The Five-Year Party Read Online Free PDF

administrators who had been so lenient and understanding about all kinds of other offenses became angry bill collectors, debt collectors who threatened termination if students failed to cough up the cash.
     
    While the old school college administrators evaluated themselves on how successful their students became after graduation, party school administrators have become obsessed with a single number on the student’s record: the bottom line. How much income does this student generate for us? They multiply the number of students at the college by the annual tuition rate times the number of years it takes them to graduate. This bottom line number could be improved by crowding in more students, raising the tuition rate, or keeping students in the system for more years. It should come as no surprise then that party school administrators have concentrated on raising all three of those numbers.
     
    This may seem strange because most colleges are non-profit organizations and therefore unable to generate a true profit, but money is still power, no matter how you acquire it. Colleges with excess funds could give their administrators big pay raises, hire more administrators to lighten the load with many hands, and pay for non-stop construction projects designed to attract even more students. It was the winner-take-all strategy taught at business schools. More students—that is, more customers—meant more profit, which would enable the college to build more dormitories and dining halls to accommodate even more customers in a never-ending spiral of expansion. At the same time, excess revenue allowed party schools to add the kinds of expensive frills—like water parks and climbing walls, in some places—that they knew students were looking for.
     
    Party schools call this competition to attract students the “arms race,” where they rush to add the latest student-friendly frills to smash the competition in the same way that rival software companies seek the “killer app” that brings customers clamoring to their doors. Today, college promotional booklets referred to as “view books” are full of photos of students partying, students playing sports, students eating and playing in their dorm rooms. They resemble in many ways the brochures for luxury resorts or cruises. What’s missing from them are photos of students in class, students reading books, or students studying. To even a casual observer of these materials, it’s clear that the main attraction of a college education is no longer education. It’s a five- or six-year cruise on the S.S. Party Barge and party schools do their best to deliver what they are advertising.
     
    At the other end of the college process, party schools have flooded the job market with tens of thousands of semi-literate, unemployable graduates who aren’t able to follow simple instructions. Even before the current recession, studies showed there were millions of graduates who weren’t able to find suitable work and were forced to take positions as temporary office workers, clerks, pizza deliverers, and cab drivers. To make matters worse, these unemployable party school alumni were strapped with tens of thousands of dollars in college loans with payments averaging $400 a month. Many of these party school alumni now view their party school education as a kind of scam, promising them high-paying jobs but leaving them drowning in debt.
     
    Meanwhile, party school administrators, following in the footsteps of the industry tycoons they seek to emulate, have increasingly been discovered with their hands in the cookie jar. College administrators have taken kickbacks from student loan companies for directing student business their way and sold the names and addresses of students to credit card companies to be targeted for marketing. Administrators were also found to have cozy relationships with the rich and powerful. “Clout lists” permitted the children of the well-connected to bypass the regular