despite the fact that my college was public and supported by taxpayer money, vast amounts of data were kept secret or, worse yet, deliberately distorted to protect the college’s image and marketing position. Students who committed felonies like rape, assault, and arson were handled in secret campus judicial board hearings that were closed to everyone on campus. The results were never made public, despite my students’ requests and Freedom of Information Act challenges. My college, like hundreds of other colleges around the country, was deliberately hiding its high crime rates and even lying on federal forms requiring full disclosure of campus crimes.
As my files grew, it began to appear that a large segment of the higher education industry was involved in a massive fraud in which parents, students, and taxpayers were being hoodwinked into paying for one thing—a college education—but were actually getting something entirely different—a five-year (or longer) party, where education was no longer required. It was a classic bait and switch. Parents were asked to pay tuition that increased each year at two to three times the rate of inflation, yet faculty salaries and spending for instruction remained constant. Most of the classes that freshmen and sophomores attended were not even taught by a full-time professor but by a part-time adjunct instructor, who was paid the minimum wage, didn’t have an office, and wasn’t invited to department meetings.
Where was all this tuition money going if not for education? The answer, I found, was that it was being used to pay for an ever-expanding number of administrative positions. Each year, colleges added assistant vice presidents, deputy deans, or directors for non-educational programs like graduation ceremonies, student activities, student nutrition, multi-culturalism, service learning, and student involvement. Salaries for administrators were also growing at an alarming rate. Some college presidents were paid over a half million dollars per year. The other main reason for the tuition hikes was the frenzy of campus construction, where colleges added multi-million dollar student centers, water parks, hot tubs, million-dollar workout centers, and climbing walls in a never-ceasing competition with other colleges to add the latest perk to attract more students. Even in the current recession, most college campuses are perpetual construction zones where there seem to be as many hard hats as baseball caps, and massive cranes and yellow construction markers are a permanent part of the landscape. Most of these buildings had no direct educational purpose but were designed to provide the frills that high school graduates looking for a place to party said they wanted.
When I discussed with parents what college classes were like today, they simply refused to believe it. How could college graduates be functionally illiterate? How could all that tuition money be wasted on administrative salaries and frills with little connection to instruction?
The idea for this book developed from those discussions with parents as I attempted to show how low higher education had fallen and how only one dollar in five of their tuition money was spent on instruction. Although many parents were aware of the term “party schools,” for example, most seemed to have no idea how dangerous unsupervised binge drinking had become. Wikipedia defines a party school as a “college or university that has a reputation for heavy alcohol and drug use or a general culture of licentiousness.” Estimates vary on how many party schools exist in America, but there are far more than the twenty listed on the
Princeton Review
’s annual list. But the problem reaches beyond the party school phenomenon to a related one that I call
subprime
colleges, where diplomas are being awarded to students who don’t deserve them. Many of today’s college students are not even aware that they are supposed to be learning things in college. For many of them, college is a simple cash-for-diploma transaction. They pay their tuition money and purchase a diploma. Education at these colleges is strictly optional. The 10 percent minority who want to learn are allowed to do so; the vast majority who are only there for the party get the same grades and are awarded the same diplomas.