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I\u2019m continuing to look at a thorough discussion of the main reasons higher education is such a mess today<\/a>. The author cites four key problem areas, but as always I have some things to add.<\/p>\n Students<\/strong><\/p>\n By all available metrics, student intellectual performance has declined precipitously as the university administration has ballooned\u2026the takeaway numbers regarding the university\u2019s role in the decline are shocking: 45 percent of students \u201cdid not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning\u201d during the first two years of college\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n While the above is certainly correct, and I\u2019ve already noted college graduate IQ is in freefall<\/a> right now, to the point that it\u2019s reasonable to consider today\u2019s college graduates of below average intelligence. The author fails to identify why this is the case. Again I emphasize the twin issues of corrupted (by administration) accreditation and fraudulent student loans.<\/p>\n Back when accreditation was legitimate, accredited schools were forced to have \u201crespectable entrance requirements.\u201d Honest, if universities restricted admissions to only students who displayed some interest in education, the author would not be able to blame the students for what\u2019s happening in higher education today.<\/p>\n The student loan scam provides money to anyone who wants to set foot on campus, and that includes people who have no interest in learning anything. And\u2026this is where admin come in. They took over accreditation so that \u201crestricted admissions\u201d was removed, and campuses flooded with students (and those sweet student loan checks!).<\/p>\n Then admin told faculty to keep on passing even the fake students, instead of flunking them off campus after one semester. And so faculty no longer asked students to read, to write, to learn anything at all which couldn\u2019t be picked up in a few minutes\u2019 effort at most. We now have social promotion in college <\/a>because it\u2019s so important to keep those student loan checks flowing.<\/p>\n The author goes into more detail why students are a problem, but\u2026no. Administration, through corrupted accreditation and the broken student loan system, are far more a problem than the students, and the many fake students on campus today will vanish overnight if we remove student loans so they\u2019d have nothing to gain by coming to campus, or alternatively (by some miracle) make accreditation force entrance requirements on schools.<\/p>\n Where is all the money going? In 1970 in the United States, 268,952 administrators and staffers supported the work of 446,830 full-time professors. Today, the proportions have almost flipped. Now we have 675,000 professors being \u201csupported\u201d by 756,595 administrators and staffers. [16<\/a>]<\/em><\/p>\n The above is documented, but it should also be pointed out that we\u2019ve tripled our student base in that time, and tripled our administrators\u2026while the number of professors has increased only 50%. It\u2019s actually worse than this, as many administrative positions have been \u201creclassified\u201d as faculty positions (for example, the library staff), even if these supposed faculty teach nobody and perform no research. The reason for doing so is it make the \u201cstudent\/faculty\u201d ratio look better. Supposedly, this ratio is around 17 on many campuses, even if every classroom has at least 50 students and every faculty teaches at least 5 classes\u2026it\u2019s curious how no administrator understands how these numbers can\u2019t possibly be accurate, though I certainly forgive the author for not realizing this part of the fraud of higher education (so many frauds to follow, after all).<\/p>\n One exception to this grim story is how elites educate their own children. The Waldorf School of the Peninsula, which teaches the kids of many who work for Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo, and Hewlett-Packard, doesn\u2019t allow computers or cell phones or iPads in its K-12 classrooms. There it is all about real human contact, free conversation, and tactile, intellectual, and emotional engagement. [20<\/a>] And when it comes to elite universities, things are similarly oriented. The children of the wealthy and powerful are not reading half-page op-eds for their weekly course content and then pressing a clicker to indicate whether they like it or not<\/em><\/p>\n While the above isn\u2019t directly related to the rest of the article here, I include it because it\u2019s really, really, important for the gentle reader to know. The education commoners get is nothing like the education the elite get\u2014John Taylor Gatto discusses this in detail<\/a> (I strongly encourage the gentle reader to consider what this multiple teacher-of-the-year winner has to say, and to read his other works as well).<\/p>\n Similarly, the elite don\u2019t send their kids to the mostly bogus higher education system the commoners go to. In particular, their kids don\u2019t go to community college, hence why the frauds there are generally so huge.<\/p>\n The author returns to discussing the problems of our current higher education system.<\/p>\n The University Curriculum<\/strong><\/p>\n \u2026one cause of the decline is \u201clack of rigor.\u201d Students can\u2019t do things they used to be able to do for the simple reason that we no longer insist that they do them. And why is that? \u2026If students cannot think, read, or write any longer, it\u2019s because administrators don\u2019t care if they can or can\u2019t.<\/em><\/p>\n The above is certainly correct, and again highlights the failure of accreditation, which is supposed to certify the legitimacy of the education at an institution. My first decade in higher education, I believed my universities were systematically defrauding accreditation. It was only when I went to an unaccredited school, and went through all the forms necessary to get accreditation that I realized the truth:<\/p>\n You can\u2019t defraud accreditation regarding the education at a university. Accreditors DO NOT CARE about education. I\u2019ve gone line by line over how a school gets accredited<\/a>, at no point is education relevant to the process. As UNC demonstrated, you can literally run fraudulent courses for thousands of students, actively work to cover up the fraud, destroy the careers and livelihood of any faculty who tried to fix the fraud, maintain the fraud for a couple decades\u2026and the accreditor does not care, and at no point will the accreditor threaten to remove accreditation and the flow of those sweet, sweet, student loan checks.