This is the third in a series begun in Fall of this year. Parts one and two dealt with the way hate and indifference (respectively) came to occupy the top two spots on my “fuckit-list”. Since September, there’s been radio silence, not because I’ve anything less to be pissed about--more because I’ve been preoccupied with my new job as an adjunct professor of English composition at a community college-like institution of “higher learning.”
The day before Thanksgiving, I found out I no longer have that job. The decision is apparently part of an anti-union-organization effort my employers assume I’m involved in. I’m not. Not officially. I support the effort, but have not signed on as an employee.
Because losing my job is not what pisses me off. There aren’t a lot of folks with my academic credentials looking for adjunct jobs on the community college market—or maybe there are—at any rate, I’ve already got a new one: it’s not my ass on the line here. It really isn’t. It’s ours. All of ours. Above all, it’s the collective asses of the low-income, largely minority students who are supposedly being served by this school (and others like it). And yes, that is what pisses me off. They're being "served" alright!
I’m still trying to wrap my head around the whole thing...starting with the expansion of my vocabulary that’s gone hand-in-hand with this new position. I’d heard of "diploma mills," but never of a “dropout factory” before.
In 2007, USA Today ran a report on the phenomenon:
It's a nickname no principal could be proud of: "Dropout Factory," a high school where no more than 60% of the students who start as freshmen make it to their senior year. That dubious distinction applies to more than one in 10 high schools across America.
In late November of this year, Huffington Post reported on a new study by America’s Promise Alliance offering signs of hope:
The number of dropout factories – where fewer than 60 percent of students who started as freshmen remain enrolled four years later – fell nationally from 2,007 in 2002 to 1,746 in 2008, the most recent data available. At the same time, the nation's graduation rate rose from 72 to 75 percent between 2001 and 2008, with more than half of states increasing their graduation rates.
Hope? Yeah, we know how that goes, don’t we?
Until recently, the term has been reserved for use with regard to high schools, not colleges. But a report in Washington Monthly—which appeared just as the scope of the problem was starting to dawn on me, confronted as I was with two classes of college freshman who couldn’t handle such basic vocabulary as “bigot,” “ensue,” “debacle,” “chasm,” “flourish,” “pundit,” “barter,” “telltale,” and “dismal,” and who were challenged by grammar exercises I was pulling from fourth-grade textbooks—applied the term to describe College Dropout Factories:
Nationwide, low-income minority students are disproportionately steered toward colleges not where they’re most likely to succeed, but where they’re most likely to fail.
I found my school on Washington Monthly’s rankings of college dropout factories, with a graduation rate of under 10%. (Interestingly, college-level dropout factories' graduation rates are far lower than high schools' which, by definition are below 60. All of the 50 schools on Washington Monthly's list had rates less than 20%. Abysmal, innit?).
OK, so I’ve been off the college circuit and out of the academic loop for a while, working instead for a non-profit in the arts education sector, and mostly at the elementary school level: ironically, about five years ago, while working as visiting assistant professor of foreign languages at a legitimate state university, I was so dismayed by the caliber of students enrolled in my classes that I said to myself, “Hey, if you want to fix this problem, you’ve got to start getting them in the 6th grade, if not sooner.” I packed in my PhD and (ivy league) publications list to head back to grammar school.
The college dropout factories employ deceptive marketing strategies to lure anyone who is eligible for federal financial aid and subsidized loans into taking on mountains of debt for an "education" that will not likely secure any sort of career advancement. 30-year old Melissa Dalmier’s story, covered by ABC News is typical:
The mother of three had big dreams to be an elementary school teacher, so when she saw ads for the University of Phoenix pop-up on her computer, she e-mailed them for more information. A few minutes later, Dalmier said she got a call from one of the school's recruiters, who she said told her that enrolling in the associate's degree in education program at the University of Phoenix would put her on the fast-track to reaching her dream.
"[The recruiter said] they had an agreement with Illinois State Board of Education and that as soon as I finished their program I'd be ready to start working," she recalled.
Within 15 minutes, Dalmier was enrolled. Since she didn't have enough money to pay for tuition, she said the recruiter helped her get federal student aid. In total, she took out about $8,000 in federally-guaranteed student loans.
But just a few months after Dalmier started, she said she learned the horrible truth: the degree program she was enrolled in would not qualify her to become a public school teacher upon graduation in Illinois.
