The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
    cmaukonen's picture

    Hurry Hurry Hurry...Get you red hot degrees here ! Guaranteed to make you rich !

    By cmaukonen on Mon, 11/15/2010 - 11:47pm |

    One of the people in chat posted this link from Chronicle of Higher Education.  It is very telling but hardly surprising. The cheating that goes on in Colleges and Univeristies especially the Ivy Leagues and the rich kids that attend them.

    The request came in by e-mail around 2 in the afternoon. It was from a previous customer, and she had urgent business. I quote her message here verbatim (if I had to put up with it, so should you): "You did me business ethics propsal for me I need propsal got approved pls can you will write me paper?"

    I've gotten pretty good at interpreting this kind of correspondence. The client had attached a document from her professor with details about the paper. She needed the first section in a week. Seventy-five pages.

    I told her no problem.

    It truly was no problem. In the past year, I've written roughly 5,000 pages of scholarly literature, most on very tight deadlines. But you won't find my name on a single paper.

    I've written toward a master's degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I've worked on bachelor's degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I've written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I've attended three dozen online universities. I've completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else.

    You've never heard of me, but there's a good chance that you've read some of my work. I'm a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can't detect, that you can't defend against, that you may not even know exists.

    I work at an online company that generates tens of thousands of dollars a month by creating original essays based on specific instructions provided by cheating students. I've worked there full time since 2004. On any day of the academic year, I am working on upward of 20 assignments.

    .....................

    From my experience, three demographic groups seek out my services: the English-as-second-language student; the hopelessly deficient student; and the lazy rich kid.

    For the last, colleges are a perfect launching ground—they are built to reward the rich and to forgive them their laziness. Let's be honest: The successful among us are not always the best and the brightest, and certainly not the most ethical. My favorite customers are those with an unlimited supply of money and no shortage of instructions on how they would like to see their work executed. While the deficient student will generally not know how to ask for what he wants until he doesn't get it, the lazy rich student will know exactly what he wants. He is poised for a life of paying others and telling them what to do. Indeed, he is acquiring all the skills he needs to stay on top.

    As for the first two types of students—the ESL and the hopelessly deficient—colleges are utterly failing them. Students who come to American universities from other countries find that their efforts to learn a new language are confounded not only by cultural difficulties but also by the pressures of grading. The focus on evaluation rather than education means that those who haven't mastered English must do so quickly or suffer the consequences. My service provides a particularly quick way to "master" English. And those who are hopelessly deficient—a euphemism, I admit—struggle with communication in general.

    Kind of makes you think...at least I hope you can think. How many of those in Congress have used the services of such people ? McConnell, Boehner,  Cantor, Ben Nelson ?? Others ? And how many managers and business and financial executives ? How many of the tea party members ? The truth is that education..especially higher education has been sold as the entry to the club of the American Dream. The price you pay for the big bucks and nothing more. So how you get this ticket is becoming less and less important.  Our education system is churning out idiots with degrees.

     

     



    Comments

    Sad, but not surprising.  I went to college in the fall of 1968.  I was a person who was bored in high school and though I had a high IQ, had just gotten by, graduating something like 181st in a class of about 250. I stunned everyone when I was one of only 15 or so students in my Senior year that earned a Regents Scholarship. I knew stuff, I just found classrooms boring and uninspiring and so I drifted off into my own little world.  College allowed me to similarly get by on my wits rather than solid academic work. Fortunately, I was a theatre major and chose to study acting, so most of the courses didn't require the writing of long papers. I look back on my college years as mostly lessons in Life and learning how to get along with other people.  For me, studying and the desire to learn came long after I left college.  It took me many years to find my passion and the things I wanted to learn.  I mention all this, not to support this kind of activity. But I can understand how people tend to skate through the system, unchallenged and uninspired. This activity, of course, takes it to another level.  Cheating. It's just morally wrong, to say nothing of the real problems it raises when people buy a degree they didn't earn and take credit for knowledge they really don't possess. 

    The internet has, of course, enabled this to become a big business. In earlier times, you had to actually know some local brainiac who would be willing to do this sort of thing on the side to earn a few bucks.  Now it's an industry.

    I think the problem with all this, ethics aside, is that people are no longer learning critical thinking. No longer learning how to analyze problems and figure out solutions.  And Congress is not the only place where we have a problem.  Think how many voters are out there, unable to think for themselves and understand problems and how to analyze and find solutions for them. No wonder Dems got shellacked.

