Professor Doom
This was a book I needed to write. I’ve been in higher education 30 years, all my adult life, and I’ve seen it change from the inside. You don’t have to work in higher ed to know something is very wrong, from the Diversity Commissars making a half million a year to the race riots to the endless graduates who can’t answer even rudimentary questions about our country, much less write even a single sentence without struggling, not to mention the roughly 50,000,000 citizens now trapped in student loans (including over 100,000 senior citizens losing their social security to pay for their loans).
My book reveals many secrets about how higher education went so very wrong, but the biggest secret is “accreditation.” Most people think accredited schools are legitimate schools, but, like so much of higher education, this is inverted—the better schools are the unaccredited ones. I worked at an unaccredited community college, and became quite familiar with everything it takes for a school to become accredited. Before the school became accredited, it was legitimate. It had to be, because students were spending their own money and they wanted a real education. After accreditation, the school, more accurately the caste of non-scholars running the school, was no longer interested in being legitimate, as the loot from student loan and grant money (only available to accredited schools) was massive, and the students going there “for free” no longer cared about the education.
I also look at the people running our schools, the self-proclaimed titans of industry who proudly justify their million-a-year salaries with their doctorates in “Administration.” I take an 8000 level course in administration, the most advanced material our “leaders” have to, supposedly, learn, and reveal why these people put no value in education: have no education themselves.
It isn’t simply the rulers of our campuses who are suspect. In times past, the leaders of our schools, the administrators, were scholars, professors who took some time off from teaching and research to cover the part-time jobs of Dean and the like (part-time because these positions have so little to do over the summers and holidays, and primarily work at the beginning and end of the semester). Now these positions are filled by full-time plunderers, far more concerned with looting the student loan money and acquiring lakefront property than actually helping the kids who come out of high school thinking they “must” go to college next.
I also address the faculty, de-professionalized into a cadre of low paid, temp workers. Our tuition has risen so high, while professor salaries have dropped so far, that a single student’s tuition pays the cost of hiring a teacher for the course. So realize that in a class with 100 students in it, the tuition of the other 99 students is pure profit…profits which go straight to the administrators—and there are more administrators than faculty in this country now.
In a similar vein, we teach many fake courses on campus today, for example “The philosophy of Game of Thrones.” Average GPA is now A- (and I discuss why this is so), but our curriculum is so light on material that on-time graduation rates are ridiculously low. It’s all about the growth, the raking in of student loan money. Even schools with 0.6% graduation rates are considered successes worthy enough for awards—provided they grow fast enough.
Because our schools take Federal money, there are Federal strings attached. One of those strings is they have to document just about everything they do. Thus, I document much of what I say with publicly available information. It should also be emphasized: our schools have known, for many years, that they are committing great harm to kids. And they keep on doing it.
That point bears reinforcement. As part of accreditation, a school promises, in writing, to act with integrity. An 18-year-old, right out of high school can’t buy a lottery ticket or place a $5 bet on a hand of blackjack, because our society believes someone that age should not be trusted to make risky financial decisions. But, that same kid needs merely check a box on a form with many other things to fill out, and he can find himself $30,000 in debt in a matter of months. The reason this is considered acceptable is the school promises to act with integrity, promises not to bury that kid in debt. Our student loan debt grows around $100 billion a year, so how’s that promise working out?
And again I point out: the schools know they are doing great harm to kids because they document the harm they are doing, and keep on doing it year after year. How is this integrity?
At some point, our higher education system will collapse, and my book details much of how it happened, even if ultimately the student loan scam is the core of all of it. Thus I had to write this book, to maybe save even a few from the great harm our higher education system is inflicting.