Wikipedia Sucks!

This one will take years to fill up.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/navigati ... uthor-card

The weirdly-spelled Dahn Shauls on Linked in, four years ago:

The College Meltdown Is Painfully Obvious (Update 12-6-2016)
Published on July 19, 2016

Dahn Shaulis

Higher Education Investigations, Research, Analysis, and Casework

Whether or not the media recognize the extent of the problem, US higher education is in the middle phases of crisis--especially for the working and middle classes. My other LinkedIn articles on the US College Meltdown, America's Most Endangered Colleges, and When College Choice is a Fraud provide the evidence in detail.

Briefly:

(1) College costs have risen so dramatically that a growing number of colleges (and majors) are risky investments for working class students and even many middle-class students.

1/4 of all US colleges have a negative rate of return for students.

(2) Record numbers of students are not graduating on time or graduating at all, which reduces their return on investment.

(3) Despite being advertised as cheaper educational alternatives, community college enrollments continue to drop.




(Source: Inside Higher Education)

(4) Most people who are graduating from college are not getting jobs in their field of study.




(5) The first four points make it a struggle for millions of Americans to repay student loans. And if they can't pay, many cannot get on with what used to be considered normal adult life (living independently, having a career/starting a business, getting married, having children).

The Gallup-Purdue Index 2015 Report stated that only 38% of alumni that graduated between the year 2006 and 2015 thought they had a financially valuable college education.

(6) 1/3 of all colleges (2100 schools) have student loan repayment rates below 50%.

(7) Many for-profit, private, and public colleges face increasing austerity, which puts pressure on them to increase tuition and cut staff. Most college teachers are part-time workers.

(8) College has become a global industry, some say a racket, moving away from teachers and students--and increasingly controlled by banks and hedge funds that focus on winners and losers, profits and losses, marketing and numbers.

(9) Increasing "savage inequalities" in K-12 grade schools are leading to more "degrees of inequality" that contribute to reduced class mobility.

(10) College teachers are being forced to water down the curriculum and socially promote students.

(11) Federal and state governments are aware of the savage inequalities in K-12 and the US College Meltdown and refuse to act at the level required of them. Much of their inaction has to do with vested interests.

(12) The US is projected to produce significantly fewer high school graduates. Coupled with the savage inequalities of K-12, American colleges will have to compete even more for qualified students.


Given the state of K-12 and higher education, what can individuals (and their families) do for their own futures? What can professional educators do for themselves and those they are supposed to serve?

I'm looking for specific resources for high school students and their families, high school counselors, undergraduate students and their parents, graduate students, and teachers navigating the US College Meltdown.

Two recent finds:

(1) Will College Pay Off? (Peter Capelli)


(2) The Other College Guide (Jane Sweetland and Paul Glastris)


What sources have you found to navigate the US College Meltdown--and why did you find them valuable?

***

Shauls runs College Meltdown, a blogspot site that discusses the bad situation US universites are in right now.

I got into the "College is a mess" thing through College Misery (http://collegemisery.blogspot.com/) aka Rate Your Students (http://rateyourstudents.blogspot.com/) which were websites for college professors in the Bush II years to vent. One of the many rant blogs was 100 Reasons NOT to Go to Grad School (http://100rsns.blogspot.com/) which the blog owner never finished - it's still at 98 reasons two years later. The Uncrowned King of the "Scamblog" movement of ex-law students talking about what a waste of time most SoLs are was Nando, who had graduated from Drake Law right as the economy imploded in 2007-08 and could not find a job in the field AT ALL. His wife and doing part-time shitwork kept him off the street. Here he is ripping into a powerful clown in 2011:

sunday, july 24, 2011
Profiles in Passing the Buck: ABA “President” and Vagina Stephen Zack

Pig Boy’s Correspondence With Barbara Boxer

http://boxer.senate.gov/en/press/releases/033111b.cfm

On March 31, 2011, U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer demanded that the ABA provide accurate info to law school applicants.

http://www.abajournal.com/files/Boxer_cover_letter.pdf

On April 27th, ABA head pig Stephen Zack replied to Boxer’s request. It contains little of substance. Take a look at this platitude:

“No one could be more focused on the future of our next generation of lawyers than the ABA and the legal profession for whom we speak," Zack wrote. "An interest in pursuing justice should not leave someone with a life shadowed by overwhelming debt."