<\/p>\n And so again I point out that if we fix accreditation, or get rid of the student loan checks, this problem will likely dramatically reduce in severity. The author discusses the problems in more detail but I feel it\u2019s better simply to identify how to start fixing the problems.<\/p>\n The next issue identified is:<\/p>\n University Governance<\/strong><\/p>\n \u2026that was how the university used to function. Administrators arose from the general faculty, served their terms in office, and then returned to their home departments.<\/em><\/p>\n As I\u2019ve mentioned before, the university used to be run by scholars, each taking over the many part-time administrative positions for a while before fully returning to faculty. Please understand, this made sense, as most administrative positions really aren\u2019t necessary for 8 hours a day, particularly when classes aren\u2019t in session.<\/p>\n Now our campuses are run by full-time administrators, filling their time doing things no faculty could even guess. I\u2019m inclined to blame faculty for ceding the reins of power to the wandering plunderers who run campuses today. The student loan scam poured so much money on campus it seemed like a good idea at the time to just hire a full time Dean or whatever to deal with issues, little realizing what non-scholars would do in these positions\u2026faculty gave loaded guns to these chimpanzees.<\/p>\n That\u2019s my opinion based on direct observation. The author offers a different reason for the appearance of the plunderers:<\/p>\n Once the mandate changed to supplying the economy not with \u201cskilled\u201d labor \u2014 universities have always done that \u2014 but with a certain technically minded human being, scholars were deemed not merely unqualified to execute the mandate, but antithetical to it. And they were, stated in this way, which is why they were removed from university governance and academic decision-making.<\/em><\/p>\n I disagree here. Who<\/strong> removed faculty from university governance? Obviously, faculty did, at least initially, as they were the only ones who could do so. Who set the new agenda for what higher education was supposed to be about, leading to the mess we have today? The people faculty foolishly hired to replace them.<\/p>\n Oops.<\/p>\n Once we let them in, they used their power to hire more of their kind, which in turn hired more. It\u2019s been a very destructive parasitic infestation:<\/p>\n A first step in the process was to hire senior managers from outside the local university so boards of governors could vet them for agreement with the new corporate ethos. These managers were in turn empowered to duplicate themselves within the institution through the appointment of like-minded colleagues and staff. This cohort of the corporate-minded has grown at a rate such that it has outpaced all other university appointments \u2014 in the United States a 240 percent increase from 1985 to 2005 compared to a mere 50 percent for faculty. [34<\/a>]<\/em><\/p>\n I see only the drastic solution of cutting off the money paying for these guys: kill the student loan scam, and schools will either quickly go bankrupt (and most will), or fire the vast bulk of their useless administrative staff. I can\u2019t fathom a guess at how many will take the latter option. 1%? 5%? Not many. However, the bankrupted schools will create an educational vacuum which allow new schools to be built from the ground up.<\/p>\n With luck, the new schools will adopt the methods which allowed us to have the best system of universities in the world. It sure won\u2019t be pretty for the first few years after the student loans are finally shut off, however.<\/p>\n Please understand, this drastic action is both necessary, and inevitable:<\/p>\n Why do calls for austerity and downsizing apply to everyone except<\/strong> these people? Isn\u2019t the point of good administration that it\u2019s done efficiently and cheaply? In Canadian universities, part-time faculty now do 60 percent to 70 percent of the teaching because full-time faculty have been cut so dramatically. [35<\/a>]<\/em><\/p>\n The parasitic administrative class has grown so large that it\u2019s destroying the host. Already, many schools cannot afford<\/em> to have teachers because they spend so much on endless ranks of administrators, who mostly spend their time scrambling to find the cheapest teachers they can get\u2026even as tuition climbs and climbs and climbs.<\/p>\n \u2026as David Layzell, fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, said to the National Observer when asked about the administrative culture at the University of Calgary: \u201c\u2018I really don\u2019t feel that I can talk with you about this.\u2019 He added: \u2018Maybe that says more than us actually talking\u2019.\u201d [39]<\/p>\n The culture of fear of higher education really has what faculty as remain terrified. Again, I point at the money. During Prohibition, mobsters controlled alcohol, because there was so much money in doing so. Everyone still drank\u2026but you were afraid to talk about it openly.<\/p>\n However, once Prohibition ended\u2026the fear factor in getting a beer vanished overnight. And the mobsters no longer controlled the alcohol.<\/p>\n In a similar vein, even though 80% of the citizens of this country go to college in some form, there\u2019s a culture of fear here due to higher education\u2019s control by the thugs running the institutions. Kill the student loan scam, and I very much suspect that culture of fear will disappear quickly.<\/p>\n Next we\u2019ll look at the final issue in this article.<\/p>\n www.professorconfess.blogspot.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"