The Shadow Scholar

by Dave Tomar

I do remember the assignment that got me fired. It was about Africa during the cold war, and it was only two pages long. I finished the paper late, something about which I had been warned several times by my employer. The customer was pissed about the delay to begin with and even more pissed about the completed assignment itself.

  I was a repeat offender by that point, so I hardly had a leg to stand on. But I’m still pretty sure I satisfied the assignment’s instructions. Screw the teacher who asked for a two-page assessment of how the different governments of Malawi, Mozambique, Angola, Ethiopia, Zaire, Sudan, and Somalia interacted with the competing superpowers of the cold war. The customer accused me of providing only a superficial assessment of these individual interactions, as though I could be fooled into writing an additional ten pages for free just because you couldn’t possibly address the subject in any less space. Customers are always looking for freebies.

  And this one time, I slipped up. I was sapped of the emotional energy needed to restrain myself. I was feeling empty and without a whole lot to look forward to, and I wasn’t going to be bullied. I’d be damned if I was going to waste an opportunity for satisfaction.

  “I apologize that this assignment did not meet your high academic standards,” I wrote to the customer. “Perhaps you’d have better luck doing your own work, smart guy.”

  It was some time coming anyway, but the paper-writing company fired me and was fully justified in doing so. I was unraveling. Ethan was kind enough to let me write papers under his account. I repaid him by taking on too much work, ignoring repeat warnings about my habitual lateness, and, eventually, also getting him fired.

  9

  Degree Mill University

  How terrifying it is to feel that you have no future. How hopeless it is to feel that this—whatever this is, the things you have now, and are not satisfied with—is all you will ever have. How devastating it is to feel that the brief time allotted to you by chance on this earth will never get any better and that you will not only not have the things that you want but also, for most of your time here, you will not have the things that you need.

  These are the fears that bring panic to my generation.

  While I scrambled to find work for myself and Ethan, my buddy Finestone was across town facing the same fears that we were, fears about making an honest living, about making a passable living, and about hopelessness. I went to college with Finestone, and like me, like Ethan, he was wrestling with these fears and exploiting them at the same time.

  And his employer, which we will refer to here as Shady Trade University, knew all about them. The university talked about such fears in its training materials. It taught recruiters how to understand and exploit them. They—all the for-profit colleges that fester before our generation—have learned to exploit the terrifying reality of each target’s situation. Their admissions processes are driven by cold-calling telemarketers working toward mandatory quotas by using hard-sell tactics and psychological manipulation designed to play on the fears of potential students.

  Finestone and I were each raised the same way, and the same way as a lot of middle-class Americans. We were raised to believe that college was everything. You must go to college! Your grandparents didn’t go to college, so they labored in the dung mines for the Kaiser. Your parents didn’t go to college, so all they could afford was a house in the basement of a Stomp rehearsal hall. Your brother didn’t go to college, and now he sits in a lawn chair at a traffic light selling fabric roses.

  If you don’t go to college, you will end up a loser. You will have no prospects. You will wander the earth alone like the Incredible Hulk, with nothing to contribute, no viable skills, and nothing to look forward to and possibly wearing shredded purple jean shorts.

  And then a chipper-sounding young person calls you on your ten-minute lunch break at the hog-fat-rendering plant and says, “I have a way that you can take control of your life. Education is the key.”

  You say, “I really can’t afford to go to school.”

  Then he says, “With the job market being what it is today, you can’t afford not to go to school.”

  “But I’ve never really been good at school. In fact, I recently lost a piece of my brain in an automobile accident.”

  “It doesn’t matter. We have no standards whatsoever. As far as we’re concerned, you’re already in.”

  Recruiters are trained to have answers for everything.

  It doesn’t matter if you can’t afford it. We’ll get you financial aid. It doesn’t matter that you have struggled with long-term learning deficiencies. We’ll make you into a better student, and a better human being. It doesn’t matter that you can’t use a fork without injuring your eye. We’ve got classes for that. It doesn’t matter if you are sometimes startled and moved to ask “Who’s there?” by the sound of your own flatulence. We think you’d probably be a good candidate for distance learning.

  It doesn’t matter your disposition or deficiencies. There is a school out there that is willing to take your money and give you a degree. And it will tell you anything to make you believe that you can get this degree, nay, that you must get this degree if your life is to be anything greater than a series of random and directionless events.

  My buddy Finestone confirmed this for me. While I was looking for another job aiding America’s lesser academic specimens, he was helping to create them. In many ways, our two enterprises worked in concert with one another, part of a massive conspiracy to populate the world with morons.

  Shady Trade University, according to its website, serves roughly fifty-four thousand students across more than eighty campuses. During his two years of employment there, Finestone was a jack-of-all-trades. He worked in Student Support. He worked in the Business Office. He worked in Admissions. He was shuttled around three departments across three campuses. In a variety of work experiences, Finestone witnessed the ins and outs of this corporation.