Of course, the puppet does nothing to lessen the debt burden of recent law grads. In the next paragraph, Porky adds:

“Much of the issue is about students making informed, smart choices, and the ABA distributes information that can help.”

Do you see how this tub of lard puts the onus entirely on the law student?! What a beacon of integrity and ethics, huh?!?!

http://boxer.senate.gov/en/press/releases/052011.cfm

On May 20, 2011, Boxer issued this follow-up letter to Stephen Zack and the ABA. Here is an excerpt, where the senator mentions the need for independent oversight of law school data:

“It is troubling that the recommendations do not address the need for independent oversight of the data law school deans submit to the ABA and publications like U.S. News and World Report. The Section’s recommendations would allow law schools to continue to submit unaudited data, despite the fact that a lack of oversight has been identified by many observers as a major problem.” [Emphasis mine]

Spineless Zack’s Interaction With Charles Grassley

On July 11, 2011, U.S. Senator Charles Grassley sent this five page letter - which includes 31 questions for the ABA - to Piggy:

http://grassley.senate.gov/about/upload ... to-ABA.pdf

“Given the questions being raised by the increase of the number of law schools, the increase in graduate debt, and the decrease in graduate job prospects, this raises concerns regarding the ABA’s internal controls. As the Ranking Member of the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, I have an interest in the health of the legal profession. To the extent that taxpayer dollars are used, I also have an interest in ensuring that the students who take out federally-backed loans are in a position to pay back their loans and that the default rates on these loans do not increase.” [Emphasis mine]

Here is a portion of the ABA’s July 20th tepid response to U.S. Senator Charles Grassley. Again, Ball-less Stephen Zack repeats his earlier “stance”:

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2011/07/21/aba ... w-schools/

“In this response yesterday to Grassley, Zack said the ABA shares the senator’s concerns. “No one could be more focused on the future of our next generation of lawyers than the ABA,” Zack wrote.

But in this accompanying memo to Grassley, the ABA’s law-school accreditation section said it does not believe law schools offer scholarships as a “bait and switch.” If students lose scholarship funding, it is a result of their failure to maintain sufficiently high grades, the group said.”

That is a huge surprise, isn’t it?!?! Apparently, it is okay for "professional schools" to accept far too many students, for the available number of career openings. Furthermore, this empty suit does not care if schools continue to cook the books, in an attempt to attract more applicants.

Someone Grab Zack a Fresh Tampon

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20MDvWzTQOc

Here is a video of Stephen "Pass the Buck" Zack:

"Well, we always need new lawyers. The question is, uh, "Do the people going to law school really understand, uh, what the future of the practice holds in store for them?" What are the real economics of the practice? Everybody watches, uh, LA Law and Boston Legal, and they see in the newspaper reports about these massive salaries paid by Wall Street firms. $160,000 starting salaries.

Well, the truth of the matter is that the mean salary of lawyers around the country is $62,000. And before there is a commitment to, uh, take loans that can be in excess of $100,000, uh, you have to understand what the real economics of the practice of law might be for you, as an individual. And we're asking law schools to better inform potential applicants as to what the real cost of legal education, uh, will be.

For example, you know, what their hourly, uh, credit cost is. And what the standard of living in their given areas would cost over a three year period. So they can evaluate for themselves whether it's worth it to them, and what their liability and risks are, uh, when they graduate."

Once again, you can see that this cockroach is more than happy to place all of the blame on law students. His mother must be very proud. (Yet, pieces of trash such as Kimber Russell believe that the ABA should reform the $y$tem.)

Conclusion: In the final analysis, Stephen Zack is a political hack and gutless tool. He serves the interests of American Biglaw. This man does not represent law students or small-time lawyers. Stephen, make sure to clean your vulva and shave your bush - before addressing the following issues: JD overproduction; skyrocketing law school tuition; and the shrinking legal job market.
posted by nando at 5:13 am 44 comments

The original can be seen here: http://thirdtierreality.blogspot.com/20 ... ident.html

Nando was chased out of Blogland by one of the "third tier toilet" law schools, possibly Wes Cooley SoL or the InfilLaw trio before they mostly collapsed....a "third tier" for the innocent is a school that is part of the "ungraded" bottom third as judged by the quasi-defunct U.S. News and World Report - the magazine is gone, but their rankings still hold water somehow. San Diego's Thomas Jefferson School of Law fits into that category perfectly, especially now that it has lost it's ABA accreditation and can only teach California State Law. Third Tier Reality is only viewable by invite or through the Wayback Machine.

