Wall Street Journal: Nov 11, 2025. Higher Ed Needs Receivership, Not Ref...

A Particularly Devastating Critique of Colleges

The spate of indictments of higher education continues, indeed accelerates. This article by a professor is one of the more devastating.

An Emotional Plea for Colleges to be Honest with Prospective Students: The College Report Card

I seem to have gotten nowhere with a rational approach, so here is a more emotional appeal for you to demand that colleges replace their deceptive marketing practices with a College Report Card. It wouldn't seem that this would be so important but it would dramatically improve the lives of literally millions of people and help America slow its descent into being a third-world country.

Below the video, I provide a transcript of it.

Transcript of the video

An Emotional Plea for Colleges to be Honest with Prospective Students

by Marty Nemko

Among my saddest moments as a career counselor is when I hear a story like this, “I wasn’t a good student in high school but I wanted to prove that I could get a college diploma --I’d be the first one in my family to do it. But it’s been five years and $80,000 and I still have 45 units to go.”

I have a hard time telling such people the killer statistic: According to the U.S. Department of Education, despite colleges having dumbed-down classes to accommodate to the weak students, among college freshmen who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their high school class, more than three of four won’t earn a diploma, even if given 8 1/2 years! Yet colleges admit and take the money from hundreds of thousands of such students each year!

Even worse, most of those college dropouts leave college having learned little of value. And I urge you, before you trust me on this, see the frightening results of the definitive national study, Academically Adrift--Google it,) a mountain of debt, and devastated self-esteem from all their unsuccessful struggles at college.

Perhaps worst of all, the aforementioned people too rarely end up with a career that requires a college degree. So it’s not surprising that when you hop into a cab or walk into a restaurant, you’re likely to meet workers who spent years and their family’s life savings, mortgaged their family's future, on college only to end up with a job they could have done as a high school dropout.

Colleges trumpet the statistic that, over their lifetimes, college graduates earn more than non-graduates, but that’s terribly misleading:

• For one, you could lock the college-bound in a closet for four years and they’d earn more than the pool of non-college-bound--They’re brighter, they're more motivated; they have better family connections.
• What also makes that million-dollar statistic misleading is that statistic is retrospective. Yes, in past, when a far lower percentage of high school students went to college, college grads had a big advantage in the job market. But today, when colleges admit nearly any student who breathes, that advantage is far smaller. Now we have an oversupply of college graduates at the same time as employers are automating as many jobs as possible, offshoring as many jobs as possible, turning as many jobs as possible to part-time or temp jobs, to beat the enormous cost of hiring U.S. workers.
• At the same time, the cost of college increases well beyond the cost of inflation and the average-time-to degree increases. The calculus is particularly bad for students with a less-than-stellar record in high school.

There is a desperate need for government to mandate a College Report Card, so prospective students and their families could see--for students with their high school records--their likelihood of graduating, the average amount of learning such students accrue, and the likelihood they'll be professionally employed if they defy the odds and graduate.

Public outcry is the only way we can get colleges to change and for the government to mandate that colleges prominent post on their website an externally audited report card on themselves. So please forward this video to your contacts, especially to college-bound students and to their families, and to any legislators you know.

For much more on the need for a college report card, see my blog: http://martynemko.blogspot.com.

The College Report Card: An Animated Fairy Tale

I continue to experiment with ways to get my College Report Card idea to go viral. This time, it's an animation.

I'm convinced that, while simple, government requiring all colleges to post an externally audited report card on themselves is, arguably, the most potent yet practical way yet proposed to get colleges to dramatically improve the quality of higher education.

And of course, if all colleges posted a College Report Card, it would help prospective students to more wisely choose a college or graduate or to decide that a non-school option may be wiser.

I created this animation using a website, Xtranormal.com, that makes it remarkably easy to convert your text into animation. I did it in 20 minutes. I don't find that the animation adds sufficiently to the text but I thought it was worth sharing with you. A transcript of this 3-minute animation appears below.

TRANSCRIPT

There once was a young man, and he was admitted to a college. And he liked the college. He sang the song he had so often heard: "American higher education is a national treasure."

But decades passed and the man learned that his college had changed. The buildings were now fancier but instead of college costing what nearly anyone could afford, now everyone except rich people has to take out big loans. Really big loans.

And now, the college admits many weak students along with the good ones so the classes have to be dumbed-down. And so students learn much less. Despite the dumbing-down, most of the college's students, really most, 55%, dropped out. Even many who graduate, deeply in debt, can find only a job they could have done without college. And most dispiriting to the man, most of the students learn little--the tests show that half of them read, wrote, and reasoned no better than when they began college. The man didn't believe it at first but after reading the authoritative nationwide study: Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, he had to accept that it was true.

