Educational Malpractice at the University of Texas at San Antonio

This essay was originally part of a series of documents that were shared with my former department chair at the University of Texas at San Antonio over several years. Later, I shared some of this information with the new incoming President in a letter I wrote him in December, 2017. After it was clear that the university would do nothing to fix these issues, I complied these essays and data, as well as other data and essays, and I submitted it to university officials in the fall of 2018. Then I quit teaching in Texas.

“On paper, her school claimed that almost all of its graduates were headed for college.  In fact, the principal said, most of them ‘couldn’t spell college, let alone attend.’”

— quoted in Sharon L. Nichols & David C. Berliner, Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America's Schools

Introduction: Cheating Cultures in Educational Institutions

UTSA has a serious problem that urgently needs to be acknowledged and addressed by administrators, faculty, and student affairs staff.  Most freshman entering UTSA are not prepared for academic success in college, which is why UTSA has traditionally had low retention and graduation rates.  In order to support that claim, I will be providing an interdisciplinary synthesis of many bodies of academic literature in conjunction with original observations and research.  Rather than dealing with this serious problem, some faculty at UTSA are engaging in various forms of malpractice and fraud, especially in the Writing Program, which will be the focus of this report. 

Why are students unprepared for success in college?  There are many reasons for this predicament, including inadequate Texas funding of K-12 schools, especially during the Great Recession of 2008 and its aftermath when hundreds of millions of dollars were cut from Texas schools, thousands of teachers were laid off, class sizes were increased, and the curriculum was cut.  Other reasons include inequitable educational resources in Texas K-12 schools, and low student motivation to succeed academically, which is tied both to student’s psychology and their parent’s socio-economic status. 

In Texas, as in most states around the U.S., students are graduating high school not only unprepared for college, but also without basic literacy and numeracy skills, including the ability to read and write.  Worst of all, many Texas high schools are fraudulently awarding diplomas to students who should not be graduating because these students lack basic numeracy, reading, and writing skills.  Nichols and Berliner (2007) analyzed a 2003 study, which researched 108 schools in Texas.  In half of these schools, “70 percent or more students were considered at risk of academic failure,” and yet these schools graduated nearly all of their students and claimed a dropout rate of only “1 percent or less” (p. 83).  In 2000-2001, Houston, Texas boasted a 1.5 percent drop out rate, yet one Houston principal admitted to a researcher, “On paper, her school claimed that almost all of its graduates were headed for college.  In fact, the principal said, most of them ‘couldn’t spell college, let alone attend’” (qtd. in  Nichols & Berliner, 2007, p. 83). Texas is not alone.  This kind of educational fraud is happening all over the U.S., most famously in Atlanta, where 35 educators where charged, and 11 were convicted, on state racketeering charges (Mitchell, 2017).

Just a couple of months ago, a teacher in Bastrop, Texas published a resignation letter that went vial around the country (Mulder, 2018).  She discussed the demoralizing environment in her school where she doesn’t have the materials that she needs to teach due to budget cuts, so she spends her own money to invest in supplies, only to have her students damage or destroy them.  She also explained that she would be failing almost half of her class because they don’t have the necessary skills, and because they won’t complete assignments.  She explains that Bastrop administrators are doing nothing to address this situation, they side with non-performing students and their parents, and they blame teachers for students’ problems, all of which makes the situation worse.  She exclaimed, “My administrator will demand an explanation of why I let so many fail without giving them support, even though I’ve done practically everything short of doing the work for them” (para. 7).

These low motivated and academically unprepared students not only manage to graduate from Texas high schools, but then they end up enrolling in community colleges and non-selective state universities, like UTSA.  There is enormous social pressure for everyone to go to college, but most unprepared high school students will drop out of college without ever earning a degree (Rosenbaum, 2001), and many of these dropouts will have unprecedented levels of student loan debt (Golderick-Rab, 2016).  At open-door community colleges across the U.S. the dropout rate exceeds 70 percent (Beach, 2011).  Since its inception, UTSA has been a non-selective university and it admits many unprepared students.  Thus, it has always had low retention rates and low graduation rates, with currently less than 40% of freshman graduating with a degree in six years, which is the highest graduation rate that UTSA has ever had. 

I have taught first-year freshmen in the Writing Program at UTSA for the past eight years.  I have found that most of my students do not have the basic student skills, let alone the prerequisite reading, writing, and thinking skills required to successfully pass Writing classes, let alone earn a college degree.  I will be documenting the academic metrics of my students later in this report.  Worst of all, many of these students who lack basic skills have already passed through writing classes at UTSA where they learned almost nothing, even though the majority of them received A and B course grades.

K-12 schools in Texas are failing to prepare all students for success in college, which is the root of the problem that I am addressing, but institutions of higher education in Texas are exacerbating this problem by not properly screening students, by not keeping academic standards high, and by not providing the necessary support that high-risk students need.  In particular, UTSA has inadequate enrollment procedures to ensure that incoming students are emotionally and academically prepared for success in college.  This includes the psychological readiness of students, as I have seen that about 1-2 percent of my students suffer from serious mental health problems, which prevent them from being successful students.  UTSA also has faculty inadequately trained to teach, especially adjunct faculty teaching freshmen.  And most importantly, rather than understand the problems of unprepared students and do the hard work of educating them, many faculty at UTSA are lowering academic standards and passing these unprepared students with inflated grades. 

Lowering academic standards harms unprepared students in several ways.  First, students are allowed to pass without demonstrating real knowledge, which gives them an inflated sense of accomplishment, which will hinder future attempts at learning when they encounter more responsible faculty with higher academic standards.  A lack of learning will also eventually catch up with these students.  They are at high risk of failing more difficult classes as they move into their junior and senior year, and this will increase their chances of dropping out.  Worst of all, because they were socially promoted, these students spent thousands of dollars and accumulated higher amounts of debt without learning any real knowledge or skills, and so they will drop out of college worse off than when they started. 

Plus, pandering to unprepared students with lower academic standards also harms high achieving students who will not get the full education they want, which will limit their opportunities to be successful in graduate school or the labor market.  This situation also harms committed scholar-teachers who have high academic standards and use evidence-based teaching practices because students complain about the hard work and double standards of more competent faculty, and administrators complain about higher D/W/F grades. 

I have spent the last eight years at UTSA wresting with this situation by spending thousands of unpaid hours pouring through the academic literature and tirelessly innovating in my classrooms, including developing my own curricular materials tailored to my students’ needs.  As the philosopher Richard McKeon (1953/1990) pointed over a half century ago, teaching and scholarship should be deeply intertwined (p. 34).  I have always used my passion and commitment as a scholar to better inform my teaching and the development of my curriculum.  I have used my academic skills to study not only the subjects of literacy, epistemology, and communication, which I teach, but also the predicaments of my students at UTSA and the Writing Program that is supposed to be training them. For the past eight years, I have been formally assessing and documenting student motivation and academic proficiency.  I have also been studying the quality of the faculty and the curriculum of the Writing Program, as well as some of the institutional policies of UTSA.  I have tried to understand the complex causes of student failure so that I could develop innovative ways of increasing student motivation and achievement, and I have also tried to share this knowledge with my colleagues to promote department and institutional reform. 

While I am focusing on the Writing Department at UTSA, I want to reiterate that many schools around the country have endorsed “playing school” and/or adopting a “cheating culture” to not only deal with unprepared students who cannot or will not learn, but also to deal with unrealistic policy directives that have been pushed by politicians and school administrators (Nichols & Berliner, 2007, p. 33).  I will explain how UTSA is one of those schools, but it is not alone in its predicament.  I have talked to a colleague at UT El Paso, which is facing the same problems as UTSA, and I have personally seen these same problems at Austin Community College and St. Edwards University, where I have also worked as an instructor.  As educational scholars Nichols and Berliner (2007) have documented, “through the overvaluing of certain indicators, pressure is increased on everyone in education.  Eventually, those pressures tend to corrupt the educational system” (p. 34).  Because of the widespread political pressure to increase student success metrics, especially retention and graduation rates, there is widespread “potential” at all levels of our educational system “for manipulating data” (p. 84) and engaging in various forms of educational malpractice and fraud to cook the books. 

Around the country, educators feel enormous pressure to play school, pass underperforming students through the system, and award the maximum amount of credentials.  This pressure is corrupting not only K-12 schools, but also institutions of higher education.  In 2006 the Spellings Commission released its final report, A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education.  In this report the committee noted, “There are disturbing signs that many students who do earn degrees have not actually mastered the reading, writing, and thinking skills we expect of college graduates. Over the past decade, literacy among college graduates has actually declined. Unacceptable numbers of college graduates enter the workforce without the skills employers say they need in an economy where, as the truism holds correctly, knowledge matters more than ever” (p. vii). 

Like the cheating teachers in the Atlanta scandal, my colleagues in the Writing Program at UTSA are not bad people with sinister motives.  I believe that most of them sincerely want to help students succeed in college and in life, and most of them feel pressured by our Department Chair and the administration.  Yet despite their good intentions, as documented in studies around the country at all levels of schooling, unprofessional and fraudulent practices, including rampant grade inflation, end up hurting students in many ways, especially the most disadvantaged (Marcus, 2017).  The unprofessional and fraudulent practices in the Writing Program must stop, for the benefit not only of faculty and students, but also to protect UTSA’s academic integrity so that our university can rise to Tier I status, and thereby use its future position to better the people of San Antonio and the entire state of Texas.

I believe in transparency, the importance of data and scientific analysis, and the power of knowledge to transform policy and practice.  I want to publicize the problems that UTSA faces so that these problems can be acknowledged and addressed with new policies and better practices.  I sincerely want to see UTSA develop into a Tier I university that can make a real impact in the lives of students, especially disadvantaged students who will benefit the most from a college education.

Malpractice and Fraud Due to Mismanagement in the Writing Program at UTSA         

I have been a faculty member in the Writing Program at UTSA since 2010.  From the beginning, I noticed that this department was dysfunctional and beset by many problems.  I have formally studied higher education and published on the subject, so once I arrived, I immediately started collecting and analyzing data on student motivation and academic achievement, as well as the strengths and flaws of the Writing Program curriculum, program faculty, and UTSA policies.  Over the past eight years, I have shared my data and preliminary conclusions with my colleagues many times, but I came to realize that most of my colleagues did not want to address the problems our department faced.  Instead of researching and engaging with these problems, the Chair of the Writing Program has not only ignored the problems I addressed, but she has continued or initiated many counter-productive and unprofessional practices.  I also think that some of these practices constitute forms of educational fraud. 

In her defense, the Chair has told me that both our current Dean and our previous Dean have supported her unprofessional and fraudulent policies.  So while I am laying responsibility primarily on the Chair in this report, other senior administrators at UTSA, and the institutional culture they have fostered, have most likely contributed to the dysfunctional nature of the Writing Program.

First of all, it is important to understand that most faculty in the Writing Program have only a two-year master’s degree in English, most of which were earned low-tier public universities, like UTSA.  Further, some of our faculty are graduate students in the English department who are unprepared and unqualified to teach.  Only a few of our faculty have delivered conference papers, and just two or three have published an academic paper.  Most of our faculty don’t even read academic research of any kind, let alone write and publish research.  Many of our faculty watch tv, play video games, read novels, or use social media during their office hours, rather than engage in serious scholarship, like research, writing academic papers, conducting peer-review, or engaging with public policy. 

Maybe one or two members of our department, beside myself, actively engage in academic research or publish scholarship.  And as far as I know, I am the only person who is an active peer reviewer for academic journals or professional scholarly associations.  I am the only person serving on the editorial board of an academic journal.  I am the only person in the department to have written and published academic books, which have been peer reviewed and widely cited by other scholars around the world.  I am also the only faculty member in the department whose scholarship has been formally endorsed by a President of the MLA, the formal professional body that governs the discipline of English.

Most of my colleagues have only two years of graduate school, studying fictional literature, a subject that is completely unrelated to the current curriculum of the Writing Program at UTSA, which is focused on academic writing, critical thinking (including quantitative reasoning), and argumentation.  Almost none my colleagues have any formal training in quantitative reasoning, and many are hostile to the very subject of math.  Further, most of my colleagues have never professionally written anything, which is deeply troubling to say about a Writing Program at a research university aspiring to teach Tier I status.  Unlike many other traditional academic subjects, which are abstract and theoretical, writing is a practice and a craft, and you can only teach it well if you actually practice it as a professional, especially I would argue, if you are teaching academic or scientific writing, which includes the important process of critical peer review.

Low-quality faculty is one of the core problems our department faces, but no one in the Writing Program wants to discuss this problem, especially the Chair.  I would argue that this topic is taboo largely because of the widely documented “Dunning-Kruger Effect” (Nichols, 2017, pp.  43-44).  The more ignorant and incompetent people are, the less likely they can see their ignorance and incompetence; thus, the more likely they believe they are competent, and the more likely they will resist new information to fix the problem they cannot see or acknowledge.  Low-quality faculty simply cannot see, let alone understand, their many inadequacies.

