Should Students Sue their College?

A woman filed an lawsuit against her alma mater for not providing enough career services. That may have been frivolous but millions of college students, in my non-lawyer opinion, have enormous justification for suing their college:

• Failure to disclose. Colleges, for example, hide their obscenely low graduation rates. For example, the four-year graduation rate for full-time freshmen at the 20-campus California State University system, which enrolls nearly a half million students, is only 17%, 40% in five years, 49% in six years. Only a tiny percentage of applicants have been informed of their odds. Such statistics if they appear at all on a college's website are buried in a place that few students find. And college recruiters too rarely mention non-self-serving statistics. If all prospective students were informed, no doubt many fewer would attend.

When a person buys a home, the seller is required to disclose all the home's actual and potential problems or face a lawsuit. A potential investor must be informed of the risks or can sue. I predict that a successful lawsuit could be filed against a college on grounds that it failed both in admitting students it knew were unlikely to succeed and in not disclosing that to them.

In my view, all colleges should be required to prominently post on their website and recruitment brochure its four-, five-, and six-year graduation rate for students with varying high school records.

• Failure to perform. Nationally, college freshman-to-graduation growth in reading, writing, critical thinking, quantitative reasoning, etc. is frighteningly low. A study funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that 50 percent of college seniors failed a test that required them to do such basic tasks as interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, or compare credit card offers. Almost 20 percent of seniors had only basic quantitative skills. For example, the students could not estimate if their car had enough gas to get to the gas station. Unbelievably, according to the U.S. Department of Education's most recent Higher Education Commission Report (the Spellings Report,) things are getting even worse: "Over the past decade, literacy among college graduates has actually declined." According to the most recent National Assessment of Adult Literacy, for instance, the percentage of college graduates deemed proficient in prose literacy has actually declined from 40 to 31 percent in the past decade. Employers report repeatedly that many new graduates they hire are not prepared to work, lacking the critical thinking, writing and problem-solving skills needed in today's workplaces."
  

I predict that a successful lawsuit could be filed on grounds that a college failed to perform. If someone bought a $100,000 car that wouldn't work, he'd demand the dealer fix it, refund the money, or would sue and easily win. Yet colleges too often take $100,000+, years of a student's life, and provide an education that doesn't work. Such students would seem to have a winning lawsuit.

• Deceptive advertising. College recruitment materials (brochures, websites, etc) too often manipulate prospective students into believing that if they graduate, they have a solid chance of being well employed in careers related to their major, even in such long-shot majors as art, music, and journalism. For example, many colleges' recruitment materials profile (complete with color photos) successful graduates. That's often true even when a college knows that most of its graduates (not the mention the non-graduates) will never earn enough money from such majors to even pay back their student loans, let alone earn a middle-class income from art, journalism, music, etc. I believe that a lawsuit claiming deceptive advertising could prevail.

Yet people don't sue colleges (or schools) because we've been conditioned to be in awe of our colleges and not to search for what's behind their ivy-covered veneer. Colleges have powerful marketing and lobbying machines that manipulate the media and government into deflecting attention from what colleges are really like by trumpeting misleading claims like "College graduates earn a million dollars more" and "America's higher education is the finest in the world."

Wake up. Higher education is among the largest purchases and certainly the most time-consuming purchase you'll ever make. Alas, too often it yields a poor return for the time and money invested. Make that purchase at least as carefully as you would a car.

And if you're unhappy with the education you've bought, do what you'd do if your new car was a lemon: demand it be fixed or that you get your money back, and if the college fails to do so, consider suing its Ivy-covered butt.

A Simple Way to Improve College

I appeared today on NPR's The Takeaway with John Hockenberry and Farai Chideya discussing America's most overrated product: higher education. HERE's the clip.

I wish I would have had the opportunity to say more. This is what I would have said:

Colleges really are a most unexamined icon. They should be required to provide a Student's Bill of Rights, a key plank of which would be that every college would be required to post a Report Card reporting key statistics about the college:

• 4- and 5-year graduation rates for A students, B students, and C students. Nationwide, we admit to so-called four-year colleges 200,000 students from the bottom 40% of their high school class, yet 2/3 of them don't graduate even if given 8 1/2 years.
• The amount of freshman-to-senior growth in thinking skills, math reasoning, etc. for students with similar high school record.
• The true cost (cash and loan) that that student will likely have incurred over the four (or more years they're in college, based on their family's income and assets. Today, colleges too often use what I call The Drug Dealer Scam, in which they give freshmen a big discount but once they have the student hooked (attending the college,) they jack up the tuition in years two through four and then after year four, take away all institutional aid.

Tire manufacturers are required to mold into each tire's sidewall its tread life, traction, and temperature rating. Yet colleges, in selling what may be the largest purchase of a person's life and one that can greatly affect their life, are allowed to sell their product with no disclosures, only Madison-Avenue-inspired brochures and websites, and highly sales-trained tour guides and admission "counselors." (Their "counselors" rarely counsel any admissible student to go to any other college.) Requiring colleges to prominently post a Report Card on itself with items like those above will both allow the the prospective college student to make a fully informed choice AND put pressure on colleges to improve the quality of what they provide. Now, all colleges' incentives are to provide cheap-quality education so they can divert student funds to the esoteric, rarely useful research that excites academics but few others.

To date, we have been subjecting college students to a Tuskegee Experiment--a highly risky treatment without disclosing the risks, side-effects, and opportunity costs. We need to let the sunshine in.