West Virginia Says It’s Too Poor To Support Its Only Major University

As students and faculty prepared for the start of the new academic year this month, the president of West Virginia University, Gordon Gee, made a startling announcement: he’s eliminating 169 faculty jobs, about 16% of the full-time professors, and dropping 32 undergraduate and graduate degree programs, including all of its foreign language programs.

No foreign language classes? No French, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, anything other than English? Apparently not–and in response to questions, the university suggested that students might be offered an online app instead. It’s not just humanities, either: WVU is also getting rid of its graduate program in mathematics.

These cuts came as a shock to the students and faculty of WVU, who are understandably dismayed. The university administration says it’s just about money, as they face a $45 million deficit that they must do something about.

I’m not buying it. What really seems to be going on (and this is not unique to West Virginia), is that the state has steadily cut its support for WVU over the years, creating ever-larger deficits. The problem now is that the current president, Gordon Gee, seems to be saying that’s all fine with him. He didn’t even ask the state if it could help before he imposed these drastic cuts: as quoted in the Washington Post, Gee said “If I had gone down and asked for $45 million from the state legislature, they would have thrown me out.” Perhaps, but did you even try?

In the same article, State Senator Eric Tarr (R) also said he “wholeheartedly” believes that WVU president Gee is doing the right thing. And yet in the same interview, Sen. Eric said “We have never not supported WVU.”

Hmm, really? Over the past decade, the state has cut its support for WVU by 36%, or nearly $100 million. So it’s pretty clear that the legislature is not supporting WVU, at least not like they did in the past.

With support like that, who needs detractors?

According to one analysis, if West Virginia’s legislature had simply kept WVU’s funding flat for the past decade, WVU’s deficit right now would be far smaller, just $7.6 million rather than $45 million.

President Gee, did you ask the legislators about that?

I can’t help noting that WVU just renewed Gee’s contract for another year, at $800K per year. So they do seem to be able to come up with money for administrators. Gee’s only the 4th highest-paid WVU employee, with the football and basketball coaches each making over $4 million. I wasn’t able to find out how much WVU paid the consulting company rpk Group, whom Gee hired to come up with these severe cuts, but I’ll bet they weren’t cheap.

The state of West Virginia has only one R1-class research university, West Virginia University, with some 25,000 students on its main campus in Morgantown. If this trend continues, the state might no longer have even one major research university. That’s too bad.

And despite what WVU’s Gee and the consultants he hired might claim, this is not just about money; it’s about priorities. Currently, only five states don’t have an R1 level university: Alaska, Idaho, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming. Does West Virginia want to join that club?

It’s true that West Virginia is one of the poorest states in the U.S., with a poverty rate of 16.8%. But can it really not afford even one major university? For West Virginia residents, WVU is the only R1 university that most of them can afford, because in-state tuition is far cheaper than out-of-state tuition at any other state university.

The way to fix this problem isn’t to eliminate the core elements of a college education, which include foreign languages. The fix is simple: the legislature should step up and say they truly support WVU, and cover its deficit without eliminating any programs. Then they should find a university president who is willing to ask for the funds that a major university needs. I’m sure they can find someone willing to do the job, maybe for even less than $800K per year.

Zoom classes are a disaster for colleges. It's time to bring all students back into the classroom.

When the Covid-19 pandemic first hit, in March of 2020, colleges everywhere (including Johns Hopkins University, where I teach and conduct research) shut down and sent everyone home. Within two weeks, we switched all of our classes to Zoom.

It was a remarkable pivot, and necessary at the time. But we’re now more than two years into the pandemic, and many colleges and universities are still holding classes on Zoom, or offering a Zoom option for students who want it.

This has become, to put it bluntly, a disaster for students.

The Chronicle of Higher Education published a lengthy article in April that surveyed faculty all over the country. It paints a grim picture: students are reporting mental health problems in record numbers, grades are low, and attendance is even lower. Depression is widespread. College life, it seems, is not good.

Most universities returned to in-person classes this past fall, and some returned in person as early as the fall of 2020. All of them instituted systems to prevent Covid-19 outbreaks, including regular PCR testing, required quarantines for anyone who was positive, and (most important of all) required vaccinations.

These precautions generally worked: we saw very few serious outbreaks of Covid-19 on college campuses, and even fewer serious illnesses. College students, I should note, are at very low risk for serious illness, based on their age.

Unfortunately, all of these precautions sent a loud message to students: you’re in danger! Quarantine, hibernate, stay away from other people!

And now some of them don’t want to come back.

At many universities, the strategy for returning to campus has included a combination of hybrid and in-person classes. Some schools had students return and held all classes over Zoom, at least for the first semester or two. Others held smaller classes in person, and large lectures were delivered by Zoom. Many colleges (mine included) required professors to record all lectures, even if students were there in person.

These strategies continued right through the current semester. Zoom recordings were available to anyone, in part to ensure that students who caught the virus would still be able to keep up with classes.

That sounded fair enough, but it hasn’t worked out well at all. It turns out that – surprise! – 19-year-olds don’t always make the wisest decisions about how to manage their time.

For example, if you give them the choice between (A) get dressed, walk across campus, and sit in a classroom for an hour to listen to a professor’s lecture, or (B) stay in your dorm room and veg out, and (maybe) watch the Zoom recording of the lecture later–they usually choose B!

