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By Professor Doom      Hey, it�s no secret we�ve got a serious problem in higher education right now. Our kids, trained from birth that they should go to college after high school, are doing their supposed duty by going to college�and getting destroyed. Many of them leave higher education with lives crushed by debt, and gaining nothing from their 4 to 6 years of higher �education� that will help with that debt. Teaching kids they must go to college once they hit 18 is about as abusive as teaching them they should jump into a volcano at that age.      The Mises Institute usually focuses on theoretical Libertarian ideology or Austrian economics, but recently they posted an article on higher education: Four Reasons Why College Degrees Are Becoming Useless      It�s a good enough piece, but it repeatedly neglects an important concept: why . So, let�s hit the reasons and fill in the missing details. 1.      Gradu...

By Professor Doom      In the Communist takeovers of the 20 th century, the shapers of public opinion were targeted for either control or elimination. This is understandable, as socialist ideas generally can�t stand up to any intelligent challenge�getting rid of people with an opposing point of view, particularly those who can express that view to the public, is thus a necessary part of any transition to completely centralized state power.       There are three major categories of the public: children, young adults, and adults. The last election showed that the control of the public schools/higher education/media (the main ways to influence the public as children/young adults/adults) was simply not complete enough to allow a candidate dedicated to the all-powerful state to simply walk into office. So�the control is not yet complete in at least one of those categories. Changes need to be made!        I guess ...

By Professor Doom      One of the best kept secrets of �higher ed� is how much of it is repetition of high school, or lower. It�s particularly bad at what are called (or used to be called) community colleges, institutions taxpayers were suckered into paying for in exchange for their kids being �taught� the same subjects taxpayers paid for their kids to be taught in the public schools.      It�s a massive fraud, and I�ve shown in this blog that most schools have around 90% of their coursework at the high school level or lower, often much lower . It�s well known these courses are frauds, just as it�s well known that over 90% of the students in such courses get nothing out of them but debt and wasted years of their lives.      For the most part, the states don�t really care about the huge fraud they�re inflicting upon their citizens (it�s not like their citizens can do anything about it), but Florida decided to address the fraud...

By Professor Doom Admin, 1996:   �If you do not get your retention up to 85%, your contract will not be renewed.� --why I had to leave a certain state university. �Retention� is the percent of students that do not drop the course and do not fail. On this particular campus of 50,000+ students, fraud was so rampant that some 20% of the names on the roster never actually came to class. If you wanted to remain faculty, you had little choice but to pass students who you never even saw, much less never did any work or took any test demonstrating they knew anything.      I�ve focused so much on the politics infecting our campuses that it�s been a while since I�ve discussed how our campuses became overwhelmed with students who have no business being on campus. How did it happen?       Admin worked to trap them on campus. Keeping a fake student on campus is called �retention,� and, as always, it started innocuously enough. Simpler courses, c...

By Professor Doom      For decades, there�s been a constant push to bring coursework online. From an administrative point of view, online courses are wonderful: almost no overhead, a worldwide market, and possibly infinite class size. The big expense is you need an educator to run (note: I don�t use the word �teach�) the course, but you can use most anyone for that, so that�s cheaper than a traditional class, too.      I brought one of the first courses online in the prior millennium (I apologize), but at the time I explained to admin that in order for an online course to be successful, you�d need to restrict the market. For a student to succeed in an online course, he needs to be willing to read the book and study on his own, putting at least the amount of time into the course that he would spend going to classes. So, you only wanted students who studied to be in online courses.      (Yes, I know, there was a time when study w...