Wotta shocker.
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.
… and the best visual, in response to the Bin Laden porn stash story.
Best title so far: Lawrence of a Labia.
e-schools eat shit, especially on the primary and secondary school level. Make a pledge to dedicate one half-second of your brain power as to why and you’ll get there.
University Diaries, of course, spends most of its time on the nation’s wretched online universities; but we need to keep reminding ourselves of the grand experiment going on at the pre-college level with our children.
Ohio, for instance, has been particularly excited about online schools, and the results are now coming in.
From the Plain-Dealer:
Ohio’s publicly funded online schools are a disastrous alternative to public schools that should be under more scrutiny, according to a study released Thursday by a left-leaning think tank.
Turns out their graduation rates are pathetic. Dedicate two seconds of your brain power to the online experience as experienced by a fifteen-year-old and you’ll get there.
With five of the state’s seven largest e-schools posting graduation rates lower than that of the state’s worst traditional public school district, and six of seven rated less than “effective,” a liberal policy group said yesterday that the state is wasting money on the poorly performing online schools.
Good old Treca Digital Academy has a 24.1 percent graduation rate. (Here’s their website, with Frequently Asked Questions. Turns out no one asks – even frequently – what their graduation rates are.)
A high-ranking politician, asked if his crucial legislative support for e-schools has anything to do with really big campaign contributions from e-school entrepreneurs, says that’s a “damn lie.”
Kind of strong language, huh? I think he’s e-nnoyed.
Truly lurid details here.
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Think about it for a moment. Think of the life of an Ohio schoolchild, her high school career entirely online, and then her college career also entirely via distance technology. Ain’t it wonderful – to imagine that? That’s why hard-working, concerned parents throughout the state are fighting to make this their children’s educational destiny.
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Gail Collins weighs in.
Am I gonna have to stop beating up on Alabama?
… the Spanish university system.
In Italy, it’s bloodlines; in Spain, cronies.
Either way, really lousy university systems.
… at the office…
On-site amenities [at a new building across from UD’s office] will include a Citibank branch, Roti Mediterranean Grill, Sweetgreen and Circa. A much-anticipated Whole Foods will open by Sept. 1.
… and at home. (UD reflects on her neighborhood.)
Garrett Park, Maryland, a town near Bethesda, is deceptive, especially if you live, as we do, near the CSX train tracks. From our small house, surrounded by woods, the world looks rural, not suburban. And forget urban.
We’ve got over a half-acre of lawn and trees, on which deer, coyotes, raccoons, owls, and a zillion other animals thrive. This time of year, with the spring blossoms, we can barely see neighboring houses. And because there’s only one through-street in Garrett Park, little traffic passes by our split rail fence and unmanicured lawn.
Yet this sylvan scene has more to do with strategic barriers and bluffs than with reality.
The train tracks themselves represent one such borderland. The end of our land is an abrupt thirty-foot drop into the narrow canyon of the tracks, and on the other side of that canyon, hidden by kudzu and all sorts of other growing things, lies quite-built-up Randolph Hills.
A park jammed with mature trees hides from our house the madly popular Black Market Bistro, which brings lots of cars to the streets of our town. However crowded the restaurant, though, the cars never reach our property.
As for the sound of trains near our house: I grew up in Garrett Park and don’t really hear them.
And anyway, lonely train whistles are echt rural.
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When, a few days ago, my husband and I were shocked out of sleep — out of that particular night’s sleep and out of the larger placidity of Garrett Park — by a big explosion, I assumed something terrible had happened to a train. The tracks vibrated massively in the aftermath of a blast I figured had to do with a catastrophic chemical accident. Afraid of what might have been released into the air, I didn’t throw on clothes and explore. Instead, I waited for sirens, which started up two minutes after the boom. And then I went back to sleep.
The morning’s news about the Randolph Hills house just across the tracks that we’d heard splinter into nothingness was another reminder that to live in Garrett Park is to inhabit a very tenuous tranquility, a shaky small-town life in the midst of the city. The quiet wild greenery of Garrett Park is itself manufactured: It represents the legal and political accomplishment of generations of savvy, feisty townspeople who’ve kept roads closed and trees replenished and McMansions out. They’ve kept our no-home-delivery post office going, an arrangement which means that we take walks and meet our neighbors every day, just the way they do in the boonies.
