Authors: Craig Brandon

The Five-Year Party (30 page)

BOOK: The Five-Year Party

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There are six regional accreditation groups in the United States, but they all work pretty much the same way. Colleges apply for membership and then become a part of the organization. The college and individual departments submit regular self-study reports about changes they have made and problems they are experiencing. The accrediting groups develop a book-length statement of standards that they use as a guide when suggesting changes in college policies, courses, and programs. The accrediting organization collects comments and can schedule site visits to take a look at individual programs or problems, and once every decade they do a comprehensive evaluation of each college.
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On the face of it, this should work, so why haven’t they spotted the problems documented in this book? First of all, the accrediting organizations are made up almost entirely of academics, including many from the organizations they evaluate. It does little good to have party school administrators evaluate themselves. Why not let parents and state legislators, the ones who pay the bills at state universities, have a say in what goes on?

Second, their work is done in secret. None of the reports and self-study documents are required to be made public. The public is invited to file complaints against individual colleges, but these complaints aren’t made public either. The accrediting group doesn’t do it and the colleges are not prohibited from doing it but rarely do. If this begins to sound like Agriculture Department food inspectors tipping off the meat-packing plants before they show up, you understand what I am talking about. It’s all just too cozy, hidden, and friendly and it provides little protection for consumers.

Most importantly, however, the accreditation reports that I have seen are guilty of not noticing the forest for all those trees. The investigators are trained to look for small problems such as a need for more faculty in a particular subject, a change in the requirements for a major, or whether individual courses fit into the mission of the college. Colleges spend a lot of time fighting with other colleges that want to offer competing programs and similar degrees. A lot of politics is involved. The evaluators put on blinders when it comes to the big picture. Although they interview students enrolled in the program, they don’t contact graduates about what they have and have not learned. They don’t talk to employers about whether the graduates were adequately trained to perform useful work. The minutes of the bimonthly meetings are filled with these kinds of petty disputes; the larger picture is not discussed.

No evaluation official ever asks if students are really learning anything at these colleges. In the documents I examined, the issue is not even discussed. The New England Association of Schools and Colleges, for example, has published its Standards for Accreditation that deal with several of the issues documented in this book.

For example, section 4.2 requires colleges to demonstrate “an effective system for academic oversight, assuring the quality of the academic program,” but this was mostly an illusion. Whenever I complained about academic standards, I felt like I was crying in the wilderness. The academic standards were largely in the hands of the students. If they thought a class was too difficult for them, the administration ordered it to be dumbed down or cancelled. This is where the accreditation watchdogs should step in and defend academic standards against these pressures to dumb them down to accommodate disengaged students.

Section 4.7 requires that students completing a degree must “demonstrate collegiate-level skills in the English language.” This is something of a joke. If this provision were enforced, there would be a 90 percent decline in graduates at most colleges. Many of the graduates I was familiar with did not even possess high school level English skills. This provision would be wonderful if it were enforced. Sadly, it is not and no one seems to care.

Section 4.19 requires that graduates “demonstrate an in-depth understanding of an area of knowledge or practice.” What they are talking about here is the student’s major, but few students meet this requirement either, unless we are talking about plagiarism or partying as an area of knowledge. Only the genuine students—the 10 percent who actually came to college to learn something—possessed anything like an “in-depth understanding” of issues in their majors. The rest were merely treading water.

Parents who have been burned by colleges should not hesitate to file a complaint with the accrediting organization, but it seems to me that these organizations, as they are currently run, are not likely to get involved in a detailed evaluation of subprime colleges and party schools unless there is a huge public outcry against them. It would require a complete about-face for these organizations to get involved. Meanwhile, the “accredited” tag will carry very little weight with anyone who knows what’s really going on.

State education departments also have the power to take a close look at colleges and universities in their states, but they rarely seem to bother, leaving the accreditation up to the regional groups. Colleges, of course, never invite them to take a look. Taxpayers and legislators who want to solve the five-year party problem should ask the state to investigate what is being taught—and not taught—in their state’s higher education programs.

7. Require college seniors to pass a “value added” test before receiving a diploma.

This is perhaps the most radical but most effective idea in this book, yet it would not require a lot of resources or time. A group of experts in each field would come up with a list of essential information and skills that they would expect all bachelor’s degree holders to possess at graduation. This would go a long way towards assuring future employers that what they are looking at is a competent future employee and not someone who took the slacker track through college. Students, of course, would be expected to go beyond the basics, but this test would make sure they had a firm foundation in their area.

Just the idea that this test existed would go a long way towards improving the attitude of students at subprime colleges. When a student asks, “Why do I need to know this?” the professor would simply be able to say, “Because it will be on the test,” and not have to go into a long discussion about what is on the syllabus and why. Flunk the test and you don’t get a college diploma. That’s simple and easy to understand.

