For Profit Colleges

As someone who daylights at a "genuine" university and teaches online at a for-profit university on the side, this general discussion on Dick Durbin's attack on For-Profit universities really interested me.

The for-profit pays me mad money, yo, and asks very little in return. No thinking, no research, no real teaching. No need for days off when some days require a 10 minute email check and nothing else. All I do is hold their students' hands. I email students if they haven't logged on the website for a few days. I praise their shameful attempts at writing. I am upbeat and use lots of exclamation points and help them pretend that they are playing grown-up and getting a full education that will lead to a crazy good career.

But Online University BLOWS. It uses Wikipedia as a textbook. They are all about "equal access" and spurn the use of a textbook or any peer-reviewed source. Instead of creating assignments about the material that encourage critical thinking, they hold discussion forums about student "feelings" on basket weaving. And they charge $2000 for this Wikipedia-based, feeling-oriented, 6-week course.

I get truly hilarious emails from my students -- hilarious, but also really heart-breaking. These people think they are getting an education. One student recently emailed me about how he plans on taking his BA in Basket Weaving and hopes to become a tenured Basket Weaving Prof at Genuine State University. I tried to tell him about the 12 years of training that goes into getting a usable PhD in Basket Weaving. I tried to explain, without selling Online U short, that he would not be able to use an unaccredited degree to go down that path. But he was cheery and stupid in his response: "Thax for your advise, it's stuf like this that makes me look forward to years of talking [basket weaving]."

Oh, Opie, you poor poor schmuck. What are they doing to you?

And how unethical am I? My 6-hours-per-week online job pays me THREE TIMES what my 3-days-per week, 5-hours-prep meatspace teaching job pays me. I could not do the "real" teaching if I didn't participate in the highly exploitative, for-profit "education."

I'm getting kinda sick of using quotes here.

Studies show that online students retain their information much more effectively than students who listen through lectures. That might be a whole different issue here -- the problem of taking notes / surfing facebook while sitting in class -- but those studies rather ignore the online courses that focus on WikiAnswers and feelings rather than the nuts and bolts of Basket Weaving.

Maybe Opie will get some friends and they will rise up to support Dick Durbin's attempts to regulate this sham of a university system. Or maybe such an attack on freedom will be decried by the Tea Party, and for profit universities will prevail!

From the annals of sophomore social science

I'm not teaching at the moment, but CM seems a bit slow, so I went through some of my old emails from and to students looking for something fun. I particularly liked the email below (lightly edited), written to students who had turned in their preliminary source list for a project:

Dear Halfway Clueless Group.

I just looked over your sources. The ones by Onyx, Diamond, and Ruby look good, but I have some concerns about the others. The article by Rhinestone is not about your project topic. Also, rather than using Acrylic's article about a scientist's research, it would better to read the research yourself. If you do a simple search in the database we discussed in class, you should be able to find the original article. My final concern is about the post from the New Age woo site. The "law of attraction" is not a scientific law and is not related your project topic. I highly recommend not using it in your presentation or paper.

Yours,
Arrogant

I hope that this exercise was in the end somewhat helpful in teaching the students about identifying scholarly resources, but, even if it wasn't, it certainly saved me from some awful presentations.