     

     


    by MrSmith1 on Tue, 11/16/2010 - 1:25am

    Smith, 75 percent of Tea party supporters are over the age of 45, which means that they finished their educations long before anyone started selling essays on the internet.


    by Michael Wolraich on Tue, 11/16/2010 - 8:01am

    True that. 


    by MrSmith1 on Tue, 11/16/2010 - 8:05am

    Never said they weren't. But knowledge and intelligence and wisdom seem to be more and more despised by these people possible because they themselves posses little if any of each.


    by cmaukonen on Tue, 11/16/2010 - 9:20am

    Agreed. The dumbing down grows exponentially.


    by MrSmith1 on Tue, 11/16/2010 - 9:23am

    To blame stupidity is to fundamentally misunderstand the way paranoia takes hold of a society. Or rather, once you blame stupidity (or insanity), you've given up on the possiblity of understanding. In fact, the kind of social paranoia that the Tea Parties present has seduced people across the stratum of education, intelligence, income, and pretty much any other simple social-cultural distinction.


    by Michael Wolraich on Tue, 11/16/2010 - 9:51am

    Ah but they go hand in hand. They posses little understanding and knowledge because they choose not to. And they choose not to because to understand and accept knowledge would intrude on their little paranoid world. It's kind of a catch 22.


    by cmaukonen on Tue, 11/16/2010 - 10:56am

    Genghis, I disagree. This has very little, if anything, to do with stupidity. It is laziness and an over-inflated sense of entitlement more than anything else. The people who do this want the rewards of a higher education without the willingness to submit to doing the actual work of learning.  Willful ignorance is more difficult to deal with than plain old stupidity. Stupidity can be ameloriated through education.  A willfully ignorant person remains stubborn in their views and won't even listen to reason.


    by MrSmith1 on Tue, 11/16/2010 - 1:37pm

    I agree with both of you that the apparent "stupidity" is a form of willful self-indulgence and that it has to do with the psychological appeal of the paranoid mythology. So the most interesting question IMO is: What is the psychological appeal of paranoia?


    by Michael Wolraich on Tue, 11/16/2010 - 2:36pm

    It's familiar and there for comfortable and keeps them in control. I have had the pleasure of training a number of people in technical fields with which they were not knowledgeable in and found the biggest problem was not intellect or even their previous education but psychological blocks to the subject matter. Once I got beyond that - no mean trick I can tell you - the rest was fairly easy.

    One thing people really cannot stand is feeling out of control.


    by cmaukonen on Tue, 11/16/2010 - 4:00pm

    Bingo. As someone who runs an online support group for a chronic degenerative disease, one of the problems I see most often with newly diagnosed people is the feeling of being out of control and the fear that it causes in them. It's tough adjusting to the realization that while you can learn to manage a chronic illness, you may never regain total control over it. That fear of being out of control bothers some people so much, they even go so far as to deny they have the disease at all.


    by MrSmith1 on Tue, 11/16/2010 - 4:37pm

    And yet paranoid people imagine that someone else is in control--an evil Jewish billionaire, for example. Why is that a comfortable feeling? It sounds scary.


    by Michael Wolraich on Tue, 11/16/2010 - 4:43pm

    Another facet in the appeal is "order."  The comfort comes. in part, from believing that there is a rhyme and reason to what happens, especially in regards to the bad things that happen.  Beyond that, it shift the responsibility and blame for the negative things from one's self to the larger darker forces at work.  At the same time, it places the individual into a larger "play," that is beyond the mundane one in which they live, a play where the minor players are at least not merely leaves blowing capriciously on the winds. Or as Guildenstern put it:

    Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are...condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one - that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it'll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so. Because if we happened, just happened to discover, or even suspect, that our spontaneity was part of their order, we'd know that we were lost.


    by Elusive Trope on Tue, 11/16/2010 - 5:35pm

    Perhaps because it's easier to be at the effect of something that to be responsible for it.


    by MrSmith1 on Tue, 11/16/2010 - 5:45pm

    Reminds me of the way Christopher Hitchens describes modern notions of religion as a "celestial tyranny" with creepy, panoptical capabilities.  Yet people many people claim to find this idea comforting.  Methinks there be a connection here.


    by DF on Wed, 11/17/2010 - 9:36pm

    Have you ever had someone tell you that they are going to pray for you because you are going to hell since you don't believe as they do (Am I the only one who gets this fairly frequently)?  Why would they need to say this? Because what they believe is just that - a belief.  There is no proof therefore they must demonize anyone who doesn't prop up this unprovable belief in order to feel they are right.  I don't think it is paranoia as much as defending the fort which rests on unstable ground.


    by emerson on Tue, 11/16/2010 - 6:14pm

    It's been rumored that this is how GWB got through Yale.  Wouldn't be surprised.