  Now, before I get into what he learned about them, I must say that I bear no personal grudge against the Shade Trade business or any other like it. Among the larger and more successful institutions that fall under the “for-profit” or “proprietary” label are the University of Phoenix, Kaplan University, DeVry University, Capella University, Strayer University, Walden University, and ITT Technical Institute.

  In a way, I kind of loved for-profit colleges. And not just because their students were some of my best clients. Naturally, we would court that type, but no more or less than students at fancy private institutions, state schools, community colleges, or graduate schools.

  It’s just that the work assigned at such institutions was so easy, the standards so low, and the priorities so far removed from the interests of honest student evaluation that I could pretty much take a laxative, wad up a sheet of paper, wipe my ass with it, fax it over to the student, and collect my pay. I never did, of course. I prefer the gentle caress of a quilted two-ply, thank you very much.

  The for-profit school that I encountered most frequently in my work, we will refer to as McLearning University. I treated my McLearning University assignments with all the respect owed to the word jumble in the Sunday funnies. Maybe even less. I’ll share a pretty obvious secret of the trade right here. I have been known—at least to myself—to recycle material. I mean, I’m getting paid to churn out content. And it is original, mostly. But look, if I’ve already written a five-page paper about supply chain management at some fictional industrial conglomerate called Riordan Manufacturing, and I’m asked to write a paper of almost identical details one year later, and again two years later, and again four years later… if they don’t have any quality control, why should I?

  Many a McLearning assignment has been accompanied by the warning that the Turnitin software will be employed to ensure that the assignment has not been copied from the Internet. Turnitin is a kind of plagiarism watchdog, a service that maintains a constantly growing bank of completed classroom assignments and cross-checks all newly submitted assignments for “c
ontent overlap” both with this database and with all content available on the Web. But there are easy ways to get around it if you have a mind to. Using an internal thesaurus is a pretty good one: I can change 50 percent of the words in each sentence and create an assignment that won’t raise a single red flag.

  Still, Turnitin is a great Band-Aid because it fosters the illusion that plagiarism is being deterred, which is tremendous for any for-profit university. Many for-profit schools maintain formal disciplinary procedures in the event of academic dishonesty, but the consequences are highly variant, based on the findings of investigation, hearing, and committee arbitration. In any event, expulsion is a poor tactic in a consumer industry. Meanwhile, my work goes undetected, no matter how many times I resell the same paper to for-profit schools. Replace “argues” with “asserts,” “recommendation” with “suggestion,” and “conclusion” with “resolution.” Give the old paper a new title, slap its bottom, and send it to market.

  Even if actual human beings are reading these assignments (and I can’t prove that they do or they don’t), I presume they don’t care either way about cheating. I also presume that they surely know on some level that they need cheating students to survive. Me, Turnitin, McLearning University. We all profit off students turning in clean papers and getting good grades—regardless of how that goal is achieved.

  I know I sound cynical, but as a scumbag working in a scumbag racket, I know opportunism when I see it. And Finestone described a world of sleaze that would make Bernie Madoff proud.

  So how do these for-profit schools work, exactly? According to a 2011 article in Bloomberg Businessweek, the Pell Grant is what keeps the scheme in business. The Pell Grant is awarded by the Department of Education to prospective students who demonstrate financial need and who have not yet earned a bachelor’s degree. While most students will require additional private loans to combat the high cost of education, as a grant the Pell does not call for repayment. It is a foundational block in the financial aid pyramid. The Businessweek article indicates that though only about 12 percent of U.S. students are enrolled in for-profit colleges, students at for-profit colleges account for a full quarter of all Pell Grants awarded by the Department of Education.1

  And to what end, exactly? Why, to educate, of course; to help the less fortunate seize opportunity; to give a fighting chance to the disadvantaged among us. Hell, I don’t need to tell you. You’ve driven past the billboards. You’ve thrown their mailers into your recycling can. You’ve seen those commercials where the girl with sex appeal says that you can earn a degree while sitting at home in your undergarments.

  You can’t put a price tag on education and not expect market behavior to take hold. Sure, we’d all love to buy our clothes at Brooks Brothers and Bloomingdale’s. But some of us, we’re still going to have to shop at T.J. Maxx and Ross Dress for Less. We just hope that our off-brand slacks and irregular T-shirts don’t cost us opportunities for popularity and mating. And while I can think of no more important ambition than the perpetuation of the species, this analogy is still more troubling when applied to higher education. Here, the off-brand and the irregular are not simply of a lower quality. They are criminally exploitative.

  A 2010 article on the Huffington Post reports that one such for-profit institution uses “guerrilla registration” in order to keep its enrollment numbers high. According to its own internal sources, at the end of 2010, the institution had 58,200 students enrolled in online programs and another 7,400 enrolled in classroom-based programs. The Huffington Post describes the experience of one such “enrolled” student after she attempted to withdraw from her program. The student recalls:

  [An] academic advisor told her she could simply fill out a withdrawal form and incur no additional expenses beyond the registration fees she had already paid. But a year and a half later, in 2006, collections agents began hounding her, she says, demanding that she pay some $10,000 in supposedly overdue tuition charges. Despite having attended only two online sessions, [the student] had remained officially enrolled at [the university] for nearly a year after her withdrawal.

