COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY ADMISSION DIRECTORS

A dear friend shared a Sept. 19 article published in Insider: Higher Education, More Pressure Than Ever: The 2014 Survey of College and University Admissions Directors by Scott Jaschick; a well written and comprehensive article intended to cover some of the problems college admissions officer have of filling their classrooms. Although not said, the article screamed out the lamentable state of our current system of educations for profit. The merits of small private schools are that instructors can provide special attention to individual students as well as being able to focus on one general educational aim, technical verses academic for example. Because of the nature of the “beast”, private school and colleges focus almost entirely on academics and administrators divide their schools curriculum from there into things like engineering, medicine, business, etc; thus, avoid the costly pitfall of trying to teach everything to everybody, which is the shared weakness of public institutions.

No longer student merit based as it should be but family wealth that is the deciding factor in college education or not. Private institutions exist because they can clearly do better than public schools. I appreciate the idea that a family can send their child to the best school “they can afford” because they are interested in educating their child but I think we can do better. As a liberal I am interest in education all children; my feelings have something to do with treating all children equally. Someday as a rich society, I hope we mature to the point where college education will be free and merit based. I saw what turned out to be a great boast the GI bill had in lifting society was after Second World War and the Korean War. Suddenly, legions of students had money to pay tuition; those were halcyon years for college admission officers. Think of what that legislation would do for our country if that legislation had included everyone, not just ex GI’s.

Now, we can reduce the problems to the availability of qualified student with enough money to pay the tuition. The invisible hand of Adam Smith has been laid on education; which is what is wrong with education for profit. It is my strong opinion that free enterprise has no place in education. The author of the cited article mentioned a reference that suggested but not forcefully, “open enrollment is hurting community colleges and their students”.  Of course, open enrollment is the back door way of addressing the subject of tuition free or very affordable situations in public institutions.  As a retired college professor, I endorse the concept of community colleges with open enrollment. This takes the burden of evaluating SAT, ACT results off admission officers, and puts it on the backs of professors, who should be trained professional. The thing that is wrong with “open enrollment” is that professors do not do a good job of weeding out the non qualified to move on to the next level, or as the saying goes they are not tough enough; altruism is a inborn quality of teachers. A freshman class is not the placed for being a nice person. The result is grade and degree inflation, which is what eventually hurts students and society. Of course, both private and public colleges avoid this difficulty up front by not admitting students they judge will fail. Unfortunately, once admitted they are likely to graduate, which relates to the reason community colleges with open enrollments fail to weed out poor students.

To the credit of professional enrollment staff, simply having enough money to pay tuition does not guarantee admission, hence graduation. Although, the logic is a bit forced, I graduated from a profession school in which for course after course for four years of professional school, not one student in my class failed. It had been that way with many classes for many years. Obviously, they all had enough money to pay their tuition, or they would not have been there. In addition, they all had passed the rigors of pre-professional college. Someone was doing something right. If this is true of private college with high graduate rates, would this mean that admission officers have infallible judgments or are the students there to pay tuition? Stated another way, every student with enough money to pay tuition graduates or is this indicating free enterprise; has hit: college degrees for sale. Careful analysis of graduation rates related to tuition rates could tell but suitable data is not available or ever will be; The author of this article repost that 9 in 10 admissions directors believe that other colleges submit false reports.

Colleges that practice faulty admission policies create real dangers for ordered society. All admission officers know they could fill their classes to overflowing by not looking just for “students who can afford it, and throw academic qualifications to the wind. We know there is some of that going on all the time in the most prestigious institutions. Of course, the easy way to fill classes, especially in professional school, is to lower tuition and allow every student to graduate with a degree, which soon ruins the prestige of their degrees and that college, just like charging more than the market will bear will ruin their prestige; in either case, the eventual result is empty classrooms. This is the “dance” admission officers and college administrators face everyday. This is why the professions have the requirements that say degree in medicine, veterinary medicine, dentistry, and law are not enough; holders of those degrees have to pass board certification or in the case of the law, bar examinations.

Many practices fall outside of the main streams that are important sidebars to education. Prospective students use many devices and tricks to gain entrance to the best of colleges. The most common I am aware of is the rich foreign family sending their children to the U.S. with hands full of money to compete with low income students from this country. Some are qualified academically but others not. In some college’s, foreign nationals fill entire classes especially graduate programs, especially in the most expensive colleges. For example, pathway programs for foreign students designed to teach English are often associated with collage admission upon success completion. In addition to private money, undergraduate degrees paid for by foreign government for country development programs sometime award money to children of prestigious families but they are marginal students. The idea is that the student will return to his or her home country but that student ends up in the graduate program in the same U.S. university and eventually U.S. citizenship; thus out of the reach of that government.  

We all know that any time money is involved nefarious activities are not far behind. The proof is “gapping” a term I had not heard of before reading this article. Gapping, if I understand the  term, is the practice of admitting students to the best schools, thus enticing prospective students to borrow more money than they can really afford. It is reminiscent of the mortgage crisis; unscrupulous lenders allowed people to move into houses they could not afford. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, has been a champion of guarding students against unscrupulous lenders of all kinds. President Obama has been trying to work with an unwilling congress to cut excessive student loan rates and institute regulations controlling student loans, hence student debt. Financial institution lobbyists are the most powerful on Capital Hill.   

Over sixty colleges and universities have endowment of over one billion dollars; ironically, those university and colleges have the highest tuition rates; in a chilling way, this makes sense. The author of the above-cited article points out that a recent report “blasted colleges for devoting large shares of their aid budgets to non-need-based scholarships”; I wonder if the billion dollar colleges were the ones being talk about?   

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