Finally, I’ll show you how the low achievement levels of graduates and the high cost of party school tuition have financially damaged tens of thousands of party school graduates who are unable to find the highly paid jobs they were promised and are forced to make student loan payments of $400 a month for decades. In the final chapter, I’ll outline the steps that parents and legislators can take to cancel the party school system. It’s essential that we restore the rigor that American colleges need to train the leaders of tomorrow to compete with economic challenges from Asia in the coming decades.
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Maximizing Profits at the Students’ Expense
W
hen party school administrators shifted their primary mission from educating students to maximizing profits in the 1990s, it worked because there was something in it for almost everyone. The dramatic increases in tuition turned administrators into powerful wheeler-dealers, academic Donald Trumps, who could design and construct multi-million-dollar campus buildings and increase their salaries. For faculty, the new dumbed-down classes and relaxed grading meant they no longer had to put much time and effort into preparing for their classes or grading papers. And the majority of party school students certainly weren’t going to complain as their campuses were turned into amusement parks and class requirements for reading, writing, and studying were drastically reduced to make college more “student friendly” and where nearly everyone got an A or a B for hardly any work.
To maintain the party, however, it was absolutely necessary that parents, the press, accreditation organizations, and taxpayers be kept in the dark about the transformations that had taken place. Parents would likely raise a stink if they knew they were paying a higher and higher price for less and less education. Recent surveys, in fact, show that parents are beginning to doubt the value of higher education. Although just a few years ago, 97 percent of parents said sending their children to college was an absolute necessity for their futures,
4
a 2009 survey showed that the percentage of parents who believed this had fallen to just 55 percent. At the same time, the number of parents who had figured out that colleges care more about their bottom lines than they do about education has climbed steadily over the years to 60 percent in 2009. Only 35 percent of parents said they thought college administrators’ prime mission was the education of students.
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Administrators know that colleges have a growing credibility problem, but many parents still cling to the old-fashioned idea that colleges will protect their children. Each time the news leaks out about illiterate college graduates, students drinking themselves to death, dumbed-down classes, inflated grades, the high campus crime rates, or how those millions of dollars in tuition money are being spent on frills, colleges have to turn up the propaganda machines to turn down the negative news coverage.
But that is only part of party schools’ public relations problem. At the same time they try to turn down the coverage of student misbehavior in the mainstream media, they still have to make sure their potential customers, the high school students looking for a great place to party, are getting the opposite message: anyone, no matter how dumb, is invited to the twenty-four-hour party and no one cares if you learn anything or not. Why get a boring job when you can spend the next six years at our deluxe resort while your parents and the taxpayers pay the bill for you? You can have the time of your life without doing any work at all!
The ability of party school administrators to keep these two balls in the air at one time is a credit to their propaganda skills. Although most parents don’t realize it, they are the focus of a highly organized, misleading, and expensive public relations campaign beginning when their children are still in high school.
The Lies Told Along the Golden Walk
Party schools’ public relations campaigns begin with what colleges call “the golden walk,” when parents and their high-school-age children tour the campus before they make a decision about which college to attend. The walks are “golden” because they draw in the customers willing to pay the exorbitant tuition bills that finance party school operations. The tours are designed to seem casual and informal with a student walking backwards in front of the group, rattling off statistics, and engaging in supposedly lighthearted banter.
Don’t believe it! The golden walk is the result of thousands of hours of careful preparation by college administrators and professional consulting companies that are paid thousands of dollars to make sure that what parents see is what party school administrators
want
them to see. The student tour guide’s pitches are as carefully scripted as used car salesmen’s spiels, thoroughly rehearsed and refined over many hours of practice.
Parents usually have no idea that when they take the “golden walk,” they are not getting objective, honest information but a wellcrafted sales pitch. Colleges know what parents are looking for and often engage in misrepresentation, misstatements, and even outright lies to entice them to sign up.
When parents ask admissions officers about the cost of attending the college, for example, they are shown the current one-year sticker price and told to multiply that by four, “with a little extra built in for inflation.” This is the first of many lies and misleading statements that college admissions officers tell parents. Many colleges, like the one I worked at, state on their websites and their documents that they are “four-year liberal arts” colleges, even though it is well known that only 30 percent of students graduate in four years. National statistics show that 60 percent of students require at least
six
years to graduate. Parents will not find this very essential piece of information anywhere on college documents or websites. Lynn Olson, senior editor of
Education Week
, has referred to these additional college years and the costs associated with them as the dirty little secret of higher education.
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Parents usually don’t learn about these hidden charges until their children bring home the news that they will need another year or two to graduate. These extra years in college are informally known as the “super senior” years and students refer to themselves as being on “the six-year plan.” For parents who have attempted to budget for their children’s education, these additional costs, which can add as much as 50 percent to the college bill, can be devastating. If they were somehow able to avoid taking out private student loans from predatory lenders up to this point, this is where they are finally forced to capitulate.