Attendance at in-person classes is shocking low, across the country. As the Chronicle of Higher Education reported, in one large biology class of 120 students, only 20-30 showed up in person, and only one or two watched the video. According to the Chronicle’s survey, “far fewer students show up to class. Those who do avoid speaking when possible. Many skip the readings or the homework. They struggle on tests.”

Not only that, but students almost never watch those Zoom recordings. They think they will go back and watch the video, but the little data that we have shows that they don’t. Remember, these are 19- and 20-year olds.

Fortunately, there’s a way to fix this. Universities need to remember that we’re in the business of educating students, and we can’t just ask the students what they want and then give it to them. They need guidance on how to get educated.

We need to tell our students what to do. That means we need to stop offering them recordings that they can “catch up on later,” because they just won’t do that. Sure, they will grumble if they have to get out of bed and go to class, but what teenager doesn’t?

And here’s one of the things we need to tell them: if you’re a student, you are required to attend class, in person. But what if they are sick? Well, we’ve had ways to deal with that forever, and we simply need to return to those ways. Students can miss a class, maybe two, and get notes from others or meet one-on-one with the professor to find out what they missed. This happens occasionally, and we can manage it.

One thing I’ve realized during these pandemic classes is that no combination of homework and tests will ensure that a student has learned everything in the classes and in the readings for a course. So to those students who say “look, I did well on all the assignments and passed the final, so isn’t that enough?” I answer no, it’s not.

A college class is more than just the sum of the grades on the assignments. Being in class with other students is a critical part of the educational experience: it enables countless unplanned interactions, both social and intellectual, that make college much, much more than just watching a bunch of lectures on Zoom and doing the assignments.

And, as many of my fellow professors have pointed out, it affects us too: lecturing to a room full of young people is a far different experience from lecturing to screen, no matter how many people are on the other side of that screen. “Teaching to me is like a live performance,” one of my colleagues told me, “and the audience interaction (even non-verbal feedback) affects that.”

Of course traditional lectures aren’t the perfect way to deliver an education. I know that college classes could benefit from all sorts of innovations, such as “flipped” classrooms and more hands-on experiences. But classes as we’ve been teaching them are pretty darned good, and they’re a heckuva lot better than staring at a screen in the loneliness of a dorm room. For their own good, and for ours, we need to bring all our students back to class.

Football has corrupted our universities. Time for it to leave.

The University of Maryland, College Park began their first
game of the season by honoring their teammate Jordan
McNair, number 79, who died during a May 2018 practice.

The University of Maryland, where I was a professor for six years, is embroiled in a football scandal that started with the tragic death of a young player, Jordan McNair, who died of heat stroke during practice. On an especially hot day in late May, the coaches were driving the players too hard, and when McNair collapsed, they failed to immerse him in cold water, which might have saved his life.

This past week, as the results of a 192-page inquiry were being leaked to the press, the university's Board of Regents has been meeting this weekend to decide what actions to take. According to the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun, the board is considering whether to fire the coach, DJ Durkin (who has been on administrative leave since early September), the president of U. Maryland, Wallace Loh, and the athletic director, Damon Evans.

The University of Maryland has made one mistake after another with its football program, as I've pointed out again and again. Let's look at a timeline:

2010: in virtually his very first major decision as president, Wallace Loh approved the hiring of a new coach (Randy Edsall) and a $2 million payout to the old coach (Ralph Friedgen), who was pushed out a year early. This was at a time when the entire university system was in the midst of a 3-year hiring and salary freeze, which included unpaid furloughs (basically, pay cuts) for almost all employees. Not for football, though.

2011: UMD doubled down: in order to invest more in football, the university eliminated 8 other varsity sports, all of them sports that are healthy for students and that don't carry any risk of permanent brain damage. Here's what they cut: men’s cross-country, indoor track, outdoor track, men’s swimming and diving, men’s tennis, women’s acrobatics and tumbling, women’s swimming and diving, and women’s water polo. Loh's argument at the time: "should we have fewer programs so that they can be better supported and, hence, more likely to be successful at the highest level? Or, should we keep the large number of programs that are undersupported compared to their conference peers?"

It pains me to read these words again. Is this what "successful" means for a major university? That its football team wins a few more games? Meanwhile, hundreds of students who played those other sports, all of which likely enriched their lives and their health, were left without teams.

2012: Maryland left the ACC, to which it had belonged for over 50 years, and joined the Big Ten conference, a move that was supposed to make more money. Never mind that it would require the players to travel much longer distances for games at other schools in the Big Ten. Never mind the $50 million exit fee to leave the ACC.

2015: Deja vu! Maryland football was still losing, so they fired the coach again, giving him a $4.7 million payout from state funds, to hire another new coach, DJ Durkin. The coach they fired, Randy Edsall, was the guy who was supposed to take the Terrapins "from good to great." That worked out well, didn't it?

2017: How is that team doing, anyway? Overall record 4-8, tied for dead last in the Big Ten's eastern division. What was it that president Loh said again about being successful at the highest level?

2018: Under coach DJ Durkin, a team practice on a very hot day causes the tragic death of a young player, Jordan McNair.