Why does the Writing Program have so many low-quality faculty?  Largely it’s due to institutional policies at UTSA.  For adjuncts, UTSA offers low pay and poor working conditions teaching unprepared undergraduates, so it does not attract highly qualified faculty, especially for programs that focus on freshmen (the tenure track is a different story, and I am not addressing tenure track faculty in this report).  I have heard that many other departments at UTSA suffer from similar problems as the Writing Program, and many of my colleagues have claimed that the new Academic Inquiry program is the most dysfunctional program at UTSA, but I have no direct knowledge or data to address that claim. 

When I was hired at UTSA, my education, experience, and scholarship were ignored, and I was placed at the bottom of the pay scale at the poverty-level wage of $24,000 a year, plus benefits (before taxes).  To add insult to injury, this was the full-time salary, and as a new adjunct, I was only given full-time status fall semester and then part-time status spring, so I was making only $18,000 a year (before taxes and mandatory retirement contributions), with paid benefits for only four months because I could not afford the pay the premiums for the rest of the year.  This was much less then I was paid for the same position in California or Oregon.  Few competent scholars would put up with such dismal compensation.  Like almost all of my adjunct colleagues, I have had to work a second or third job to survive financially.

While these poor working conditions are a problem for all UTSA adjunct faculty, there is another problem unique to the Writing Program because it mostly employs faculty with English degrees.  As I will point out in the next chapter, due to the arbitrary history of English as an academic discipline, most of my colleagues have not been trained in the subjects they have been hired to teach.  With Masters degree in English, most of our faculty have no formal training in the core fields of rhetoric, composition, communication, or critical thinking (let alone quantitative reasoning) that govern our curriculum.  Further, I don’t think any faculty in the department, other than myself, has training in the field of education, which covers teaching, student learning, curriculum, and educational assessment.  Given the challenging student population we are trying to teach, knowledge of education is a must if our program seeks to be successful.

A poorly trained adjunct faculty would not necessarily be an insurmountable problem if they were properly supervised and trained with ongoing professional development.  However, there has been no proper supervision or real professional development in the Writing Program.  Traditionally, university faculty engage in faculty development via attending academic conferences and engaging in scholarship.  But adjuncts at UTSA are so impoverished that few of them can afford to attend a conference.  With only a Master’s degree, most are not adequately trained to engage in scholarship or research, and for those that do have the necessary training and aspire to publish, they are often too busy to do so because they have to work multiple jobs to survive.

But the Chair has also actively subverted basic university standards of faculty professionalism, largely because she had shirked her responsibility to adequately supervise or train low-skilled adjuncts.  She has disregarded the essential practice of “professional development” that is mandatory in all top-tier research universities.  Instead of engaging with the academic and scientific research that governs our multi-disciplinary curriculum, she uses bi-yearly meetings to do two things.  First, she takes hours to restate all of the basic policies published in the Faculty Handbook and discuss institutional and departmental news, which is a useless and demeaning ritual – all of this information could easily be sent to faculty via email.  Then she has untrained faculty members hastily put together half-baked presentations (rarely addressing even a single academic source) on topics they are usually unqualified to discuss.  Or she has unqualified textbook representatives give the department a presentation on how to teach to the textbook.  These practices do not constitute “professional” development.

I can remember only three times in eight years that we have had a trained scholar speak during our professional development days, and I was one of those three speakers.  I agree with Brint (2008) and Grubb (1999) that higher education faculty need greater professionalization when it comes to teaching and being responsible for student learning, especially adjunct faculty (hence one of the reasons why I wrote this report).  Brint (2008) has called for the “reconstruction of college teaching as a profession” (p. 5).  I have continually urged the Chair and the main coordinating committee to offer real professional development engaging our faculty with the academic and scientific literature, but no one wants to spend the time, money, or effort that real professional development would demand. 

Our department “norming” sessions are another example of how university standards of faculty professionalism have been subverted.  Once each semester, all faculty gather in small groups to evaluate three student essays from the previous year.  These meetings could be an invaluable time to discuss research on the core concepts of our curriculum, and also how best to teach these concepts, as well as the subjects of student learning, curriculum, and educational assessment.  But in most meetings there is no critical assessment of teaching or student learning, or any learned discussion of any topic.  The Chair selects mostly inexperienced and unqualified faculty to lead these meetings.  Most don’t know what they’re doing, so they just follow a prescribed and mindless ritual initiated by The Chair.  Rather than discuss best practices in the scholarly literature, these “norming” sessions usually reinforce unprofessional subjective opinions and common sense.  When listing to my colleagues evaluate student writing, it is clear that most of them suffer from what medical researcher Archie Cochrane calls “the God complex,” a common ailment of semi-professionals and non-professionals: They don’t need research or data to back up their claims; “they just know” the truth because their subjective intuition tells them its true (qtd. in Tetlock & Gardner, 2015, p. 31).      

While the Writing Program does engage in a yearly assessment process, I found that this process is deeply flawed, if not possibly fraudulent.  For one, if you read the actual assessment reports you will see that some of the numbers are inconsistent, which shows that these reports are not carefully put together.  Further, the department does not have specific, measurable, and valid SLOs or core course topics, nor are there any calibrated assessment tools to measure any specific or objective evaluative criteria.  In fact, The Chair has ignored my continued requests for clear Student Learning Objectives and core course topics so that faculty can better assess which students demonstrate the necessary skills needed to pass a class, especially in terms of the transition from Writing I to Writing II.  I finally got these core concepts into the latest report of the main coordinating committee this year; however, in a recent email telling the department about these changes, it appears that they have been deleted, so I’m not sure if these core concepts have been made official policy, or if they have been put on hold or discarded. 

In order to illustrate the Writing Program’s lack of valid SLOs, take for example the grading standards and learning objectives set forth in our Faculty Handbook for 2017-2018.  Here are some of the vague standards for an A paper: “not commonplace or predictable,” “original,” “polished,” “strong,” “varied,” and “well-chosen” (p. 10).  Or take some of the program goals for WRC 0203: “address the needs of different purposes” and “use appropriate format, structure, voice, tone, and levels of formality” (p. 49).  I don’t know what these words are supposed to mean, and I certainly could not see them or objectively evaluate them in a student paper. 

Philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt (2005) calls this sort of vague verbiage “bullshit,” which is language that cannot be clearly understood or empirically verified.  Frankfurt (2005) argues that bullshit is worse than lying because people are “not even trying” to be accurate, and more importantly, because they are not “committed” to the truth of their statements (pp. 32, 36).  Frankfurt (2005) criticizes bullshit as “empty, without substance or content…No more information is communicated than if the speaker had merely exhaled” (pp. 42-43).  When the Writing Program officially uses and endorses vague, “bullshit” criteria like this, each faculty member will subjectively grade in idiosyncratic ways.  Vague SLOs lead to invalid assessments of student work, and also to an unfair range of scores, not only between teachers, but also between assignments in the same class.

Another example of vague, “bullshit” SLOs can be found in Writing Program definitions of “critical thinking.”  These official definitions are vapid, widely inconsistent, almost completely false, and unconnected from the academic disciplines of psychology and philosophy, which govern the concept and practice of critical thinking.  For the portfolio assessment in the Faculty Handbook, the “critical thinking” objectives include: “summary, paraphrase, analysis, evaluation, and critique,” “thoughtful selection and meaningful synthesis of supporting evidence” (p. 74).  None of these terms are directly connected to the actually definition of critical thinking.  For the Core Curriculum Appendix I, critical thinking standards are: “creative thinking, innovation, inquiry, analysis, evaluation, and synthesis of information” (p. 45).  Again, this list of vague and unconnected words is not connected to the definition of critical thinking.  And for the program goals of WRC 0203, critical thinking supposedly means “use writing and reading as resources of inquiry and communication,” “recognize, understand, summarize, and evaluate the ideas of others,” “understand the power of language and knowledge,” and “understand the interactions among critical thinking, critical reading, and writing” (p. 49).  As far as I can tell, whoever wrote this handbook was just mindlessly writing vague words or just making stuff up.  None of these definitions of critical thinking is consistent, let alone coherent or accurate. 

How can a program teach the core skill of critical thinking when nobody actually knows what it means, let alone how it is done or how to assess it?  I made this exact point to the main departmental coordinating committee several times, and yet no one understood what I was saying. My colleagues think the meaning of critical thinking is obvious because it is simply a matter of common sense, and apparently they can’t see, or chose not to see, the inconsistent and incoherent lists of vague words in our Faculty Handbook.  As a scholar who has published on epistemology and cognition, I’m embarrassed to be associated with the meaningless, confused, and false official language of our department on critical thinking, which was obviously written by amateurs who had no understanding of what they were talking about. 

The vague and sometimes meaningless SLOs are just one part of an imprecise and invalid system of “holistic grading,” which the Chair has instituted, with the support of many colleagues.  This subjective grading system leads to inflated grades that are not correlated with actual student knowledge or skills. This system is usually applied inconsistently, and the data collected is often invalid because the rubrics allow a wide range of subjective opinions.  Writing Program faculty have no training in, or knowledge about, educational assessment, and so they don’t understand how and why their holistic rubrics and subjective evaluations are flawed.  In fact, the Chair and many of my colleagues are biased against the very idea of collecting objective data and conducting educational assessments.  No one in the department, except for myself, seems to understand the concept of validity or the value of assessing objective learning standards. 

As I will demonstrate later in this report, I have uncovered limited student learning in the Writing Program.  I believe that the lack of student learning is a direct result of the lack of objective SLOs and of invalid, holistic assessment instruments, which in conjunction with departmental and institutional pressure, lead to low and subjective academic standards and also to grade inflation, which can be seen as forms of academic fraud.  Faculty subjectively judge student work, use low standards, and inflate grades that are unconnected with real student knowledge or skills, rather than do the harder work of validly assessing objective criteria.

While I am very concerned about grade inflation and lack of student learning in the Writing Program, I am more concerned with the fact that the Chair seems to be orchestrating this fraud, both directly through departmental policy, and indirectly through her comments and the norms she has set.  She makes it clear to faculty that the majority of our students should pass our classes, regardless of actual effort or academic performance.  She also makes it equally clear that she views failing grades as the fault of incompetent instructors, not the result of low student achievement or low motivation. Thus, most of my colleagues are not only using holistic and subjective rubrics to award inflated grades that are disconnected with actual student knowledge or skills, but they are also awarding lots of extra credit and empty points for attendance and participation in an effort to artificially boost student grades and maintain the Chair’s mandated grade distribution. 

Suspiciously, our department has maintained the same basic departmental grade distribution every semester for many years.  In the Writing Program, 80 percent of students consistently earn passing grades every semester, and over 60 percent consistently earn A or B grades.  Interestingly, this inflated grade distribution has always been much higher than our yearly program assessments, which reveal a passing rate about 11 to 15.5 percent lower.  On these yearly assessments, the Writing I average score went from 73 percent passing in 2015-2016 down to 70 percent passing the following year, while the Writing II average went from 75 percent in 2015-2016 down to 69 percent the next year and then down to 67.9 percent last year.  The yearly assessments show a similar downtrend, albeit with a much softer slope, as I have found in my own classes, which can be seen in the previous chart (data on my students’ performance at the start of the semester is indicated on the lower dotted line “Essay 1 Pass”).  While I think the yearly reports are a more accurate reflection of student skills than course grades, I still think these yearly assessments are inflated, due to untrained faculty, vague SLOs, and subjective holistic grading techniques.

The official numbers publicized by the Writing Program sound impressive, and that’s exactly what the Chair and the rest of my colleagues want UTSA administrators to think.  However, my research shows that the majority of students in our department cannot read, write, or critically think, and I have hundreds of student essays to prove it.   Worse, students are passing through Writing I at UTSA without mastering the basic prerequisite skills that are supposed to be taught in that class.  As the chart above shows (the lower dotted line “Essay 1 Pass”), last spring only 22 percent of students in my Writing II class could demonstrate core Writing I skills, which was down from 43 percent in Spring 2016.  I have consistently found that over half of the students who “pass” Writing I cannot demonstrate most core sills, including how to read.  I will discuss this issue with more data later in this report.  For now I want to point out, as the chart above illustrates, that my measurements of student competency have been steadily decreasing since 2016, yet the departmental grade average has held constant, which suggests that not only are my colleagues are artificially inflating grades to keep them in line with traditional standards, but they are consistently inflating grades in roughly the same proportion every semester, which suggests coordination, if not collusion.

The Chair prints the grade distribution of each faculty member every semester and she criticizes any faculty member whose distribution does not match departmental averages, which (as it states clearly in our Faculty Handbook) leads to lower performance ratings, which in turn leads to lower rates of promotion and less employment via less classes offered the following semester.  I have been a victim of this vicious circle for years.  The majority of my colleagues who consistently inflate their grades also consistently earn high scores on student evaluations, while my dropping grade distribution has matched my dropping student evaluation scores.  It is interesting to note that these scores can vary a lot between different sections of the same class during the same semester, which clearly show that it is not the instructor’s teaching that is being measured but the subjective feelings and opinions of students.  In effect, the Chair is coordinating department-wide fraud by demanding that faculty meet inflated grade distributions, which produce inflated student evaluation scores, and she punishes faculty that fall below her prescribed distribution levels.  I tried to collect more precise data on this issue last year, but my colleagues verbally assaulted me for even talking about this issue, and the Chair told me that the Dean doesn’t see any problem with the Writing Program’s inflated grade distribution.