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Another stop on the golden walk is usually a dormitory room, which the tour guide might describe as “typical.” The reality, however, is that the dormitory that parents are shown is the newest residence hall on campus with all the latest frills. These rooms, however, are usually reserved for seniors. What parents are never allowed to see are the freshman dorms, where students start their college careers. You can understand why colleges don’t want parents anywhere near the graffiti-decorated hallways, broken furniture, and group bathrooms full of vomit and ramen noodles. At Keene State College, where I used to work, it was common practice to stack freshmen into these rooms like cordwood, with as many as four students assigned to a room designed for two. Why? So many freshmen leave the school during the first year—usually at least 25 percent—that colleges overstuff them in the fall to avoid having empty rooms in the spring.
Jeff Kallay, a self-described “experience evangelist” for a Pennsylvania-based company called TargetX, rents himself out to colleges at rates up to $20,000 to evaluate their golden walks. He said many college tours are led by “PR-spewing tour bots” who lack any connection with reality. Some of these guides are not above telling parents whoppers like “no one drinks here” and quote the “official” crime rates that everyone knows are artificially low. The just-for-show dorm rooms with their throw rugs and Green Day posters also send a phony message, he said.
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The underlying problem is that parents assume that party school administrators have their children’s best interests in mind when they talk about whether their college is “the right fit” for their child. Parents still think that colleges put education at the top of their list of priorities because no one told them about the takeover by Diplomas Inc. The truth is that if your child is breathing and you have enough money to pay the bill, your child is always the right fit.
The
Atlantic Monthly
examined the college admissions process in 2005 and found that an entire new industry known as “enrollment management” has replaced what used to be the admissions office at many colleges across the country. The admissions officers are no longer college employees but work for private sector firms hired by the college to offer “image enhancement” and “strategic marketing position” in the battle against every other college to attract paying students.
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College administrators from the lowest assistant director to the president have been taught that they are part of a “higher education industry,” where each department is a “revenue center,” and students and parents are customers who must be lured to the market by a shiny new product and then retained by offering easy classes with high grades.
David R. Kirp, a professor of public policy at Berkeley, examined a number of college view books, the slick advertising brochures sent out by colleges to the parents of prospective students, and made an interesting observation. The books are full of photos of happy, diverse students, frolicking on the campus grounds, participating in sports, eating in the dining hall, or socializing in a residence hall suite. What is missing is any hint of what used to be the college’s prime mission—education. Classroom shots are so rare as to be nearly nonexistent and there are few shots of students reading. Why? College officials know that most students don’t want to be reminded that they are supposed to go to college to study, not to socialize. The books feature “pastoral retreats from the bustling world” but photos of students in classrooms are rare. “Only the bravest consultant is willing to emphasize the hard work of learning . . . for fear of scaring away prospective applicants,” Kirp said.
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Given that they have been targeted with marketing material featuring food, frolicking, and fun that would not be out of place at a fashionable resort, it should be no surprise that students arrive on campus believing that they have purchased a ticket to a five-year party. It’s one of the reasons students express dismay when professors demand that they read and learn something in their classes. That is not what they signed up for.
John Gardner, executive director of Brevard College’s Policy Center on the First Year of College, said students begin to think of college as a continuous party even before they arrive because they are buying what the promotional brochures seem to be selling. “The overwhelming emphasis of a lot of that literature is ‘if you come here, you’re going to have the time of your life,’” he said. “It’s not very common to have visiting students actually interact with faculty or sit in on classes.”
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When the golden walks passed through the building where I worked, the brand-new Media Arts Center at Keene State College in New Hampshire, parents were impressed by the wide-screen television monitors in the lobby displaying student work or streaming live footage from the television studio. The parents lingered in the lobby for a minute, oohed and aahed in admiration, just as they were supposed to do, and then they moved on to the next station on the golden walk. When the walk was not in operation, however, those television monitors were usually not even turned on. What parents didn’t see on their visits were the leaking roofs, backed-up sewers, and rodent infestations that had plagued this building since it had been converted from a defunct cafeteria.
If parents had visited my classroom just down the hall, they would have observed a much different and more truthful picture of what they could expect after their children were admitted. On a typical day, none of my twenty-two students would be taking notes and only a few would be paying attention. Two would be asleep with their heads down on the desks, three would be listening to their iPods or texting messages on their cell phones, four would be engaged in a lively conversation among themselves about the awesome party they went to last night. Some would be wearing their pajama bottoms, chewing gum, scratching their new tattoos or piercings, or eating their lunch. Only two or three students would have read the assignment for the day and they were the only ones who had a clue about what I was discussing. No one would ask a question and 90 percent of them were simply filling a seat, watching the clock, and waiting for the class to end so they could get on with their party school life.
Nips and Tucks for Tired Colleges
Most of the methods that colleges use to make themselves look good, like the trappings of the golden walk, aren’t cheap—and it’s the students and their parents who end up unwittingly paying the price. Party schools have rushed to change their official names from “college” to “university” during the past few years for no other reason than that a focus group told them it sounded more prestigious. Making such a name change may sound simple, but it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to remake stationery, the college seal, signs, and even the carved rocks at college entrance gates. Of course, this kind of change is simply smoke and mirrors and has absolutely no impact on what is being taught. It is entirely a marketing scheme designed to gain a foot up on the competition. Focus groups and market surveys show that parents think
university
sounds more prestigious than
college
and that’s all it takes for party school administrators to go into action to change their institutions’ names.