And the man was sad. He thought and he thought. What could make colleges better? Finally, he had an idea: He asked, "If the government requires each tire to have a "report card" molded into it, if government requires all packaged food to have a "report card" on the package, why doesn't government require all colleges to have a report card posted on its website: how much students learn in reading, writing, thinking, broken down by students' high school record? What percent graduate in four years? After deducting cash financial aid, how much four or five years costs? What percentage of graduates have professional jobs within a year of graduation, broken down by major--sociology majors aren't going to be as employable as computer science majors.

Having all colleges post a College Report Card would help students choose a good college. More important, it would embarrass the colleges into improving their poor quality of education: Instead of hiring professors based mainly on how many research dollars they can bring in, they'd hire professors because they were great at educating and inspiring students. Instead of spending on fat administrations and fancy buildings and shrubs, they'd spend on providing mentors and coaches to students.

And so the man went to Congress to try to get a law passed requiring colleges to prominently post a report card on themselves, with companies like Price Waterhouse coming in to audit them to avoid cheating. But that scared the colleges, so their very powerful lobby squashed the man--or at least his idea.

And so now, everyone continues to sing: "American higher education is a national treasure." And everyone is living happily ever after. But not really.

The College Report Card: Making Colleges More Transparent and Accountable (3-min. version)

Here's a three-minute version of my video arguing that perhaps the most potent thing that could be done to improve the quality of college education and, in turn, improve society, is for the federal government to require all colleges to post on their website an externally audited report card on themselves.

Below the video is a transcript of it as well as links to a longer version of this video, other writings on the College Report Card, including an actual proposed Report Card, and a version of a College Report Card that would be invaluable for students and families to use in choosing a college.

* * * * *

Here is the transcript:

There has finally been a spate of books and articles in major publications asserting that higher education adds remarkably little value for all the time, money, and opportunity cost.

Colleges have been extremely resistant to change but I've come up with an approach that is remarkably simple yet would be remarkably potent: requiring all colleges to post a College Report Card on themselves on their website. The College Report Card would be externally audited to avoid cheating.

A College Report Card would include such items as:

• how much freshman-to-senior growth occurs in reading, writing, critical thinking, mathematical reasoning, etc.,
• the graduation rate in 4, 5, and six years, broken down by students' high school records.
• employability: what percentage of graduates are professional employed within a year of graduation, broken down by major.
• a student satisfaction survey-It's of course valuable to hear what the customer says.
• A summary of the accreditation team's visiting report.
• (Note: I neglected to include one key item: the true cost of attendance for four, five, and six years broken down by family income and assets.)

Of course, a College Report Card would help students choose a college, which is critical because it's one of the largest and most important purchases people ever make.

But also, importantly, a College Report Card would--because the students, the public, and legislators would see how much or how little value the college provides--would finally put real pressure on colleges to compete, to improve, rather than allocate so much of their resources to fat administrations and to research, so much of which they know apriori will be of little value.

I'm doing my best to promulgate the idea of requiring all colleges to post a substantive College Report Card. I think that would do great good not only for students and for higher education, but for the nation as a whole because while education is far from the magic pill we wish it would be, educating our best and brightest, most of whom go to college, could go a long way to helping us survive if not thrive in our ever more challenging global economy.

* * * *

HERE is a link to a longer (14-minute) version of this video.

HERE is a link to a four-page proposal for a College Report Card, which includes a sample Report Card.

HERE is a link to a College Report Card that students and families might use to help pick a college

The College Report Card: Making Colleges More Transparent and Accountable

Here is a video--with lots of visuals with supporting data and photos--in which I make the case for colleges to be required to prominently post on its website an externally audited report card on itself.

Such a College Report Card would help students choose a college more wisely. Even more important, it would pressure colleges to finally add sufficient value for the enormous time and money that a college or graduate degree demands.

Below the video is a transcript of it as well as links to my other recent writings about The College Report Card, including a version for students and parents to use in selecting a college.

It's very difficult to choose a college wisely.

And it's not surprising. We require tires to have "report card" grades molded into their sidewalls. We require packaged foods to prominently list their calories, fat, even vitamins and minerals. Yet, colleges, one of our most important and expensive purchases are required to prominently post nothing on their websites.

So colleges just hire marketing firms to manipulate students into choosing their college based on such things as deceptive pictures, for example, pointing out the prettiest part of campus. It will not point out, for example, that the weather is bone-chilling miserable half the year or that the campus crime rate is terrible. At Tulane, despite all the pretty pictures on the website, there were three rapes, 30 burglaries, 193 cases of larceny--in just one school year.