This slow-moving disaster illustrates what I've pointed out before:

• Universities have no business trying to run a big-time sports entertainment business–and make no mistake, that's what NCAA Division I football is.
• They're often very bad at it, as Wallace Loh and UMD have illustrated.
• Universities treat players as indentured servants: they refuse to pay the players for their work, and they often spit them out after four years without even providing a proper education. This undermines their core mission, which is educating and nurturing their students. (Read Taylor Branch's compelling exposé in the Atlantic for much more on this topic.)
• Making matters even worse, we now know that there's a serious risk that football players will suffer chronic traumatic encephalopathy later in life, a permanently disabling form of brain damage.

The bottom line: football is corrupting our universities, and it needs to go. This doesn't necessarily mean that fans must lose their favorite college teams. Here's one possible solution.

Football fans, including state legislators and university administrators, like to claim that football makes a profit. Let's suppose that's true: then it will do just fine as an independent business. Get football out of the universities, and make it a privately-run minor league for the NFL (which it already is, in effect). Let each team pay fees for use of the university's name, the stadium, practice fields, and parking on game days. Then the football club can pay its coaches whatever it wants, and it will have to pay the athletes, who are disgracefully paid nothing right now. And the university will still have its team, but without the corrupting influence of money. Even better, universities won't have to pretend that they are providing a first-class education to the players, while padding their coffers at the players' expense.

Let's end the farce of having university presidents try to manage large, commercial sports programs. Let them get back to focusing on research and education, topics on which they actually have some expertise.

I'm not naive: I don't think any major university is going to get rid of football any time soon, despite the growing evidence that football carries a major risk of brain damage to the players. This has only happened once, when the University of Chicago eliminated its football program in 1939, and brought it back in decades later as much-reduced program, now in NCAA Division III. The university itself has remained a powerhouse, routinely ranked in the top universities in the country academically.

Meanwhile, the Maryland Board of Regents is trying to decide what to do. If they read the timeline above, they'll know what I think: get rid of the whole lot, including the football program, and get the university back to its real mission.

Will this be the end of college football? The risk of brain damage is startlingly high.

Parents send their kids off to college with high hopes and great expectations. Universities, in turn, have a responsibility to provide an education in an environment that supports and also challenges the students.

Universities are not supposed to encourage activities that may result in permanent brain damage.

And yet, they do. As revealed in a new report by Jesse Mez and colleagues from Boston University, just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, a shockingly high number of former football players, from both college and professional teams, suffered chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) later in life, likely as a result of their years playing football.

The study authors looked at 202 deceased former football players whose brains had been donated for research, and found that 87% of them had some degree of CTE. The highest rates of CTE were among former NFL players, which affected 110 out of 111 players. CTE was nearly as bad in college football players, though, with 91% of them (48 out of 53) suffering from CTE.

Over half of the high school players (27) had "severe pathology." The authors noted that in deceased players with severe CTE, the most common cause of death was neurodegenerative disease. As they also explain:

"There is substantial evidence that CTE is a progressive, neurodegenerative disease."

In other words, CTE is a death sentence.

The authors of the study stated their conclusions carefully, noting that the study was not randomized, and that players and their families may have been motivated to participate because they were concerned about a possible link between football and CTE. Nonetheless, even if the risk of CTE is much lower than found in this study, universities should be taking a very hard look at the risks that they are exposing their students to.

Or to put it another way, is it okay to ask young men to play football if the risk of permanent brain damage is only 50%? What if it's just 10 or 20%? Is that okay? Is football that important?

Readers of this column know my answer: no. College is not about football, and if it disappears completely, universities will be just fine. The University of Chicago eliminated its football program in 1939, and brought it back in decades later as much-reduced program, now in NCAA Division III. The university itself has remained a powerhouse, routinely ranked in the top universities in the country academically.

As I've written before, football is corrupting our universities, blinding them to their true mission (education and research) in the pursuit of a profitable entertainment business. University presidents seem helpless to stop or even slow down the enormous machine that is big-time college football. For example, in 2015 the University of Maryland (where I used to be a professor) paid millions of dollars to buy out the football coach, so that he could quit a year early and the university could pay millions more to a new coach. Ironically, Maryland had done exactly the same thing in 2011 to buy out the previous coach, at a time when the entire state had hiring and salary freezes in place. None of these actions benefitted the university or its students.

All the while, universities pretend that they are educating the players. Here's a quote from Bleacher Report's interview with star UCLA quarterback Josh Rosen:

"Look, football and school don't go together. They just don't.... No one in their right mind should have a football player's schedule, and go to school."

This from one of the top college football players in the country. (On this topic, Taylor Branch's 2011 exposé in The Atlantic is particularly worth reading. Or this article by a disillusioned former Michigan fan.)

Universities now face an ethical dilemma far more serious than merely taking advantage of athletes' skills to entertain football fans and pay inflated salaries to coaches. The JAMA study reveals that by running a football program, universities are not just robbing young men of four years that might be better spent getting an education and preparing for life: they might be robbing their students of life itself.

I took the SAT so you don't have to. It's a very poor test of math skills.

As I write this, tens of thousands of high school students are hunched over desks, filling in little circles with number 2 pencils, laboring to complete the SAT, a test that will have an outsized impact on where they go to college. In my state, the test starts at the teenager-unfriendly hour of 8:00am and last a grueling four hours or more.

One of my daughters is among those students. and as preparation she took the four practice tests provided by the College Board–the private company that owns the tests. (The tests are administered by the Educational Testing Service.) There are two main parts to the SAT, a math test and a verbal test, and as every student knows, the scores range from 200 to 800 on each part. For many decades, this test has been one of the main gatekeepers to college: the US News College rankings use it, and colleges advertise the average SATs of their freshman classes. Every student wants to know what SAT score they need to get into their preferred university. 1.7 million high school students will take the SAT this year, and many of them will take it twice.