(1) That blog is only readable by invited readers.
(2) The clarity and impact of the information, which could be considerable, is not improved by the sexist language, which tends to discredit it as mere rant, which is a shame, because the problem is very real.

Blame the boomers, because they want to be administrators....

a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.

Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase.

The rapid increase in college enrollment can be defended by intellectually respectable arguments. Even the explosion in administrative personnel is, at least in theory, defensible. On the other hand, there are no valid arguments to support the recent trend toward seven-figure salaries for high-ranking university administrators, unless one considers evidence-free assertions about “the market” to be intellectually rigorous.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opin ... -much.html

And our friend Mr. Corona the virus is not helping:

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/a ... ts/608095/

"The Real Lesson of the College Closures" The Atlantic
Outside the Ivy League, students who go home for the semester are at risk of leaving school for good.

SAAHIL DESAI MARCH 16, 2020

When some college students first got the news that their school was canceling in-person classes due to the coronavirus outbreak, they broke out into spontaneous dining-hall dance parties, joked about nabbing dirt-cheap flights to Italy, and plotted elaborate pranks to dupe their professors over video chat.

But for plenty of low-income of students, the deluge of colleges that have shut their doors because of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, hasn’t led to revelry. “It’s been really chaotic,” Andrew Perez, a Harvard senior from Los Angeles, told me. “Being a first-generation student, it feels like a gut punch not having my parents see me walk across the stage.”

Over the past week, institutions including Amherst College and Asnuntuck Community College have taken the unprecedented step of temporarily closing campus and shifting all classes online. Some colleges took it a step further, sending all their students home for the rest of the year.

It’s quite possibly the single most disruptive event in American higher education in at least a half century—one that has left students scrambling to wrangle flights home and pack up their dorm room. When students at the University of Dayton were given just 24 hours to flee campus, they rioted, throwing bottles at police officers and jumping on top of cars. Even at Harvard, the richest university in the world, some students were left to crowdfund alternative housing and moving arrangements.

The coronavirus doesn’t discriminate—poor students and rich students, exalted Ivy League institutions and middling commuter schools will all be forced to take harsh isolationist measures in the name of social distancing. Although for some colleges, shutting down a campus can be a mild nuisance for most students, at less-prestigious ones, a closure can amount to a five-alarm fire.


“The real story is not Harvard,” says Sara Goldrick-Rab, a Temple University professor who runs the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice. “It’s at Bunker Hill Community College across town. It’s what’s going to happen to the Community College of Philadelphia.”

Elite colleges are best positioned to ride out the tumult of a closure, because of the most simple economic equation around: They are stocked with the progeny of the über-rich. Thirty-eight elite colleges, including most of the Ivy League, enroll more students from the top 1 percent than the bottom 60 percent. But the typical American college student isn’t clad in Canada Goose. She’s barely getting by. When Goldrick-Rab and her colleagues surveyed nearly 167,000 college students at more than 200 institutions nationwide about their well-being last year, they found that nearly half of students suffered from housing instability, while nearly 40 percent had gone hungry in the past month. At community colleges, those rates were even higher. Harvard’s largely wealthy student body may be prepared to deal with the financial and academic fallout of a pandemic-triggered school shutdown, but many students elsewhere aren’t at all.

International students, who have no home in the United States besides their colleges, perhaps have the most to lose from the closures. Stephen Nwalorizi, a senior at Berea College in Kentucky, was panicked when his school announced that it would fullycancel the rest of the semester. Nwalorizi thought the move was “going to end my education,” he told me, because he’s a citizen of Nigeria, which was added to the Trump administration’s travel-ban list last month. The school ultimately granted him an exemption to stay on campus, so his immigration status is, for now, secure.

Even low-income students who are U.S. citizens are at risk of leaving college for good. “There’s a very real chance that students facing financial crises—which are about to get worse—will not be coming back to school,” Goldrick-Rab says. “This is a disaster. You’re putting the most disadvantaged students at a bigger educational disadvantage.”


