“I’m Not Hiring From *That* School Ever Again.”

What happens when the school accreditation scam gets outed as a scam?

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Photo by Caleb Woods on Unsplash

“At this point, you wouldn’t have anything to worry about,” said my mom’s friend. “You basically just pay and get passed these days. You would get a degree and people would take you more seriously.”

Mom’s friend Tanya* was trying again, rather futilely, to encourage me to go back to school to finish my degree. I do not want to go to school, especially not my primary college. 

Student loans are the only type of common loan not discharged by bankruptcy ,  and with the interest rates they require? No, thank you. I want to have a life that is not going to be surrounded in crippling debt. 

While Tanya believed college could offer a new foothold in this awful economy, the truth is that she’s missing something very alarming. Employers no longer see a degree the way they once were — and rightfully so. 

I’ll drop a dirty little secret about modern academia: you’re not *really* allowed to fail students.

So, in theory, you can still fail students. In practice, most teachers and college professors know that a failing grade is a huge no-no. Most parents and students will complain to admins if you fail them. 

To make matters worse, a failing grade is no longer taken at face value. As a teacher, you have to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they deserve a failing grade. Otherwise, you might open yourself (and the school) to a lawsuit. 

If you go on Reddit, you’re going to see a lot of teachers talk about how they aren’t really allowed to give students consequences for bad marks. Rare is the student held back a year or told to take repeat classes. Rarer still are expulsions or flunk-outs.

The idea of flunking out of middle school is not in the realm of possibility for most students. It’s hard to take school seriously when you know that just sitting in class with a pulse will get you passed ahead to the next grade. 

Ah, but there's still one bastion of consequences, right? I’m talking about parents. 

Sadly, parents aren’t disciplining their kids. Three generations ago, having your parents told about a failing grade was almost always a sign that your life was going to be rough for a minute. Today? Not so much.

Parents generally don’t want to hear that Little Timmy flunked class. Too many parents assume their child can do no wrong, that it’s the teacher’s fault if the child fails, and that it’s the teacher’s job to babysit their kid. 

So, it’s a Catch-22 for beleaguered teachers who want to provide feedback but can’t. 

It’s also important to recognize another major issue teachers face when flunking students.

When I was in high school, a law called No Child Left Behind took hold of America. This law basically rewards schools that have high passing/graduation rates while punishing those with failing students. 

Schools need that funding — and admins are the ones who will jockey for every bit, bob, and dollar they can. School administrators will make the lives of teachers who step in the way of their fundraising hard. 

Is this fair? No. Is this legal? Potentially not, but it is still a thing. Workplace retaliation is scarily common in modern workplaces. What’s wilder is that this type of harassment is added on top of the acts of violence committed by students!

Simply put, the system is set up in a way that makes teachers’ lives harder if they try to flunk students. Is this true in all schools? No, but from what I’ve heard anecdotally, it’s pretty common. 

All things considered, it’s not shocking to hear how many students keep getting passed until graduation despite barely being able to read. 

This attitude started in lower grades, traveled up to high schools, and is now seeping into colleges.

When I was a teenager, college was seen as the metric of success. If you didn’t have a degree, you were written off as a failure. Everyone had to go to college, and everyone had to pass. 

That’s what politicians kept saying and I think everyone started to drink the Kool-Aid of higher education. Prior to the 1980s, college was actually meant to be for a select few. You didn’t need a degree to get a decent job back then.

To a point, this might have protected colleges from the increasingly common attitude of of “Little Timmy must pass and get his little trophy or else we’ll hurt him.” 

Unfortunately, the vast majority of people who go to college don’t go because they want to learn. They go because it’s a means to an end — a way to get a job that potentially pays a living wage. 

That transactional attitude slowly eroded what schools were supposed to be. Once a bastion for higher learning and objective, structured thought, schools started to backslide. 

Schools stopped being a service or even a public institution. They started to get run by businesses. People today seem to assume that paying for a class means you get the diploma — an assertion that’s increasingly correct.

Make no mistake about it, it’s affecting colleges in a bad way.