In August, ABC News investigated Remington College in Houston. Criminal Justice professor Larry Stewart was shocked to find convicted felons in his classes at the for-profit school:
My very first class, I had a husband and wife who, he had done 13 years at the Texas Department of Corrections for a home invasion, robbery," he said. "And his wife had done three years for trafficking drugs across state lines.
Larry Stewart’s story was starting to sound verrrrrrrrrrrrrry familiar:
”They're more concerned about the bottom line. What is the bottom figure on this student," he said. "They look at, 'How much money did we make this term or this quarter?
As one of my colleagues recently stated, the only requirement for admission at this school is that the candidate be eligible for financial aid.
Let’s be clear: I’ve been working with inner city youth of all ages for over 15 years. I wasn’t expecting Harvard/Princeton/Yale-level diction and syntax. I wasn’t expecting them to know words like “excoriate,” “vicissitudes” or “propitiate”; I figured I’d be teaching subject-verb agreement, pronoun-antecedent reference, verb tenses and parallel structure along with the five-paragraph essay. I went into it knowing the academic challenge, and ready to meet it. My husband calls me a “cradle to college language turn-around artist” and I know that I’m damn good at what I do—I thought it was just what the school needed. And it is—but it’s not what the school wants.
During my intake interview, I was told that students enrolled in my classes who obviously did not have the basic language skills to succeed in the course would be placed in more remedial classes. After reading my students' first writing assignment, I contacted the department chair to inform him that there were at least three students in my classes who did not have those basic skills (two of them non-native speakers, immigrants from far eastern countries who obviously did not speak enough English to understand the instructions I was giving about classroom logistics; the third was an African American male who’d come through the public school system in this country). I was told it was “sink or swim” for these students: they either managed to pass the class, or they didn’t. I later learned that the third student—let’s call him MJ--was currently in his third year as a freshman at the institution. That’s right: he is repeating his freshman year for the third time, and for each year, he has taken out student loans to pay for the privilege of failing. Still, he does not have the basic language skills needed to write one coherent sentence, much less a two-page paper. Mid-semester, he came to me, explaining that the reason he had been absent for the past two weeks was that he’d been incarcerated for selling crack cocaine. He's not a crackhead; he's a crack dealer--not because he's a bad person, and not because he's stupid (he's not: he had one of the highest reading comprehension levels in the class): he's hovering on the brink of homelessness and doesn't know how the hell else to keep himself afloat. Sink or swim? Yeah, this guy's about to sink: and the best his "university" can do to help is ask him to take out yet another loan?
At the adjunct orientation, we were told the school has “success counselors” to provide assistance in cases like this. At this juncture, though, I realized the success counseling was as much of a farce as the rest: they didn’t want this kid to pass. He was a cash cow, and the more tuition they could milk out of him, the better. Who cares if the kid’s doing time when he’s supposed to be in class? I tried to give him my “look kid, I know it’s tough speech, but you can do it—and really, unlike most of your professors, I do know how tough it is--I’ve done time (as a juvenile). I was a ward of the state. I went through the “system”. My mother was on welfare. She had an 8th-grade education. But I know you are smart, and I know you can do this.”....Sadly, though, I knew I did not have the resources to give him the kind of help he needed. I directed him to the “success counselor,” and sent an email to his advisor, expressing my concerns. I never got a response, and the kid never showed up again.
I suppose I should be relieved. MJ’s not the only student in my classes who’s got trouble with the law: three others excused their prolonged absence from class by saying they’d been in jail. Yet another was afraid to come to school because there was a warrant out for his arrest. Sure, I live and work in the “hood” and do so by choice, not necessity, so I run into crack dealers and gangbangers every day. I'm "native" to the "hood." It's where I grew up. But, like most of my colleagues and neighbors, I do my best to keep the criminal elements at bay. I’ve invested thousands into security systems designed to keep them off my property.
I have a PhD from a state university, an MA from an elite private institution (tuition: approx. $30,000/year), and in fact, am still working to pay off my own student loan debt. I don’t expect to have to deal with crack dealers and gangbangers at my job. I really don’t. I've done thirty years of "hard time" working my way into a position where I should not have to deal with crack dealers in a college classroom--nobody should, at least not without the requisite support systems in place to ensure that the situation does not "go postal". But when they recently hauled off a kid in cuffs because he was holding gang meetings in the library, I’ll admit, I flinched. If this is what I thought I’d been signing up for when I applied for a job as a college English teacher, I’d have gone to the state department of corrections (where I got my own illustrious start as a juvenile!) to look for a job. I am a professor, not a parole officer.