I wanted to understand what the test was like, so I took the math test with my daughter–three times. On three successive weekends, we each took one of the practice tests, and then used the answers provided by the College Board to score ourselves and review what we got wrong.

Here's what I learned from taking the SAT math test: it's all about speed. The concepts are not difficult; you need to know algebra, geometry, a little bit of trigonometry, and a tiny bit of statistics. The main skill you need, though, is speed. It's a very poor test of how well you understand math. For the three tests, I was only able to finish everything on time once. Even so, I had to work very quickly and I didn't have time to go back and check my answers.

Question 27 from SAT test 2 from the College

Board. "D" is the correct answer.

The math test has two parts: one with 20 questions, for which you get 25 minutes, and another with 38 questions, for which you get 55 minutes and where you're allowed to use a calculator. The test is designed to trip you up if you work too quickly: many of the multiple-choice answers match the answer you would get if you made a careless error of a particular type.

Doing well on the SAT requires that you know the tricks of the test, and that you've memorized many formulas so that they come to mind instantly. And I mean instantly: if you have to think for 30 seconds to remember something, that's far too long.

What's more, the questions themselves can be lengthy, and students might waste precious minutes just trying to be sure they understand the wording. For example, one question shown here filled half a page: just reading it would take some students longer than they can afford for this speed-obsessed test. (If you want to see a full-sized image, get the tests here.)

Statistics is a relatively new topic area for the SAT, and if the practice test is any guide, they haven't yet figured out how to construct good stat questions.  Here is one of them:

A researcher conducted a survey to determine whether people in a certain large town prefer watching sports on television to attending the sporting event. The researcher asked 117 people who visited a local restaurant on a Saturday, and 7 people refused to respond. Which of the following factors makes it least likely that a reliable conclusion can be drawn about the sports-watching preferences of all people in the town?
A)  Sample size
B)  Population size
C)  The number of people who refused to respond
D)  Where the survey was given 

The official correct answer is D, because (says the College Board) the survey was not collected from a random sample. However, I could argue that A is at least as good an answer, because 117 people is a tiny sample from what is called a "large town," and because we don't know that the people who visit this restaurant are un-representative of the town. Whether you think the answer is A or D, this is a lousy question to put on a test where the answers should be unambiguous.

You might be wondering what my score was. I'm not going to reveal that, but I will say that I had a higher score when I took the SAT in 1975, as a 15-year-old high school student. I must have been faster then, but I'm pretty certain that I understand math better now, after 35 years of working in a mathematical field. I suspect that the current test puts a greater emphasis on speed than the 1975 version, but there's no way to check that without copies of the 1970s-era SAT exams.

Let me put this another way: there's not a single question on any of the practice math SAT exams that I would call difficult. Most of them are quite easy if you know a bit of algebra and geometry. But unless you are fast, answering all 58 questions in 80 minutes is darn near impossible. For example, consider this simple problem:

At a lunch stand, each hamburger has 50 more calories than each order of fries. If 2 hamburgers and 3 orders of fries have a total of 1700 calories, how many calories does a hamburger have? 

This question is not multiple choice; you have to write down a number, which means you have to work it through. Any student who knows basic algebra should be able to solve this, but can s/he do it in less than 75 seconds? And if takes 90 seconds, does that mean s/he should be rejected by Yale?

As a measure of true understanding, the SAT math test is terrible. We should not be using it to make enormously consequential decisions about where almost every high school senior in the country goes to college. On a positive note, a growing number of colleges have rebelled and no longer require the SAT. Two years ago, a large study showed that, at colleges in this group, there was no difference in college performance between students who submitted SAT scores and those who didn't.

Perhaps pressure from colleges that are making the SAT optional will force the College Board to create a math test that measures something that matters for college success. They could go a long way towards a better test by simply giving students twice as much time. If that made the test too long, they could simply ask fewer questions. Meanwhile, I hope that more colleges will make the SAT optional, and instead use high school grades and other, more meaningful measures of a student's knowledge.

(*This was written on June 4, 2016, the date of the second SAT test in the "new" format. Prior to March 2016, the test had three parts, each with a maximum score of 800.)

Football is still corrupting our universities. It needs to go.

(In which I again take on the football-industrial complex, and get myself in trouble with fans.)

It's happening again. The University of Maryland is about to pay millions of dollars to its football coach so they can fire him a year early, and proceed to hire a new football coach and pay him millions of dollars. All this at a time when the university is desperately strapped for cash, after years of hiring freezes, salary freezes, and unpaid furloughs for its employees.

What's truly astonishing is that U. Maryland did exactly the same thing just four years ago, and it has been a complete disaster. Here's how I described the scenario in 2011, when I was still a professor there:

• Pay $2 million to buy out the old coach, Ralph Friedgen, and hire a new one, Randy Edsall who will presumably boost attendance and revenue.
• Hire Edsall for $2 million per year, who then produced a losing season (2 wins, 10 losses), leaving games with even lower attendance than before.
• Because football is still losing money, get rid of 8 other varsity sports.

Yes, they really did eliminate 8 other sports in order to invest more in football. Here's what they cut: men’s cross-country, indoor track, outdoor track, men’s swimming and diving, men’s tennis, women’s acrobatics and tumbling, women’s swimming and diving, and women’s water polo.

