Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Trump Capitulates On Fraud Lawsuit

This has been kicking around my head, if "Trump University" can get sued for nonperformance, so can every other school in the country, and someone beat me to it:

Looking closer at the complaints against Trump University, the primary allegation is fraud.According to students and instructors, “Some of whom described the program as a scheme to cheat customers out of thousands of dollars.” Also high-pressure tactics, “Tapping into the roller coaster of emotions to get students to sign up.”
Let’s compare all of this to “real universities” and colleges and other institutions of higher learning across the US. Counting both two and four-year institutions, public and private, just over 4700 such institutions dot the US landscape.

We do not have free trade in education.  To fix education, we need deregulation, get the accreditation out and that will sink the odious textbook scam.  There is a model of education that worked for a thousand years, in which students pay the instructors directly, for what they thought the lecture was worth.  In such a system tenure is not necessary since quality results are all that matter.

As I teach at the college level, strictly noncredit extension seminars, for the last 35 years, far and wide, the colleges report back we extension, adjunct lecturers are rated as a group far higher than the tenured professoriat.

Now, that amounts to nothing for a simple reason:  we adjunct profs are expert in a narrow field, we are popularizers, not scholars; our student base is self-selecting - they want our content and pay their own cash for it.  So we have both apples and oranges on both content and audience.

What it does prove is the adjunct model, what the Germans call privatdozent, could be THE model leading to more, better, cheaper, faster educational opportunities.

Education is important, but the Hegemon has captured that too.

I have a delightful sideline lecturing where I want, when I want, what I want with fees set by me.  There is only so much time I can devote to it, but it pays off in expertise gained, since as everyone has said since Adam, it you want to learn, teach.

I even created a course "Go Back To School - As The Instructor" delivered online to help the countless unemployed, especially in my cohort, to keep working and build something while the economic ship righted back circa 2008. Better to have on a resume "teaching, writing, consulting" for however long the economy sucked, instead of "collected welfare."  "Teacher" is stronger than "student" when looking for work.

Sadly the Hegemon had other ideas.  Student loans had recently been made unbankruptable, so in an effort to enslave countless more, ex nihilo credit based student loans were extended with abandon.  Unemployed java coders could retrain to be roofers!  Unemployed roofers could retrain to be java coders!  Practically no takers for those who wanted to go back to school as a teacher, when you could get sure money going back to school as a student, and not really work too hard.  The promise of a "degree" promising employment was pure fantasy, like at Trump University.

Two to four years later, they came out, tens of thousands in debt, unbankruptable and unemployed, unemployable outside of the barista job they could have had before enslaving themselves.

Student loans on the books went from 500 bil to 1.5 tril.

Trumps first act should be to free the slaves, an emancipation proclamation, announcing henceforth student loan "debt" (scare quotes since the debt is denominated in ex nihilo credit tally, and has no value anyway) may be bankrupted by any interested party.

Also, deregulate education.  There is a model, the student pays the instructor directly, in place right now, that could be extended to the entire educational process.  A true revolution.

What was said about Trump U could be said about any U, just search and replace the complaint documents with the college from which you "graduated."  Indeed, a settlement compromise with the Universities may very well be the ability to bankrupt a student "loan."  The Universities won't care, they got theirs, jack.  It is the issuers of the ex nihilo credit that lose.

I like this idea.

Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.


0 comments: