At America’s universities, status is for sale

WHEN WILLIAM “RICK” Singer was charged for using bribery and false information to get kids from wealthy families into school, few Americans were surprised to learn that some parents would do anything to get their kids a Yale or Stanford degree. What did surprise many people was that the scandal also involved traditionally second-tier schools like the University of Southern California and Wake Forest.

How did we get here? I would argue that this toxic situation was created, in part, by two major forces introduced in the 1980s: federal funding cuts, initiated under Ronald Reagan, and the 1983 launch of the US News & World Report college rankings.

The Reagan-era cuts were sizeable. By 1989, the federal share of education funding had dropped from 12 to 6 percent; further state cuts to higher education followed. Strapped for cash and faced with a declining student population, colleges and universities found themselves in a race to attract applicants.

Around the same time, in 1983, U.S. News & World Report launched its college rankings, which, for the first time, solidified a set of standards by which all of America’s institutions — from commuter schools like Northeastern to nationally renowned universities like Stanford — would now be judged. Some of the metrics used to determine rankings directly addressed educational quality, but other metrics seemed more tangential to the actual task of teaching and learning.

When federal aid evaporated, tuition costs escalated, forcing parents and students to justify the out-of-pocket expense of a degree. So they turned to the college rankings. “[Applicants] said, ‘Hmm, if I’m going to be spending this much money, I hope my degree is worth something, not just in the skills, but in brand value,’” says Steve Cohen, the coauthor of the 1983 book “Getting In!,” about college admissions.

In a short time, college applicants became brand shoppers. “Suddenly people had a much better idea of what other colleges existed out there and where they fell in the pecking order,” says Jeff Selingo, an authority who writes about higher education.

America’s institutions, which needed students’ dollars more than ever, were forced to appeal to this new kind of shopper. To attract wealthier and higher-achieving applicants, schools began to sink big money into aggressive marketing tactics, campus amenities, and pedigreed faculty. (Many schools were “recruiting top-notch college professors in much the same way professional sports teams lure star athletes,” reported The Washington Post at the time.)

Between 1995 and 2006, annual spending on college construction grew from $6.1 billion to $15.1 billion, according to College Planning & Management, an industry publication. As in the business world, the actual workers in higher education — primarily, adjunct professors — found their compensation inadequate while the number of highly paid college administrators, the executives, proliferated.

In the years that followed, schools that couldn’t play the rankings game fell down the list. Meanwhile, the exorbitant cost of enhancing an institution’s prestige was transferred onto students in the form of higher tuition. Americans’ educational debt now stands at $1.5 trillion.

In the 1990s, Northeastern was still a regional school, its campus mostly parking lots to accommodate its large commuter population. And it ranked 162nd. Reeling from shrinking enrollment and an economic recession, Northeastern’s president, Jack Curry, cut class size and 875 jobs. He sensed that the school’s time was up. “If we didn’t change,” Curry told me in 2014 while I was reporting a story for Boston magazine, “I don’t think we would have survived,”

“It was a traumatic time,” Bob Culver, a former Northeastern senior vice president and treasurer told me back then. “[Northeastern] was an institution that was physically and financially in need of attention at a time when all the sudden the market moved away from it.”

In 1996, Curry’s successor, Richard Freeland, saw the college rankings as an opportunity. Freeland had watched higher-ranked schools attract better students and bigger donations from alumni. He placed his bets: “There’s no question that the system invites gaming,” Freeland told me in 2014. “We made a systematic effort to influence [the outcome].”

Even as it published its methodology, exactly how U.S. News calculated its rankings was a closely guarded secret, and today the formula continues to be tweaked to reflect changing priorities. But like Google and Facebook algorithms, the formula can be inferred.

So Freeland had researchers reverse-engineer the rankings and calculate which U.S. News criteria he could manipulate, such as class size and graduation rate, to rise in the rankings. Freeland was so determined to advance that he even visited the U.S. News offices in Washington, D.C., to further divine the mysteries of the methodology with rankings guru Bob Morse. He also had a mission: to influence one metric. Due to Northeastern’s co-op program, most students were graduating in at least five years, rather than the traditional four, which counted against the school’s ranking, until Freeland appealed to the media company to reconsider the metric.