Graduating easily is great, but there’s a snag everyone forgot about. 

Employers hire people with degrees because it’s assumed they have proven their ability to think critically. A degree is proof that you have learned something in school — hopefully, quite a bit!

So, uh, what happens when you have a bunch of college grads who can’t write a cohesive paragraph? Well, the value of that diploma starts to decrease. If it continues to decrease, the diploma ends up being a bust.

But wait! What about accreditation? Accreditation was created as a way to certify that students learned a set standard of facts, processes, and concepts. In theory, it should stop the problem in its tracks. 

In practice? It doesn't do shit aside from guaranteeing entry into other accredited schools. How do I know? I’ve met college graduates who can’t read with diplomas from accredited schools!

Lately, I’ve noticed a new trend among managers and companies: they’re avoiding college degrees in favor of real-life experience. Those who still require degrees have become far more discerning about the school in question. 

It only takes a couple of bad grad experiences to turn off companies to a school. In a bid to make school graduation rates higher, our education system made those rates effectively worthless. 

I personally have heard at least one person in my circles say they’d “never hire from that school again.”

Ouch to those grads.

We’re going to face a breaking point as a society with an education crisis. 

The current situation with public education is not sustainable by any means of the word. Teachers are overburdened, budgets are too tight, parents are absolved of their responsibilities, and admins are greedy bastards.

Passing kids might seem like not a big deal in small numbers, but we’re dealing with a nationwide problem. We are robbing students of the right to fail, the blessing of understanding consequences before they become life-ruining, and also robbing them of a decent education. 

According to at least one survey, 19 percent of all high school graduates can’t read. The same site notes that 45 million Americans are functionally illiterate. Illiteracy rates are linked to higher crime rates, because no one wants to hire a person who can’t read. 

Think about that. If you walk down the street and see five people, statistically one of those five can’t read. Those people aren’t going to be able to be secretaries, marketers, lawyers, doctors, or engineers. 

We always need more low-education labor, true, but there’s a problem here. Our society can’t function without a lot of highly educated, knowledgeable, and science-oriented people. 

As of right now:

1. We have a massive doctor shortage that’s getting worse every year. Part of this is due to the limited number of residencies we have in America. The other part is that most people cannot pass medical school without breaking their backs doing so. 
    
   As school becomes increasingly expensive and elusive, fewer people will actually meet the current standards required to work in the medical field. We can’t lower those standards without losing lives. I mean really, do you want someone who can’t read doing your bloodwork!?

2. We have an increasingly alarming shortage of educators. Not for nothing, but America was absolutely phenomenal at ruining this career for people who were truly passionate about it. We have no one to blame but ourselves for the sheer number of people quitting the education world. 

3. We are also in the middle of a lawyer shortage. Nationwide, there are not enough attorneys to fully cover all the cases that courts want to see. This is one of the reasons why courts are so backed up. 

4. Oh, and we are also in the middle of an accountant shortage. There aren’t enough people who are good at being a CPA and willing to take the CPA exam. This makes tax season even harder than it already is. 

I want to point something out here. While we will always need retail staff, delivery people, and plumbers, we cannot survive without doctors, lawyers, and teachers. 

Throughout history, brain drain has been one of the worst omens for society.

Let’s look at basic history. A lack of education is what caused the Dark Ages of Europe. The Rennaissance, on the other hand, was when Europe blossomed thanks to a boom in education, reading, and science. 

Or, we can do a little microcosm study. 

States that have few economic opportunities for educated grads are more likely to suffer from brain drain. Brain drain is linked to higher violent crime rates, higher maternal mortality rates, worse healthcare, more corruption, and a decline in life quality. 

People tend to flee states that have a brain drain, even when they don’t have a degree themselves. Brain-drained societies are not attractive to anyone. And much of what we take for granted tends to vanish in a society without much education. 

Brain drains are how ghost towns, social collapses, and mob mentality become the norm. Sadly, it seems like we’re going to learn this lesson the hard way, since we as a society refuse to teach kids about school’s importance the easy way. 

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Blep. Gimme a slice.