- Brandon, Craig.
The Five-Year Party.
Dallas: BenBella Books, 2010.
ISBN 978-1-935251-80-4.
-
I suspect that many readers of Tom Wolfe's
I Am Charlotte Simmons (October 2010)
whose own
bright college days
are three or four decades behind them will conclude that
Wolfe embroidered quite a bit upon the contemporary campus
scene in the interest of telling an entertaining tale. In this book,
based upon the author's twelve years of experience teaching journalism at
Keene State College in New Hampshire
and extensive research, you'll get a factual look at what goes on
at “party schools”, which have de-emphasised education
in favour of “retention”—in other words, extracting
the maximum amount of money from students and their families, and
burdening them with crushing loans which make it impossible for
graduates to accumulate capital in those early years which,
due to
compounding, are so crucial. In fact, Charlotte Simmons
actually paints a better picture of college life than that which
awaits most freshmen arriving on campus: Charlotte's fictional
Dupont University was an élite school, with at least one
Nobel Prize winner on the faculty, and although corrupted by its
high-profile athletic program, enforced genuine academic standards
for the non-athlete student body and had real consequences for
failure to perform.
Not so at party schools. First of all, let's examine what these
“party schools”
are. What they're not is the kind of small, private, liberal
arts college parodied in
Animal House.
Instead, the lists of top party schools compiled annually by
Playboy and the Princeton Review
are overwhelmingly dominated by huge, taxpayer-supported, state
universities. In the most recent set of lists, out of a total of
twenty top party schools, only two were private institutions. Because
of their massive size, state party schools account for a large
fraction of the entire U.S. college enrollment, and hence are
representative of college life for most students who do not
enter the small number of élite schools which are feeders
for the ruling class.
As with most “public services” operated by governments,
things at these state institutions of “higher education”
are not what they appear to be on the surface, and certainly not
what parents expect when they send their son or daughter off on
what they have been led to believe is the first step toward a promising
career. The first lie is in the very concept of a “four-year
college”: with today's absurd relaxation of standards for dropping
classes, lighter class loads, and “retention” taking
priority over selecting out those unsuited to instruction at the
college level, only a minority of students finish in four years, and
around half take more than five years to graduate, with only about
54% graduating even in six years. Apart from the wasted years
of these students' lives, this means the price tag, and corresponding
debt burden of a college education is 25%, 50%, or even more above
the advertised sticker price, with the additional revenue going into
the college's coffers and providing no incentive whatsoever to move
students through the system more rapidly.
But the greatest scandal and fraud is not the binge drinking,
widespread drug use, casual sex, high rates of serious crime
covered up by a campus disciplinary system more interested
in preserving the reputation of the institution than weeding out
predators among the student body, although all of these are
discussed in depth here, but rather the fact that at these
gold-plated diploma mill feedlots, education has been
de-emphasised to the extent of being entirely optional. Indeed,
only about one fifth of university budgets goes to instruction;
all the rest disappears into the fat salaries of endlessly
proliferating legions of administrators, country club like
student amenities, and ambitious building programs. Classes
have been dumbed down to the extent that it is possible to
navigate a “slacker track” to a bachelor's degree
without ever taking a single course more intellectually
demanding than what was once considered junior high level, or
without being able to read, comprehend, and write the English
language with high school proficiency. Grade inflation has resulted
in more than 90% of all grades being either A or B, with a B
expected by students as their reward simply for showing up, with
the consequence that grade reports to parents and transcripts for
prospective employers have become meaningless and impossible to
evaluate.
The
National Survey of Student Engagement
finds that only about 10% of U.S. university students are “fully
engaged”—actually behaving as college students were once
expected to in order to make the most of the educational resources
available to them. Twice that percent were “fully disengaged”:
just there to party or passing time, while the remainder weren't full
time slackers but not really interested in learning things.
Now these are very interesting numbers, and they lead me to a conclusion
which the author never explores. Prior to the 1960s, it was assumed
that only a minority of highest-ranking secondary school students would
go on to college. With the mean IQ of bachelor's degree holders ranging
from 110 to 120, this means that they necessarily make up around
the top 10 to 15 percent of the population by intelligence. But now,
the idea seems to be that everybody should get a “college
education”, and indeed today in the U.S. around 70% of high
school graduates go on to some kind of college program (although a
far smaller fraction ever graduate). Now clearly, a college education
which was once suited to the most intelligent 10% of the population
is simply not going to work for the fat middle of the bell curve, which
characterises the present-day college population. Looked at this way,
the party school seems to be an inevitable consequence. If society has
deemed it valuable that all shall receive a “college education”,
then it is necessary to redefine “college education” as
something the average citizen can accomplish and receive the requisite
credential. Hence the elimination, or optional status, of actual
learning, evaluation of performance, and useful grades. With
universities forced to compete on their attractiveness to “the
customer”—the students—they concentrate on amenities and
lax enforcement of codes of conduct in order to keep those tuition
dollars coming in for four, five, six, or however many years it takes.
A number of observers have wondered whether the next bubble to
pop will be higher education. Certainly, the parallels
are obvious: an overbuilt industry, funded by unsustainable
debt, delivering a shoddy product, at a cost which has been
growing much faster than inflation or the incomes of those who
foot the bills. This look inside the ugly mass education business
only reinforces that impression, since another consequence of
a bubble is the normalisation and acceptance of absurdity by those
inside it. Certainly one indication the bubble may be about to
pop is that employers have twigged to the fact that a college
diploma and glowing transcript from one of these rackets the author
calls “subprime colleges” is no evidence whatsoever
of a job applicant's literacy, knowledge, or work ethic, which
explains why so many alumni of these programs are living in their
parents' basements today, getting along by waiting tables or delivering
pizza, while they wait for that lucky break they believe they're
entitled to. This population is only likely to increase as
employers in need of knowledge workers discover they can outsource
those functions to Asia, where university degrees are much more
rare but actually mean something.
Elite universities, of course, continue to provide excellent
educational opportunities for the small number of students
who make it through the rigorous selection process to get
there. It's also possible for a dedicated and fully engaged
student to get a pretty good education at a party school,
as long as they manage to avoid the distractions, select
challenging courses and dedicated professors, and don't
have the bad fortune to suffer assault, rape, arson, or murder
by the inebriated animals that outnumber them ten to one.
But then it's up to them, after graduating, to convince employers
that their degree isn't just a fancy credential, but rather something
they've genuinely worked for.
Allan Bloom observed that “every age is blind to its own
worst madness”, an eternal truth to which anybody who
has been inside a bubble becomes painfully aware, usually
after it unexpectedly pops. For those outside the U.S.
education scene, this book provides a look into a bizarre
mirror universe which is the daily reality for many
undergraduates today. Parents planning to send their
progeny off to college need to know this information, and
take to heart the author's recommendations of how to look
under the glossy surface and discover the reality of the
institution to which their son or daughter's future will
be entrusted.
In the Kindle edition, end notes are linked
in the text, but the index contains just a list of terms with no
links to where they appear and is consequently completely useless.
November 2010 