This fraud is further enabled by the Chair’s misuse of student comments and student evaluations, which constitute 30% of our yearly employee evaluations (as stated in the Faculty Handbook), although I suspect that student comments used to carry much more weight in the past.  Faculty who lower standards and inflate grades get higher student evaluations and less complaints because students don’t have to work as hard to get high grades and most students pass a class regardless of effort or skill.  In contrast, faculty with high academic standards award objective grades tied to the actual academic performance of students, which means students have to work harder to demonstrate real learning, and often receive lower grades in the process, which causes students to complain and give instructors lower evaluation scores – which, in turn, leads to lower performance ratings by the Chair, lower or no promotions, and reduced or loss of employment.  It is a vicious circle.  So it is easy to see why most faculty in the department participate in the fraud that the Chair is orchestrating.

Because my colleagues want steady employment with the least amount of student complaints, they lower their academic standards and they do not challenge students to demonstrate real learning.  I have personally seen some colleagues give students meaningless and vapid instruction, whereby students simply have to unthinkingly follow a prescribed ritual to receive a passing grade.  My colleagues are passing students (if not giving them As and Bs) who can’t read, write, or critically think.  One of my students last semester confided in an essay, “My last writing course I had taken my first semester had been a breeze” (Student #1).  Another student explained, “This course [my Writing II course] took me by surprise” because “in none of these schools [previously attended] was I introduced to the importance of objectivity over subjectivity and how to correctly identify points and thesis within works” (Student #2).  Students are passing classes at UTSA with an inflated sense of knowledge and skill, which will result in future struggles when they eventually reach a class (or job) where they actually have to meet objective standards to succeed.  I find this situation to be deeply troubling, and I consider it not only unethical, but also a violation of the academic integrity of UTSA and of the rights of our students as citizens and customers who deserve a real education for their tuition dollars.        

While unprofessionally low standards and the fraudulent practice of enforced grade inflation are the most serious issues affecting our department, the Chair has also intentionally subverted some other important UTSA policies, which have lowered the quality of teaching and student learning in our department.

Ironically, our department has been tasked by UTSA to teach quantitative reasoning, which is not actually happening in most of our writing classes because English teachers are notoriously fearful of math.  Instead of quantitative reasoning, many of my colleagues teach how to subjectively opine or lie with descriptive statistics.  For the most part, the Chair appointed unqualified faculty members to lead the quantitative reasoning and writing initiative (the one qualified faculty member retired soon after the program was initiated).  Most members of the department have no understanding of quantitative reasoning or descriptive statistics, and some members are actively hostile towards the practices data collection and scientific objectivity. 

In the Writing Program Faculty Handbook (pp. 19-20), someone has badly summarized and pasted block quotes from the UTSA report on Quantitative Scholarship.  I have not read the original documents, so I cannot judge its contents, but I can assess how it is being summarized and presented to our faculty.  There is a bunch of empty language framing a vague purpose, like “understand and evaluate data, assess risks and benefits, and make informed decisions” (p. 20).  What does this mean exactly and how is it done?  Few in our department could hazard a guess. 

Nowhere in the Handbook is there any definition of quantitative reasoning or how it is concretely done (for example a discussion of descriptive vs. inferential statistics, probability theory, the concept of validity, or sampling, including sample size and sample bias).  Instead of concrete and knowledgeable directions, there is a decontextualized and vague process (Explore, Visualize, Analyze, Understand, Translate, and Express).  The “Q” program, as it is known in our department, has been largely reduced in most classrooms to a meaningless bureaucratic shuffling of papers, whereby faculty take a couple of days to follow a prescribed worksheet.  Why?  Faculty have not been properly trained in qualitative thinking, and official documents offer nothing but vague and useless verbiage.  Worse, most of our faculty have strong biases against math and qualitative thinking.  Thus, the department assessments of quantitative reasoning have been deeply flawed with questionable validity. 

Likewise, there is an important system-wide UT initiative for peer-observation to improve faculty teaching (see UTSA HOP 2.20), which is being subverted.  Once again, the Chair assigned unqualified faculty to work on this program.  And while the basic letter of the law has been followed, for the most part, the spirit of the initiative has been undermined, which I think constitutes another from of fraud.  The leader of this initiative has no teaching experience (he was reporter before becoming a teacher a couple of years ago), and he has never done any formal study or research on education, teaching, or student learning.  For many years, I have asked the Chair to develop this program into a serious endeavor to teach faculty about the science of teaching, assessment, and student learning, but she has refused to listen or do anything to develop this program.  I was recently peer-reviewed by the leader of this program.  He sat in on a class…and that was it.  I assume he filled out the paperwork, but it doesn’t matter because this paperwork is ignored by the Chair and simply put in employee files.  The exercise is currently a pointless waste of time that is of no value to the observer, the observed, or the program.  Peer-observation is a vital component of faculty development, and the Writing Program has reduced it to another meaningless bureaucratic shuffling of papers.

Not only are many faculty inadequately prepared to teach, but competent faculty are prevented from teaching effectively.  First of all, the Chair has mandated an unprofessional “teach-to-the-textbook” curriculum, which many faculty in the department slavishly follow because they have no original ideas about teaching or learning, let alone about the subject matter we are employed to teach. Many of our faculty do little more than follow the prescribed readings and exercises in our textbooks without fully understanding what they are teaching or why, let alone designing original curricular materials.  Many faculty cannot recognize erroneous or outdated information in our textbooks, and so students get indoctrinated with useless material, which causes confusion when they are later presented with correct information in future classes.  When I first joined UTSA, I gave a short lecture to the whole department criticizing the theoretical faults and factual inaccuracies in one of our main textbooks.  The Chair and the rest of the department ignored my presentation; we continue to use this deeply flawed book, and most of our students get indoctrinated with some useless and inaccurate information.

Another issue that prevents quality teaching is our department’s over-reliance on student comments and evaluations, which constitute 30 percent of our yearly employment evaluations. These evaluations determine faculty raises, full-time employment, and promotion.  I will demonstrate later in this report how student evaluations are invalid, discriminatory, and inversely connected to actual student academic achievement.  Many faculty in our department are scared of honestly interacting with their students for fear that students will complain and their employment will be jeopardized.  One junior faculty member who had been with the program for only two years confided in me that he wishes he could talk to students the way I do, but he fears student complaints, which would cause retaliation by the Chair and the departmental promotion committee.

Despite earning a PhD, the Chair has not been properly trained in information literacy, and she has shared many “fake” and predatory “scholarly journal” emails requesting faculty research for publication, which are scams that usually involve requesting money to publish.  Somehow, these spam emails get through the UTSA security, which really needs to be addressed by the IT department.  I had to explain to the Chair on several occasions about predatory journals and Beall’s List, which apparently she had never heard about.  She was passing these emails on to the rest of the department as legitimate publishing opportunities, which I think is irresponsible and unprofessional. 

Early in my career here at UTSA, the Chair also passed along an email about a summer teaching program in China.  I responded to the email, thinking my Chair had actually screened emails she sent to the department and that she would only forward legitimate program opportunities for our faculty.  I went to China to teach for that program and it tuned out to be fraudulent in many ways (including the altering of final grades to pass every student).  I wrote a book about that fraudulent program to warn both faculty and students.  I also alerted an editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education and worked with a reporter to research these fraudulent programs in China, and I was the main source of an article on the subject in that journal.  A component department Chair would take personal responsibility to screen any information that is shared to the whole department because in sharing such information it can be seen as an endorsement.

The unprofessional and fraudulent practices that I have described in the Writing Program at UTSA have become commonplace in higher education.  Several decades ago, Dennis McGrath and Martin B. Spear (1991) published The Academic Crisis of the Community College, which documented a disturbing trend in community colleges that has since spread to research universities, especially non-selective institutions like UTSA.  McGrath and Spear (1991) argued that college classes are “conventional and mostly ineffective” (p. 48) because they “expect little commitment or effort from students and provide only meager models of intellectual activity” (p. 19).  The curriculum is often “mere compilations of facts, strung together by discrete concepts within a transparent theory” (p. 30).  Both faculty and students have lowered “expectation[s] about what counts as rigorous academic work” because “intellectual activity [has] bec[ome] debased and trivialized, reduced to skills, information, or personal expression” (p. 54).  Faculty focused on teaching freshmen and sophomores are “disengage[d] from disciplines” and this “spawns a progressive, if silent, academic drift – away from rigor, toward negotiated anemic practices” (p. 142).  Many students in America at open-door or non-selective institutions of higher education are getting a “scaled-down” (p. 93) “weak version” of college (p. 12) and a “significant leveling down of the ‘norms of literacy’” (p. 15), which limits their possibilities and sets them up for failure.

I have tried to understand this trend with my scholarship, especially my book on the history of community colleges in the U.S. (Beach, 2011), and I have tried to battle against this trend with my teaching.  Unlike my colleagues, I offer high and largely objective academic standards because I am very familiar with the research on good teaching and student learning, which I will discuss at more length later in this report.  Good college-level teaching should connect students to the objective world via scientific scholarship and critical thinking so that students can learn how the world works, and so students can learn real skills so they can successfully operate in the world (Gopnik, 2016, p. 180).  As development psychologist Alison Gopnik (2016) documents, authentic learning takes place through concrete activities, whereby students become “informal apprentices” (p. 181) and they should “practice practice, practice” (p. 182) the specific skills the teacher introduces.  Students move from ignorance and incompetence to competence, and then finally to “masterly learning,” whereby they take what they have “already learned and make it second nature” (p. 182, 204). 

The teacher’s job is to explain, demonstrate, critically analyze, and evaluate students’ practice so that they can learn from their mistakes.  Gopnik (2016) explains, “With each round of imitation practice, and critique, the learner becomes more and more skilled, and tackles more and more demanding parts of the process” (Gopnik, 2016, p. 185).  The learning process requires a lot of work and effort, and it can be “grueling” and painful (p. 185), which causes many students to complain about the effort they have to expend.  True learning is much more like the apprenticeship model found in sports and music than academic subjects (p. 186), which are more demanding practices than just memorizing information and filling in answers on standardized tests.  I seek to give my students a real education along the lines of the apprenticeship model that Gopnik (2016) discussed, and I hold my students to high academic standards that push them beyond their subjective preferences towards knowledge of the objective world. 

But faculty in institutions of higher education should not just be good teachers.  We should also be scholars, which political scientist Keith E. Whittington (2018) defines as those who “produce and disseminate knowledge in according with professional disciplinary standards” (p. 148).  As scholar-teachers, faculty should not be circumscribed by administrators and be told “what to teacher or how to teach it” (p. 142), as long as we can demonstrate professional research that legitimizes our practices.  This is the foundation of free speech in the academy (p. 7), which enables universities to be marketplace of ideas.  As Whittington (2018) argues, “The faculty members and staff of a university have an obligation to socialize and train students to engage in civil but passionate debated about important, controversial, and sometimes offensive subjects, and to be able to critically examine arguments and ideas that they find attractive as well as those they find repulsive.  Colleges and universities will have failed in their educational mission if they produce graduates who are incapable of facing up to and judiciously engaging difficult ideas” (p. 93).  As an instructor of writing, critical thinking, and argumentation, I wholeheartedly agree with Whittington (2018), and I take my mission very seriously because I know the social and political ramification if I do not.

Few faculty in the Writing Program follow my example of good teaching, let alone my commitment to scholarship, disciplinary standards, and academic integrity.  But I understand why.  It’s easier to teach to the textbook, have low standards, and inflate grades, especially when you are working two or three jobs.  My colleagues also fear the vicious circle, which is understandable: Students will complain, which leads to lower student evaluations, which leads to punitive measures, especially lower employment.  Plus, there is a psychological cost for being a committed scholar-teacher.  When a faculty member holds high standards, both for themselves and for students, these professional standards can cause a lot of frustration and demoralization.  Professor of education Doris A. Santoro (2018) has documented K-12 teachers’ “high level of dissatisfaction” with their jobs due to widespread “demoralization,” which she defines as the “inability to enact the values that motivate and sustain their work” as teachers (pp. 3, 43).  This same kind of demoralization happens in higher education.  I have suffered demoralization for years at UTSA. 

Many teachers, like myself, passionately care about “the integrity of the profession,” but they “cannot do what they believe a good teacher should do” because there is “dissonance between educators’ moral centers and the conditions in which they teach” (Santoro, 2018, pp. 88, 43).  Santoro (2018) talked about a teacher named Reggie who had to resign after 10 years because, “You play ball or leave with your ethics” (p. 1).  I know some colleagues who have had to quit UTSA (and other institutions) because they were demoralized by the dysfunctional policies and unprofessional practices.  For years, I have felt the pressure to lower my standards or to just quit, but instead I have worked harder to research the problems UTSA faces, I have continually tried to discuss these with colleagues, and now I have written this report.  I have always tried to stay true to my principles and best practices, and to stand up for what is right, trying to change UTSA for the better.