Or the pretty pictures somehow don't include, for example, a picture of the mice and rats in Georgetown dorms, which I first heard about decades ago and recently in College Prowler, which posts student reviews said, "Often you will find rats. There are lots of rats."

The colleges post photos on their websites of small, personalized classes taught by an inspired professor and deeply engaged students, even on campuses where most of a student's time is spent in large lectures, or with boring professors.

Colleges post pictures of an engaged student peering into a test tube, which implies that many undergraduates are intimately involved in important research, when in fact only a small percentage are and even if they are, it's usually of little or no benefit to their development let alone their career.

Of course, nearly all college websites include a shot of happy graduates. But few colleges reveal the fact that most students don't graduate even if they take six years. Most students!

And in the coup de gras, the colleges post pictures that suggest that a degree from their school is the key to a great job. In fact, almost half of students are not working or with jobs that don't require a college degree.

Colleges love to trumpet the grossly misleading statistic that college graduates earn a million dollars more over their lifetime. Why misleading? It would take a long time to fully explain, but I'll just quickly say here that that data looks backward not forward--today we have an oversupply of college students. Second, the pool of college graduates is very different in ability, motivation and connections than the pool of non-graduates, so you could have locked the graduates in a closet for four years and they'd have earned more money. And indeed, they wouldn't be locked in a closet, they'd be learning on the job, making connections. Don't fall for deceptive statistics marketed by colleges and repeated in the media.

More basic, on most colleges' sites, it's hard to even find out the total cost of four years: assuming you graduate in four years. (I showed U.S.C.'s financial aid page.) No cost listing. Where's the sticker price?! Note their again deceiving with statistics: "60% of students at USC receive some type of financial assistance." How much? Where, based on your family's income and assets is an estimate of how much financial aid you'll get--not loan, the cash aid! Not just in year one, where they may give you a bigger discount to get you in the door, like the drug dealer who gives you the first dose of crack free or cheap to get you hooked and then jacks up the price.

And indeed, graduates and dropouts alike are terribly weighed down in student debt at the same time as the glut of college graduates has resulted in nearly half of them unemployed or doing jobs they could have done with a mere high school diploma.

It's particularly important to report the true cost of a college education with report after report showing how little value students actually get from higher education. Here, I include shots of articles excoriating higher education in New York magazine, the LA Times, New York Times, CNN.com, the Wall Street Journal, and books: Crisis on Campus (Knopf), The Five-Year Party, No Sucker Left Behind, University Inc, Higher Education?: How colleges are wasting our money and failing our kids.

Among the most scathing books is Academically Adrift, the 2011 authoritative report from the University of Chicago that found that nationwide, students grow frighteningly little even if they defy the odds and graduate: 45% grew not at all in the first two years. 36% not at all from freshman to senior!

Again, may I remind you how many even of the graduates are unemployed and countless more underemployed? Nearly half!

It's time for government to mandate that each college issue an externally audited Report Card on itself. It should include:

• The full projected four-year cost of attendance (subtracting cash financial aid), disaggregated by family income and assets.
• Freshman-to-senior growth in reading, critical thinking, etc., disaggregated by student’s high school record.
• 4- and 6-year graduation rates, disaggregated by student’s high school record.
• The results of a student satisfaction survey
• The summary of the accreditation visiting team report.
• The % of graduates who are professionally employed within one year of graduation, broken down by major.

Of course, such a College Report Card would empower students to choose their college wisely or even to decide that, for that person, a wiser choice would be a short program at a community college for example in robotics repair or cheffing, the military, or on-the-job training, for example, at the elbow of a journeyman electrician or an ethical and successful small business owner.

Bringing transparency to how much value-added a college provides for all the time, money, and opportunity cost would bring another important benefit: It would pressure colleges that add too little value for all that time and money, which according to the research, is MOST colleges, to improve. (Currently, colleges experience no such pressure.

Mandating a College Report Card would help colleges become the national treasure they claim they are, help our students to get an education that will make them more thoughtful human beings, better citizens, and more employable. That, in turn, would help America remain vibrant in our ever tougher global economy.

* * * * *

HERE is a link to a four-page proposal for a College Report Card.

And HERE is a link to a College Report Card that students and families might use to help pick a college.

Outline of my talk at U.C. Berkeley: "America's Most Overrated Product: Higher Education"

Here are my notes for the talk I gave at Berkeley yesterday, "America's Most Overrated Product: Higher Education, how to reinvent it and create a great career for yourself in the process."

They videorecorded it and said they'll email it to me in a week, at which point, I'll upload it so you can watch it.

Here are the not-fully-self-explanatory notes I used for the presentation:

Guido Sarducci: Five Minute University. In five minutes you learn what the average college graduate remembers five years after he or she is out of school. It may be a joke but reflects a real problem.