None of this produced any tangible benefits, either financial or academic.

Now let's look at what U. Maryland is about to do now, after several embarrassing blowout losses this season:

• Pay $4.7 million to buy out the current coach, Randy Edsall. That's $2.1 million for the rest of this season and $2.6 million for next year. 
• Hire a new football coach and pay him at least as much as the old coach.
• Continue to impose unpaid furloughs and pay freezes on academic staff across the board.

Wow, this investment in football really seems to be working for U. Maryland.

What the heck is the U. Maryland president, Wallace Loh, thinking? 

Loh originally hired Edsall just a month after he (Loh) joined the university. One might attempt to explain this as a rookie error made by a new president. But this time he has no such excuse.

U. Maryland is by no means alone in its misguided emphasis on football. In 2012, the University of Florida announced it was eliminating its Computer Science program while simultaneously increasing the football budget. The ensuing outcry (spurred in part by my Forbes blog) convinced the administration to back down, but at the time they saw no irony in their plan to cut science education and spend more on football. 

Listen, sports fans: football is not the reason we have universities. Universities exist to provide education, no matter what the (sometimes rabid) football boosters may say. Some American universities (hello U. Chicago!) do extremely well without having a team at all. Outside the U.S., universities have no major sports programs at all–the students enjoy sports, as all young people do, but the universities focus on what they do best.

Yes, I know the arguments on the other side. “Football makes a profit,” some claim. To that I would say, so what? Universities could make a profit running a casino too – should they do that?

But just for the sake of argument, let's accept the premise that football is profitable. Great! In that case, we can spin off the teams as private corporations, and let them pay to use the university logos, stadiums, etc. The teams can pay the players, as any professional team must, and the students and alumni can continue to cheer on "their" teams, just as residents of Baltimore cheer for "their" professional, privately owned Ravens team. 

Let's face it: university administrations are simply not equipped to run a major sports and entertainment business, which is what college football has become. The spectable of U. Maryland spending $4.7 million simply to buy out its current football coach, when the university is desperately trying to save money for its core mission, demonstrates how corrupting the influence of football has become.

Even worse is the shameful abuse of the players, who serve as unpaid laborers while their coaches make millions. "We give them a free education," administrators and coaches respond. Yeah, right. College football is a multi-billion dollar industry, in which the athletes at the center of the game are prohibited from taking any money. Just pay them, and they can decide if they want to pay tuition with their own money.

If we make college football private, everyone wins. Universities keep their football revenue, the fans get their team, and the university no longer has to pretend that it's educating its unpaid football players. We could even set up the system so that players were given a proper academic scholarship after their playing days were over, which for most of them is just a few years. And perhaps best of all, the players would earn the paychecks they deserve. 

Otherwise, expect me to write another article in about five years, in which I will describe yet again how the University of Maryland (or some other school) is paying millions of dollars to buy out the contract of their football coach, while the school's academic mission is ignored.

Scott Walker takes $250 million from the University of Wisconsin, gives it to billionaire sports team owners

Just two months ago I wrote about Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's dual attacks on his state's flagship university. Walker, who is currently running for the Republican nomination for President, is moving to eliminate tenure for professors at the University of Wisconsin, while at the same time implementing an enormous $250 million budget cut.

This week we learned a new reason why Gov. Walker cut that $250 million: he wants to give it to wealthy hedge fund managers to build a new basketball arena for the Milwaukee Bucks.

No kidding. I can only imagine what my colleagues at the University of Wisconsin are thinking.

On Wednesday, Walker signed a bill that would spend $250 million of taxpayers' money to build the new arena. Last year, the team was purchased by two billionaire hedge fund managers, Marc Lasry and Wesley Edens. In what's become a standard ploy, the new owners threatened to move the team if they didn't get a new arena.

As the Washington Post reported on Thursday, one of the team's other owners is Jon Hammes, one of Walker's top campaign fundraisers. Hammes' son recently donated $150,000 to a pro-Walker super PAC. For the Hammes, this must seem to be a pretty good return on investment: $150K plus some fundraising work in return for $250 million. (Obviously, Walker will deny that there's been any quid pro quo. But he's been working on this deal for months: according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal, he included $220 million in state money for the arena in his budget back in February, but state lawmakers took it out.)

The libertarian Cato Institute denounced the public financing of the arena, according to the New York Times. Other Republicans are furious with Walker because one of the team's co-owners (Lasry) is a major supporter of Hillary Clinton's campaign.

When I wrote about Walker's attacks on the University of Wisconsin in June, I was mystified by why he would go on the offensive against an institution that his state should be incredibly proud of–and that provides countless benefits to the state and the nation. It seemed petty and vindictive, and it still does.

But the money cut from the University of Wisconsin, $250 million, exactly matches the state's contribution to the new arena for the billionaire hedge fund owners of the Milwaukee Bucks. It's now obvious what Scott Walker's priorities are.

Lending millions for bad education

Would you pay the same tuition for a Harvard degree as for a second-rate school that you've never heard of? Probably not. But thanks to the federal government’s help, that’s exactly what we are all doing. It turns out that many of the biggest beneficiaries of federal loan programs for graduate schools are low quality, for-profit universities that have figured out how to turn federal largesse into nice fat profits.