But I have paid a great cost over the years.  I have suffered a lot of stress and worry every semester, which has caused me health problems.  I have also psychologically suffered from being criticized by my peers and my Chair.  I have been passed up for promotions and raises, and so I earn a lower salary than most of my colleagues, even though I am the most productive and acclaimed scholar in the department.  Santoro (2018) has analyzed the “isolation” that many educators feel as “conscientious objectors” when they stand up “in the name of professional ethics” in order to demarcate the line between the “good work” of teaching from those actions that violate professional standards (pp. 8, 4).  Many teachers have a “craft conscience” so when dictated rules or norms violate professional standards these teachers feel that “they are degrading their profession” by being forced to acquiesce to what Santoro calls “moral violence” (pp. 91, 138).  I have acutely felt the “moral violence” perpetuated by the policies and practices of the Chair, and it has worn me down.

One issue that many teachers around the country complain about again and again is administrative pressure to pass students who do not meet professional standards by demonstrating adequate learning.  I would argue that this is the biggest problem in the Writing Program, although this pressure has come from top administrators at UTSA.  The Chair has repeatedly criticized me for not falling in line with the rest of the department.  As Santoro (2018) documented, some teachers lament that they “damaged the integrity of my work when I passed that student” (p. 32).  Other teachers have explained how they are sometimes pressured by administrators with what Santoro (2018) calls “moral blackmail,” which entails shaming teachers so they will change student grades or else face admonition or official reprimand, which could include dismissal (pp. 136, 97).  I have been a victim of both moral violence and moral blackmail because the Chair has often criticized my teaching and me personally, mostly because students complain about my high academic standards, and because I fail too many students.  The Chair has also used “moral blackmail” by threatening my promotions and employment over this issue.  But I have staid true to my principles and best practices, and I have suffered for it.

Over the past eight years, I have raised all of these issues in one form or another, and many issues I have repeatedly raised every year.  I have tried to appeal to the Chair of the department in private conversations and emails, to the main coordinating committee, and through emails to the whole department, but my ideas have been ignored, and I have often been criticized and ostracized, especially by the Chair.  I have also been stuck in a Lecturer II position for years, while almost all of my colleagues have been promoted to Lecturer III, some with lots of merit pay and awards, even though they all have less experience, less education, and less professional accomplishments than I do.  And worst of all, every semester I see and more and more unprepared students who can’t read and write get passed through the writing program without the skills they need to be successful in life. 

Unprepared for Success:  UTSA Students Lack the Motivation, Student Skills, and Academic Skills to Succeed in College

For the past eight years, I have been formally assessing student motivation and academic proficiency.  I have also been studying the quality of the faculty and the curriculum of the Writing Program, as well as some of the institutional policies of UTSA.  I wanted to both understand the complex causes of student failure and also to develop innovative ways of increasing student motivation and achievement.  It is important to note that most of the students that I see in Writing II have already passed through Writing I at UTSA learning almost nothing, Because my colleagues inflate grades with low standards, I am put in the almost impossible position of trying to teach unprepared and largely unmotivated students both Writing I and Writing II in a 16 week semester, a difficult situation which is hard on both students and myself.

1. Attendance and Persistence, Week 1-12

When I first started teaching at UTSA I had a mandatory attendance policy, but I did not specifically reward or penalize students for coming or not coming to class, other than the right to revise one of their major essays if they missed 2-3 classes or less.  I quickly noticed that absent rates were very high, comparable to what I have seen in community colleges.  From 2010 to 2012, I began to document absenteeism.  I found that 22% of my students missed almost two weeks of class by the 12th week of classes (about 14% of class time) and 17% of my students missed more than two weeks of class (about 19.5% of class time).  Almost all of these students would end up dropping or failing because they were not in class to learn, hear directions, or stay on top of assignments.

By 2014, I not only made attendance mandatory, but I had to start grading attendance to keep more students coming to class.  Almost every day there were some points to be earned by being in class and participating.  Even with graded attendance, many students still missed a lot of classes, or never showed up at all.  In the fall of 2016, over the first four weeks of the semester, two students never came to class.  After a month, I emailed students and advisors in order to tell students to withdraw.  Two other students withdrew during the first two weeks: One of these students said there was a family emergency, and the other student did not explain reason for leaving.  These four students represented about 5% of the total students I had that semester.

During the first nine weeks of that same fall semester 2016, many students were coming to class late and/or not attending class regularly.  Several of these students effectively stopped coming to class, although only a few students officially “withdrew” from class.   I cannot teach or help students who do not demonstrate the basic student skills of coming to class prepared to learn.

Students with the most absences and late attendance, Week 1-9 (Absent/Late)

1)     6 Students:  5/0, 6/4, 4/6, 4/2, 2/3, 2/6 [2 of these students stopped attending]

2)     5 Students:  9/1, 3, 13/3, 9/2, 13/1 [5 of these students stopped attending; 1 was pregnant and got married]

3)     5 Students: 6/0, 8/0, 5/2, 9/0, 14/0 [3 students stopped attending; 1 with mental health issue]

4)     2 Students: 5/1, 8/0

5)     1 Student: 3/0 [1 student stopped attending: she was married, working 40 hours, taking 6 classes]

Students withdrawing from class during weeks 2-4 or week 8, grades for W students week 8

1)     1 (wk 2-4); 2 (wk 8):  [256 points out of 365], [262/365]

2)     4 (wk 2-4)

3)     2 (wk 8): [178/365], [214/365]

4)     1 (wk 8): [197/365]

5)     2 (wk 2-4)

Analysis of Attendance and Persistence

There were two periods where students formally withdrew from the class with a “W” grade.  The first period was between weeks 2-4 and the second period was around week 8.  During the first four weeks, seven students had dropped.  During this time and into week 9, around 20% to 30% of students in each class (except class #5) stopped coming to class regularly, were excessively late to class, or both. While attendance naturally fluctuates, some students had a pattern of coming to class late, or only attending 1 or 2 classes a week.  Many students would stop attending regularly before and after major assignments.

By week 9, twelve students had stopped coming to class regularly.  Of those twelve, five students formally withdrew from class by week 9, one got married and was on her honeymoon, and another student had a psychological breakdown due to personal issues.  The other five students have not communicated with me and they have not withdrawn.  One of these students was a serious, hard working student who had come into my office about 5 times during the first month of the semester.  She asked for advice on her major, transferring to another university, internships, and also help on class assignments.  But this student was married, working full-time, and taking 6 classes.  We had talked about her workload, and I’m assuming that is the cause of her absents, but she never explained why she stopped coming to class (she later formally withdrew from class, and I learned that she felt the class was too hard). 

How can students learn and pass a class if they are not in class, or actively engaged with their coursework?  The simple answer is they cannot.  Many UTSA students are unwilling or unable to attend all of their college classes, which is one of the significance causes of student failure. 

Why Do Students Miss Class?  Possible Causes:

There are many possible causes for excessive absences: not having prerequisite skills; succumbing to the added stress of having to learn two classes at once; poor student skills; not liking the responsibility of active learning; not liking my high standards.  But I think the main cause of absents/lateness was time management: Students have too many commitments, which is the focus of the next section of this report.  The majority of my students are working and/or talking 5-6 college classes.  However, there were some other unique circumstances as well:  One student had a mental health break-down, which took her away from class for almost two weeks, and another student was pregnant, getting married, and going on a honeymoon during the semester.  Every semester I have at least one or two students who discuss serious mental health issues with me (representing about 2-3% of all my students), and many students who discuss conflicts between school and work or school and family.

2. Assessing “Soft” Student Skills, Week 1-4

For the first four weeks at UTSA, my students were graded on “soft” student skills and attendance, so I was specifically assessing specific “soft” skills.  Having taught at the community college level for over a decade and having published many books and articles on community colleges, I have found that lack of student skills is one of the most significant problems causing low rates of success for community college students in terms of passing classes, persisting, graduating with degrees, or transferring to universities. 

Many community colleges now require mandatory “student success” classes, which teach students the basic skills of being a successful college student, like how to read, how to learn, how to take tests, how to prioritize goals, how to manage money, and how to navigate the institution of college.  In these classes, students are mostly graded mostly on participation.  When I have taught these classes, students could

fail the major assignments but still pass the class if they came almost every day, participated in class, and completed almost every assignment.  And yet, many students still fail the class, mostly because of absenteeism and non-completion of assignments.  In the above chart, you will see that 20% to 40% of community college students failed my student success classes due to these reasons.  Also, I would like to explain why one class had almost 20% more successful students.  The class with a 79% success rate was at 7:30am while the other class with a 62% success rate was at 3pm.  I have found that early morning classes have significantly different student characteristics than classes held during the day or evening.  Generally, I have found that students who take early morning classes are more motivated and prepared. 

In my UTSA classes, on top of teaching soft skills, there are also two graded academic assignments testing prerequisite knowledge from their previous course, which here at UTSA would be WRC 1013 (Freshman Composition I), but many students take this prerequisite class in high school.  To be successful on these academic assignments, students needed to follow assignment directions in syllabus (also there were models of sample work in syllabus and on blackboard to help demonstrate assignments).  If student demonstrated all “soft” skills, but failed the two academic assignments with F grades, then they still would have had a C+ to B- grade for class.   In order to earn a failing grade of D+ or lower, a student needed to fail both “soft” skills assessments and the two academic assignments.  For the first month at UTSA, my assessment was focused on:        

            1)  Attendance

            2) Punctuality

            3) Effort/Motivation: Bringing textbooks/assignments to class

            4) Effort/Motivation: Taking lecture/discussion notes

            5) Effort/Motivation:  Following directions in syllabus and asking for help

            6) Effort/Learning:  2 academic assignments focused on prerequisite skills

Percentage and raw number of students failing class with D+ or lower (does not include 4 withdraws)

      Class 1)  31.5% (6 students)

      Class 2)  45.5%  (10)

      Class 3)  48% (12)

      Class 4)  33% (6)

      Class 5)  5.5% (1)

Analysis of Student Skills: Around 30% to 45% of students could not demonstrate core “soft” student skills, which included simply coming to all class on time with required materials and taking notes during class.  This is comparable with what I see at community colleges, and in many ways, UTSA students are nearly identical with “non-traditional” community college students in terms of academic risk factors.  Without foundational student skills and prerequisite knowledge, there is no way a student can pass a college class, let alone earn a degree.

Possible Causes: Poor student skills in high school; High school teacher’s not teaching soft skills; High school teacher’s teaching soft skills but not holding students accountable; 1st generation college students not aware of some soft skills (especially learning skills); Working 30-50 hours a week plus taking full load of classes; Some students taking 5-6 classes; Family responsibilities; illness

3. Assessing Prerequisite Core Skills through Essay Writing

The first major essay assignment was started week three and culminated at the beginning of week five.  This essay assignment was designed to specifically target and assess prerequisite skills from previous writing classes that students needed in order to learn and master new WRC 1023 skills.  These prerequisite skills have traditionally been taught in middle school, high school, and then covered at a higher level in Freshman Composition I course. 

I took three class periods to discuss these prerequisite skills.  These skills include basic sentence structure, basic paragraph structure, basic essay structure (topic, thesis, supporting points, evidence, and transitions), citations, plagiarism, and the “borrowing” skills of summary, paraphrase, and quoting.  Outside of foundational these skills, I took another day and a half to test for reading comprehension skills, which entails finding the basic parts of writing (topic, thesis, supporting points, and evidence) in order to understand an author’s argument. 

During class, students were required to take notes and ask questions about any concepts or skills they did not understand (few asked questions).  This information was also assigned in two textbooks and some extra readings.  I also told students to ask questions in office hours if there was any “review” information that they did not understand (few came to office hours).  I repeated all of this core prerequisite information three times, once on each of these three days, plus students were supposed to read their textbooks: All concepts and skills were covered four times or more. 

The first step of essay 1 was to read one source, roughly four-five pages in length.  Students were to annotate this reading in order to find topic, thesis, supporting points, and evidence.  Students used this information to write a summary and analysis essay, which was to be 3-4 pages in length. As mentioned, there was one and a half class periods devoted to reading comprehension in order to assess student-reading skills and help them understand the assigned text.  Students worked in groups to annotate the reading, making sure they could identify the parts mentioned above.  Before class, many students did not follow directions and/or they simply did not do the reading/annotation assignment.  For those that did, most found the topic, but few found the thesis.  Few students could distinguish supporting points from evidence/details, and most annotations consisted of random words and sentences underlined, most not part of central argument of text.  Because no student could effectively read, I had to tell students the thesis and main ideas of the text, writing the basic points on board, and then requiring them to go back to the text to fully state and explain these main ideas in their own words after class.

The second step of essay 1 entailed students working groups in order to create a typed outline for their summary & analysis essay.  I took 1 day of class to evaluate and grade each group outline, giving students oral and written feedback.  Students then had 1.5 weeks to re-read text, revise their outline, write a draft, revise their drafts, and then hand in the final version of the essay.  I specifically DID NOT take class time to discuss drafts and editing because this was a diagnostic essay assignment designed to test prerequisite skills, so I needed to see what students could do with only some guided help and review.  Even after telling the students the thesis and main ideas (as described in last paragraph) and having them work together in groups on the outline, most groups still had no comprehension of the thesis and main ideas of the text.  In office hours, I literally had to go paragraph by paragraph in order to read the text out loud to some students in order to explain thesis, main points, and essay organization.