In fact, value added is terrible. See Spellings Report or my Chronicle of Higher Education article, "America's Most Overrated Product: Higher Education."

The more prestigious the worse the value-added! And when you think about it, it's not surprising: how faculty is trained, hired, promoted. Class size. Political bias--Robert Reich's big public lie. Schumpeter: "The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie." The biggest problem: profs value their arcana over their secular-sacred obligation to fairly and carefully educate students, at a prestigious college, the best and brightest, with greatest potential to abet society.

The true graduation rates.

The true fully-employed rates.

And today, with true 4- and certainly 5 year sticker price over $100K at Berkeley, $200K at designer-label privates.

If a physician didn't disclose that an expensive and time consuming treatment had poor prospects for success, he'd be sued. Yet colleges not only don't get sued, they're rewarded with more taxpayer and tuition money.

What universities really care about: research and prestige. It was so clear to me as student, faculty, consultant to prezes. "Students are a necessary evil." Evidence:

If universities cared about students it would provide:

Maximally useful content not arcana

Ideologically diverse faculty not one where all worthy ideas are deemed to reside left of center.

A separate track of faculty based on ability to be a highly effective if not transformative undergraduate instructor. (It's a self-serving canard that good researchers make the best undergraduate instructors.)

Superprofs (Immersive, interactive courses team-taught online by dream teams of the nation's most transformational instructors drawn from in and outside academe.

A teaching/mentoring bootcamp which all teaching faculty must successfully complete.

Mentoring by faculty and administrators, not mere academic advising by minimally trained peer advisors.

An average class size of 15, paid for by the money saved from much streamlined administrations and modest landscaping and not spending fortunes on unnecessary buildings like the country-club-like RSF. The university wastes fortunes: e.g., $3 million on Bain instead of using its highly paid people in all UC, including Systemwide Budget Office plus Haas faculty. $300,000 for Jennifer Granholm and hubby to teach 2 classes?

Private apartments, not 2-3-to-a-room dorms: the ACLU would sue if they housed welfare recipients that way.

Prominently post a College Report Card: disaggregated graduation rate, price of the degree, value-added in reading, writing, critical thinking, quantitative reasoning, oral communication, leadership), % professionally employed within six months of graduation, the accreditation report, student satisfaction survey results. Instead colleges obfuscate with Madison-Avenue-like brochures and websites.

Why the govt or media doesn't demand college's to be accountable as they do with drugs, tires, even food labels. Reasons: colleges make students more liberal, and the higher ed lobby is very powerful. That's why, for example, student loans are the only loan not dischargeable through bankruptcy.

Making the most of Berkeley

One-on-one--e.g., independent studies. Ask respected people for advice.

Carefully select your instructors. Better a good prof in a not seemingly-interesting subject than vice-versa.

Prioritize learning what you care about, even if your grades suffer.

Ask questions.

Find true ideological diversity

Seek leadership opportunities--join or start a club, project

Make the most of your career center.

Activism

Join ASUC Senate. Fight for a College Report Card, more ideologically diverse speakers.

Become a student member of the Academic Senate

Get a work-study job in the president's office.

Refuse to donate to dear old Cal--explain why.

Get U.S. News's rankings to add value-added to its ranking criteria.

Invite the media to your picketing U.C's development office. Urge people to not donate to Cal until it posts a full and honest College Report Card.

Careers aimed at reinventing higher education

Become a higher education reporter.

Work for USOE, WASC, Consumers Union, PIRG, etc. entities that could hold colleges more accountable.

Create a true consumer advocate website for college shoppers.

Start Utopia U.

The College Report Card: Key to higher ed accountability

If we require each drug to submit mountains of data to the FDA, if we require each food item to list how much protein, calcium, etc it contains, if we require each tire to have a tread life, traction, and temperature rating molded into its sidewall, shouldn't we require each institution of higher education to post, linked-to from its home page, a College Report Card that presented this information?:

(This version regards bachelor's-degree institutions but, of course, could be adapted to Associate and graduate degree programs, as well as disaggregated for transfer students.)

• Freshman-to-senior average growth in critical thinking, writing, quantitative reasoning, etc. (disaggregated by high school record)

(For you statisticians out there, a variable consisting of pre-post growth embeds significant error variance, but with the large N and that variable being only one of a number of indices of college quality, the wisdom of including a measure of growth outweighs the disadvantage of a large confidence interval. And if that argument is deemed inadequate, a reasonable proxy would be to use senior scores adjusted for high school weighted GPA and SAT score.)