Even at that point in the game, I still wasn’t pissed.Dismayed? To be sure. Shocked? Absolutely. But pissed? Not really. It wasn’t until I went to Guidestar to look up the institution’s 990s. That’s when I learned that the school has nearly $40 million in assets, and takes in $13 million annually, most of it in tuition from student loans taken out by young African American males like MJ who may not even have the wherewithal to understand that these are loans, not grants. If they can’t handle the word “proponent”, I doubt that they know what a “promissory note” is. What if MJ ever manages to turn his life around, just like I did? He's going to be saddled with a mountain of debt that even bankruptcy won't erase.
I went into this ready to roll up my sleeves and get down to the business of teaching these kids what they need to know to succeed in college, and in the business world. After half of my students simply failed to turn in their first assignment, I invited one of the school’s top academic advisors to my classroom while I delivered the following lecture, whose content I had discussed extensively with community educators and parents beforehand:
Failure is not an Option
I believe there are two kinds of people in the world, those for whom
Failure is an option.
and those for whom
Failure is NOT an option.
Please look at those statements and decide which one best suits your attitude toward life, and toward your education. I assume you belong to the second group, or you would not be in this classroom.
But if you do believe “failure is an option,” we can cut to the chase right now. After you have listened to what I have to say, if you still feel that failure is an option—maybe you think it’s your ONLY option--we can submit a grade of “F” to the records department. I won’t have to waste my time filling in zeros on an Excel spreadsheet for the rest of the term, and you won’t have to waste your time coming here in order to fail the course. Failing is easy.
How many of you have heard of Urban Prep Academy, the all Black male high school whose first graduating class had a 100% college acceptance rate? That was a big deal. It got national attention. But this is what Tim King, the director and CEO of Urban Prep, had to say about that:
"Graduating high school is not a big deal. Getting into college is not a big deal. Finishing college -- that's a big deal."--Tim King
The reason you are here is that you want to improve your lives and your options for employment. You are here because you don’t want to spend the rest of your life working at McDonald’s—or worse.
But, as full-time students, you already HAVE a job. And WE—the taxpayers--are your employers: we are the ones subsidizing your education. I’m your professor; but I’m also your employer. You come into this class with an A. In the first two weeks on this job, you went from an A to an F. In today’s economy, most employers would FIRE you and give your job to one of the millions of others waiting in line for that job. That is an F-word you don’t want to hear—ever.
If your employer asks you to go to the company website to print a document that you will need to do your job, and you simply don’t do that, you could lose your job. If you ignore information your boss sends you in an email about an important deadline and you miss that deadline as a result, you will probably lose your job. If your employer asks you to turn in a report by a specific date and time, and you bring it to him three days late, you are more than likely to lose your job.
Getting a job is not a big deal: keeping it is.
For you, email and the internet may seem like playthings—Facebook, Myspace and Yahoo have taught you that the Internet is a place you go to have fun. But in the real world—in the work world—these are tools. Email is the primary means of business communication in the world today. It’s not a toy: it’s a tool. An important one. There is hardly a job in the world today that does not require that you check your email daily and respond to whatever is in your inbox.
“I couldn’t access my campus email” is hogwash. If you can access your Yahoo! account, your gmail account, Facebook and Myspace, then you can access your campus account. And that should be the FIRST thing you check because it is your WORK account. Work first, play later.
One of the most common requirements you will find on almost any job posting today-- on Craigstlist, Monster.com, or ANYWHERE--is:
“Excellent verbal and written communication skills.”
If you don’t have the English language skills to respond to emails your boss or clients send you; if you don’t have the English language skills to communicate with customers, agencies and employers; if you don’t have the English skills needed to even APPLY for a job, you are not going to be competitive on the job market. Without excellent verbal and written communication skills, you are not likely to be able to get a job, much less keep one.
And that is why his class--English Composition–is one of the most important classes you will take: because it is designed to give you the skills you will need not only to succeed at this university, but to succeed in finding employment and keeping it.
I have seen enough of your work—even for those of you who didn’t turn in a paper—to I know that you do NOT have those skills now. You MUST develop the language skills needed to succeed n the business world. That is what this class is all about—but you cannot benefit from this class if you are not HERE, physically and mentally.