This assignment was a diagnostic test to see if students knew A) how to effective read and annotate core parts of an essay, B) how to create an outline, and C) how to write a college-level summary essay demonstrating proper paraphrase, summary, quoting, and citation, and D) how to edit drafts.  More specifically, I was testing for knowledge of these core concepts: topic, thesis, detailed evidence, transitions, summary, paragraph, quoting, and citation, as well as writing a basic sentence and paragraph.  I was also testing to see if students can follow directions and complete work by deadlines (re-test of soft student skills mentioned above). 

Before entering my class, students should have basic knowledge of ALL prerequisite skills from previous classes.  However, I was not giving a true diagnostic because I explained multiple times ALL of the information they needed to be successful on this assignment.  First, as I stated above, I provided students with all the core concepts four times (3 times in class plus textbook readings).  Second, I provided students with models of sample student outlines and essays on blackboard.  Third, I provided students with a detailed essay structure for the assignment on the syllabus.  Fourth, I gave them a detailed “peer-review” assignment, which reinforced many of the core concepts.  Finally, I told them the topic, thesis, supporting points, and major details of the text so they were not fully responsible for reading on their own.  If students had a basic understanding of core skills, they should have been able to demonstrate all of these prerequisite skills on essay #1, especially with ALL the copious amount of help that I provided.

Percentage and raw number of students passing (C- or higher) or failing (D+ or lower) Essay 1

1)     47% Pass  /  53% Fail

2)     41% Pass  / 59% Fail

3)     40% Pass  /  60% Fail

4)     33% Pass  /  67% Fail

5)     71% Pass  /  29% Fail

Majority of students do not have prerequisite skills.  Where did students take Writing I class?

1)     5 UTSA WRC 1013; 3 other university; 1 community college; 8 high school

2)     4 UTSA WRC 1013; 3 other university; 1 community college; 9 high school

3)     1 UTSA WRC 1013; 2 other university; 3 community college; 14 high school

4)     6 UTSA WRC 1013; 3 community college; 10 high school

5)     2 UTSA WRC 1013; 2 other university; 12 high school

In a follow up survey the next year, I specifically asked students about their high school English classes.  Almost all claimed to have earned As and Bs in high school English for both their senior and junior years.  Also, 68% claimed they took AP English and 32% took duel-credit college-level English.  This leads me to believe that high schools are not teaching basic skills, not even at in duel-credit classes, and that high school and duel-credit teachers are inflating grades.  I have taught duel-credit college classes in Austin area high schools and I have found that many students, and in some cases most students, do not have the basic literacy skills of reading or writing.  In one lower SES Austin area high school, I taught a sophomore-level class, which meant that students had already passed two prerequisite college-level writing classes, yet half of the class could not effectively read or write a sentence, let alone demonstrate higher order reading comprehension or essay writing skills.

Analysis of Prerequisite Skills:

The majority of students in four classes (53% to 67%) could not demonstrate the basic prerequisite skills needed for WRC 1023.  Most importantly, the majority of my students are functionally illiterate.  They cannot understand the core topic, thesis, and main ideas of a text: A) They have limited vocabulary and cannot understand all the words in a college-level text, and they do not look up unknown words; B) They cannot see, let alone understand, topic, thesis, or main points, so they “read” a text as just a jumbled list of details – They cannot see main parts of argument and how main parts are logically connected; C) They confuse details with points; D) They cannot link points and details to the person or group responsible for that information – They do not see the conversation/debate within the text, and even when this conversation is pointed out to them and explained, most quickly forget this concept.

Lack of prerequisite skills makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for many students to successfully pass my course.  Having to learn WRC 1013 concepts AND WRC 1023 concepts at the same time puts a lot of stress on students.  On top of this, circling back to the first issue or poor “soft” student skills, many students do not put much effort into coming to class, doing homework, following directions, understanding lectures/textbooks, asking questions, or fully completing assignments. 

Given these circumstances, there is not much that I can do as a teacher.  First, I have to lower standards and inflate grades; otherwise I would have to fail most of my students for not being able to demonstrate basic pre-perquisite skills.  I reward students with points simply for coming to class on time, brining their books, taking notes, and for doing open-book reading quizzes.  Even then, around 5-30% of my students cannot meet these basic requirements.  Around 10-15% of my students (often more) can’t even make it to class consistently.

But I still hold students to a relatively high academic standard, and I force students to be responsible for information by using Socratic teaching methods.  Students simply want to be “told what to do,” and then parrot the correct answer, which is not an effective way to learn.  Instead, I often answer student questions with a question, trying to get them to first identify the topic of their question, and then generate their own answer by using knowledge from class lectures, notes, and textbooks.  Many students find the Socratic method frustrating, too hard, and for some, rude.  Why?  Because I do not directly answer their questions, and I make them think for themselves.  Many students do not know how to think and they don’t want to put much effort into learning thinking skills.  But what is college if it is not teaching students how to think for themselves so they can be self-directed learners?

Possible Causes: The majority my students are coming from an AP class in high school or a community college.  It is clear that some students were simply not taught all the basic prerequisite skills.  I talked to one adult student who took Writing I in a community college, and she said she wrote four personal essays and one research paper.  Most of the information that we “reviewed” in class was new to her.  It is also likely that some students were taught core skills, but the teacher used ineffective methods, so skills only made it into short-term memory, and then were quickly lost.  Some students do not want to invest much time and energy into the learning process: They simply want a teacher to tell them what to do.  Some students are overconfident in their skills, or just unaware of how college works, because they expect that they will be able to pass all assignments without much effort.

For those who took WRC 1013 here at UTSA, all should have been introduced to core skills (although one of the essays in the norm session this semester showed that not all UTSA instructors are teaching core skills, i.e. the student with flawed punctuation and limited higher order skills who got straight As in WRC 1013).  But while most WRC 1013 teachers do cover core concepts and skills, some are most likely using ineffective teaching methods, so knowledge and skills gained in class are quickly lost, and they are not retained for future courses.

4. Student Class Load and Employment

Competing responsibilities and time management are high risk factors for low student achievement and non-completion of degrees.  This is amply documented in the literature on higher education students.  In 2016, I took a survey, asking students about how much they work and how many classes they were taking.  My working hypothesis was that many students could not manage competing responsibilities, and therefore, they simply did not have the time be successful in all of their college classes, especially a writing/thinking intensive course like WRC 1023.

Student Employment Hours: 20 hours or less / 21-35 / over 36 hours

1)     10 Students Working:  7 / 3 / 0

2)     11 Students Working:  9 / 1 / 1

3)     8 Students Working:  7 / 1 / 0

4)     5 Students Working:  3 / 2 / 0

5)     5 Students Working:  5 / 0 / 0

Student Class Load: 4 classes / 5 classes / 6 classes

1)     3 / 11/ 0

2)     3 / 11 / 1

3)     9 / 8/ 2

4)     3 / 7 / 1

5)     0 / 14 / 1

Analysis of Competing Responsibilities: 

In some classes, over 50% of my students were working 20 hours or more, on top of taking 5-6 university classes.  I took a follow up survey in 2017 and found that 39% of my students were taking 5-6 classes.  Few students can be academically successful with such a burdensome workload.

Possible Causes:

In conversations with several students, financial reasons motivated them to not only work in order to help pay for school, but also to take more classes so as to finish quickly, thereby paying less tuition.  I counseled many students about the virtues of working less and taking out loans so they would have more time and energy to devote to academic success.

5. Does Lack of Prerequisite Skills Predict Success in WRC 1023?

I did not have the time to collect or organize all the data needed to run a statistical analysis to begin to answer the above question.  But from studying the scholarly literature on the subject and from my experience, I suspect I know at least some of the main causes of absents, withdrawals, and failing grades in WRC 1023: lack of prerequisite skills and poor time-management due to working and taking too many classes.  There are other causes, but I think these are the two most important.  In order to test the connection between prerequisite skills and success on new skills, I have put the grades of essay #1 and essay #2 next to each other in the table below:

            Does Essay #1 Grade Predict Essay #2 Grade and Withdrawing? 

            1)         9 passed Essay 1;  3 (33%) of these students failed Essay 2 or withdrew

                        10 failed Essay 1;  9 (90%) of these students failed Essay 2 or withdrew

            2)         9 passed Essay 1; 3 (33%) of these students failed Essay 2 or withdrew

                        13 failed Essay 1; 6 (46%) of these students failed Essay 2 or withdrew

            3)         10 passed Essay 1;  4 (40%) of these students failed Essay 2 or withdrew

                        15 failed Essay 1;  12 (80%) of these students failed Essay 2 or withdrew

            4)         6 passed Essay 1;  3 (50%) of these students failed Essay 2 or withdrew

            12 failed Essay 1;  8 (67%) of these students failed Essay 2 or withdrew

5)       12 passed Essay 1;  2 (17%) of these students failed Essay 2 or withdrew

                       5 failed Essay 1; 2 (40%) of these students failed Essay 2 or withdrew

Analysis: 

The data indicate a clear trend.  Students without prerequisite skills (as measured by diagnostic Essay 1) are more than twice as likely to fail Essay 2 or withdraw from class than students with prerequisite skills.   Also, while prerequisite skills necessary, they are not sufficient for success with higher order skills, as some students who passed Essay 1 still failed the harder Essay 2.  Finally, the data also show the limited, but powerful effect a competent teacher can have on un-prepared students.  Around 10-60% of un-prepared students who failed Essay 1 went on to pass Essay 2.  In terms of measuring teaching effectiveness, I think that these data are the most significant measure.

Possible Causes:

The probable cause is intuitive.  Students need prerequisite skills in order to learn and master higher order skills.

6. Why Do Students Fail Open Book Exams?

Most students could not recall basic information from textbook readings during class discussions.  After class lectures and discussions, which were reiterations of textbook reading, many, if not most, students still could not recall or explain basic concepts.  Students could also not understand basic concepts after getting detailed feedback on essay #1.  Core concepts were explicitly noted on graded student essays.  After getting these essays back, students were responsible for reviewing information, fixing each part of their essay, and then coming to see me in office hours to discuss their mistakes and to see if they were able to fix them.  I offered most students extra credit for this process.  Many students came to my office with essays that had hardly been changed at all.  I would put my finger on concept one, then put my finger on where that concept was demonstrated poorly in draft #1, and then I would put my finger on the new essay where that part was supposedly “fixed.”  In many cases, there was not even a single altered word, let alone substantial revision.  I also rarely got any response, let alone accurate answers, for definitions of basic concepts, like “what is a thesis?” or “how do you quote?”  Even when offered extra credit, students were unable or unwilling to do the work required to learn core concepts. 

We went over basic skills material multiple times in class and in assigned readings, students wrote Essay 1 as a diagnostic test of these skills, and many students started revising Essay 1 with additional feedback from me during office hours. Later in the semester, I gave an open book exam on these basic skills to see if students were gaining knowledge.  An open-book exam is really a high school tactic and I’m not aware of professors giving such exams in higher education, especially at a university.  At this point in the class (week 9), all students should have been able to successfully get 100% on an open book exam, but many did not.  Why?

Open Book Exam:  Students Failing Exam / Students Not Turning In Exam

1)     3 / 2  (29% of total class)

2)     1 / 3 (17% of total class)

3)     0 / 7 (32% of total class)

4)     1 / 5 (29% of total class)

5)     0 / 0

Analysis: 

A significant number of students in most classes could not pass a take home exam, or could not complete the assignment and turn it in.  There is no way to effectively teach a student who lacks the cognitive skills to complete an open-book exam, or who lacks the basic motivation to do their homework.  The assignment was worth 24 points, or almost 2% of their total grade, so it was not a minor assignment.

Possible Causes:

I think there are two probable causes.  Some students are overcommitted with competing responsibilities, and these students do not have the time to complete assignments, or come to class regularly.  Other students have low motivation, and these students do not care enough to complete assignments or work hard enough to master new skills.  But there is also a more basic potential cause: Many students are illiterate or have undeveloped literacy skills.  Last semester, spring 2018, I conducted a basic reading and discussion activity in class.  Students read a two-page newspaper article, and I asked a lot of basic reading comprehension questions, but few students could demonstrate high-school level literacy, let alone college-level literacy.  Most of the students in several classes couldn’t even find and accurately count the number of human researchers who were named in the article, which is a very simple task that an 7th or 8th grader could do. 

8. The Signal and the Noise: Are There Any Patterns?

Analyzing this data, I see a general pattern.  Around 30-48% of students were failing by week 4.  The first three classes had 5-6 students who were chronically late and absent from class.  Between 53-67% of students failed the first essay.  And 17-30% of these students could not pass or complete a take-home exam.  The data indicate that over 1/3 of my students (approximately 30-40%) were overburdened with competing responsibilities, they could not motivate themselves enough to attend class or learn, or they could not put enough effort into the class to be successful.  Further, around 2/3 of the class (53-75%) did not have basic prerequisite skills to be successful so they had to learn both prerequisite skills and higher order skills at the same time, which could have also contributed to demotivating some of these students.  Given this data, a competent teacher who is not unduly lowering standards and/or inflating grades would expect to pass only around 50% of these students.  The data showed that I had a measurable impact on between 10-60% of un-prepared students who failed Essay 1 because they students went on to pass Essay 2.  These data are the most significant measure of my teaching effectiveness.

