The Five-Year Party Read Online Free PDF Page B

admission procedures. Administrators allowed students with the right political connections to obtain degrees without completing the course work. One study found that salaries for college administrators rose by a third in five years, and that doesn’t include the generous perks that colleges provide for them, including $2 million homes, private jets, and golden parachute retirement packages.
     
    All of this comes as no surprise to the academics who read professional journals such as the Chronicle of Higher Education , which has been publishing articles for more than a decade about dumbed-down classes, low academic standards, inflated grades, illiterate college graduates, the oversupply of graduates, and the antics of college administrators who wanted to emulate the lifestyle of Donald Trump. The mainstream news media doesn’t exactly ignore the problems either. Forbes magazine , the New York Times , BusinessWeek , U.S. News & World Report , and the Christian Science Monitor have all run articles in recent years about what Forbes called “country club campuses.” 3 There is no shortage of stories about skyrocketing tuition increases, the crippling debt and lack of jobs the party school graduates face, high crime rates on college campuses, and drunken parties involving hundreds of students that break out after major sporting events. There are also detailed profiles when a student dies of alcohol poisoning. What the national news media fails to report, however, is how all of these seemingly different kinds of college problem stories are really parts of one big story: colleges have been redesigned for partying rather than studying. And parents and taxpayers, the people who pick up the tab for the five-year party, never question the value of higher education, even when the price increases at three times the inflation rate.
     
    In the following chapters, I’ll explain how so many American colleges turned themselves into party schools and describe what goes on there from the point of view of an insider. I’ll take you behind the scenes to show you how little education takes place in party school classrooms, how infrequently students study, and how their demand for dumbed-down classes and high grades has led to colleges where education has become optional. I’ll also take you on a tour of college campuses showing you the dangerous levels of crime, including assault, rape, and arson, and how perpetrators are leniently prosecuted in the colleges’ own secret court system. I’ll explain how the dominant cult of alcohol consumption creates the last place in America where public intoxication is not only accepted but treated as normal behavior. I’ll describe the steps that college public relations offices take to hide what really goes on there from the public, the press, and parents.
     
    Finally, I’ll show you how the low achievement levels of graduates and the high cost of party school tuition have financially damaged tens of thousands of party school graduates who are unable to find the highly paid jobs they were promised and are forced to make student loan payments of $400 a month for decades. In the final chapter, I’ll outline the steps that parents and legislators can take to cancel the party school system. It’s essential that we restore the rigor that American colleges need to train the leaders of tomorrow to compete with economic challenges from Asia in the coming decades.
     

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    Maximizing Profits at the Students’ Expense
     
    W hen party school administrators shifted their primary mission from educating students to maximizing profits in the 1990s, it worked because there was something in it for almost everyone. The dramatic increases in tuition turned administrators into powerful wheeler-dealers, academic Donald Trumps, who could design and construct multi-million-dollar campus buildings and increase their salaries. For faculty, the new dumbed-down classes and relaxed grading meant they no longer had to