… from UD‘s house in upstate New York is SUNY Cobleskill.
Quite a distance down the hill. The house sits way up in tiny Summit. We drive to Cobleskill, the closest town, for groceries.
A news story about SUNY Cobleskill is just beginning to break, and if its details check out, yikes.
… In a blistering complaint, a professor claims the SUNY College of Agriculture and Technology at Cobleskill removed him from as dean because he objected to the school’s policy of recruiting unqualified students, many of them black, solely to get its hands on their tuition, “for the express and admitted purpose of making budget, knowing that these students are not reasonably likely to graduate.” He claims black students were fraudulently induced into enrolling so their tuition could “subsidize agricultural programs, which run at an annual deficit,” and which “serve white students almost exclusively.”
In his federal complaint, Thomas Hickey says he was a tenured professor and Dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He claims the campus president and vice president for academic affairs lowered academic standards and admitted students they knew were unlikely to graduate, and even falsified some students’ records to make them eligible.
… Hickey claims he discovered that a student who earned a B+ in English Composition was functionally illiterate.
He claims [Anne Myers, Academic Affairs VP] changed the school’s Academic Review standards by lowering the threshold GPA to 1.0: “On Dec. 2, 2008, Defendant Myers sent an email to the faculty stating that ‘in light of the budget, we will use a 1.0 [Grade Point Average] cut off for first semester freshmen for Academic Review.'” And he claims that “as one point, she suspended Academic Review entirely.”
Thomas Cronin, a physics professor, responded to Myers’ email with one of his own, according to the complaint. It said: “The list of academically and morally corrupt practices that ensue from our inability to adhere to our own standards is rather long. One of our worst offenses is that we admit, and re-admit students absolutely unqualified and absolutely incapable of achieving a college degree. Many go into debt or cause their families to go into debt into [sic] order to attempt a college degree. This is an absolutely corrupt practice and it may be criminal. If we have done this to even one student, then we are guilty of a very low form of corruption.” …
November 30th, 2009 at 11:41AM
The dirty little secret (one of them, at least) of big public universities. This wouldn’t apply to Michigan or Berkeley, but at Kansas State we get very bright students and students who are incapable of succeeding in college. We use the ACT, not the SAT, and students with a 32 or higher on the ACT have roughly an 80% chance of graduation. Students with 19 or lower have a 35% chance of graduation. I had an admitted student show up for freshman advising who’d scored a 9–i.e., lower than 99+% of all high school students taking the test.
November 30th, 2009 at 11:53AM
Hard to read what’s going on here. SUNY Cobleskill is an unusual campus, part baccalaureate college, part community college, and presumably has minimal admissions standards for at least some programs. I’m perfectly prepared to believe that standards have been lowered, faculty have been mistreated, etc.; but there seem to be fundamental issues of institutional mission (and SUNY budget processes).
November 30th, 2009 at 2:55PM
The faculty at Cobleskill are riding in the same great big boat as many other places. The demands of diversity and cash flow require that many a student be fed to our modern Moloch.
November 30th, 2009 at 7:44PM
I teach at a community college. Our enrollment is up 13% and state funds are down 10%. Tuition is the way to make up the deficit.
Just about everyone who should go to college is going to college. Colleges are marketing to people who are unlikely to succeed and unlikely to understand that they won’t succeed. This is what happens when state subsidies subside.
Naturally, in the math courses the passing rate is declining and we take heat for this. The state wants us to accept anyone who applies, pass most of the people who take our classes, and demands that those who pass know the material. You can have any two of these but not all three. At some point the bubble will burst. The question is how many lives will be ruined by unforgivable student loan debt before this happens.
This job makes me feel like a prostitute.
November 30th, 2009 at 8:04PM
orders: You capture the Catch-22 extremely well. Thank you for the comment.