University Diaries » Newspapers should not be complicit.

Newspapers should not write bland articles quoting presidents of schools like Texas Southern University (graduation rate virtually non-existent; one corruption scandal after another) saying that the campus “is in the midst of a renaissance.” Newspapers should not affix bland headlines like NEW PLANS TO IMPROVE PERFORMANCE AT TSU to these articles. Is this Pravda? Izvestia? Is it the job of the nation’s press to jolly taxpayers into continuing to subsidize a disgrace? Why is TSU accredited? That’s the sort of question journalists should ask. Instead, the New York Times publishes some guy talking about how they just planted a bunch of trees.

Here’s the deal, from a much better article about TSU and schools like it:

… Nearly everyone considers it scandalous when poor kids are shunted into lousy high schools with low graduation rates, and we have no problem naming and shaming those schools. Bad primary and secondary schools are frequently the subject of front-page newspaper investigations and the backdrop for speeches by reformist mayors and school district chiefs. But bad colleges are spared such scrutiny.

… [D]ismal institutions like Chicago State … prey on underserved communities, not just for years but for decades, without anyone really noticing.

… Low graduation rates will never cause a loss of accreditation.

… As for helping your students earn degrees, why bother? State appropriations systems and federal financial aid are based on enrollment: as long as students keep coming, the money keeps flowing. And since the total number of college students increased from 7.4 million in 1984 to 10.8 million in 2009, colleges have many students to waste. “It’s like trench warfare in World War I,” says Michael Kirst, a Stanford University education professor. “You blow the whistle, and they come out of the trenches, and they get mowed down, but there are always more troops coming over. It’s very easy to get new troops. If 85 percent of them don’t finish, there’s another 85 percent of them that can come in to take their place.”

… [We have] to broach a heretofore-forbidden topic in higher education: shutting the worst institutions down.

… No university, regardless of historical legacies or sunk cost, is worth the price being exacted from thousands of students who leave in despair.

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