Not all colleges and universities are party schools. Many of them still cling to the notion that education, not student entertainment, is their primary mission. And many students who attend party schools are still able to learn and resist the ubiquitous temptations to misbehave. But few colleges, from first-rate research universities to the Ivy League, remain untouched by the changes in educational priority I describe here.
I left my teaching position in 2007, right after the dean threatened to put me on probation unless I made my classes more student-friendly by removing grammar from my lesson plans and showing more movies. The administration had already expressed its frustrations with my concerns about the decline in the quality of teaching and my students’ continued filing of Freedom of Information Act requests. Besides, I had a book I wanted to write—this one. I had a message that I thought parents and taxpayers needed to hear.
This book—written by a college faculty member who watched as his college was transformed into a party school and a subprime college, a parent, and a former education reporter of twenty years—is aimed at parents of college students and soon-to-be college students about what really goes on in many of today’s colleges and universities and why. I will spell out in detail what’s wrong with today’s colleges, how it got that way, why it matters, and what can be done to restore the
higher
to higher education. It is my sincere belief that many parents are wasting tens of thousands of dollars sending their children to colleges where they will learn very little. These colleges award empty diplomas that many employers now understand are nearly worthless. By exposing these practices, I hope that I can be a part of the process of reform.
In these pages, I’ll explain what you can do to make sure your children don’t waste their college education money. I’ll talk about the red flags to look for to determine whether your child’s prospective colleges are more interested in keeping their students happy than in giving them the education they deserve.
I am a firm believer in higher education and what it can do for the bright children of America, but what is going on at hundreds of campuses today is not higher education or even lower education. It’s not really education at all, just one big, non-stop party.
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How Retention Replaced Education at America’s Colleges
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generation ago, when parents sent their children to college, they knew what they were getting for their money. College was the magic doorway that opened up the American dream and those who passed through its gates could expect wealth, success, and a life full of meaningful engagement with the world. Students who survived the hard work and hours of serious study were welcomed into the ranks of society’s leaders, both within their own communities and in national affairs. A bachelor’s degree was the certificate that proved to the world that the bearer had mastered key skills, learned how to solve problems through critical thinking, and demonstrated the wisdom necessary to participate in the world of enlightened endeavors.
Because colleges accepted only the best and brightest students, just getting in the door was an accomplishment celebrated by parents and students alike as a milestone in their professional development. Those who gained admittance were already a part of the elite, the leaders of tomorrow. The student who received a college acceptance letter had made the first cut for inclusion on the intellectual all-star team.
The mission of colleges was clear. They were ascetic refuges from the outside world, dedicated to knowledge and learning. They were communities of scholars where free thought was encouraged and young minds were nurtured and taught how to think. It was a place where highly trained experts passed on the knowledge and wisdom of the ages to a new generation. This mission had remained essentially unchanged since the Middle Ages and its roots could be traced back to ancient Greece.
Of course, there had always been students who got into trouble. Many students were, after all, adolescents and prone to all kinds of misbehavior, from swallowing goldfish and packing telephone booths to all-night parties in the fraternity house. There were, however, limits to higher education’s tolerance for misbehavior. Professors and administrators knew that an important part of their jobs was to serve as the gatekeepers who weeded out the poor-performing and lazy students from the more serious majority. Students who consistently scored poorly on exams, failed to read assignments, or didn’t bother to show up for class were eventually directed to the college’s exit door. It wasn’t just a punishment for substandard performance; it was a way to ensure that high standards were maintained so that the college degree would be awarded only to those who earned it. This, in turn, guaranteed that the degree itself retained its high value for those who did the hard work and demonstrated that they deserved it.
If you entered a college classroom a generation ago, you would have found a professor at the front of the room lecturing or leading a discussion about one of the important topics on the syllabus. Students participated or at least pretended to be interested in the topic. There were questions that led to discussions, which led to a deeper understanding. The vast majority of students understood that their role in higher education was to take the time to prepare for their classes by reading the assigned texts and coming to class ready to participate in the discussion. Studying was what students did and it was why they were there.
To ensure that the entire process worked smoothly, there were accreditation organizations that oversaw each step in the college education process, ensuring that standards were kept high and that colleges lived up to their primary mission: education.
Employers understood that a job applicant who held a bachelor’s degree was guaranteed to be of higher intellectual quality than a high school graduate. Certified college graduates possessed not only a wide array of basic knowledge but the abilities to learn quickly, to make logical decisions when presented with problems, and to discuss matters in a sophisticated and intelligent fashion.
Today, unfortunately, almost everything you just read about colleges is no longer true.
The inconvenient truth is that only the best colleges in America still consider “education” to be their primary mission. Instead, since the early 1990s, colleges have been reinventing themselves using a business model, transforming themselves into Diplomas Inc., run by a new breed of college administrator more interested in retaining customers than in educating students. As a result of this change in focus, hundreds of college campuses have been deliberately transformed into havens of adolescent hedonism, where student misbehavior has become the norm and college administrators allow it because they don’t want their student customers to take their tuition money somewhere else. In an all-out effort to attract and retain as many student customers as possible, administrators have given students exactly what they said they wanted: more parties and less education. Dining halls have been enlarged and reinvented as gourmet food courts and campuses have been tricked out with hot tubs, climbing walls, workout centers, water parks, and wide-screen television sets. Dormitories have been torn down and replaced with luxury condominiums.
