… will get you.
… will get you.
And the university promptly responded to his request: Fork over $40,000 – no – make that $100,000 – and they’re yours.
It’s hard for us to access our records! And since you’ve been so indecorous as to appeal to Hawaii state open records laws in response to our initial outright refusal of your request (“[T]he agency that oversees Hawaii’s open records law issued an advisory opinion saying the invoices must be released.”), it’s only right that we punish you.
Bad boy. Bother us again and we’ll charge you fourteen million and shoot off your kneecaps.
Gordon Gee tries to take your mind off of it.
This is an old story, and a most repellent one.
Cynical universities are in on the scam too, since it has the effect of pushing down their “admitted” percentages, making the schools look that much more attractive.
… you’ve already read this sort of prose.
If you happen to be the state of Minnesota, and if you happen to close down one of these diploma mills, you will be accused of failing to understand the beautiful educational synergy of online technology and fifteen year olds.
The Minnesota Department of Education has taken an unprecedented move to close an online charter school accused of graduating students improperly.
The department notified the West St. Paul-based BlueSky Online School on Thursday that it would sever the school’s contract with its overseer, a recourse the state has under recent charter legislation.
Don’t you love the idea of giving an online school the name BlueSky? It’s the one thing you’ll never see – you don’t even get to take short walks from one classroom to the next. Prison would be more like it.
Actually, prison’s an improvement. At least you get a cellmate.
Oh – and in its defense BlueSky says the following:
BlueSky has said the charges reflect a lack of understanding of online instruction.
Yes, let’s all get on board for the proper understanding of online high school instruction.
You take a teenager, see, isolate her in a room with full access to games, Facebook, YouTube, music, and the rest of the internet, and watch her learn algebra.
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UD thanks Michael for the link.
From the New York Times:
… “Enron-type accounting standards have become the norm,” says William Henderson of Indiana University, one of many exasperated law professors who are asking the American Bar Association to overhaul the way law schools assess themselves. “Every time I look at this data, I feel dirty.”
It is an open secret, Professor Henderson and others say, that schools finesse survey information in dozens of ways. And the survey’s guidelines, which are established not by U.S. News but by the American Bar Association, in conjunction with an organization called the National Association for Law Placement, all but invite trimming.
A law grad, for instance, counts as “employed after nine months” even if he or she has a job that doesn’t require a law degree. Waiting tables at Applebee’s? You’re employed. Stocking aisles at Home Depot? You’re working, too.
… Job openings for lawyers have plunged, but law schools are not dialing back enrollment. About 43,000 J.D.’s were handed out in 2009, 11 percent more than a decade earlier, and the number of law schools keeps rising — nine new ones in the last 10 years, and five more seeking approval to open in the future.
… [M]any law school professors privately are appalled by what they describe as a huge and continuing transfer of wealth, from students short on cash to richly salaried academics.
… Solving the J.D. overabundance problem, according to Professor Henderson, will have to involve one very drastic measure: a bunch of lower-tier law schools will need to close. But nobody inside of the legal establishment, he predicts, has the stomach for that. “Ultimately,” he says, “some public authority will have to step in because law schools and lawyers are incapable of policing themselves.” …
A being has the same,” writes Emily Dickinson in The Bone that Has No Marrow.
Bones in need of marrow need people willing to be bone marrow donors; non-profit institutions like university hospitals are among the beings who have obligations to handle the pulling in of donors in a seemly and humane way.
After all, they’re non-profits, dedicated to education and healing. Right?
That perennial class act, the University of Massachusetts, burnishes its reputation once again:
… UMass Memorial Health Care Inc.’s use of pricey models in short skirts and spike heels to entice people to sign up for its bone marrow registry, while allegedly misleading consumers about the cost of testing, has drawn scrutiny of the hospital chain from authorities in New Hampshire.
Condemning the practice as a scam involving “suspect marketing and billing practices,’’ New Hampshire Attorney General Michael A. Delany yesterday announced a major probe of shopping-mall bone marrow donor recruitment drives by UMass Memorial and its subsidiary, the Caitlin Raymond International Registry.
James T. Boffetti, New Hampshire senior assistant attorney general, said in a telephone interview yesterday afternoon that his office will investigate potential criminal violations of New Hampshire’s Consumer Protection Act as part of a joint probe with the state’s Insurance Department.
Caitlin Raymond staff and the models from a Boston agency, which charged UMass Memorial between $40,000 and $50,000 a week for about a year and a half, told potential donors that the DNA test required to join the registry did not cost anything, Boffetti said.
However, UMass Memorial billed the potential donors’ insurance companies as much as $4,300 per test, far more than the roughly $100 charged by most labs, according to Boffetti.