As of Thursday, you are failing this course. Your papers are 60% of your grade.
Some of you at least tried. You tried, and you failed. And for you: I can tell you right now that passing this class is going to require supreme effort on your part. You are going to have to work hard to pass this class.
But most of you did not even bother to try. You simply didn’t turn in the assignment. If you didn’t know about the assignment, that means you did not complete the FIRST assignment (get the syllabus, read it, ask if there are questions), and/or you were not paying attention in class (if you were here), and/or you ignored my email reminding you about the assignment. In the work world, this would be more than sufficient grounds for immediate termination.
For those of you who didn’t even bother to try, I have another quote:
“I can accept failure. Everyone fails at something. What I cannot accept is the failure to try.”
That quote comes from Michael Jordan.
But the other point—and this is the main reason I have invited Ms. X to join us today—is that you don’t have to do this alone. If you are struggling with the course requirements, if you have issues—whatever they may be (child care, transportation, family crisis, illness, computer access, etc.)—there are resources here for you and we are here to help. We are here because we are invested in your success.
The problems start when we are more invested in your success than you are. Personally, I have no intention of taking your failure “sitting down.”
As it turns out, this move proved part of my “downfall.” I haven’t yet been officially informed of my termination, but when I asked my boss whether I would be re-assigned the course, he said it wasn’t likely because he thought I had “anger issues”. ;-) Mustering all the indignation of a sleeping cat whose tail’s just been stepped on in the middle of the night, he said “You gave your students a five-page RANT, for god’s sake! If I’d been a student in your classroom, I’d have been completely mystified.”
Could be, for an over-the-hill, ripe for retirement-and-then-some white guy who’s been holed up in a cramped, windowless office in a college dropout factory for the past thirty years, it was mystifying. But, for those students who were sincerely interested in getting a college education, the lecture demystified the process. They understood that my lectures on subject verb agreement and verb tense were hardly academic. This wasn’t about learning how to write a goddamned five-paragraph essay for some decrepit prof who can’t even get the title of the textbook right on the syllabus. It was about developing the language skills needed to survive and succeed in the real world.
OK, so I know it’s just not cool to quote Susan B. Anthony , Michael Jordan and Tim King in the same breath. I mean, really, it’s a stretch. Maybe “failure is not an option” only works for a bunch of white guys in a NASA control room?
Funny thing, here’s what my students said about the class, about my “by any means necessary”-approach to their education and my refusal to take their failure sitting down (in response to the question on a student survey “would you recommend this teacher to others, why or why not?”):
The professor was very successful in explaining the material. She explained it thoroughly and at a pace that everyone could follow. I learned a lot and hope that anyone that has this professor in the future will too.
She understands her craft and is passionate about teaching it.
Made it easier to understand and helped me stop making the common mistakes that everyone makes.
Yes, because she explained everything clearly and always had assignments to help you understand even more.
Because she explains everything well. Thing that I didn’t understand when I was in high school now I understand.
Because she has the knowledge. She explains every topic so well that everyone can understand it.
She is a really well preparated professor. Knows how to explains things well.
She is a good teacher and understand the student problm. I learn a lot from her.
She is a wonderful teacher. She entertains her students, as well as teaches them important materials.
Because, she is nice and very good at teaching.
Because she makes it easy to understand whats being taught.
She’s very humorous and easygoing but at the same time when it comes down to teaching she is very helpful.
She is not all monotone like the others.
Only two of about 40 students answered in the negative, and what they said was (verbatim).
No, because too much.
Class is very difficult and the teacher is more than enough for me.
Yeah, “because too much.” Too much for a student who does not have the English language skills to so much as follow instructions on course logistics, or even to ask for clarification (verbally).
I’ve left their grammar errors in the quotes—understand that this reflects progress. Hey, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and you sure as hell can’t make up for 15 years of mis-education in ten weeks, but unlike most of my colleagues at the school, I don’t blame the students for being where they are. If I had another three or four years with them, I could get them where they need to be linguistically. My classes met at 8 AM, and even those students who had no chance of passing kept attending regularly. I posted my lecture notes and other materials on the student portal—by semester's end, I had over 1,500 hits to the site. The students are hungry for knowledge. They want to learn and strive to succeed. But success has no place in the dropout factory plan.