    by Ramona on Tue, 11/16/2010 - 9:22am

    Ramona, I was just in the process of listening to this Grit tv interview with Chris Hedges about his new book The Death of the Liberal Class.  It may be OT in terms of labels, but the history is interesting; lots I didn't know or connect.  Anyhoo.

    http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/11/chris-hedges-death-of-the-liberal-class.html

    Sorry to interrupt, C.


    by we are stardust on Tue, 11/16/2010 - 11:04am

    I think he took Poly Sci and American Studies--most of which at the time were considered "guts", relative to other departments. (Not to demean better departments at other Universities)


    by Oxy Mora on Tue, 11/16/2010 - 12:28pm

    Since I don't have a degree, and am perhaps, not qualified to judge, I did attend college and (except for the science and math) most of the lectures, etc., were filled with opinionated BS.

    http://www.booktv.org/Program/11850/Higher+Education+How+Colleges+are+Wa...


    by chucktrotter on Tue, 11/16/2010 - 2:44pm

    That article in the Chronicle is appalling, cmaukonen. And cheating is a major problem.

    I am going to quibble with one small point:

    The cheating that goes on in Colleges and Univeristies especially the Ivy Leagues and the rich kids that attend them.


    The paper mill writer does specify that he writes for "lazy rich kids." But he never said Ivy League, let alone say that his customers were especially Ivy Leaguers. The rich kids= Ivy Leaguers equation is easy, and actually wrong. There aren't only rich students at those places. And kids at less prestigious private universities are actually *less* economically diverse.

    The basic deal in American higher education is that private colleges and universities are all priced more or less alike, with an annual price hovering around 50 grand. Public colleges and universities are priced lower, at least for in-state students, but the gap between the public school prices and the private college prices gets narrower every year, as the public prices rise faster than the private ones do. (I've been meaning to blog about this.)

    Two points about this. First, the most prestigious of those private schools are not more expensive than the less prestigious. Princeton and Yale cost about the same as a medium-quality private college, and even about the same as a pretty lame one. All of the colleges and universities in Greater Boston, except UMass/Boston, charge more or less the same tuition, even though Harvard and MIT are world-famous and the rest aren't really. The rich and famous schools don't charge more.

    Second, the rich and famous schools, with more money to spend on financial aid, actually cost less to attend in practice. They can take more poor kids, and help more lower-middle-class kids, then their less elite but equally pricey peers. So not only is the sticker price for Harvard pretty close to the sticker price for Tufts (two subway stops away), but it heavily discounts that sticker price and Tufts can't afford to discount it much at all. 

    When you're running one of those expensive but not rich private universities, you've just got to take more kids whose parents can pay their full boat. So while I wouldn't deny the existence of lazy rich kids in the Ivy Leagues, they're actually everywhere in our private universities, and perversely more common outside the Ivies than inside.


     


    by Doctor Cleveland on Tue, 11/16/2010 - 11:20pm

    If and when you blog on the narrowing price gap between private and public schools would you also address the following point you made above.

    "Princeton and Yale cost about the same as a medium-quality private college, and even about the same as a pretty lame one."

    I understand the name-recognition difference and the value of having a degree from a prestigious school over that of another but is the education actually better? The terms "medium quality" and "pretty lame" jump out to me.  My question comes from a conversation a few years ago which included several recent graduates with Masters degrees. One said that when she went to a very small school she had professors as instructors and they were much better than the instructors she had when she transfered to a major research institution. Another young woman who was in graduate school at Texas Tech, now an M.D, said she strongly agreed. Her statement was that when she went to TCJC [Tarrant County Junior College] she had PHD's for instructors and they were very good. "Now", she said, "students at Tech have me for a teacher."
     No one argued for the greater quality of the teaching at a major university.


    by A Guy Called LULU on Wed, 11/17/2010 - 8:05am

    Lulu, I specifically said private colleges. If you want to have the argument about whether private schools give a better education than public schools, then you'll have to argue with someone besides me, because I'm not arguing anything different. My comment's got nothing to do with Texas Tech, or Tarrant County Junior College, or any of the public universities that I've been involved with myself. It's about the distinction between the famous private schools, the less famous private schools, and the really obscure private schools, all of which charge the same prices. 

    I was trying to stick to prestige questions, but I did slip and disparage the quality of certain institutions, which out of professional courtesy I will not name. But let's say this: among the highly expensive schools out there, there are some that are not only not famous, but deeply deserve not to be famous. Those schools very often provide less education than the local public universities do, but at Ivy League prices. Actually, at higher prices than the Ivy League, because those schools charge full sticker price.

    Every area has a few local private colleges which are very expensive and considered very big deals in that particular area code, and are largely unknown outside it. These schools are most easily identified by people moving to a place for the first time, and encountering the local reverence for a completely unknown school (or, often, the sense that this unknown school is as good, or better, than another local college which really *is* a big deal).