Students at some institutions may have nowhere else to go after their campus closes down, and yet the cruel irony is that the students most in need of help attend institutions that are least able to give it. Elite schools such as Davidson College and Princeton University helped their students with the cost of tickets home and doled out loaner laptops to those who need them—but that sort of safety net isn’t an option at public colleges that were cash-starved even before the economy went south. (Harvard’s $41 billion endowment is larger than the combined bank account of every single community college in America—and it’s not even remotely close.)

“Most college students go to places that have much less not only in endowment sizes, but also in resources, to buffer the effects of closing a campus,” says W. Carson Byrd, a sociologist of higher education at the University of Louisville. Less wealthy schools will have trouble with a host of processes, he says, “whether it’s trying to promote online learning, or helping students figure out, How do you finish the semester? How do you graduate?”

Working-class students I spoke with outside the Ivy League were still processing the shock of school closures while they struggled to acclimate to a brave new world of online classes. “I don’t have the most reliable internet access,” said Mickey Arce, a senior at Bucknell University. “I don’t want to pay a ton to get an online education.” Debbie Miszak, a junior at Michigan State University studying journalism, also expressed concern about making online courses work. “A couple of my classes are not super suitable to being online,” she told me.

The college closures are a reminder of who exactly will end up worse off when the dust from the coronavirus pandemic finally settles. Students at the tiny sliver of deep-pocketed colleges that command most of the media attention will largely be just fine. It’s everyone else we have to worry about.

This will show us which institutions were poorly run/funded. Because they will be part of the massive bankruptcy wave that will follow the virus. Something similar happened in 1918-19, with the "added bonus" that the flu disproportionately killed younger people. It was bad for most industries--except health care (they love pandemics!)

Christ, we could go on for years about the mess that is legal education today. The ABA is like the AMA, more of a union for established (read wealthy) attorneys to keep out newcomers and discourage court self-representation. Great empire circling the drain and all that.

ericbarbour wrote: ↑

Mon Mar 23, 2020 2:25 am

This will show us which institutions were poorly run/funded. Because they will be part of the massive bankruptcy wave that will follow the virus. Something similar happened in 1918-19, with the "added bonus" that the flu disproportionately killed younger people. It was bad for most industries--except health care (they love pandemics!)

Christ, we could go on for years about the mess that is legal education today. The ABA is like the AMA, more of a union for established (read wealthy) attorneys to keep out newcomers and discourage court self-representation. Great empire circling the drain and all that.

Responses:

....except health care (they love pandemics!)

No they don't. Healthcare is now about fees in America, which is why we have too few hospitals. Army Corps. of Engineers are allegedly building hospitals to handle the mess. Cruise liners will probably also be converted to ad-hoc hospital ships. This is a clusterfuck of titanic proportions. May everyone at Reason magazine get the virus, cleaning house of the fraudulent Libertarian "ideology."

Because they will be part of the massive bankruptcy wave that will follow the virus.

The for-profit colleges are doomed (and that includes a number of Lawl Skools.) The nasty secret of established colleges are that most are sitting on huge endowments, including the state schools like San Diego State Univ. thanks to the sweeping rise in tuition costs. We will discover how utterly hollow the neoliberal fraud in higher education TRULY IS after this pandemic ends.

I could rant about the Lawl Skools, but I'll let the crew at Outside the Law School Scam do that for me.


Only Mr. French could make this moment work.

Strelnikov, my blog is now rebranded and for the present accessible to the public. You are right that this thread will probably last for years. The next big enrollment drop should be in 2026--18 years after the Great Recession. There may be another significant enrollment drop in 2038, 18 years after Covid. https://higheredinquirer.blogspot.com/

CollegeMeltdown wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 27, 2021 2:48 am

Strelnikov, my blog is now rebranded and for the present accessible to the public. You are right that this thread will probably last for years. The next big enrollment drop should be in 2026--18 years after the Great Recession. There may be another significant enrollment drop in 2038, 18 years after Covid. https://higheredinquirer.blogspot.com/

Good! I am glad you are still operating. We are in a weird period in higher ed and I do not see this status quo lasting longer than two years.....we are in too deep with student debt, the college wealth premium has collapsed according to The Atlantic last year, it's all looking too scammy even to the legacy students. It is a situation ripe for collapse or revolt.