A new study from the Center for American Progress finds that just 20 universities account for nearly one-fifth of all grad student debt, a total $6.6 billion. What’s perhaps most surprising is who those universities are: 10 of the 20 are for-profit schools, including two foreign schools.

The problem here is that these schools offer terrible value for the money. There’s little debate (except from the schools themselves) that these schools have very low standards for admission. The only requirement seems to be money, and if you don’t have it, they will help you borrow it (often from the federal government). The degrees themselves are barely worth the paper they are printed on, because the reputations of most of these schools are–well, let's just say they aren't good. Graduate degrees do improve your career choices, if you get them from a well-regarded institution. But when the school isn’t even ranked in the top 200, a degree isn’t going to open any doors, and it’s certainly not worth borrowing tens of thousands of dollars to get one.

The biggest borrower on the list is Walden University, whose grad students borrowed $756 million last year, according to the CAP report. Walden is owned by Laureate Education, a for-profit education company that hopes to go public next year. This seems to be a profitable enterprise, at least for its CEO. If you've never heard of Walden, join the club: it has no academic reputation to speak of. (Don't confuse Walden University with Walden College, the fictional school made famous in the Doonesbury comic strip. Garry Trudeau did poke fun at Walden U. once, in his August 2012 strip. In that strip, the president of Walden College laments that the graduation rate is so low that “it’s like we’re a for-profit school!”)

For-profit schools are taking advantage of a quirk in the law governing student loads. As Elizabeth Baylor at the Center for American Progress explains, the Higher Education Act allows graduate students to borrow much more than undergrads, up to $50,000 per year. Online, for-profit universities encourage students to borrow far more money by offering graduate degrees (what they call graduate degrees, anyway) rather than bachelor's degrees. 

I first wrote about these for-profits nearly five years ago (see “The Yugos of Higher Education”), and everything I wrote then is still true. For-profit schools continue to award “worthless degrees that leave students with a mountain of debt,” as reported on the show Frontline.

I've heard the argument from the other side: we’re offering education to people who aren’t served by mainstream universities, they say. Well, maybe that used to be true, but no more. Are you a student who just wants to learn a new skill? Today you can get high-quality education for free through Coursera or EdX, which offer courses taught by professors at the country's top universities, including my own. If you want a certificate of completion for a course, you can get it for as little as $50 at Coursera. 

If, on the other other hand, you want a degree to burnish your resume, there are thousands of small (non-profit!) colleges in cities around the country that offer equal or better training, at lower cost, than for-profit universities.

Let me try another comparison. Let’s supposed you wanted to borrow $20,000 to buy a new Mercedes. That seems reasonable, since the car itself is collateral for the loan. Now suppose instead you wanted to borrow the same $20,000, but you’re going to use it to buy an old Yugo, one of the worst cars every made. Why should anyone lend you the money for that? Yet that’s exactly what we’re doing by subsidizing loans for mediocre universities.

Could it get any worse? Well yes, actually: the 7th-largest recipient of graduate student debt, at $352 million, is Liberty University, a school founded by the fundamentalist Christian televangelist Jerry Falwell. This school doesn’t just offer a mediocre education. Instead, they mis-educate by teaching students creationism instead of evolution. They even have a Center for Creation Science to “promote and communicate a robust young-Earth creationist view of Earth history.” This is misinformation masquerading as education.

It’s too bad that for-profit universities continue to draw in students with promises of a better future, only to leave them in debt. But we don’t have to subsidize their practices. Let’s stop offering loans for degrees at online-only and for-profit schools.

U.S. Education Department helps bail out for-profit college that lured students into bad loans

Talk about trying to fly under the radar: announcing a deal during Thanksgiving week is a sure sign that someone—in this case the U.S. Department of Education—doesn’t want you to notice.

In the deal announced on November 20, a student debt collection company, ECMC Group, will buy 56 college campuses from Corinthian Colleges Inc., a for-profit university. Corinthian runs these campuses in 17 states under the names Everest College, Everest Institute, and Wyotech.

Corinthian, until recently a high-flying for-profit university, has flourished thanks to federal largesse: its students received Pell grants totalling over $400 million in 2012-2013, and it receives about $1.4 billion a year in federal aid.

All of this money supports a for-profit university (one of the Yugos of higher education) whose students have egregiously high rates of loan defaults and who often fail to complete their programs. These failure rates are a direct consequence of Corinthian’s strategy of targeting the poor and disadvantaged with “promises of jobs and good wages that would support their families.”

Just a few months ago, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) sued Corinthian Colleges for its “predatory lending scheme,” claiming that 

“Corinthian lured tens of thousands of students to take out private loans to cover expensive tuition costs by advertising bogus job prospects and career services. Corinthian then used illegal debt collection tactics to strong-arm students into paying back those loans while still in school.”

After the CFPB announcement, the U.S. Education Department began restricting federal student aid to Corinthian schools, which Corinthian said would “put it at risk of failure.”  

Now, in a move that seems to undermine the actions of the CFPB, the U.S. Department of Education has brokered a deal to keep these schools in business, to be run by the Zenith Education Group, a subsidiary of ECMC Group, Inc. This action comes less than 3 months after the Education Department sent a letter to Corinthian denying its recertification application for federal student loans because 

“Everest Decatur [one of Corinthian’s colleges] created false placements and misrepresented Everest Decatur’s job placement rates to its accreditor in an attempt to maintain its eligibility for Title IV, HEA program funds.” 