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A new fighting song for U Mass.
We whore for bone marrow
Through malls broad and narrow…
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UD thanks Dennis.
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Not that I want to pile on, but really.
3. College presidents who sit on corporate boards have faced criticism and even lawsuits when things go wrong. Some have decided it’s not worth the hassle. Match the college leader with the board from which he or she resigned:
A. Erroll B. Davis Jr., then-chancellor of the University System of Georgia
B. Ruth J. Simmons, president of Brown U.
C. E. Gordon Gee, president of Ohio State U.
D. Shirley Ann Jackson, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
a. Stepped down last year from the board of Massey Energy Company, owner the West Virginia mine where 29 miners died in April.
b. Resigned board position at BP five days before the company’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in April.
c. Left the board of Goldman Sachs in March, a month before the Securities and Exchange Commission charged the company with fraud for its role in the subprime-mortgage crisis.
d. Left the board of NYSE Euronext in April, but is paid more than $1-million annually for service on five other boards, in addition to an academic salary of $1.6-million.
Yeah, that last one’s Shirley Ann Jackson – everyone knows that. Too easy.
But with today’s news out of Goldman Sachs, it’s a good moment to honor the many years of loyal service the president of Brown University (she’s c.) gave the Goldman Sachs compensation committee.
… you can hear Tom Harkin being very indignant indeed about the scummy for-profit schools of America.
“A very sick industry.”
Harkin seems particularly scandalized by the involvement of hedge fund people in these schools. Someone should show him who’s running Brown University. And Yeshiva University.
…Hm. He seems to be under the impression that online is the poor white trash of education… He’s scathing on the subject.
I seem to be live-blogging this.
Can’t remember the exact number, but Harkin also seemed struck by the fact that the prez of some for-profit university or other made, what, fourteen billion times what the prez of Harvard makes. Something like that. Thirteen billion…
Ooh. Richard Durbin’s pissed too. For-profits rip off veterans, too. Veterans default and the schools don’t teach them shit. “How can it be fair for this kind of exploitation to continue?…. This is an absolutely unexplainable, indefensible situation!”
Harkin: “Used to be fifty percent of your students had to be campus-based. That ended in 2005. Now you’ve got the entire student body online! And look at the online dropout rates!”
Harkin: “These days a semester’s anything you want it to be. Some of these schools have semesters that are five weeks long! Keep ’em just long enough to be able to keep the money!”
Harkin: “Their mission is to grow and get profits at the expense of students… It’s the obligation of us here to provide effective government oversight and regulation… Are taxpayers dollars being used effectively?… I have grave doubts that these schools are a good taxpayer investment.”
Regular readers know that UD uses the phrase the mephitic factor to designate the intensity of bad smells in the air on this or that American campus at any given time.
Brown University, a fancy Ivy League institution, is an example of a High Mephitic Factor school — its gathering emanations of corruption and wrongdoing of late have an elite feel to them, coming from famous scientists on the faculty, and from sophisticated, wealthy trustees.
Auburn University, a school without academic or social distinction, represents the much more typical Low Mephitic Factor, where the shitty smell in the quads has to do with athletes and their associates who cheat — on the field, and in the classroom.
High or low, the mephitic factor is almost always about the same thing: greed. Pastor Newton pimped his son Cam to Mississippi State; now that same son is at Auburn, and it’s only a matter of time before the NCAA proves that the father pimped the son to Auburn too. Until then, Newton gets to play, and the campus gets to keep that smell.
[People at the NCAA] know (and believe they can prove) that Cecil Newton demanded money for Cam’s commitment, thanks to the Mississippi State evidence. They cannot prove that he made the same demand of Auburn, or that Cam was aware of his father’s pay-for-play schemes. This sounds as believable as a hooker not knowing she’s being pimped out, but it’s not about what probably happened. It’s about what can be proven, and as of this moment, it cannot be proven that Cam Newton or Auburn did anything against the rules.
Brown could clear some of the bad air; but that would mean acknowledging what’s going on there, not merely with one of its trustees, but, soon enough, in all likelihood, with another. The scientist, the trustees… After awhile, the campus smells, and schools that care about that, schools that have something to lose by way of integrity, need to act.
“[I]nstead of providing a solid pathway to the middle class, (for-profits) are paving a path into the subbasement of the American economy.”
From a just-issued report on for-profit colleges.
… there’s beer, get used to it.
The chair of the Northeastern Illinois University board of trustees celebrates a university president who gave tenure to a fraud who graduated from a diploma mill.
Tenuring a diploma mill fraud. That’s the sort of thing you do when you are either corrupt beyond belief, or exceedingly mentally feeble.
Only one thing to do with joke presidents.
Might want to take a look at the board of trustees, too.