… is unsurprising. She made a mess. But FAU’s fatal problem remains: It’s not a university. It holds some classes, yes. But it doesn’t much care about its faculty (all sorts of knaves and fools lurk there and create embarrassment for the school); and it has poured huge money into a football stadium that everyone knows will sit empty and bankrupt the place. Recall that FAU was so desperate to get a naming sponsor’s money that they agreed to have the name of a shady for-profit prison company be emblazoned on the stadium — until ridicule and outrage forced the university to withdraw from the deal. The president blames “fiercely negative media coverage” for her downfall, but when you make a mess that’s what you get.
The nanny state once again tries to interfere with the free market – the Secretary of Education thinks there’s something wrong with both rogue and non-rogue big-time university sports programs. American public universities shouldn’t use mucho tax money to make Tubby Smith (soon, it’s rumored, to take his winning ways to Texas Tech!) rich as all get-out. Rick Pitino shouldn’t make $20,500 a day. And so forth.
It’s the exact same thing with so-called ‘insider trading,’ not to mention giving for-profit colleges a hard time. Government is the problem.
*****************
UD thanks JND.
To be sure, a few cynical Democratic lawmakers still support the government-funded for-profit college scam (put for-profit in my search engine for background). But as the industry’s greed, and criminal neglect of students’ educations, becomes common knowledge, it’s mainly Republicans – famously contemptuous of financial dependency on the government – who continue to whomp themselves up for an industry almost wholly bankrolled by federal dollars.
As David Halperin notes, a Republican victory in November is probably the industry’s last chance to salvage its basic model (enroll everyone; use their federal education money for your executives’ salaries; watch everyone drop out and spend the rest of their lives trying to pay back loans; find new suckers). Even with Republicans running the country, the for-profits may be unable to reverse the collapse of their sickening sector, one of the few surviving instances of pure exploitation of the weak by the strong, the masses by the elites.
… and so does UD. As Phoenix falls from its ashes, and as even scuzzier outfits make their way through the courts, it truly begins to look as though Americans have figured out how the tax-syphons work, and refused to play along.
The University of Hawaii and South Carolina State University give UD an empty feeling. She doesn’t like this feeling any more than you do when you have it — as if existence is suddenly stripped of meaning and value and you’re inside a howling panorama of futility and anarchy.
Corrupt outposts of corrupt states, these two are always on UD‘s radar, not only for the commonplace (theft of funds, exploded athletics budgets), but for the baroque (Stevie Wonder concerts about which Stevie Wonder doesn’t know; just-completed federally funded research buildings turning into instant ruins).
These schools are the public non-profit twin of America’s private for-profit schools: Both surreal ruinations are fueled by the trapped, hapless, American taxpayer.
You have to go to Lucky’s speech in Samuel Beckett’s absurdist Waiting for Godot (start at 44:30) even to begin to understand the for-profit college situation in the United States. David Halperin does a nice tidy job of reviewing the mad greed and cynicism and indifference that puts our taxes in the pockets of people who exploit innocents. It won’t change until lobbying changes. And lobbying won’t change.
… to its most basic moving parts.
****************
Transcript:
Two academic men in suits chat. Looks like Harvard Yard in the background.
So the for-profits mop up $32 billion in taxpayer money a year, even though a majority of students quickly drop out!
And for presiding over these empires of failure, the average for-profit CEO is paid over $7 million!
– 7 million? Seriously?
Seriously.
– Does it come with balloons and a 4-foot check?
No, I imagine it’s a discreet transfer of wealth.
****************
UD thanks Dirk.
As Berkeley makes its own MOOC moves, this distinction is crucial: Free, open-sourced MOOCS are a public service, an investigation into certain technologies, a way of broadcasting your university’s name to the world, a democratizing gesture. Monetized credit-bearing online courses have impossibly high rates of cheating, are often cheaply done and poorly staffed, with one (frequently part-time) faculty drudge (I call these people air traffic controllers) responsible for hundreds of students, etc. They are hard to distinguish from the tax-syphoning, for-profit, shames-of-a-nation. (Scroll down.)
Faculty leaders have cautioned the university against moving too quickly with the online courses. The UC Academic Senate has said it worries about the quality and finances of the UC Online project.
In contrast, some of those most concerned about UC’s plans say they support free projects like Coursera and edX.
… is the motto of many American universities, whether diploma mills or for-profits. Their admissions requirements are can we get you to come and stay long enough for us to collect federal money?
The latest recruiting practices lawsuit is against San Francisco’s Academy of Art .
“The suit claims there were no other legitimate criteria on which the recruiters were judged” beyond hurling bodies forward.
Aunt Voula captures the problem of for-profit non-profits. Just as she doesn’t realize that lamb is meat, for-profit non-profits don’t realize that profit is profit, and therefore that profiting from running a non-profit organization makes it not not-for-profit. If you catch my drift.
This very category confusion (for-profit / not-for-profit) has tripped up the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, a putative non-profit long run for the personal profit of its director. Le tout Dallas is shocked and offended that the director has now been forced out and forced “to repay the medical center for every cent of his inappropriate spending.” How dare taxpayers humiliate this man by prying their money out of his hands!
In the New Yorker.
The top schools, led by Stanford, are now aggressively exploring online education, which they had previously left to the for-profits. This doesn’t mean that they will suddenly start granting degrees online to ten or a hundred times as many students; instead, they are likely to offer a second, cheaper (or even free) tier of education that will only enhance the lifelong value of their traditional, in-residence degrees.