About the takeover by student loan company ECMC, the New America Foundation’s Ben Miller, an expert on education policy, commented:

“You're talking about creating one of the 10 biggest nonprofit colleges on the fly with no educational expertise in place and doing so with an infrastructure of questionable quality. This type of transformation is unprecedented. Look at the biggest charter networks like KIPP. They started with one school and it took them years/decades to get bigger. So turning over something right away to operate at scale with such a vulnerable population and so-so educational offerings is an incredibly tough path to head down.”

Even if ECMC can run this operation, Corinthian and its various for-profit campuses have not demonstrated that they're worth saving. The U.S. government’s own Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has already sued Corinthian for over $500 million “to protect current and past students of Corinthian students …[and]… to halt these practices.” U.S. Congressman Steve Cohen (D-Tenn) called the deal with ECMC "a misguided use of federal funds," and added,

"When a school like [Corinthian] that has a checkered history is on the mat, throw in the towel. It's over." 

Well said. We don't need another mediocre, for-profit university recruiting students with promises of federally-subsidized loans and jobs that fail to materialize. Rather than propping up this failed enterprise, the Department of Education should simply let it fail. 

Stop teaching calculus in high school

Math education needs a reboot. Kids today are growing up into a world awash in data, and they need new skills to make sense of it all. 

The list of high school math courses in the U.S. hasn’t changed for decades. My daughters are taking the same courses I took long ago: algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus. These are all fine subjects, but they don’t serve the needs of the 21st century. 

What math courses do young people really need? Two subjects are head-smackingly obvious: computer science and statistics. Most high schools don’t offer either one. In the few schools that do, they are usually electives that only a few students take. And besides, the math curriculum is already so full that some educators have argued for scaling back. Some have even argued for getting rid of algebra, as Andrew Hacker argued in the NY Times not long ago.

So here's a simple fix: get rid of high school calculus to make way for computer programming and statistics.

Computers are an absolute mystery to most non-geeks, but it doesn’t have to be that way. A basic computer programming class requires little more than a familiarity with algebra. With computers controlling so much of their lives, from their phones to their cars to the online existence, we ought to teach our kids what’s going on under the hood. And programming will teach them a form of logical reasoning that is missing from the standard math curriculum.

With data science emerging as one of the hottest new scientific areas, a basic understanding of statistics will provide the foundation for a wide range of 21st century career paths. Not to mention that a grasp of statistics is essential for navigating the often-dubious claims of health benefits offered by various "alternative" medicine providers. 

(While we're at it, we should require more statistics in the pre-med curriculum. Doctors are faced with new medical science every day, and statistical evidence is the most common form of proof that a new treatment is effective. With so much bad science out there (just browse through my archive for many examples), doctors need better statistical knowledge to separate the wheat from the chaff.) 

Convincing schools to give up calculus won’t be easy. I imagine that most math educators will scream in protest at the mere suggestion, in fact. In their never-ending competition to look good on a blizzard of standardized tests, schools push students to accelerate in math starting in elementary school, and they offer calculus as early as the tenth grade. This doesn’t serve students well: the vast majority will never use calculus again. And those who do need it - future engineers, physicists, and the like - can take it in college. 

Colleges need to adjust their standards too. They can start by announcing that high school programming and statistics courses will be just as important as calculus in admissions decisions. If just a few top universities would take the lead, our high schools would sit up and take notice.

We can leave calculus for college. Colleges teach calculus well, and 18-year-old freshmen are ready for it. Every major university in the country has multiple freshman calculus courses, and they usually have separate courses designed for science-bound and humanities students. Many students who take high school calculus have to re-take it in college anyway, because the high school courses don’t cover quite the same material. 

Let’s get rid of high school calculus and start teaching young students the math skills they really need.

Government ranking of U.S. universities: a truly bad idea

The U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has come up with a plan to produce official government rankings of our universities.

The plan was announced this past August, and over the past month, the Obama administration has been holding public forums around the country to get input about its plan.  But it seems like they’ve already made up their minds.

I hope not.  This is such a bad idea I don’t know where to start.  But I’ll start.

First of all, we have multiple rankings systems already, including the highly regarded U.S. News college rankings, which millions of students, faculty, and administrators use every year.  Even though everyone loves to complain about it, U.S. News is pretty darned good: they rank colleges in many categories, by region, by specialty, and more. They also rank graduate programs and professional schools such as law and medicine.

If you don’t like U.S. News, there are several other rankings, including the more recently established World Rankings from Shanghai and The Times Higher Education rankings. These are excellent rankings, well-documented using multiple criteria, and not nearly so US-centric. All these websites are chock-full of useful data about hundreds of universities.

I know, I know: “ratings aren’t rankings” as Ben Miller wrote recently at the Inside Higher Ed site. But I’m not at all confident that the proposed ratings won’t turn into a ranking system, especially with the weight of the federal government behind them.

So we don’t need a federal ranking of universities. That’s the first problem.

Second, this push to create official ratings will inevitably lead to a new bureaucracy within the Education Department, which will then create a constituency that will fight to keep itself in existence. How many staff will Secretary Duncan hire to create these rankings? Dozens? Hundreds?  And how many university employees around the country will then have to be hired to answer whatever questions the government asks?  This seems like it could quickly become a very expensive proposition, running in the tens of millions of dollars annually, or perhaps even more. I haven't seen any estimate of how much this new system would cost, but I'm betting on a lot. What will we cut from the federal budget to create this new system?

