EduBubble

Paul Campos, that genius over at insidethelawschoolscam, is posting the pleading emails from the law schools looking for more suckers. Apparently even schools in the top half of the US News rankings are still looking to fill those last seats and they’re behaving, as Mr. Campos says, like carnival barkers hoping to get anyone to step right up. They even have scholarships available! And you thought the admissions deadline was an actual deadline. I wouldn’t be surprised if those admitted after the deadline don’t count in the averages reported to US News.

I’m not sure how we can confirm the claim from the AP that the students in Montreal are on strike to protest the rising tuition. How does one know that a student is on strike? Does this mean they’re not hanging around in coffee shops talking about how they’ve really got to get cracking on that huge paper that’s due like tomorrow? Do they give up slacking? Do they not not read the assignments? Double negative intended.

Double negatives are par for the course. My impression is that the students are not going to classes to protest. Not only that, the reporting says that they used the word “scab” for a student who went to class. Some are even blockading the buildings. So not only are the students upset about not getting enough learning for their money, they’re willing to increase the price per unit of knowledge to infinity by blocking everyone from attending.

Yeesh. What a crazy idea in service of a great cause. They’re complaining that a service is too expensive, but they’re refusing to consume the service that they already purchased?

(It’s worth noting that Ian Austen’s article in the NY Times reports that the demands placed on the Quebec students are rather modest, especially by US standards.  He writes, “The government wants to increase the annual university tuition of $2,144 by $321 a year for five years.” While that’s a bit much on a percentage basis, that’s only because the university has been happy to exist on state subsidies alone.)

This really shows that students are off in la-la land. They’re assuming a role in society. They’re not consumers, they have a “job” as a person absorbing knowledge the only way they can imagine to protest is to quit serving that role in society in the same way that a plumber or a train driver would do it.

The proper way to protest is not to write the check. Paul Campos, the law professor over at insidethelawschoolscam, has offered several anecdotes that law schools are running fire sales for students on the waiting list with high scores. This is the only way to put pressure on the administrators because the administrators just think in terms of money.

I feel like a broken record here. In the grand scheme of things, Elizabeth Warren’s Senate campaign has little to do with getting an economics degree in the price of tea in China. It’s just the embarrassments keep appearing and when the pitcher serves up fat, easy pitches, I feel a moral duty to clobber them.

First, Hillary Chabot at the Boston Herald reports that the genealogists are backing away from the claim that Ms. Warren is 1/32nd Cherokee because the so-called document is contemporary and no one can find the original. Ooops. More research that can’t be reproduced. Ugh.

But it gets better! Maggie Habberman at Politico reports that a 1997 article in the Fordham Law Review called Elizabeth Warren Harvard’s first “woman of color.” One link I saw put this wonderful title next to a picture of Ms. Warren pale face and blonde scalp.

Apparently part of the problem is that Michael Chmura, a former PR flack at Harvard, gave this tidbit to the author who was complaining about the lack of women of color. Not so, he said. Harvard does too have them. He also told this to the Crimson which printed their own back-patting version of the forked-tongue truth. Alas, he refuses to come to the phone and explain who told him to say this. I’m sure he didn’t come up with it on his own.

The best part are the quotes from the campaign worker trying desperately to steer the campaign back to something that Ms. Warren might be helpful. As I say again and again, Warren’s language about debt has been great, but boy is it ironic. Listen to Althea Harney, the poor chunk of meat tossed out in front of the lions to defend her boss:

It’s time to return to issues – like rising student loan debt, job creation, and Wall Street regulation – that will have a real impact on middle class families.

Hello, Ms. Harney? Paging Ms. Harney! People like Elizabeth Warren are why there is such a problem with student debt. Those huge six figure salaries don’t come from thin air. They come from the backs of the students and the taxpayers. If she really cared about student debt, she should have started trying to fix it in her own backyard. She should have taken a smaller salary.

Let me say generally nice things about the long, long piece by Andrew Martin and Andrew Lehren at the NY Times. They drill down into the debt problem with as much focus as we’ve seen from the main stream media.

Alas, they don’t have the advantage of stewing in the bile for several years as I do. They haven’t poked around long enough to see just how wrong some of the claims happen to be.

They repeat some of the classic CYA manure that the press loves to parrot. They claim that many economists claim that you’re better off with a degree than without one, even though just a few pages away they’re lionizing Mark Zuckerberg. They also repeat the bogus low numbers about “student debt” from the college board, even though most of the people they interview owe dramatically more.