I don’t know. All I know is that I didn’t have an “anger issue” when I went into this, but I sure as hell do now. Yeah, I am pissed. Not because I got fired. But because these institutions are targeting the most vulnerable population/s in our society, placing them in debt to bankroll their salaries and their 40 million dollar “endowments”—not as private for-profit schools, but as public charities which, in addition to generating millions in federally subsidized student loans, are taking down multi-million dollar state and federal grants . all the while contributing to the creation of a national crisis that some experts predict will dwarf the subprime mortgage debacle. This is what I mean when I say it’s not my ass that’s on the line here: it's ours.
In a report on How For-Profit Schools are Like Subprime MortgagesABC News tells us:
The subprime-mortgage business and for-profit colleges are built on giving loans to people who can't pay them back. Just as the housing boom was fueled by bad mortgages that could be sold to Fannie Mae and private investors, the for-profit education boom relies on students taking on debt that is guaranteed by the federal government even when students have little realistic hope of repaying it. As Eisman showed in an extraordinary presentation for investors, federal aid—mainly loans—is essentially the sole driver of the for-profit education industry.
Because the federal loans that students take out are guaranteed by the government, colleges and lenders don't need to worry about whether they are repaid. The Education Department monitors student-loan default rates for two years after students leave school; for-profit colleges make sure that even students who can't pay fill out deferment or forbearance forms to keep the numbers in line. After that, the former students are on their own, and things get worse fast. Eisman estimates the default rate after three years at Corinthian Colleges, a 105,000-student for-profit school group, at a startling 41 percent.
Just like the subprime crisis, for-profit education is a slow-moving nightmare, eating up more and more incremental education aid dollars year by year.
Just last month, a report released by the DC-based Education Trustoutlined some of the things that provide the impetus for my “anger issues”:
“The developing showdown between for-profit colleges and the government is another example of how the aspirations of the underserved and the unfulfilled promise of the American Dream combine with lax regulation to make the rich, richer and the poor, poorer,” says the report, titled Subprime Opportunity: The Unfulfilled Promise of For-Profit Colleges and Universities.
“The problem is not the ‘for-profit’ nature of for-profit colleges,” the report states. “Rather, the problem is that their (financial) returns are a function of sustained failure, rather than student success.
Low-income students and students of color are getting access, but not much success,” the report states. “And access without success—without graduation, without employment—is something the nation cannot afford.”
Remember, the focus of these media and investigative efforts is on for-profit institutions:
The report shows only 11 percent of students at four-year for-profit schools as graduating within six years versus 31 percent and 36 percent at such public and private nonprofit institutions. Similar breakdowns occur between for-profit and public or private nonprofits that are more restrictive in terms of admission. For-profit schools typically admit all of the students that apply to respective institutions.
But the dropout factory that was willing to pay me not to teach and threw me out when I had the audacity to teach for success rather than failure is a registered non-profit. A public charity. With approx. 40 million in assets, and a 10% graduation rate. A school that is apparently invested in helping low-income, minority students get the message: failure is your only option. We're banking on it.
Looks to me like the new niche: running a not-for-profit according to the same principles as the for-profits, using 501c3 status as a convenient cover to keep the wolves away from the door, to keep the cash cows in and the press cameras out.
Beyond the economic crisis this portends, there's a political crisis of unprecedented proportion. What became increasingly apparent as this nightmare unfolded was that these students--mostly twenty-somethings--did not have the basic vocabulary to understand the ABC News or any other broadcast or print sources. They simply did not. A colleague and I were discussing this aspect of the crisis and he said, about the "daily news"--"it might as well be in Swahili." Think about that in political terms: we wonder why we "can't get anything done"? Could it be because many of the people who voted Obama into office are essentially illiterate? They voted for an image because that's as much as they can comprehend. Do they even know what a "tax cut" is? Based on what I've seen in the college classroom, probably not. And this part of the problem is not restricted to the "low-income, minority" students targeted by the college dropout-factory scam. I have spoken with colleagues throughout the country who work in other settings. The problem is the same. We have an entire generation of young people whose vocabulary and language skills prevent them from understanding what is going on around them. In essence, they are functionally illiterate. And we wonder why the Sarah Palins and Glenn Becks of the world get so much attention? It's the vocabulary, stupid.
Can you say "Houston, we've got a problem?"