The hard work that used to be required has been eliminated because students said they didn’t want to do it. Don’t want to read books? No problem! Reading them is no longer required. Grades too low? Forget it. We’ll use a “grading curve” to transform your F magically into a B. Too busy to write a term paper? We’ll waive the requirement for you! A new generation of students with a sense of entitlement demands Bs just for showing up and colleges, ever eager to keep their customers satisfied, are granting their demands.
Focused on increasing their revenue stream, today’s party school colleges squeeze as many students as possible onto their campuses at the highest tuition they think they can get away with for the longest possible amount of time. To make their campuses more “student-friendly” and prevent their customers from dropping out or transferring to another campus, colleges have dumbed down their programs, sometimes to elementary school levels, and inflated grades so that nearly everyone gets an A or a B. Although there have always been student drinking parties, what has changed is that today the parties have become the main student activity at a majority of campuses, taking up far more time than attending classes or studying. Colleges used to be a place where students who were getting an education took some time off to drink; they are now places where students who came to party spend a few hours a week taking classes. A large percentage of party school students admit that they chose their college not because of its academic standing but because of its reputation as a party school, with minimal academic demands and maximum opportunities to enjoy themselves.
Party school administrators and faculty are aware of this decline in academic rigor but minimize its impact by calling themselves “non-elite” colleges and defend the decline in standards with the excuse that the unprepared and disengaged students that make up most of their student bodies probably would not have gone to college at all in previous generations. But is these students’ college attendance really an improvement if schools dumb down their programs and inflate grades to make students happy? And is it really worth tens of thousands of dollars to attend a college that is really nothing more than an adolescent resort?
Flunking out, which used to be the primary consequence for disengaged students who slacked off, has been nearly eliminated by party school administrators who think failing a student is a nonsensical rejection of a paying customer with cash in hand. These administrators have deliberately changed the priorities and rules of higher education to make it nearly impossible for students to fail. Professors are encouraged to make their classes student-friendly, and that means no outside reading assignments, no difficult concepts, no boring discussions, and no tests. Instead, they are encouraged to show movies, bring in guest speakers, and develop classroom presentations that are more “entertaining.” Many of today’s party school classes take their cues from reality television, quiz shows, stand-up comedy, video games, and three-ring circuses. They are long on fun but short on learning, but neither administrators nor students complain because both are happy. Students get diplomas without doing any work and administrators get to cash their ever-larger tuition checks.
Although colleges would still prefer that students actually learn something during their time in college, it’s no longer required. Party schools have made education an optional activity. The small minority of students who are engaged in the education process and really want to learn something in college—about 10 percent according to the National Survey of Student Engagement—can still get an education as long as they avoid the temptations to misbehave that the majority of students constantly toss in their way. The majority of today’s party school students take advantage of the “slacker tracks” through the curriculum, which allow them to obtain a diploma without reading a book, writing a term paper, or having a serious discussion. Professors are rewarded by the administration for keeping student grades high and keeping failures to a minimum under the official party school policy of retaining students at all costs. Today, 90 percent of college grades are either an A or B, where A is for the students who complete their work on time and B is for the lower half of the class who couldn’t be bothered. All other grades are essentially off-limits because they discourage students and might tempt them to drop out. The minority of students who study hard in school and get a good education are awarded the same grades and the same diplomas as the students who did as little work as possible. So where is the incentive to study hard if the high-performing students end up with the same grades and same diploma as the slackers? In this way, party schools actually discourage student engagement in the education process. There is absolutely no reward for hard work.
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Party school policies also encourage students to stay in school longer than the four years that it is supposed to take to get a bachelor’s degree. It now takes the average college student six years to complete a four-year program, adding a 50 percent surcharge to the advertised sticker price. Administrators make it easy for students to drop classes after they enroll, which means that students pay for a class without earning any academic credit. Colleges routinely fail to schedule classes that students require for graduation, forcing them to stick around for another semester or two. Students are permitted, even encouraged, to take less than a full load of classes. For students, that means more time to party; for administrators, who charge the same tuition no matter how many courses a student takes, it’s an easy way to squeeze out a little bonus tuition money from their students.
With academic demands at a minimum, party school students have dozens of hours a week for what they call
socializing
, which is their code word for drinking themselves into oblivion. Studies show that nearly half of American college students abuse alcohol, but at party schools, binge drinkers make up a majority of the student body. Students whose self-abusive drinking habits were kept in check by parents and school officials when they were in high school arrive on campus at the beginning of freshman year to find that there is no longer any supervision at all. Arrests for public intoxication, public urination, assault, sexual abuse, and DUI begin the day the students move in and continue through the semester. Hundreds of party school students drink themselves to death each year. By the end of the first year, a quarter of the freshman class has dropped out, not for academic reasons, but because they simply could not remain healthy while regularly staying up all night and consuming massive amounts of alcohol.
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