• The results of a recent student satisfaction survey
• Four-, five-, and six-year graduation rates (disaggregated by high school record)
• The percentage of graduates professionally employed, including average salary. (disaggregated by high school record and by major)
• The accreditation team's most recent report on the college.

The first institution to voluntarily post such a College Report Card would get free PR from the media far more valuable than the fortunes that the institution spends on marketing to attract students.

I know that some readers of this blog are senior college administrators. If you're one, should you advocate for your institution being that first one to post such a College Report Card?

If you don't do it voluntarily, I predict that in light of the growing groundswell of articles questioning higher education's value as well as of the integrity of colleges' admissions operations, the federal government will mandate that you issue an independently audited report card. To encourage that, I have meetings scheduled with two potentially sympathetic legislators.

It's Time to Rage Against the Higher Education Machine

As a member of the media, I often get pitches for colleges trying to boost their enrollment. I am repulsed by colleges' marketing practices because they try to be perceived as beneficent institutions rather than businesses that only care about profit, yet they hide the crucial consumer information: for example, how much growth in critical thinking do average students derive, what percentage of students graduate in the expected time, and the percentage of graduates that are professionally employed within a year of graduation.

Today, I received a pitch from a college that I found particularly odious.

One of NYU's PR/marketing firms, G.S. Schwartz & Co., sent me a marketing pitch for their art business certificate (no degree) program. The teasing subject line: "Art Business a growth field for workers chasing their passions- case study available."

It turns out that the program consists only of 19 total class sessions (the approximate equivalent of one regular college course) yet costs $2,000. The pitch invited me to interview a student in the program named Dean Harmeyer who landed an internship at Christie's. (I append the NYU pitch at the end of this blog post.)

I shook my head in derision. I've had so many clients who hold far more than a mini-certificate (for example, a BFA, MFA, or MBA in art business or other similar fields) who never earn enough to pay their student loans let alone make a middle-class living using such a degree. Yet a brand-name school like NYU descends to trying to seduce students into its program using a pitch whose rigor its own professors would dismiss as utterly invalid (a cherry-picked anecdote of one student who got an internship) to make students believe they'll likely have a real arts career if they complete the program. Of course, even when I then reviewed NYU's web page for the program, there's no information on the graduation rate, let alone the percentage of graduates are earning a middle-class income in an art-related field.

It's high time we recognize that higher education is not a beneficent national treasure but just another business and an often sleazy one at that. It's time to rage against the machine, the Higher Education Machine.

Here is the pitch I received from that PR/marketing firm hired by NYU:

From:Keith Campbell [mailto:Kcampbell@schwartz.com]
Tuesday, November 02, 2010 8:33 AM
To:mnemko@comcast.net
Subject: Art Business a growth field for workers chasing their passions- case study available

Dear Marty:

The current unemployment crisis has seen many American workers refocusing their career plans. In many cases, recently laid off workers are reassessing their past jobs, and whether they were in fields that they were passionate about, or just showing up to cash a paycheck. In the pursuit of their passions, many people are looking to the arts, the business side of which is a booming industry.

I would like to offer an interview with Terry Shtob, coordinating chair of the Department of Liberal Studies and Allied Arts at New York University School of Continuing and Professional Studies, and oversees programs in Arts Business, including professional certificates in Arts Administration and Art Appraisal. Terry can discuss the opportunities open to art lovers with business skills in the field.

I can also put you in touch with Dean Harmeyer, a student in both the NYU-SCPS Art Business and Art Appraisals programs who is currently interning for Christie’s. Dean can describe his transition from the music industry, which was floundering even before the global economic crisis, to the world of art business, and how he sees the prospects much brighter in the business of fine art.

I will follow up to gauge your interest in an interview with Terry and/or Dean.

Keith Campbell
For New York University School of Continuing and Professional Studies
Tel: (212)725-4500 Ext. 318
mailto:kcampbell@schwartz.com

GeneralEd.Org: General Ed Reinvented

Think of all the minutes you spent in undergraduate classes. Add the homework and study time. Add the travel time. Now be honest with yourself: Do you believe you derived sufficient useful learning to justify all that time and money? Might that time and money have been better spent?

Perhaps these statistics will startle you into realizing how little most people gain from their undergraduate classes:

• A study supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that 50 percent of college seniors scored below "proficient" levels on a test that required them to understand the arguments of newspaper editorials or compare credit card offers. Almost 20 percent of seniors had only basic quantitative skills. The students could not estimate if their car had enough gas to get to the gas station.
• The Spellings Report, released by a federal commission on higher education, found that: "Over the past decade, literacy among college graduates has actually declined...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."
  

Perhaps Saturday Night Live's Father Guido Sarducci was only half joking when he proposed a five-minute bachelor's degree: It would teach only what students remembered a year after they graduated.

