{"id":37510,"date":"2017-01-16T11:33:50","date_gmt":"2017-01-16T19:33:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/world.edu\/?p=37510"},"modified":"2017-01-16T11:33:50","modified_gmt":"2017-01-16T19:33:50","slug":"community-college-poverty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/community-college-poverty\/","title":{"rendered":"Community College and poverty"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Loans_web\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a been a while since I\u2019ve explained the \u201cbread and butter\u201d of community colleges. While their primary victim is the remedial student, the big source of money for many community colleges is the Pell Grant.<\/p>\n

The Pell Grant is basically free money for college. You show up and say you need money. The college signs you up for basic courses, and then gets all the money from the Pell Grant scheme. Whatever money that isn\u2019t spent on tuition and fees is then \u201crefunded\u201d (that\u2019s their word) to the student. This leads to an unofficial holiday on campus: Check Day. For many students, once they get the checks, they\u2019re gone.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no record keeping from one campus to the next, so community colleges have bands of nomadic students wandering between them, getting their checks, disappearing, than showing up at the next campus down the road.<\/p>\n

While this business plan is incredibly fraudulent, it\u2019s the business plan of many community colleges\u2014they don\u2019t care about fraud, they care about growth. I\u2019ve covered this community college business plan befor<\/a>e, but it\u2019s worth asking why we have a million students or more doing this, for what amounts to a few hundred bucks a month. Yes, we really have over a million fraudsters in the system, as I\u2019ve personally seen campuses with 40% scammers, and official estimates put it at 25%, with at least 6 million community college students in this country overall. A recent study touches on the systemic fraud, above and beyond administrative encouragement of fraud:<\/p>\n

Food and Housing Insecurities In The Community College<\/a><\/p>\n

Now, the study only looks at California, so we have to take a few grains of salt to extrapolate what\u2019s being seen in the study to community colleges elsewhere, but let\u2019s look at the results all the same:<\/p>\n

\u00a0Approximately a third (32.8%) of students experienced housing insecurity.<\/em><\/p>\n

Alas, statistics in a vacuum like this are meaningless. If 50% of the general population experiences housing insecurity, this study shows that community college students are relatively wealthy. If it\u2019s 5% of the general population, now we have, as the study claims, evidence that our community college students are in poverty. Sadly, the study doesn\u2019t give any relative statistic, so we just have to take it on faith that the results here mean what the study says they mean.<\/p>\n

I couldn\u2019t find any study that would allow an apples-to-apples comparison\u2026it\u2019s a shame the study here didn\u2019t make that a little easier to figure out.<\/p>\n

Similarly, the study finds around 12% of community college students suffer from food insecurity\u2026I\u2019ve never really seen a college student in real danger of starvation, but we\u2019ll go with the flow here.<\/p>\n

The study naturally shows that students in these situations are going to community college with more purpose to get a job (shocking, right?) and that worries about food and housing cause these students stress (shocking again, right?). The study also shows that students in these situations tend to have lower grades\u2026not exactly a shock, either.<\/p>\n

And, of course, the study shows that students in these situations are far more likely to be trapped in hopeless remedial programs, programs that we\u2019ve long known to be wildly ineffective<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This is such a damning indictment of our community college system, a system that targets the most vulnerable, sucks the last bit of money they have, and spits them out with nothing. I feel bad for the students.<\/p>\n

That said, I hate what this study is trying to imply with the \u201cstudents that have insecurity do worse in school.\u201d<\/p>\n

Part of the reason higher education is so ridiculously expensive right now is our campuses are bloated with an administrative caste to support every student whim, and, yes, every student need. Every campus now has multiple fiefdoms with names like \u201cInstitute of Student Appeasement\u201d and I know what\u2019s going to happen when administrators see this study. I\u2019ve seen fiefdom after fiefdom founded, and every time, the Poo Bah justifies it because \u201cHaving this fiefdom will improve student success on campus!\u201d<\/p>\n

For one concrete example, it\u2019s why we have fiefdoms now to give students safe spaces. Some study, somewhere, showed that students who are afraid don\u2019t do as well in class (shocking, right?). Need another concrete example? It\u2019s also why we have Diversity fiefdoms on campus. Some study, somewhere, showed that students who feel like they belong on campus are happier, and happier students do better in class (shocking, right?).<\/p>\n

This is all rubbish, of course, because our graduation rates have been dropping steadily, despite the proliferation of these obviously useless fiefdoms. We have schools with 0.6% graduation rates now<\/a>…how can we possibly claim these fiefdoms are doing any good?<\/p>\n

So, now we have a study saying we need to have a housing fiefdom, and a student feeding fiefdom.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to come across as a jerk, or unfeeling, but studies like this don\u2019t sway me. I know higher education\u2019s purpose is education and research<\/em>. But this study tries to lead the reader into thinking higher education\u2019s purpose should be to feed and house students<\/em>. Yes, we can have scholarships, and scholarships based on need are fine, but the schemes like the Pell Grant aren\u2019t about scholarship, they\u2019re about sucking in huge numbers of students so the school can get soak up huge sums of money.<\/p>\n

Most of that money just goes to administration, as I\u2019ve shown time and again on this blog. Yes, crumbs will go to our starving, homeless students, and my asking to shut down the Pell scheme might come across as my wanting to deny crumbs to our starving, homeless students.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not true.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m fine with government programs to house and feed our homeless, starving, citizens. On the other hand, I\u2019m rabidly against making it higher education\u2019s mission to feed and house our students. Studies like this merely open up more avenues of plunder for administration.<\/p>\n

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s a been a while since I\u2019ve explained the \u201cbread and butter\u201d of community colleges. While their primary victim is the remedial student, the big source of money for many community colleges is the Pell Grant. The Pell Grant is basically free money for college. You show up and say you need money. The college […]\n… learn more→<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":37511,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[13138],"coauthors":[11733],"class_list":["post-37510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-higher-education","tag-community-college"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nCommunity College and poverty - World leading higher education information and services<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/world.edu\/community-college-poverty\/\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Community College and poverty - World leading higher education information and services\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"It\u2019s a been a while since I\u2019ve explained the \u201cbread and butter\u201d of community colleges. 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