How Colleges Have Given Up on Educating Your Child: A Book Review

I am a mother of two teens. I am a college graduate and a Master Degree drop out from St John's University, New York. In fact, I was accepted by St John's and decided not to attend because they required a year of English Language course and also other subjects that I have already taken. I felt it was unnecessary and a waste of time and money.

For the past year, I have been researching on the relevance of college education in this new economy. In my journey of researching, I found out that there are many roads that lead to a child's success in life and career. In this nation, the vast majority of us are categorized as middle class families. Good old fashioned, hard working Americans looking for ways to help our children advance socially and economically.

However, with the price tag of college education increasing each year, most families are going into certain types of loans just to 'buy' an education for their children. But parents, is that the only road to advancement? Do we want to see our children in debt just to get that education and later find out that it does not buy success? Have you wonder why so many young graduates are struggling financially even with a college education?

One of the books that I have recently read is "The Five-Year Party: How Colleges have given up on educating your child and what you can do about it" by Craig Brandon. I do not agree with everything, however, there are many tips and checklists to take away from Mr. Brandon's book.

Craig Brandon said the purpose of this book is to inform parents about the abuses of higher education that party schools engage in to maximize the number of customers and their incomes at the expense of real education.

He defined party school as a relatively inexpensive four-year residential college/university that rates among the third and fourth tiers (rated by U.S. News and World Report), that admits low grades and low SAT scores.

These are the colleges that most middle income Americans goes to. According to his research:

1. Majority of the students are no better than a high school drop out after graduating. These students are not interested in learning and do not put in effort to learn.

2. Since early 1990s, colleges have been reinventing and transforming into institutions that focus on profits instead of education. Because of this transformation, the administrators want to ensure they retain students by giving exactly what they want, that is, less work more fun.

3. To retain students who are their 'customers', they enlarged dining halls into gourmet food courts, campuses with hot tubs, water parks, climbing walls, work out centers and wide screen television sets all over.

4. Dormitories being replaced by luxury condominiums. So instead of spending money on education, they used it for facilities and luxuries.

5. They use grading curve to transform an F score to a magical B. There is no high expectation for quality school work. Flunking is almost eliminated.

6. Focusing on increasing revenue, they squeezed as many students as possible onto campuses for the highest tuition and longest possible amount of years.

7. When parents and their high school age children tour the campus before they make decision, they are given a 'golden walk'. They give a misrepresentation, misstatement and 'lies' to entice them to sign up.

8. 21 cents to a dollar of your college tuition is for instructions and the rest go to administrators' salaries, construction programs and multi-million-dollar advertising and public relations campaigns.

9. Because of the high tuition fee, two thirds of students need loans to complete their studies and the schools have private loan companies to offer loans to students. Most students do not understand the terms and conditions of the loans until they graduate and are faced with the truth.

10. He outlined the dangers of these campuses because of alcohol, crime, rape, and their obsession with secrecy where parents do not find out the problems until it is too late.

Craig Brandon offered an action plan and a call to action for parents. We need to reinvent higher education with main focus on:

Educating not entertaining.

Go back to basics, the goal is to create "no frills colleges"

Replace unnecessary irrelevant courses with core subjects necessary to maintain our economy, our government and the future of our country

Students need to pass a "value added" exam before granted a degree. Value added means skills and knowledge required to be a leader

Transparency for all college policies and proof that colleges are providing education

My conclusion from this book: talk to our children and find out what are their strengths, goals and passion in life. Without a serious talk,direction and a game plan, we will walk the road to nowhere. Colleges are not the only roads that lead to our children's success.

For further information on strategies to educate your children, please download our Free Report, which is on the top right hand corner of this page. Please leave us a comment on our facebook wall.

Claudia is a mother of 2, wife and stay at home and work from home mom for 16 years. She desires to see parents stepping up to be their best and raising up a generation of uncompromising, relevant and purposed driven adults. She believes traveling, volunteering and learning another language in addition to English are important tools for educating children.

You can find her at http://www.uncommongeneration.com/. You can download a FREE REPORT: 7 Little Known Strategies the Elite Few Use to Educate their Children without Breaking the Bank!

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