The outlying data are clearly my last class at 12pm, which was far more successful than my other four classes.  Part of the reason was that this class was much smaller than the other classes (only 18 students registered week 2).  Although my first class was also smaller, this class was at 8 am and many students were consistently late and absent due to the early time.  But the main reason my 12pm class was so successful was due to random fluctuation of student enrollment.  Only 1 student (5.5%) was not fully participating and passing by week 4, and 71% of students passed Essay 1.  I was lucky with this class because students were more prepared with core prerequisite concepts and skills, and these students were more motivated to work hard, come to class, and participate.  I did not include this data above, but 87% of this class passed Essay 2, and the two failing students both got D grades (one of them a D+ or 69%) so they were not far from passing marks.  Clearly this class demonstrates how teaching and learning effectiveness is related.  A competent teacher can only do so much with low-skilled and de-motivated students, but competent teacher can be more successful if students have prerequisite skills and they are motivated to learn.

The 12pm class proves that my teaching style and curriculum are not the cause of low student persistence and achievement in my classes.  If I was an incompetent teacher or if I had unreasonable expectations, then there would be high rates of failure equally distributed between all my classes, plus one would expect little or no achievement gains with the unprepared students (between Essay 1 and 2).     

I work very hard each and every semester, and yet I am rarely very successful here at UTSA in terms of getting more students to persist in my classes and successfully pass.  Nor am I very successful in getting students to appreciate criticism and hard work as tools that promote academic and personal growth.  A lack of preparedness would not be an insurmountable problem if students were motivated and willing to work hard and learn.  But many are not.  I collected data from my students during Spring 2018.  I had them fill out a survey after each major essay assignment.  The most important question I asked was, “Did you complete the full assignment and follow all of the teacher’s directions?”  Between 45 and 61.5 percent of students said “No.”  Approximately 13.5 to 24 percent did not complete all the required reading for the project.  Around 33 to 54 percent admitted they did not spend enough time to complete the assignment and do well.  About 5 percent admitted that they didn’t even both to read the directions for the assignment in the syllabus.  When students refuse to fully participate, it is impossible to get them to learn and grow. 

But I do have some successes, albeit limited, as the data above shows.  Ironically, while students complain a lot on student evaluations and give me very low scores, according to the research I collected in Spring 2018, between 83 to 94 percent agreed that my criticism was helpful.  One student from that bunch wrote, “Professor Beach has made it his goal to help his students become better prepared for future college classes as well as our future careers.  Through his high standards for each student, Professor Beach has helped me learn from my failures, and grow strong as a writer and college student.  Although it has been a daily struggle, I have overall done well in the course and am aware of my weaknesses to work and develop them…Professor Beach has forced me to work hard and think more critically that I have ever had to before…If not for Professor Beach setting such high standards, I would not have known my own capability as a writer, student, and overall person” (Student #3). 

The data I have presented show a basic pattern, which illustrates the difficulty of teaching unprepared freshmen at UTSA, and the limited success that a highly trained and competent teacher can have.  Although I continue to innovate in my classes, I cannot be much more successful because of A) the academic quality of students admitted to this university, B) the competing outside responsibilities of these students, which takes up their time and effort, and C) the lack of effective student support programs at this university.  When I taught down the street at Trinity University, around 90-100% of my students would persist through to the end of the semester and pass my courses, the majority with A and B grades.  Such rates of success are simply not possible at UTSA, but they could be if there were better management and professional development of faculty at UTSA, and also more coordinated reforms at every level of this institution to make sure that students are prepared and fully supported to succeed.

Educational Malpractice in China

This article was a case study on ONPS International Summer School, a private university-level program at Jinan University in Guangzhou, China where I worked in 2012. This essay is an excerpt from my book Academic Capitalism in China: Higher Education or Fraud?, which was originally published in 2013. In the book, I changed the name of ONPS to China X program for legal purposes. I gave my data to The Chronicle of Higher Education and they sent reporters to China to independently verify my account and they did their own original research on the topic, which was published by Beth McMurtrie and Lara Farrar as "Chinese Summer Schools Sell Quick Credits."  Chronicle of Higher Education (Jan 14, 2013)

“This program is a business to make profit.”

— Staff member at ONPS

Higher Education in China

In East Asia, state sponsored education and a cultural emphasis on credentialed knowledge workers have both been venerated traditions for thousands of years.  In what is often called Chinese “Confucian” culture, education has been revered as a time-honored process of transmitting the collected wisdom of Chinese civilization – one of the oldest civilizations on Earth.[i]  Academic degrees have been the primary markers of social distinction and economic mobility for over two thousand years.  The hereditary locus of aristocratic power became blended with a meritocratic educated bureaucracy, which together created a “mixed aristocratic/bureaucratic ruling class.”[ii] 

For much of the past two millennia of human history, China was “the most literate and numerate society in the world.”[iii]  Educational institutions stressed rote memorization of the Chinese language, classical Chinese texts, ritualized socialization, writing, and the arts. [iv]   And while Confucian and neo-Confucian educational principles did stress individual development as “self-cultivation,” the emphasis of formal schooling, especially in later neo-Confucian institutions, focused more on situating the individual within the hierarchical “structure” of society.  Thus, much of a student’s instruction was geared toward a socialization process, whereby, the individual student learned proper social values, such as formal social discourse, deference to superiors, and traditional rituals.[v] 

Instruction culminated in a high stakes final “examination” that served as the gateway to a social title and a position in the state bureaucracy.[vi]  This East Asian educational system produced a small population of literate and cultured elites, trained in a traditional and largely unchanging body of ethical and technical knowledge.  The literate elite served as the administrative center of the Chinese empire.  This elite “enjoyed unrivalled authority and numerous privileges”[vii] because they effectively ran the empire by implementing the demands of the emperors. This caste of educated elites was higher in status than all other social classes, including military leaders, merchants, and priests.

The Communist revolution of the 1950s did not displace the standing of the educated elite in China, nor did it diminish the cultural importance of learning.  However, the revolution did temporarily replace the venerated texts of Confucius with those written by communist leaders, such as Marx and Mao.  In many ways, the communist revolution was co-opted by the previous imperial bureaucracy.  The state remained the paternalist center of an imperial empire, but there was a political shift away from hereditary monarchs towards the somewhat more open structure of the communist party, which supplanted the monarchs as the ruling authority.[viii]

Chinese communism was a very “pragmatic” blend of imperial bureaucratic tradition, communist ideology, and market activity.[ix]  Chinese leaders began to move further away from communist ideology towards capitalist economic development in 1978, albeit a form of state directed capitalism, starting with a few “special economic zones,” which eventually served as a model for the rest of the country.[x]  Due to these economic reforms, the economic growth rate accelerated considerably, moving from 4-5 percent during Mao’s administration to a yearly rate of 9.5 percent from 1978 to 1992.[xi]

The economic turn toward capitalism also ushered in a cultural transformation as well.  The Chinese people began to “worship wealth” and celebrate entrepreneurs, just like their counterparts in the capitalist western world.[xii]  As the political scientist Martin Jacques has explained, “Money-making, meanwhile, has replaced politics as the most valued and respected form of social activity, including within the [communist] Party itself.”[xiii] 

Communist Party leaders have set a new example for the rest of the nation.  They are highly educated, many with western university degrees, and they participate in market activities.  These leaders also often engage in corruption, exploiting state power to privately enrich themselves and their families.  Over 92 percent of central committee Party members have earned a college degree, many in technical subjects.  Most have used their political standing and connections to engage in entrepreneurial and investment activities, much of which would be considered corruption.  The former Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao, reportedly enabled his extended family to amass a fortune of over $2.7 billion dollars.[xiv]  In 2011 alone, close to 143,000 Party officials were accused of illegal activity, which led to “the recovery of 8.4 billion Yuan ($1.35 billion) in assets.”[xv]

The traditional veneration of education and credentials has only intensified in the 21st century.  China produces more college graduates than any other country, around 4.5 million in 2007 alone.  This was up from approximately 950,000 college graduates in 2000, an increase of over 470 percent![xvi]  And the numbers keep going up.  Now, there are close to 8 million college graduates a year, including both community colleges and universities.  A growing fraction of these college students attended and/or graduated from western universities.  By 2020, China anticipates having 195 million college graduates, compared to the United States, which expects to have only 120 million.[xvii]

The Chinese government has been investing around $250 billion a year in its educational system, encouraging more and more students to attend college and earn degrees.  Over the last decade, the number of colleges and universities in China had doubled, now numbering 2,409.[xviii]  

The demand for college credentials in China has increased exponentially, but the quality of Chinese institutions of higher education has been low and their management “dysfunctional.”[xix]  However, due to increased state investment and regulations, Chinese universities are becoming stronger.  Hu Jintao, the President of China, has admitted that “While people receive a good education, there are significant gaps compared with the advanced international level.”[xx]

Part of the problem with Chinese higher education is the lack of professors trained in research, leadership, and academic ethics.[xxi]  A generation ago, there were not many college graduates, especially researchers with postgraduate degrees.  With the exponential increase in Chinese colleges and universities, there have not been enough highly qualified college graduates to serve as professors.  And the pay is not great.  The average professor earns only the equivalent of $300 a month, which is less than many skilled laborers.  Many professors become entrepreneurs out of necessity, turning to the labor market for second jobs or to start a company.[xxii]

In 2010, no mainland Chinese universities were ranked in the top 30 internationally, but six mainland Chinese universities were ranked in the top 200, up from only five in 2004.  The United States, by contrast, has the most developed and highest ranked universities in the world.  Seven of the top ten universities in the world are in the U.S., the other three are in the U.K.  The allure of a degree from a top-ranked university has caused more and more Chinese students to study abroad in the U.S. and U.K.  During the 2003-04 school-year, there were approximately 128,000 Chinese students studying in the U.S., and another 75,000 studying in the U.K.  These numbers have been steadily increasing over the past decade, albeit with some fluctuation during the Great Recession of 2008-10.[xxiii] 

Chinese students studying abroad make up 17 percent of the total amount of international students globally.  In 2010, there were approximately 562,889 Chinese international students.  The top destinations were the U.S., Australia, Japan, the U.K., and Korea.  The U.S. is the most popular destination globally for international students, hosting approximately 19 percent of all such students.[xxiv]

But there is a dark side the educational boom in China.  For one, there is widespread corruption and fraud, by both students and professors.  Philip Altbach tentatively noted that “such corruption seems embedded in [Chinese] academe.”[xxv]  One recent study conducted by researchers from Beijing University found that Chinese students and professors had “little or no idea” about “academic ethics and misconduct.”  Approximately 40 percent of students admitted that current policies did not deter widespread cheating and fraud.[xxvi]  Unethical behavior in higher education mirrors widespread unethical behavior in the larger society, especially in politics and business, perhaps signaling a sort of break down in traditional ethical principles due to the momentous social transformation from a socialist to a capitalist society.[xxvii] 

In order to quickly graduate and get low-skilled government jobs, many students don’t care about learning or the quality of their academic work.  University students are plagiarizing established information from published sources or simply fabricating research results.  Graduate students steal research from their colleagues, publishing the data before the authors’ can write up their report.  Some hire ghost-writers to research and write graduate thesis papers and dissertations.  A master’s thesis in English costs around 20,000 Yuan, cheaper if it is written in Chinese.  You can even pay some academic journals to have your work published.  Some ghostwriting businesses offer to both write your paper and get it published![xxviii]  One Chinese student explained, “No one likes writing papers.  It is meaningless and just a technicality before graduation. Most teachers are acquiescent."[xxix]  Some graduate students just buy their degrees from corrupt higher education officials or from fake schools, often referred to as diploma mills.[xxx]  Sometimes, students have to bribe university officials just to get accepted.  One student with adequate test scores was asked to pay a $12,000 bribe in order to be admitted to a university.[xxxi] 

Professors are also engaging in academic fraud, perhaps setting bad examples, which their students eagerly follow.  More than a few professors have lied about their qualifications, falsely claiming non-existent degrees or falsely claiming published papers or books.  A couple of professors have falsely claimed to be the authors of research papers published in the west.  At least a few unscrupulous professors have just copied previously published papers and then re-submitted the work to another journal, falsely claiming original authorship of someone else’s paper.[xxxii]  At least one professor, Lu Jun, who was hired by Beijing University of Chemical Technology, admitted to completely falsifying his entire resume, lying about not only his degrees, but also his work experience and published work.  He simply copied information from the resumes of western professors and then claimed it all on his own.[xxxiii]    

Western universities have been experimenting with collaborative ventures, offering a western style university education taught by visiting professors and sanctioned by the prestige of western university standards.  Universities such as Yale, Columbia, and Arizona State University offer higher education programs in China, but students earn a western degree.  However, widespread academic fraud and corruption have strained these endeavors.  Students lie about academic credentials and research, and they routinely plagiarize and cheat.  One Yale professor explained, “When a student I am teaching steals words and ideas from an author without acknowledgment, I feel cheated…I ask myself, why should I teach people who knowingly deceive me?”[xxxiv]

Chinese academic fraud is also affecting international students and their host countries.  Western institutions of higher education want to attract international students for a number of reasons.  These students enhance a school’s diversity, it builds brand recognition and loyalty in developing countries, and international students pay full tuition, often at higher rates that domestic students.[xxxv]  Such calculations can often devolve into a type of fraudulent academic capitalism, whereby western universities sell their brand, and the lure of a prestigious degree, to unprepared students who  do not have the foundational knowledge or skills to successfully pass western university classes.