But the Garrett Park post office is imperiled. Post offices are being closed all over the country.
And ceaseless smart growth near the Grosvenor metro encroaches more and more on the town.
The exploding house across the tracks, then, wasn’t a wake-up call, because everyone here knew, before three AM the other night, that a large noisy world was right out there beyond the barricades. The exploding house was, instead, another of many reminders that small-town Garrett Park, Maryland, while not a fiction, is an increasingly implausible story-line.
… perhaps from an overdose, and instantly a sports writer starts talking on-field replacements.
His death coincides with the release of the book Basketball Junkie.
UD says: More! More!
I know Goldman Sachs (which owns a big chunk of this lovely industry) is a fatter target, but we’re about universities here at University Diaries, and college stories don’t get any bigger, or more vomit-worthy, than the for-profit college story, with its CEOs taking tens of millions of dollars a year from our tax money and from poor people.
The New York Times and other newspapers have editorialized. But public radio is hitting the hardest, featuring not only a long interview on the Kojo Nnamdi Show about this national scandal, but also an interview with Daniel Golden (UD thanks Dirk for the link) on Fresh Air. A highlight:
I visited homeless shelters where for-profit colleges were seeking students… Often you’re dealing with people whose families do not include college graduates and do not have a lot of sophistication about the system and may just have seen an ad on a website or a late-night television program, called up on a whim and got themselves signed up for federal student loans almost before they knew what happened.
… he’ll have any political power anytime soon. Still – Dr. Kutcher seems to deserve a bit of scrutiny.
“It is expected that the birds will remain aggressive for approximately the next month,” explains Queen’s University to its students – so look out. They’re going after pedestrians.
When I read this, in a newspaper article about the Queen’s University crows, who’ve already pecked three passersby —
Queen’s faculty and staff in the three buildings backing onto the walkway have a clear view of crows swooping at their colleagues.
— I instantly pictured a (Charles Addams?) New Yorker cartoon in which faculty and staff gather in the room with the best view to watch and laugh.
At the University of Miami, they’ve long had an aggressive hawk problem, which they’ve tried to make cute by naming the area of campus where they peck you Hawk Walk. (They also issue umbrellas to walkers, because hawks – go figure – don’t get aggressive if you’re carrying an umbrella.) UD proposes CROW GO as Queen’s cute name for going the Suzanne Pleshette route.
… attacking for-profit colleges. Title: EDUCATION IS THE LAST THING ON THEIR MINDS.
Born in Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo, Rajaratnam was educated there at St. Thomas’ Preparatory School before leaving for England, where he studied engineering at the University of Sussex. He came to the U.S. to get his master’s of business administration, graduating from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in 1983.
Two of his Wharton classmates — Anil Kumar, who became a partner at McKinsey & Co., and Rajiv Goel, who was a managing director at Intel — testified against him at the trial, telling jurors how their relationships began at the school and how they turned to crime. Both pleaded guilty and testified for prosecutors.
In Germany, it’s raining plagiarists.
Veronica Sass, daughter of a former premier of Bavaria, has just had her University of Konstanz doctorate taken away.
Karl-Theodor Guttenberg – now he’s blaming his family, and his dissertation chair – Veronica Sass, and pretty soon Silvana Koch-Mehrin.
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Keeping in mind that Guttenberg was Defense Minister, consider his explanation:
Another problem [he said] was with the expectations of his family to master his existing commitments successfully. It had been made clear to him that it would not have been acceptable if the quality of any of his various commitments suffered and that a work once started had to be completed. Furthermore, Guttenberg wrote that he did not want to disappoint his advisor Peter Häberle.
Big strong head of German military! Capitulates to family, dissertation advisor…
He’s now known in the German press as the Self-Defense Minister.
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UD thanks Chris.
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UPDATE: Koch-Mehrin folds ’em.