To improve graduation and retention rates, the school invested heavily in campus infrastructure, resulting in the construction of a seven-building complex, at the cost of approximately $1 billion. (Residential students are less likely to drop out than commuter students.)

On business trips, Freeland schmoozed with colleagues at other ranked institutions to influence the peer assessment portion of the U.S. News methodology.

Freeland’s plan for Northeastern paid off. When he retired in 2006, the school had moved up to number 98. Boston Business Journal called the climb “one of the most dramatic since U.S. News began ranking schools.” In turn, the one-time commuter school began attracting significantly more applicants from further afield, which Freeland attributed to its new reputation. “All those kids out in California don’t know a damn thing about Northeastern, but they know it’s rising in the rankings,” he told me.

PERHAPS MORE TROUBLING is the fact that many of the U.S. News metrics can be gamed. Selectivity, for example, offers a quick way to understand a school’s desirability and prestige, which is why virtually all institutions play some version of the admissions rate game. The goal is to encourage ever greater numbers of students to try their luck, which grows a school’s applicant pool and drives down its admissions rate. As a result, schools have watched their selectivity increase year after year. Stanford now admits 4.4 percent; Princeton: 5.5 percent; Williams: 12.2 percent. This year, Northeastern accepted 19.3 percent, according to the university.

Average test scores and GPAs of incoming freshmen, another important ranking metric, can also be gamed. Like other schools, Northeastern has found ways to work around these numbers, particularly standardized test scores, which constitute 7.75 percent of the ranking. Since President Joseph Aoun took over in 2006, the percentage of students from international schools attending Northeastern has quadrupled to 20 percent of the student body. (This high percentage of foreign students is not uncommon at American universities today; because they pay their own way, they’re very desirable.) When applying, these students are explicitly instructed by Northeastern not to submit their SAT and ACT data. (Both Boston University and NYU are test-optional for these students.)

U.S. News penalizes schools that fail to submit all scores they receive from students, but if the school in question doesn’t collect this information, it has nothing to report. Based on Northeastern’s percentage of students coming from international schools, at least one-fifth of undergraduate scores weren’t factored into the official average reported to U.S. News.

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Muslim teacher at top London High School can't read or write

Struggling to read and write was not enough to stop a teacher getting a job at a top secondary school.

Faisal Ahmed was given the green light by elite teacher training program TeachFirst despite having 'extreme difficulty with handwriting', problems with reading and understanding 'written tests'.

Just days into his new job at St Thomas More Catholic school in leafy Wood Green, north London, he was summoned by the headmaster and suspended, reported The Sun.

Mr Ahmed suffers from dyspraxia, a condition that affects co-ordination, and he told the headmaster Mark Rowland that he was unable to write for 'more than a couple of minutes' as his condition caused him too much pain.

TeachFirst recruits top graduates who are parachuted into schools while they study for a teaching qualification, with the organisation receiving millions in funding.

The scandal emerged when Mr Ahmed, who is in his 30s, sued the school for constructive dismissal and disability discrimination after he quit in anger.

Papers obtained by the Sun showed that Mr Ahmed lost his legal battle and subsequent appeal over the 2016 scandal, with the London Central Employment and Tribunal throwing out his claims last month.

Ex-City worker Mr Ahmed was going to teach vital GCSE and A-Level lessons to teenagers.

TeachFirst admitted that they did not inform the school of Mr Ahmed's condition.

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Australian academics are heading down the Communist road

MAURICE NEWMAN

With Anzac Day near, self-loathing academics are back. Anything that undermines our national pride, besmirches our military achievements and questions our values will be prosecuted.

Rewriting Australia’s proud military record is important to revisionists. They want us to see brave, selfless service as being nothing more than the projection of white supremacy.