But not all international students are victims.  Many students lie, cheat, and buy their way into western universities.  Approximately 80 percent of Chinese international students hire an agent to prepare the application materials to apply to a western university. These agents are paid up to $10,000 for their services.  Many of these agents not only fraudulently fill out the application, lying about educational credentials, skills, and references, but these agents also write the students application essays, lying about the student’s experience and misrepresenting students’ foreign language proficiency.  One consultancy group researching such agencies estimates that most of the information on Chinese student applications is fraudulent: 90 percent of recommendation letters, 70 percent of application essays, and 50 percent of high school transcripts are fake.[xxxvi] 

An educational researcher from the U.S. warned, "The problem is massive.  There's no oversight in China, no control over who can set up an agency, over what the agency can and can't do…[These agencies] help in creating fraudulent documents."[xxxvii]  One Australian research group explained, “unscrupulous education agents on impossibly high commissions” are “funneling students with fraudulent documents into any course irrespective of the quality of the course or the student.”[xxxviii]  The Chinese government has finally recognized this problem and is starting to take steps to regulate these college application agencies.

But unscrupulous Chinese students and entrepreneurs are not the only people engaged in academic capitalism.  As already noted, American institutions of higher education are also exploiting students for brand expansion and economic gain.  But a new class of fraudulent for-profit colleges, which are often referred to as “diploma mills,” have sprung up in the U.S. to take advantage of gullible Chinese exchange students.  Some of these fraudulent organizations have been set up by former Chinese nationals who have used their knowledge of Chinese education to better exploit eager international students.  Dickson State University admitted unqualified international students, 95 percent of whom came from China, and awarded them fraudulent degrees.[xxxix]  Herguan University and Tri-Valley University, both located in the San Francisco Bay Area, preyed upon Chinese exchange students and generated millions in illicit profits, until U.S. officials began to investigate these fraudulent organizations.[xl]

A newer type of academic capitalism has recently emerged in China, which is a hybrid form of Chinese entrepreneurialism and western higher education.[xli]  The Chinese government designates these ventures as “duli” or “independent institutions.”  Luxi Zhang and Bob Adamson, professors at The Hong Kong Institute of Education, explain, “The Ministry of Education stated that an independent institution should be run by entrepreneurs, following the principle of ‘seven independences’: independent campus and basic facilities, relatively independent teaching and administrative staffing, independent student enrolment, independent certification, independent finance budgeting, independent legal entity and independent civil responsibilities.”[xlii]

One variant of this new phenomenon is the international university summer school.  Chinese capitalists have created undergraduate “summer school” programs hosted at Chinese universities, but usually not officially connected to, or sponsored by, the university.  These programs target mostly international students who return home to China during the summer, although some also target western undergraduates looking to study abroad.  But unlike other forms of academic capitalism in China, these organizations hire western university professors and lecturers who teach western style classes.[xliii] 

These programs claim that students can take credits from these summer schools back to the U.S. and earn transfer credit from U.S. universities.  Most of these programs operate on the campus of various Chinese universities, and some actually use the name of host universities; however, these summer schools are actually just private businesses renting classrooms, ostensibly using the university location to provide a veneer of academic legitimacy.[xliv]

These programs are mostly run by young Chinese businessmen who have been educated in western universities.  Some of these entrepreneurs are still registered undergraduate students at U.S. universities, taking time off from school to develop their own business.  These young entrepreneurs secure funding from Chinese capitalists and run their summer school businesses like franchises, spinning off affiliated programs in new cities, most likely earning a percentage of profits for new programs.  As The Chronicle of Higher Education recently explained, “These entrepreneurs have taken an American product—the Western college course—and created a shorter, cheaper version to sell to their peers. In doing so, they have tapped into the seemingly insatiable demand for Western education by China's growing middle class.”[xlv]    

Besides the convenience of taking western university courses back home in China, these programs also offer western credit hours at substantially lower prices than exchange students would be paying at U.S. universities.  As one Chinese student explained, “If summer school provides me the credits and it's cheaper, why not choose that?"  According to another international student, these programs seem to attract two different types of students: “Those who want to finish college as soon as possible, they work very hard. Another group, they can't finish the courses in their own school, and they think summer school will be easy.” 

There is evidence to suggest that some of these schools engage in deceptive practices, similar in type of broader forms of fraud and unethical behavior documented in the larger Chinese marketplace.[xlvi]  Profit hungry administrators at these for-profit schools don’t seem to be screening applicants to differentiate serious students from others who just want to buy cheap credits.[xlvii]  Some of these schools, as I’ll explain in the next chapter, give students financial incentives to take as many classes as possible, which set up most students to fail – or puts pressure on faculty to just pass all students.  One U.S. professor criticized these summer schools for undermining the integrity of western institutions of higher education: "Essentially what Summer China did was create a cheap, Chinese program.  I was providing an inexpensive product students could buy in lieu of better developed courses back home [in the U.S.]."[xlviii]

With some much scheming and fraud in Chinese higher education, by faculty, students, and businessmen, it seems insightful to ask, what is Chinese higher education for?  If these institutions were actually imparting real skills and knowledge that were to be usefully employed in Chinese society and in the economy, then cracking down on academic fraud would be a pertinent policy issue.  But if high education is simply a status marker of prestige, a mindless social ritual that serves as a gateway into the Chinese state bureaucracy, then why not just buy a credential, or steal it? 

For thousands of years in China, education has been reduced to a commodity, mere social capital, and it is prized not for its utility, but because of its exclusivity, like a luxury good.  As such, it should come as no surprise that educational credentials are bought and sold like any other commodity.  Further, like most other luxury goods in China, educational credentials are easy to fake.  Selling fake credentials is simply one more black-market activity, a mundane expansion of China’s seemingly limitless sea of counterfeit goods.

CHINA X: Educational Opportunity or Fraud?

CHINA X[xlix] International Summer School was created in 2011 on the campus of Qingdao University in Qingdao, Shandong province, which is located on the central-east coast of China.  The purpose of the program was to invite the "world’s top professors" to China in order to teach western university classes in English.  The program is mostly geared to Chinese foreign exchange students studying abroad in the United States.  While home visiting their families, these students could earn transfer credits towards an American bachelor’s degree.  The program claims to offer the equivalent of American college courses taught in English by American professors - for a much cheaper price. 

CHINA X is a private school.  It is not an official part of any university, nor is it run by local faculty.  Instead, it is organized and administrated by local businessmen and hosted at prominent Chinese universities.  Some of these program administrators are college students in their mid-twenties.  CHINA X is a franchise business.  Each locale is independently organized and operated.  There seems to be no centralized coordination or oversight, although all campuses share a single website.  In 2012 the CHINA X program expanded into two more cities in China: Southwest Jiaotong University in Chengdu and Jinan University in Guangzhou.  In 2013 the program will reportedly spread to Beijing and Taiwan.

In its first year, there were around 200 students accepted into the program.  By 2012, around 400 to 500 students enrolled between the three campuses.  Most students were Chinese exchange students who have already been accepted for undergraduate study in American universities.  Many of these students were freshmen or sophomores already studying abroad, some from prominent U.S. universities, like the University of Wisconsin, Syracuse University, and the University of California.  Most of these students had come home to China for summer vacation in order to see family.  Some of the students were recent graduates from local Chinese high schools.  Students who pass CHINA X courses earn credits that supposedly can transfer to "over 200 American colleges," although only 35 universities are listed on the website.  The program is not just academic.  It also offers non-credit classes on dance, rock-n-roll, and yachting, as well as on-campus dormitories and social activities, like dance parties and field trips.

The CHINA X program has a highly ambitious, and potentially contradictory, vision. The mission statement of the program is published on its website, both in English and Chinese.  It claims,

“Cooperating with more groundbreaking Chinese and American universities, CHINA X International Summer School is devoted to constructing the best summer program in Greater China, building an international high-end platform for the elite students community, well-known professors and Fortune 500 companies.”

There seem to be several different, and possibly conflicting, goals here.  One part of the CHINA X mission seems to be to foster international cooperation between Chinese and American universities through cultural exchange.  Another goal seems to be a competitive educational and/or business vision to create "the best" university summer school in China for "elite students" at the "lowest cost among peer programs across the world."  And finally, there is another goal, only half-articulated, which seems to be an aspiration to be a business school.  It is not clear if this program wants to attract funding or guest speakers from "Fortune 500 companies," or if CHINA X aspires to be a global corporation, like most Fortune 500 companies.

I want to look at each of these goals, one by one.  Did this program foster international cooperation between Chinese and American universities?  Did this program hire the "world's top professors" in order to create a superior university summer program for "elite" students?  Was this program seeking to become an international business school, or did it aspire to be a global corporation? 

I evaluated the claims made on the CHINA X website with three sources of data: my observation of this program in Guangzhou during the summer of 2012, discussions with other American faculty members who taught in this program, and interviews with support staff.  I concluded that this program does not foster much international cooperation, and what little cooperation did take place was marred by economic exploitation.  It does not recruit "top" professors, nor does it recruit "elite" students.  And the program does not offer superior university courses.  The program did focus on business and economics, but was not a coherent business school.  And finally, CHINA X was a for-profit enterprise that seemed to focus on maximizing profit, not maximizing education or student learning, and towards this end, the program may have committed academic fraud.

First, did this program foster international cooperation?  Yes, there were some forms of international cooperation; however, it was mostly between faculty and support staff.  One Chinese professor from the business school gave a speech on the first day, but was never seen again.  Another Chinese professor from the business school attended a few of the public speaking classes.  No other Chinese professors participated in the program.  Students attended classes, but rarely, if ever, talked to professors outside of class.  Most did not do much speaking in class.  Some students also attended field trips and social events, but there was rarely any mixing with professors, outside of occasional small talk.  The only real exchange was between faculty and the sixteen support staff, all of whom were local students at Jinan University, and many of whom were graduate students.  Faculty members were dependent upon these students for help, both with classes and with navigating the culture.  Supposedly there were "research" opportunities to collaborate with Chinese colleagues, but nothing was ever said of this opportunity once we arrived, and no American faculty had any contact with the local professors. 

While there was collaboration and exchange with the support staff, it was not collaboration between equals.  Sadly, these staff members were being economically exploited by the program, as are many workers in China.  There were two types of support staff: teaching assistants and living assistants.  Teaching assistants, like their counterparts in American universities, were mostly graduate students who attended classes, lead recitation sections, and helped professors proctor exams and grade assignments.  Living assistants were both graduate and undergraduate students who helped professors interact with the local culture, which included help with shopping, dining, banking, sightseeing, and issues with living quarters. 

These students served an important role, but they were not being compensated fairly for their work.  Over the five-week program, the TAs would work between 15 to 30 hours a week, while the living assistants would work between 5 to 10 hours a week.  Both groups were required to be on call day and night to help professors when needed.  And they were required to put in extra hours as service workers during program events and parties.  For this all this effort, TAs earned 700-500 Yuan, which is the equivalent of $80-$122 for five weeks.  Thus, for 75 to 150 hours of work over five weeks, TAs earned the equivalent of $0.53 to $1.63 an hour.  Worse, the living assistants were paid nothing at all. 

Almost all of the assistants I interviewed said they were not treated fairly by the program.  One TA said the working conditions were "terrible" and that "I did not feel like I was valued."  Another TA said "the payment is abnormal in the market," which meant that the CHINA X wages were low, even by the extremely low standards of the Chinese labor market.  But this student didn't complain.  She was the only respondent to consider her treatment fair because she was able to take free classes by American professors, which she valued more than a decent salary.  She said, "I don’t really care about the salary. I join the program because there are relevant courses that I want to learn. So, I tend to participate it even there’s no payment." 

Clearly, these students joined the program for non-monetary rewards, but the CHINA X administrators seemed to exploit these motivations.  All Chinese undergraduates need to take an internship for school, thus, working for CHINA X fulfilled this requirement.  Some students also saw this as an opportunity to make connections with American faculty who might help them later study abroad in the U.S.  But rather than treat support staff as volunteers and students, they were treated as menial workers who were expected to be on call for duty at all hours of the day.

While CHINA X didn't foster much by way of international cooperation, how about its second claim: Did it hire the "world's top professors" in order to create a superior university summer program for "elite" students?  On all three parts of this claim the answer is unequivocally negative.  CHINA X did not hire "top professors" by any standard way of measuring such a claim.  The program was inferior in every way to an American college course, although it was potentially much cheaper.  And the program certainly did not admit "elite" students. 