I predict that they’ll come around. In other parts of the article, they sound almost incredulous about the horse manure shoveled out to the students in the so-called financial aid package letter. Why do they call it “aid” when the debt comes with such a high rate of interest? Many students need to hire an account to see just how much they’ll really owe when they finally discover that the so-called “aid” is really a loan.

Bob Samuels did a great job poking holes in the way the financial aid office can’t even answer the questions themselves. The BS is piled higher and deeper.

But they’ll figure it out.

Kelly Field at the Chronicle of Higher Edumacation brings us some horror stories from the student debt collection  industry.

Stacey Patton at the Chronicle of Higher Edumacation struck a nerve with an article about all of those PhDs and Masters degree folks on food stamps. The article opens up with someone with a doctorate in medieval history talking about how she’s not a welfare queen and then wanders around the campuses meeting more people who are (1) gainfully employed and (2) on the dole.

There seem to be two distinct issues. The first is that it’s quite shameful for the universities to continue paying adjunct professors so little. It is one thing to have professors fixing that tweed jacket with leather patches and it’s something else entirely to have them need government assistance to buy food. In each of these schools, there are certainly other professors who are getting full salaries and teaching fewer courses.

But, alas, these PhDs on food stamps are also surprisingly clueless given that we’re supposed to think of a PhD as proof that someone is very clueful. What did this woman think would come of a degree in medieval studies? Haven’t these PhDs  heard of the laws of supply and demand? She says that it’s not right for someone educated to be on food stamps as if all of the hard work on a dissertation was a guarantee against poverty and injustice. All of that hard work won’t protect a farmer when a hail storm destroys the crops. All of the hard work won’t protect a manufacturing company if a rival gets to market first. Why should the education business be any different?

What is very sad about this article is the fact that the PhDs don’t learn from their experiences. The basic toddler can understand the causality. If doing A leads to B, you try not to do A so often. Alas, what do these underpaid but very educated people do? They want to sucker more people into the education tent. The article is supposed to have a happy ending because one of the welfare queens gets a full-time, tenure-track job. And so the cycle of abuse continues.

Sometimes the headlines just write themselves.

It’s hard to believe, but Michael Krupnick at the San Jose Mercury News reports that the Berkeley administration actually fired someone for making too much money. Oh wait. That’s not exactly correct. They fired an assistant vice chancellor for tripling the salary of her “sex partner”. The sex partner still has his job but it looks like they’re trying to crack down on him for swearing.

How much money is at stake? It’s the kind of cash that gets families– oops, I meant sex partnerships– into the 1%. The woman, Diane Leite, may only be an assistant to an assistant, but she was bringing home $188,000. Her sex partner used to make only $41k but he started getting $120k in 2010. He was two notches below her in the Berkeley org chart and that makes him an assistant to an assistant to an assistant to an assistant. Who knows how much he makes today while we’re waiting to hear what punishment he must endure for his swearing.

When we last heard the words “fraud” and “Harvard” in the same sentence, the news media was focused on Adam Wheeler, a clever scamp who talked his way into Harvard, but was now on his way out the door. He claimed to have a fancy pedigree including nice grades from Phillips Academy and M.I.T. For some odd reason, the Harvard admissions mechanism didn’t notice that Mr. Wheeler received As instead of the normal 5s given out at MIT for superior work. Ooops.

Harvard turned around and pressed 20 criminal charges including larceny. It’s not nice to embarrass powerful people. (Yale did much  the same thing when it was deceived.)

Now the word “fraud” is back in the same sentence with “Harvard” because another clever scamp, Bob Maginn, the Massachusetts GOP chairman, is asking whether Elizabeth Warren committed academic fraud by claiming to be a Native American. (See reporting by Chris Chaplin at the Boston Herald.)  As we’ve seen, she had no research to back this up herself. She just clicked those magic keys just like Adam Wheeler. The only public knowledge we have comes from independent researchers who found the word “Cherokee” in the marriage license of her great-great-great-grandmother.

Is this resume padding? Is this like what Adam Wheeler did? What a clever scamp.

I can’t say I get the connection. Maybe I can just say that the students have learned how to get attention. The prices seem laughable compared to US tuition but I think they’re smart for putting the pressure on as soon as possible. For more, read the AFP reporting.

The University of Texas announced firmer plans of how one can get a bachelor’s degree for just $10k. Whoo hoo!