If you're like many people, you say, "Perhaps I didn't learn enough of enduring value from my $100K and 4-6 years of classes but I needed the bachelor's degree to get a job or get into graduate school." True, today, more than ever, employers are demanding a degree.

But there has to be a better bachelors degree, a way you can learn more of greater value at less less cost. That shouldn't be too difficult. After all, colleges continue to teach virtually as they did 2,000 years ago minus the toga and plus Powerpoint: a sage on the stage plus discussion.

Here, I propose a better way--a much superior kind of online bachelor degree. I call it Utopia U. Of course, online degree programs are already available but as you will see below, Utopia U promises to indeed be clearly superior.

I would gladly give away the concept to entities willing to run with it but if I'm forced to proceed myself, I will try to get it funded by tuition fees and housing it on Google.com, and/or with grants from the U.S. Office of Education (where it might be called U.S. U) one or more universities or foundations (e.g., Gates or Kauffman,) and/or investments from corporations, for example, Apple or Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway.

Central to each course are these features:

• The core screening criterion for course content: Is that content central to the life well-led? The primary focus of each course will be to maximize the probability that the students will incorporate each course's core skills and knowledge into the way they function professionally and personally.
• Most courses should make heavy use of of immersive simulations plus lecturettes with options to click on links to explanatory text, video, etc.Each instructor would develop the course in collaboration with a top instructional designer and a specially selected computer programmer.
• The instructors, selected from within and outside academia, will be selected on: demonstrated ability to explain complicated concepts so average students understand them fully, motivate students to love learning, and be transformational: help students grow in important ways beyond learning the course material. I will likely reach out to winners of state and national professor of the year awards.
• There will be student-to-student online interaction: discussions about lecturettes, group immersive projects, forums to address problems (as on most website help sections), etc.
• Iris or fingerprint recognition technology and open-book exams will reduce cheating to levels below that at traditional universities.
  

All of the following courses are required and there are no electives.

All students will graduate with a Bachelor of Professional Studies. For a version of this document that includs the courses and modules, click HERE.

As I mentioned, my preference is to give the idea of Utopia U away to a person or entity motivated to run with it. I'd be pleased to serve as a consultant. Anyone interested? Contact me at mnemko@comcast.net or 510-655-2777.

An Immodest Proposal for Reinventing Higher Education

USA Today reports that student loan debt now exceeds credit card debt! $828 billion!

Huge waste. I could provide a great college education for every undergraduate student in the nation for decades for 1/1000 of what the current student debt is: Interactive, simulation-based online courses taught by the nation's leading professors. A computer would keep track of courses taken and passed and degrees automatically awarded when requirements were completed.

Because this education would be so clearly superior and less expensive than traditional college education (and it would become a profit center for a university,) I believe I'd be able to convince a designer-label college to award degrees to completers of the program. My pitch: Do you want your name or a competitor's name on it?

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.

"Is a College Degree Worthless?"

MSN features yet another vain attempt to convince the foolish public that college is, as I've called it, "America's Most Overrated Product. " This article is called, "Is a College Degree Worthless?"

Why a vain attempt? For every such article, the public swallows a mountain of college-orchestrated propaganda on why, for example, even more students should attend college. Now, the Obama administration, having swallowed the mountain, is saying that its goal is that all high school students have the "opportunity" to attend college.

God, if he'd only spend a week at a typical (not Harvard) college, I'd bet he'd realize what a bad use of time so many of those classes are, how destructive dorm living is, and how overpriced it is relative to the benefits derived and opportunity costs lost.

I want to bury my head in the sand.

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.

Will Campuses Become Irrelevant?

A BYU professsor thinks that in a world of YouTube and iPhones, paying $100,000+ for a campus-based education will be seen as absurdly not worth the money. Also see the nearly 100 comments that follow the article.

Higher Education's Iconic Status Continues to Erode

I've long written, for example, in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, that higher education is America's most overrated product. 

I've also pointed to growing support for that contention in major media outlets. The most recent occurred today in a BBC editorial denigrating no less than Harvard Business School. 

It is ironic that the more prestigious a college, the worse the instruction is likely to be. That's because colleges gain most of their prestige from their professors' research productivity, which is inversely correlated with the ability and desire to teach. Also, compared with low-prestige colleges, prestigious universities spend a higher proportion of their budgets on research. 

Designer-label colleges can get away with charging so much and providing so little because students are brand-name driven in choosing a college, knowing that, with a designer-label diploma, employers will hire them, whether or not they learned anything at college.

Interestingly, the BBC invited Harvard Business School to respond to the scathing segment--Harvard declined to.