  Far from an aberration, [this] experience typifies the results of a practice known informally inside [the university] as “guerrilla registration”: academic advisors have long enrolled students in classes they never take, without their consent and sometimes even after they have sought to withdraw from the university.2

  Hmmmmmmm. That’s peculiar.

  Why on earth would they do that?

  In his first days at Shady Trade University, Finestone wondered the same thing.

  According to Finestone, Shady Trade University was, at the time, divided into two primary departments: Operations and Academics.

  The campus director was the head of Operations, and the dean was the head of Academics. Allegedly, these individuals were equal partners. But in actuality, Finestone assessed, the dean was little more than a scheduler of classes and an occasional tutor. The campus director was the big cheese. Operations, Finestone learned immediately and repeatedly, always came before Academics. In the hierarchy of Shady Trade University, the dean was simply a foreman on a production line. The real shit happened across the way at Operations, where decisions were made and futures affected.

  Operations was divided into three subsidiary departments: Admissions, the Business Office, and Student Support. Finestone began in Student Support.

  His title was student support coordinator, and his basic function was to ensure that students who were currently enrolled at Shady Trade were reenrolled for the coming semester. He would call first-semester students from a printout and portray himself as an academic adviser.

  But after about a month of calling students, Finestone saw that something was wrong. At a rate of roughly 10 percent, the “students” he was calling were insisting that they had already withdrawn from classes and had no intent of enrolling again. Finestone was confused. Could a pattern this consistent possibly be the result of a clerical error?

  Finestone went to the business office manager and explained the situation. The business office manager assured him that the students who “claimed” they had withdrawn had never withdrawn. The students were in fact registered and enrolled.

  Finestone wasn’t satisfied with this answer. He went to the admissions manager, who said, “Here’s what we do. When students submit their withdrawal requests or forms, we don’t withdraw them. We ignore their forms.”

  Before Finestone could protest, the admissions manager looked him in the eye and said, “This is a business decision.”

  “But why?” Finestone asked.

  “So we can hit our recruitment numbers”.

  “But what good is it having a student that doesn’t produce any revenue?”

  “You’re new with the company. You don’t understand. This is a business decision.”

  This was a shock to Finestone’s system. He had come to Shady Trade from a national retail chain with a good reputation. At his old company, if you fudged numbers, you would be summarily dismissed. He contemplated calling an ethics hotline but ultimately decided that he was too new. It was too early to make waves.

  There was so much that he didn’t know about his employers, or even about his job responsibilities. Finestone told me that, at the time, Shady Trade had no training process for employees working in either Student Support or the Business Office. Only the recruiters working in Admissions were given comprehensive job training.

  No job training was required for Student Support. Either you figured it out and went along or you were out on your ass. It was thus that Finestone came to understand many of the business decisions that were made at Shady Trade.

  Here was the basic and formal process for dealing with requests for withdrawal from a class. Let’s say that a “lead,” as they were referred to within the company, was contacted six weeks before the start of a semester, succumbed to high-pressure sales tactics, and, against his better judgment, verbally agreed to enrollment. Then a week passe
d, and he decided to preemptively drop out.

  The lead would contact his admissions officer and explain that he couldn’t afford to take time off from work/couldn’t be away from the kids long enough to go to school/was serving a stretch of six to ten for knocking over a liquor store/had done some research and realized that community college was a much better deal for the money. Whatever it was, the lead wanted to bail. The admissions officer would be instructed to turn to the internal script, to provide every possible reason why this would be the biggest mistake of the lead’s life; why it made sense now more than ever and especially in light of the concerns expressed by the lead for him to invest in his future; why distance learning was a great option for the recently incarcerated and dangerously violent.

  No withdrawals were to be granted until after the lead had been given the same hard sell to which previous experience had already proved he was vulnerable. Only after every sales tactic had been exhausted and “un-enrollment” had become imminent was the admissions officer to tell the lead that “as per your request, you will be removed from the class and from our list.”

  At that point, the admissions Officer would hang up the phone and inform the admissions manager that the student in question wanted to un-enroll. Now let’s say that this scenario applied to fifteen people during one particular month.

  In any given month, the admissions manager might find himself five reenrolled students away from meeting his recruitment quota. Therefore, ten of those fifteen students would be granted their withdrawal. The other five withdrawal requests would be ignored. Those five students would remain registered for classes.

  They would accrue fines for failure to attend classes and accumulate debt for the classes from which they had attempted to withdraw. On the bright side, the admissions manager would meet his recruitment quota.

  The files for the students who had been secretly denied withdrawal would then be sent to Student Support, where Finestone and his colleagues would call the students to convince them to reenroll for the upcoming semester. Those who believed they had withdrawn from classes in the first place would say stuff like “I thought I told you to stop calling me” or “I don’t want anything to do with your bullshit school.”