Third, a ranking system will likely spawn a host of new requirements that universities will have to satisfy. Why? Well, primarily because federal financial aid to universities will be tied to their ratings. Thus it’s pretty clear that universities will do whatever they can to keep the feds happy. And I’ve no doubt that with a full-time bureaucracy in place, the federal raters will keep moving the goalpost - coming up with new measures that in turn will spur new costs throughout academia. I’m highly skeptical that any of these government metrics will lead to better education.

We’ve already seen what government scorecards do in our public education system. Thanks to the No Child Left Behind program, we now have incessant testing of students, beginning in elementary school, and thousands of hours devoted to teaching students how to take tests rather than learn new material. Schools have not improved as a result. Do we want this trend to creep into colleges too?

I’m not the only one who thinks this a bad idea. Janet Napolitano, the president the University of California system and former Secretary of Homeland Security under President Obama, told the Washington Post that she is “deeply skeptical” of the criteria that a federal ratings bureau would develop.

“It’s not like you’re buying a car or a boat,” said Napolitano.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has already criticized the critics of the new rankings system, calling the criticism “premature and a little silly.”  Duncan emphasizes the need to address the alarming number of college students who default on their student loans. This is certainly a problem, but a college ranking (or rating) system is not the solution.

Perhaps the biggest problems with student debt is the rapid rise in mediocre, for-profit online colleges. If the feds want to get the loan problem under control, they should stop funneling money to these Yugos of higher education. As the PBS show Frontline pointed out in 2010, for-profit universities are

 “churning out worthless degrees that leave students with a mountain of debt.”  

And they’re not cheap, either - the GAO found that

“tuition in 14 out of 15 cases, regardless of degree, was more expensive at the for-profit college than at the closest public colleges.”

So yes, we do have a problem with student debt. One solution would be to exclude truly bad colleges, which are responsible for a disproportionate share of student debt, from federal aid. But that would mean naming the bad apples, who in turn will claim that the government is somehow being unfair. Perhaps the new ratings are an attempt to be fair, but it just makes no sense to rate everyone in order to identify the worst universities. Having a federal government agency produce college rankings is just a bad idea.

Government subsidies for chiropractic education

Source: daryl-cunningham.blogspot.com

The U.S. is having a political debate about college tuition loans.  Everyone seems to be in favor of keeping the loan rates low, but politicians disagree about how to pay for the subsidized rates.  (The interest rate on government-guaranteed loans will double this July, from 3.4% to 6.8%, unless Congress takes action.)

Lost in this fight is any discussion at all about which students - and which colleges - get these subsidies.  Right now, the subsidized loans are available to almost any institution that calls itself a college or university.

But what about institutions that provide a substandard education?  Or worse, what about institutions that educate people in quackery and pseudoscience?  Subsidies to these institutions are worse than useless.  These so-called colleges spread misinformation that will require much more investment to correct, if it is even possible.  Why, to be specific, is the U.S. government subsidizing students to attend chiropractic colleges?

Chiropractic colleges are a relatively new invention, as is the entire profession.  Chiropractic was invented out of whole cloth by D.D. Palmer in the 1890s.  He mistakenly believed that misalignments of the spine, which he called subluxations, caused a vast range of health problems, even infectious diseases.  Over a century later, chiropractic colleges continue to preach this nonsense; here is what Palmer College of Chiropractic says:

"Improper function of the spine due to slight misalignments—called subluxations—can cause poor health or function, even in areas far removed from the spine and spinal cord itself."

Subluxations have never been shown to cause disease. In fact, subluxations of the spine have not even been shown to exist.  Despite the thorough lack of evidence, chiropractors appear to be quite skilled at keeping patients returning for "adjustments" to maintain good health.  I wonder how much time is spent in chiropractic colleges teaching students about the need for regular spinal adjustments? As retired chiropractor Sam Homola wrote recently:

"The only thing unique about chiropractic is its basic definition as a method of adjusting vertebral subluxations to restore and maintain health....  The subluxation theory has been the chiropractic profession’s only reason for existence since its inception in 1895."

I wonder, too, if chiropractic colleges educate their students about the risk of stroke from their treatments. The rapid head-twisting move that many chiropractors use, which produces a startling cracking sound in the neck, also carries a small but real (and frightening) risk of tearing one of the arteries in the neck.  Chiropractors dispute this claim, but studies have shown that patients with vertebral tears are much more likely to have recently visited a chiropractor.  A systematic review of the evidence in 2010 concluded

"Numerous deaths have occurred after chiropractic manipulations. The risks of this treatment by far outweigh its benefit."

On top of their dubious educational programs, chiropractic colleges pay their presidents astonishingly high salaries, as documented recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which pointed out that

"the presidents of chiro­practic colleges are taking in some of the biggest paychecks in higher education." 

For example, the president of Logan College of Chiropractic, which has a budget of $24.5 million, earned $791,418 in 2009.  That's the same salary earned by the president of CalTech, which has a budget 100 times larger.

Low-cost student loans provide a benefit to many students and their universities.  But we don't need to subsidize erroneous and misguided colleges that teach their students nonsense.  If Congress is going to extend the student loan program, they should take this chance to make the program far more selective.  Helping students get a good education helps the country.  Lending students money to learn pseudoscience does just the opposite.