    My private nickname for those schools are "Faber colleges" after the school in Animal House. (Before that I called them "Golden retriever" schools, because they're about breeding and not brains.) These schools charge as much as Yale does, have very very little money for financial aid (to the extent that the need for tuition money undermines the quality of the student body), and run their educational programs on a much lower budget than the famous schools do, in ways that cut into the qualities of facilities and instruction. On the other hand, those schools tend to have nice buildings and very pretty lawns. They put a lot of tuition toward looking like a college, and not so much into actually teaching the students. A good private univeristy spends on an impressive campus *and* invests in its academic program. A good public university skimps on the grounds and spends on its academic program. A lame private university spends its money on the flashy campus, but not on the academic program.

    What Faber colleges sell is not education but social exclusivity: affluent locals consider going there a big deal, and it's a class marker. It helps you make connections in the local area. Now, certainly the Ivy League schools and other excellent private schools are selling social prestige, too, but they do actually offer a good education with it. Going to Princeton looks good, but also is good. Taking classes with a Nobel Prize winner will actually teach you something. Going to State gives you the education without the prestige (although states keep cutting the education budgets at those schools). But a Faber college is too often a second- or third-rate education with first-rate groundskeeping. And yes, I think that is pretty lame.

    (If you want to see someone else point a finger at a Faber college, Rick Bass's story "Cats and Students, Bubbles and Abysses," from his collection The Watch, does name one. Of course, I myself don't know anything about that specific college and have no idea how fair or accurate Bass's narrator is being.)


    by Doctor Cleveland on Wed, 11/17/2010 - 3:31pm

    I'm intrigued by this because we have one daughter about to start looking at colleges. The big school I had never heard of until I got to central PA was Juniata College. Local T-Shirts read, "Harvard - the Juniata of the North" and such. We go there for the area eliminations of the national spelling bee, but I don't know much about it.


    by Donal on Wed, 11/17/2010 - 4:18pm

    I can't say anything about Juniata College. I don't know anything about it.

    You and your daughter can do research into various schools, and if you want some general tips about the college search process, feel free to e-mail me.

    What I would not be swayed by is the local enthusiasm for a school. When a school is an extremely big deal locally, and completely unknown everywhere else, I consider that a warning sign. (Not a final verdict, but a big red flag.)


    by Doctor Cleveland on Wed, 11/17/2010 - 4:30pm

     "If you want to have the argument about whether private schools give a better education than public schools, then you'll have to argue with someone besides me, because I'm not arguing anything different."

     

    Doctor, you seem to have taken offense at my request. I was not picking an argument, I was hoping to get an informed opinion from a teacher regarding an opinion I got from a couple of bright students. I was assuming that the education one could expect to get at a good private school was about what one would get at a good public school. It didn't occur to me that I would be out of line mentioning public schools and I did specifically ask if you would address my question in the blog you said you might post in the future and which in the same sentence you mentioned public schools.


    by A Guy Called LULU on Wed, 11/17/2010 - 6:35pm

    Ah, sorry to be a grouch, Lulu, and sorry to misread you.

    A short answer, for now, is that public colleges are simultaneously becoming more expensive and falling behind private schools in the amount they spend on instruction. So while there are still some good values to be had in public education, there aren't as many as there were twenty or thirty years ago; state legislators have been cutting budgets for decades, and you can't do that forever. Eventually, it shows up in the quality of instruction, or in the tuition bill, or both. Signs are that it's a bit of the first and a lot of the second.

    The other key point is that students can get a good education at a public college, but there's more responsibility on them to go and get it. You can still get a world-class education at state schools, but the student has to know how to get the most out of that education. A student who doesn't take charge of her or his own education can become just a number, or waste a lot of effort in the party culture.


    by Doctor Cleveland on Wed, 11/17/2010 - 6:53pm

    Of course private college and universities have long been in the business of building endowments, public colleges and universities are much less versed on the subjects. When I was teaching college in the early  1990's we were just beginning the steep decline in funding public higher education, and now these same public schools must become versed in fund raising quickly. It is difficult to make up for that, since we've changed so drastically how we think about funding higher ed. I fear for middle class and poor students who may opt out of a university education because it just becomes too expensive. But you are quite correct about taking charge of ones own education. It is a great point.


    by tmccarthy0 on Wed, 11/17/2010 - 7:52pm

    To me the whole point is that cheating would not be as wide spread or necessary if there was not the equivalency between ones grades, major and whether or not one is pulling in the minimum wage flipping burgers. And as I understand it there are more than a few Masters and PHDs that are doing just that these days.


    by cmaukonen on Tue, 11/16/2010 - 11:44pm