Why is this not the case now? Because professors are very resistant. Some college majors have what are called capstone courses, where students are asked to demonstrate all of the skills and knowledge they have acquired during their college years, but few actually give an exam. The idea, passed on from the pre-subprime days, was that a college education was too diverse and individual to be measured in a test. But the test I am recommending would not show everything a student had learned but simply guarantee that a student had learned the basic minimum.

For example, English majors would have to demonstrate a mastery of the rules of the English language and be able to identify people like Chaucer, Longfellow, and Emerson. Chemistry majors would have to show an understanding of basic formulas and the periodic table of elements. History majors would need to know when the Civil War was fought, who won the Vietnam War, and who was the king of England during the American Revolution. This may sound ridiculously moronic, but believe me, the vast majority of today’s college graduates would probably have a very hard time passing such a test.

A passing grade on this test would show that a student has actually acquired enough knowledge to claim the privilege of being awarded a bachelor’s degree. It would send a message to employers that a diploma is more than just a piece of paper. Passing this test would do what a college diploma used to do—demonstrate that a certain level of skill and knowledge has been achieved. For colleges, it would protect the integrity of their diplomas and help put an end to the increasingly low regard that employers have for them.

For students, it would be an incentive to buckle down and really learn something during their time in college. For professors, it would be a basic outline of what to teach in their classes, yet not so restrictive that it prevents them from making their own choices about what to teach. It would be a framework for what society expects its future leaders to know.

These tests already exist but are not used very much, probably because party schools don’t want the public to know how little students are learning. To ensure that students in different colleges take the same test, it should not be drawn up by the colleges but by an outside organization. Fortunately, an organization that does exactly this already exists: the College Board, which administrates the SAT tests across the country. The new graduation exams could use the same format and methodology and could be graded the same way. The tests could be broken down into as many subgroups as necessary. Instead of one comprehensive English exam, for example, there could be separate exams for English and American literature. The state and federal governments could require these tests as a condition for receiving funding. Students who failed the test would take some additional classes at the college (which would make colleges happy) and be able to take the test again the next semester.

The same test should also be given to incoming freshmen, which would allow the college to measure exactly the improvement or “value added” students achieved during their college years. If a particular student’s grade on the test rose from 56 to 86, the college could show that its programs added 30 points to the student’s body of knowledge. Colleges could use these numbers to compare cohorts of students over time, compare the impact of new programs, and compare colleges to other colleges. It would provide solid information in an area that currently lacks it.

In the spring of 2009, colleges in Indiana, Minnesota, and Utah began this process by starting pilot projects in setting standards for what students must learn in various subjects. Supported by the Lumina Foundation for Education, the idea is based on the decade-old “Bologna Process,” by which colleges in the European Union attempted to standardize what knowledge a diploma represented across various countries. The idea is to set quality assurance standards so that a diploma granted at one college means the same thing as one granted at another college.

While university catalogs describe the requirements for a degree in terms of the courses students are required to take, said Clifford Adelman of the Institute for Higher Education Policy, a listing of the number of course titles and numbers means nothing to employers or parents. The revised process would list specific categories of information that each graduate is expected to have mastered. “If you’re majoring in chemistry, here is what I expect you to learn in terms of laboratory skills, theoretical knowledge, applications, the intersection of chemistry with other sciences, and broader questions of environment and forensics,” Adelman said.
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A Call to Action

What is at stake here is the future of our country and its place in the world. U.S. college graduates, once the best in the world, currently rank twelfth among the thirty-five major industrialized nations, behind China, Canada, and South Korea, and other countries are catching up.
²⁴⁵Unless we take action, the best American jobs will soon be exported to other countries, leaving our illiterate party school graduates to flip burgers and deliver pizzas.

Fixing American higher education’s problems won’t be easy. What it will take is a reinvention of colleges and universities, putting education and academic standards at the top of the list, and placing retention farther down. It will take a coordinated effort among parents, legislators, taxpayers, professors, and administrators. The first step, of course, is to admit that there is a problem, something that most academics have avoided doing for more than a decade.

The purpose of this book has been to inform parents about the abuses of higher education that party schools engage in to maximize the number of customers and their incomes at the expense of real education. It is my belief that informed parents are the best weapons to force college administrators and state and local governments to make the reforms necessary to ensure that colleges educate our children to the best of their ability. Parents and legislators, the ones who pay for higher education, hold the purse strings and can and should demand these reforms or threaten to withhold the funds that keep the party going. In return for their tuition money and education funding, parents and legislators should demand that colleges upgrade their academic standards, switch funding from frills to education basics, and guarantee that college graduates are proficient in the basic skills required to be employable and good citizens. They should demand solid proof that they are getting what they are paying for when they send their children to college—not just a diploma but a real education. Colleges need to call a halt to their outrageous tuition inflation, become more accountable, and pay more attention to affordability. We should settle for nothing less.

Appendix

The Red Flag List: How to Spot Party Schools and Subprime Colleges

BOOK: The Five-Year Party

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