What I Plan to Say About College on ABC-TV's 20-20

I've been invited to appear on ABC-TV's 20-20 to discuss whether college is worth it. Here are my planned talking points:

After adjusting for financial aid, the amount families pay for college has skyrocketed 439% since 1982--to subsidize silly research, pay for fancy buildings, bloated administrations, palatial dorms, and fancy gyms complete with rock-climbing walls.

The statistic that colleges most often cite to justify their astronomical costs is that you earn much more with a college degree. That’s terribly misleading: If you locked the pool of college-bound students in a closet for four years, they’d earn more than the pool of non-college-goers: They’re brighter, more motivated, and have better family connections.

Yes, employers increasingly require college degrees, but there’s no need to attend an expensive college. That’s especially true of the thousands of private colleges that do not have a designer label, but it’s even true of a designer-label college:

A study by Princeton professors Krueger & Dale found no difference in earnings whether a student graduated from an Ivy League institution or State U. Implication: Start at a community college: Dorm life is overrated anyway--kids living together for the first time too often end up creating Animal House environments. That’s why the dropout rate is so huge: More than 40% of students attending so-called four-year colleges don't graduate even if they're given--and pay for--six years of college. And the learning rate is equally low. (See below.) Besides, teaching quality is usually BETTER at community colleges than at the Ivies because faculty is hired and promoted mainly on how well they teach, not how much research they crank out--The kinds of people likely to be good researchers are the OPPOSITE of the kinds likely to be good undergraduate instructors.

Parents can save the money without short-changing the child if they beg their kids to do the few things that enable one to make the most of college:
-- Choose professors carefully; for example, read online student reviews of them. Pick the professors most likely to teach you to think and write better and who will inspire you.
-- Take writing-and reasoning centric courses: for example, rhetoric.
-- Participate in extracurriculars such as debate, student govt, and student newspaper.
-- Take classes that expose you to a wide range of political perspectives.
-- Search out great peer and adult mentors.

If your child did poorly in high school (bottom half of his high school class), do NOT take a four-year college’s willingness to admit your child as an indication of his likely succeeding there. Among students at so-called four-year colleges who graduated in the bottom 40% of their high school class, 2/3 never graduate even if given 8 1/2 years. Meanwhile they’re accumulated a mountain of debt, devastated self-esteem, and the huge opportunity cost: what they could have been doing if they hadn’t been taking academic courses. Such students should consider apprenticeships, career-prep programs at community college, the military, or learning at the elbow of a successful small business owner.

The higher ed lobby is very powerful (for example, ACE and AASCU)--pushing, for example, for increases in financial aid, which turn out NOT to mainly benefit students but the universities: giving students more financial aid allows colleges to raise tuition further. So, when a politician says “I voted to increase financial aid,” he actually mainly voted to use people's tax dollars to line the pockets of colleges, not to make college more affordable.

Those lobbying organizations also fight against colleges being required to be accountable for how much value they’re providing for all the time and money students spend on college. The Spellings Commission (a 2006 federal panel looking at higher ed) pointed out how frighteningly little learning accrues from college and recommended that colleges be held more accountable.

For example, a 2006 study supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that 50 percent of college seniors scored below "proficient" levels on a test that required them to do such basic tasks as understand the arguments of newspaper editorials or compare credit-card offers. Almost 20 percent of seniors had only basic quantitative skills. The students could not estimate if their car had enough gas to get to the gas station.

Unbelievably, according to 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."

But the higher ed lobby effectively quashed the Spellings Report’s recommendation that colleges be more accountable. Congress instead, in 2008, did just what the higher ed lobby wanted: increased financial aid without making colleges more accountable for the quality of education they dispense.

We require tire manufacturers to mold into the sidewall of every tire its treadlife, temperature, and traction ratings. Yet colleges, which are so much more expensive and could so affect students’ lives, have virtually no accountability.

Government should require colleges to prominently post on its website a College Report Card:

• the amount of freshman-to-senior value added in writing, reading, thinking, and math reasoning
  
• the percentages of students with varying high school records who graduate in four years
• the average amount of cash families with varying income and assets must pay and the average amount of loan that is assumed
• the results of its most recent student satisfaction survey
• the executive summary of the institution's latest accreditation visiting team report
  
• the average earnings of its graduates

The colleges should report how their statistics compare against their peer institutions (those admitting similar-caliber students.)

"College is a Waste"

It's rewarding when the contention you've long asserted--that the college degree is America's most overrated product--makes it to the lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal. This op-ed by Charles Murray appeared yesterday.

One More U.S. Advantage is Eroding

America has always prided itself on having the finest universities in the world. Of course, that reputation is built almost completely on their research, not the quality of education provided, especially to undergraduates. Indeed, as I've documented in previous posts and articles, the quality of teaching is, on average, abominable, and the feeble student growth is evidence of that.