Murdoch University history lecturer Dean Aszkielowicz is the latest to demonstrate contempt for our national heritage. He mocks a section of the Australian War Memorial website that states “Australians continue­ to invoke the Anzac spirit, including the concept of egalitarianism, a sardonic sense of humour and a contempt for danger, in times of hardship”.

Aszkielowicz tells his students that “very few things the Aust­ralian War Memorial claims on its website about Anzac Day are true”.

How is it that only 74 years after the end of World War II, a young academic, filled with resentment and lack of appreciation for the world he has inherited, could be so ignorant of its values and have such disdain for the bravery of those who saved this country from tyranny?

Yet he and many of his academic cohort share this obsession to rewrite history and deny the real­ity that distant wars fought to preserve freedom also helped shape our national identity.

Murdoch University defends Aszkielowicz, saying “students are encouraged to draw on arguments and views from across the political and ­ academic spectrum”. “In the context of these lectures­, our academics provided ­informed but challenging comment respectfully — this is academic freedom in action,” it says.

Academic freedom? At so many universities these words have assumed Orwellian qualities. Today, freedom in the classroom and on the campus means conformity and alignment with the approved dogma. Refusal to toe the line can mean exclusion, expulsion and failure for students.

Take Bjorn Lomborg’s attempts to establish the Australian Consensus Centre, along with a $4 million endowment, at the University of Western Australia. He was rejected because, as UWA student guild president Lizzy O’Shea observed: “Many believe his (Dr Lomborg’s) ‘research’ downplays the effects of climate change and calls for inaction.” At least three other universities agreed and also turned him down.

Heretical teaching clearly has its limits. Those limits terminated the careers of Peter Ridd and Bob Carter, each having served for 30 years at James Cook University. Both differed with their colleagues over climate change, with Ridd criticising his colleagues’ “deficient” and “misleading” environmental research. He also called into question claims the Great Barrier Reef was being wrecked by global warming.

This was heresy on a grand scale and, rather than investigate his claims, the university simply fired him. It seems at JCU some academics have more freedom than others.

This politicisation of our universities also can be seen in the number of rejections experienced by the Ramsay Centre, which is seeking to establish liberal arts courses leading to a Western civilisation degree.

The centre offers a handsome endowment and numerous scholarships, but University of Queensland antagonists reflect the general academic view the courses are “trying to undermine critical analyses of ‘the West’ in favour of an anti-intellectual celebration of Western civilisation, something which is impossible to defend in a modern university”. In other words, we won’t have the virtues of Western civilisation taught at our “modern” universities.

This is now a pattern. Students at the University of NSW are told James Cook was an invader rather than a discoverer.

The rewritten history of governor Arthur Phillip portrays him as genocidal, notwithstanding his demands Aborigines be well treated. He abolished slavery 20 years before Britain. Yet better to depict him as a white supremacist than someone doing his best with what he had.

Likewise, governor Lachlan Macquarie must be remembered for his tit-for-tat violence towards Aborigines than his role in the social, economic and architectural development of the colony.

There is a growing movement to have the statues of all three removed and their names erased from public places.

Winston Churchill understood “a nation that forgets its past has no future”. French histor­ian Ernest Renan said “forgetting … is a crucial factor in the creation of the nation”.

Louisa Lim, author of The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited, writes: “National amnesia has become what Chinese writer Yan Lianke calls a ‘state-sponsored sport’. And as Beijing’s global influence rises, its controlling instincts — to tame, corral, shape, prune, expurgate history and historical memory — are increasingly exported. At home, Beijing’s tightening grip on history designs not only what can be remembered but also the manner in which it can be marked.”

China’s latest official version of history has the force of law. It venerates Chinese patriotism and military sacrifices. As well as uniting the country behind common beliefs, Beijing will conveniently use this history to press territorial claims over the entire South China Sea.

In Australia, we have yet to hear the vision splendid our universities and academics, such as Aszkielowicz, envisage will arise from the ashes of our best-forgotten past. Perhaps, like the Chinese, it is a socialist utopia where censorship, not academic freedom, is clinically enforced and where complying academics can win an exalted place in history.

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