… designed to rope naive people in to taking over-priced courses at lousy schools. If you like the idea of subsidizing for-profit colleges as they engage in their scandalous recruiting practices, read no further.
The rest of us should find it pretty heartening that a bill just introduced in Congress “would prohibit colleges of all kinds from using dollars from federal student assistance programs, including the GI Bill, to pay for advertising and recruiting.”
A sponsor of the bill, Tom Harkin, “emphasized the proposal would leave schools free to advertise — just from a separate pot of money that hasn’t come from taxpayers.”
*********************************
And, you know, we’ve been lectured endlessly by the for-profits about letting markets work… So I guess they’re okay with this? Free market, that’s what they’re about, not like the wimpy non-profits! One look at for-profit management compensation will tell you the free market’s working just fine for them. The prez of Harvard makes like, what, around a million dollars. It’s typical for heads of for-profit colleges to make ten million or more. Some of them make much more.
But no – they’re pissed about the legislation! Not only should practically all of their revenue come from the government (not much of a free market model when you think about it, huh?), but they should be free to do fuck-all with our money.
Okay so for what it’s worth UD anticipates that the intriguing Minerva Project will be a failure. Here’s why.
Whenever your dominant, overriding motivation is profit, you’re going to create a shitty education.
Minerva bills itself as a new Ivy League American university. It’ll be totally online and totally expensive.
It will cost about half as much as elite university tuition, to be sure, but this will still be much too pricy for what students will get, which is basically a classier version of other online for-profit schools. No campus, no contact with professors or students (unless you pay yet more to live in an apartment building in some random city that Minerva will designate for their students), no experience at all besides watching a high-profile professor give lectures and then doing interactive sessions with a teacher.
I’m not sure what ‘teacher’ means here. Someone with an advanced degree, says the article I’m reading; but that could mean a person with an MA and little to no actual classroom experience…
Let us regard skeptically Minerva’s claim that it will be “the first elite American university launched in a century.” I’m afraid you don’t launch elite universities. It takes quite a lot of time for people to know you exist, much less have this great reputation. Look how long the elite American universities have been around, and tell me whether you think you can whip one up pronto.
[Minerva's founder] says that the genesis for Minerva was in learning how many academically-qualified students were being rejected from America’s top universities. “Harvard’s dean of admissions, for example, said that 85% of applicants are qualified, but less than one in ten is actually accepted… and it’s particularly difficult for foreign students trying to get into American schools. There is a basic supply and demand imbalance.”
Yeah, well, once a person who’s qualified for Harvard is turned down, she doesn’t start looking for online schools. She goes to Cornell (or any of a healthy number of other very good to great schools) instead.
****************************
UPDATE: Back in ’09, Frank Rich detailed the remarkable commitment to personal enrichment on the part of Minerva’s chief advisor, Larry Summers:
Lawrence Summers, the president’s chief economic adviser, made $5.2 million in 2008 from a hedge fund, D. E. Shaw, for a one-day-a-week job. He also earned $2.7 million in speaking fees from the likes of Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. Those institutions are not merely the beneficiaries of taxpayers’ bailouts since the crash. They also benefited during the boom from government favors: the Wall Street deregulation that both Summers and Robert Rubin, his mentor and predecessor as Treasury secretary, championed in the Clinton administration. This dynamic duo’s innovative gift to their country was banks “too big to fail.”
Some spoilsports raise the conflict-of-interest question about Summers: Can he be a fair broker of the bailout when he so recently received lavish compensation from some of its present and, no doubt, future players? This question can be answered only when every transaction in the new “public-private investment plan” to buy the banks’ toxic assets is made transparent. We need verification that this deal is not, as the economist Joseph Stiglitz has warned, a Rube Goldberg contraption contrived to facilitate “huge transfers of wealth to the financial markets” from taxpayers.
But perhaps I’ve become numb to the perennial and bipartisan revolving-door incestuousness of Washington and Wall Street. I was less shocked by the White House’s disclosure of Summers’s recent paydays than by a bit of reporting that appeared deep down in the Times follow-up article on that initial news. The reporter Louise Story wrote that Summers had done consulting work for another hedge fund, Taconic Capital Advisors, from 2004 to 2006, while still president of Harvard.
That the highly paid leader of arguably America’s most esteemed educational institution (disclosure: I went there) would simultaneously freelance as a hedge-fund guy might stand as a symbol for the values of our time. At the start of his stormy and short-lived presidency, Summers picked a fight with Cornel West for allegedly neglecting his professorial duties by taking on such extracurricular tasks as cutting a spoken-word CD. Yet Summers saw no conflict with moonlighting in the money racket while running the entire university. The students didn’t even get a CD for his efforts — and Harvard’s deflated endowment, now in a daunting liquidity crisis, didn’t exactly benefit either.
Summers’s dual portfolio in Cambridge has already led to one potential intermingling of private business and public policy in his new White House post. He tried — and, mercifully, failed — to install the co-founder of Taconic in the job of running the TARP bailouts. But again, Summers’s potential conflicts of interest seem less telling than the conflict of values that his Harvard double-résumé exemplifies.
You can be sure that Summers will bring this same innovative education/personal enrichment mix to Minerva.
*****************************
A discussion forms at Inside Higher Ed.