I recently bought two audio courses offered by The Teaching Company, which claims to comb America's most prestigious universities to find its very finest instructors. Both courses were horrible. The first was on Beethoven sonatas. The course leeched the life out of every note. Each bar was intellectually analyzed until all pleasure had been excised. In the course on argumentation, the instructor attempted to reduce argumentation to an elaborate model of principles, which I am certain will not improve my argumentation skills, nor could I imagine they'd improve anyone else's, certainly not enough to justify the 12 hours of listening time.

At the same time as American universities continue their atavistic, abstruse ways, Chinese, Indian, and other Asian universities are improving, balancing their traditional emphasis on students mastering copious material and acquiring high-level skills with a new focus on enhancing students' creativity and problem solving ability. Those improved Asian universities will both better educate their already capable, hard-working people, and encourage their best and brightest to not come to the U.S but to stay in their homeland. Meanwhile a new study reported in USA Today finds the number of American students taking classes abroad has tripled in the last decade.

The U.S. desperately needs to convert most of its universities from arcana research factories to undergraduate-centered colleges in which immersive simulations and not lectures are the norm, in which courses' primary goal is to improve students' reasoning, writing, speaking, and mathematical reasoning skills, and in which faculty is hired and promoted based on how well they can educate and inspire, not how many useless, self-indulgent, often outre research articles they can crank out.

If I Could Reinvent Undergraduate Education

My previous posts and articles such as America's Most Overrated Product: A Bachelor's Degree document how little value added the average college student accrues for all the years and money spent.

Here, I allow myself the luxury of dreaming up Utopia College. Here would be its major components:

1. Faculty would not have PhDs. They'd have a masters in higher ed. teaching. Their training would focus on how to help typical undergraduates grow in those critical elements of an undergraduate education: writing, critical thinking, mathematical reasoning, ethics, how to learn, and as Ralph Wolff, president of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges advocates, unlearning: We get very stuck in our ways, which will be ever more dysfunctional as the pace of new knowledge accelerates.

2. Courses would be problem-centered rather than discipline-centered. So they'd bear such titles as "What, if anything, should we do about climate change?" "The art of finding and nurturing a great romantic relationship" and, "Reducing the racial achievement gap."

3. Provide extensive opportunities for long-term, one-on-one relationships with faculty, peer mentors, etc. All faculty and students would receive training on how to be a mentor and protege.

4. Cost of attendance would be dramatically reduced. There are many ways to lower cost without reducing quality:

• Utilize faculty and student residences as classrooms. They lie vacant during the day.
• Using non-PhDs as faculty would be less expensive and more effective. The disparity between the way PhDs and undergraduates think is too great. Also, many PhDs’ primary interest is research, often arcane research that shouldn't be core to undergraduate education. Carefully selected holders of an M.A. in undergraduate instruction would be both less expensive and better.
• Forgo fancy administration buildings.
• Forgo country-club-like campuses with their arboretum-like lawns and shrubs and amenities such as swimming pools and golf courses. Instead, make deals with nearby swimming and golf facilities that enable students to participate at reasonable cost.
• Reduce the cost of marketing. By providing crucial data about Utopia College (see below) on its website, the college should be able to sell itself. And because Utopia would offer a superior undergraduate education at a very low price, the media will likely provide lots of marketing assistance of greater credibility than any brochures a college could create. What sorts of data would be provided?
  

-- Value added. How much do students grow at Utopia College in writing, critical thinking, problem solving, information literacy, etc. Separate data should be provided for students entering with low, medium, and high SAT scores.

-- Results of the most recent student-satisfaction survey, to be conducted by the institutions themselves.

-- The most recent accreditation report.

-- The average cash, loan, and work-study financial aid for varying levels of family income and assets. And because some colleges use the drug-dealer scam — give the first dose cheap and then jack up the price —Utopia College would list the typical financial aid packages, not just for the first year, but for years 2 through 6.

-- Retention data: the percentage of students returning for a second year, broken out by SAT score, race, and gender.

-- Safety data: the percentage of an institution's students who have been robbed or assaulted on or near the campus.

-- The four-, five-, and six-year graduation rates, broken out by SAT score, race, and gender.

-- Employment data for graduates: the percentage of graduates who, within six months of graduation, are in graduate school, unemployed, or employed in a job requiring college-level skills, along with salary data.

And so now, dear readers, what do you think? Have any suggestions for improving Utopia College?

I want to thank Ralph Wolff for the stimulating discussion that spawned this blog post. Of course, I take full responsibility for any and all weaknesses herein.