First, who were the professors?  The website claims that CHINA X has "the best line-up of professors in Asia."  It claims that professors come from highly acclaimed tier-1 research universities in America and England, like Harvard University, The University of California at Berkeley, and University of Cambridge.  The program also claims that professors are focused on "improving the quality of learning and teaching," "curriculum design," and "pedagogical innovations."  Some of the visiting professors did in fact work at internationally recognized, top-tier American universities, like the University of California at Berkeley.  But the vast majority did not.  Most of the professors came from mid- to low-ranked American state universities, like the University of Texas at San Antonio or Arlington, the University of Wisconsin at Platteville, or the University of Minnesota at Crookston.

Few, if any, of the professors were tenured full-professors, and none were leaders in any academic field.  Only a small minority of the visiting professors had done any original research or published academic work.  Some of the "professors" were not even professors at all.  Around half of the faculty were adjunct lecturers, some only partly affiliated with universities, as they taught primarily at community colleges in the United States.  Many of these adjunct faculty had only master’s degrees and not much experience teaching at the university level.  In several instances, the program website lied about the credentials of some of these professors, claiming they had earned PhDs (when they had not), and claiming they worked at more prestigious universities. 

Few of the professors knew anything about curriculum or instruction and there was little, if any, "curriculum design" or "pedagogical innovation."  Most professors simply lectured to students, assigned readings from the course textbook, used high stakes exams, and a few assigned academic papers.  While the quality of "learning and teaching" in any university naturally varies from class to class, depending on both the professor and the students, at this summer program there was no evidence of any exceptional teaching or innovative pedagogical techniques.  In fact, just the opposite.  Most offered very traditional classes.  Thus, the claims of "the best line-up of professors in Asia" and “pedagogical innovations” were clearly false.  And the claim that all professors came from prominent tier-1 American research universities was grossly overstated and misleading. 

What about the program?  Did CHINA X offer a superior university summer program?  A good university program would have innovative and demanding university classes that reinforce core learning goals, the program would be coherently integrated and well organized, and it would provide adequate student support services to ensure quality learning.  CHINA X did not display any of these characteristics.  The classes were standard, lecture and exam-oriented college classes taught by, at best, adequate instructors.  Most classes did not demand much time and effort from students, outside of preparing for exams.  There were no core learning goals or outcomes for the program.  The classes were not integrated in any way.  The program was poorly organized.  Decision making was reactive, rather than proactive, with many modifications made on the fly as problems arose. 

And there were almost no student support services: computers in classrooms were slow and infected with viruses, there was only one printer in the faculty lounge, the library did not have access to English language academic databases, there were few English language books, and there was no writing and learning facility to help tutor students.  Several faculty noted the absence of a writing and learning lab because most students struggled with their reading and writing skills.  A hastily organized "writing center" opened halfway through the five-week program.  It was staffed by one novice English instructor for a couple hours a day, and it could not accommodate even a fraction of the students who needed such services.

But the program was relatively cheap, in comparison with non-resident tuition at American universities.  Including fees and free books, one CHINA X class was $2,450 (15,680 Yuan), which at the low end of typical out-of-state tuition for an American public university, which cost around $1,500 to $7,000 for a three-credit class, depending if the university is a lower-tier or a tier-one institution.  Essentially, students were paying for a lower-tier American university education and that is exactly what they were getting, with the exception, of course, of the condensed 5-week structure.  Such short classes severely constricted the amount of information and assessment students received, thus, students were being sold a false bill of goods and left classes with little “higher education,” in terms of either knowledge or skills.

CHINA X also gave students financial incentives to take as many classes as possible.  If a student registers for two or more classes, each additional class is only an additional $400 to $500.  And this includes free books, albeit the books are pirated photocopies of American textbooks.  Many students registered for three or four classes (at least a couple registered for five!).  There is no way these students did any more than memorize short-term information to pass standardized, high-stakes exams.  Several students had to eventually drop out of classes (and lose their money) because there was no way for them to be successful with such an unrealistic load of classes.  

And finally, what about the students?  Did CHINA X admit "elite" students?  Well, the answer to this question is mixed, yes and no.  Any exchange student who enrolls in a foreign language university to earn a degree should be considered an "elite" student due to the difficulty of mastering a second language on top of the knowledge requirements of a university degree program.  However, there have been many studies about sub-standard educational practices in Chinese schools and the struggles of foreign-exchange students in American universities.  These reports raise doubts about how prepared these students are for a western university degree programs.  Further, there have been recent investigative reports about Chinese students engaging agents to apply to western universities.  These agents not only fill out the college application, but also have been known to lie about students’ qualifications and to write the application essay for the student.  While some of the students enrolled in CHINA X were absolutely "elite" students, many were not. 

Most CHINA X students were not fluent in English speaking, reading, and writing and they struggled to successfully pass intense five-week college courses.  Under ideal circumstances, with a low class-load, trained teachers, and adequate student support services, most of these students could have developed their English skills and mastered course material.  But CHINA X did not provide ideal circumstances.  Most professors had no knowledge of pedagogy, they used class only to lecture, and few met with students outside of class to help them learn.  Some professors used class time to go on “field trips,” which were no more than tours of local sites that had, at best, moderate connection to the course curriculum.  As already noted, there were almost no student support services.  And students had low expectations of easy and cheap college courses, so many enrolled for three, four, even five courses at once.  Under such circumstances, there was little student learning. 

Students struggled to meet the workload requirements and usually studied only before exams.  Many had difficulty understanding verbal English and so they sat quietly in class, taking fractured notes, starting at the walls, or playing on their computers.  Many students also had difficulty reading in English, which limited their ability to understand their textbooks, especially in the reading-heavy courses of literature and philosophy.  Many students also routinely plagiarized ideas and wording from their textbooks. 

The American professors seemed to have low expectations.  Most seemed to treat their stay in China as a vacation, rather than a serious academic endeavor.  Some dealt with poor student performance by grading on curves, setting the academic bar fairly low.  Most professors passed every student, even though few of these students possessed the English skills to pass a real university level course in the United States.  The few professors who pushed students to learn, and who eventually failed some students, were pressured to lower their standards, change grades, and pass all students.  There was even some evidence that grades were tampered with.  Two of the CHINA X support staff said that administrators may have changed professor's final grades so that all students in the program would pass classes. 

Looking past the false rhetoric of the mission statement, the CHINA X program seemed to have only one goal: It wanted to attract a lot of students to take many classes so that program administrators could make a large profit.  CHINA X did focus on business and economics, around 40% of the total classes offered, but it did not create a coherent business school model.  Instead, the program offered a diverse variety of core freshman and sophomore classes in a range of disciplines, which was meant to attract a wide variety of students.  It also offered a price plan that was meant to encourage students to take multiple classes.  All of the support staff that I interviewed agreed that the primary goal of CHINA X was to make a profit.

CHINA X is a for-profit enterprise that is clearly focused on maximizing profit, not maximizing education.  The enterprise forfeited not only educational values in the pursuit of profit, but it broke the law as well.  Most of the professors were surprised when they were told to enter the country on a tourist visa, rather than a work visa.  The program administrators explained that it was just easier that way, as there was a lot of red tape to hire foreign workers.  While plausible, it turns out that most Chinese educational institutions do in fact apply for work visas for foreign staff, and they are not all that hard to get approved.  Professors found it a bit more shocking to be paid in cash.  They were given large stacks of American dollars in incremental stages.  This method of payment gave the whole operation a gangster-like feel.

CHINA X had a clear, for-profit mission, which was at odds with its stated mission published on its website.  When asked, the support staff agreed: this was a business, not a school.  One staff member stated, "It was clear that the directors didn't care much about the quality of education."  Another explained why, "This program is a business to make profit." 

Towards its profit-driven end, CHINA X exploits support staff, students, and visiting professors.  Most participants were manipulated with false or misleading information.  Students were sold a false bill of goods.  They did not receive a top-notch American university education from highly regarded American professors.  They were provided no support services to help them learn.  And they were encouraged to take more classes than they could successfully pass. They were also not told that many American universities would not accept CHINA X courses for transfer credit.

Perhaps more worrisome, the CHINA X program seems to have engaged in deliberate academic fraud by altering the final grades of professors so that all students could pass classes.  Students may have also been complicit in the fraud if they were promised easy credits with the guarantee of passing. 

The academic community in the U.S. and in the rest of the world needs to be aware of profit-driven programs, such as CHINA X, so as to guard against a breach in the academic integrity of the western university system.  Programs such as CHINA X seem to be selling college credits, rather than offering quality higher education.  Such programs also tarnish the integrity of visiting faculty and foreign exchange students who travel abroad. 

Conclusion: What Is the Value of Higher Education in China?

For thousands of years, the value of higher education in China has not been intrinsic.  The value and utility of a college credential has rested upon one distinguishing characteristic: it is an unobtainable good that most cannot afford.  It was used solely as a status symbol, a credential signaling exclusivity.  As historian of education David F. Labaree argued, schooling is often reduced to a commodity: it is “a kind of ‘cultural currency’ that can be exchanged for social position and worldly success.”[l]  Schools offer, according to Thomas Frank, the “golden ticket” to success, thus, universities offer the “capital-C Credential.”[li]  In such a cultural environment, real learning is not important.  Instead, “surrogate learning” is all that’s needed.  As Michael W. Sedlak explained, “As long as the tests are passed, credits are accumulated, and credentials are awarded, what occurs in most classrooms is allowed to pass for education.”[lii] 

And often, as philosopher Matthew B. Crawford points out, where such social rituals displace real learning, an educational credential “serves only to obscure a more real stupidifictaion.”[liii]  Rather than make a person smart, by imparting real knowledge and skills, schools often make people stupid, by incapacitating them through mindless ritual and deference to authority.  Higher education in China is more like virtual education, rather than the acquisition of higher order skills and knowledge through real learning.  For centuries, higher education in China has been a social marker of legitimation, a mere gatekeeping function.  Higher education has served the imperial bureaucracy for centuries, certifying an administrative class of deferential servants.  It has the same basic function today.

But the enduring problem of all luxury goods, especially in vibrant, unregulated marketplaces like China, is the ability of entrepreneurs to cheaply replicate fakes, flooding the marketplace with worthless replicas and deflating the value of luxury goods through a crises of identity.  China has long been known for its industrious ability to produce cheap knock-offs of designer goods. There is evidence to suggest that deceptive practices, including the selling of fraudulent merchandise, are perfectly acceptable in the Chinese business world.[liv]  The Economist sardonically notes, “You could almost say that counterfeits remain Silk Street’s trademark, despite the market’s efforts to stamp them out.”[lv] 

The marketplace for educational credentials has been no different.[lvi]  If all have access to a luxury good, then it can’t be a luxury anymore.  If more and more people have the capital-C Credential of higher education, then how can elites visibly identify superiority?  The fake good eventually becomes exposed and devalued, and elites move on to the next luxury marker of higher social status, perhaps to goods that are not so easily knocked-off, like cars, foreign travel, and real estate.

Higher education has always been traditionally reserved for an elite upper class.  It was meant to be exclusive and to serve as a social signal legitimating elite status because it was guarded by elite institutions and conferred only by elaborate social rituals.  But the democratization of western society in the 19th and 20th centuries corroded the exclusivity of traditional elite institutions, such as political governance, schooling, and the market place.  These democratizing currents were at first forced on eastern nations, such as Japan and China, due to the western world’s insatiable appetite for new markets to buy raw materials and sell manufactured goods.  But eventually, the public at large in south-east Asia and Japan began to demand more and more democratization, albeit blending western ideas and institutions with traditional eastern ways of life.  

In the early 20th century, the economist Joseph Schumpeter foresaw how democratization would produce a credential arms race and would result in the devaluation of higher education.  He was writing at a time when only a small minority of people went to college, but policy makers were heatedly discussing the opening of higher education to larger swaths of the middle class.  Schumpeter warned that the supply of credentialed workers would outpace labor market demand.  Flooding the market with credentialed workers would devalue the signaling function of degrees, thereby, reducing the social capital of all degree holders.  This devaluation of credentials would thus condemn the previously elite class of college graduates into a netherworld of over-education and “substandard work.”[lvii]

It would be instructive to step back and ask, why are Chinese students so focused on earning college degrees?  What will they do with this luxury of exclusive social capital?  In 2012 approximately 7 million students graduated with a college degree in China, but there were no jobs for many of this credentialed class.  Due to the constrained possibilities and fierce competition of the private market, around 1.4 million of these students applied for the government civil service exams, a massive increase from the previous decade, but there were only 20,800 positions to fill.[lviii]  Some turned to state-run corporations, and a lucky few found work abroad.  But many college graduates were forced into low-paid work in factories, the emerging service sector, or in small, local, mostly family-owned businesses.         

And for the lucky college graduates who find a government job?  Do they get a life of privilege and ease?  The Economist paints a different portrait: “Mr Zhang, who is 27, is beginning his climb up the bureaucracy in the capital of a province, Shanxi, south-west of Beijing, which is reputed to be among the most corrupt and least competently governed. The jobs are hard to get, says Mr Zhang, but they are not the cushy sinecures that many assume. He works from 8am until midnight on most days, he says, compiling dry reports on topics like coal production and sales for higher-level officials. He commands a modest salary by urban standards—about 2,800 Yuan ($450) a month, in a city where a decent flat near his office rents for two-thirds that much. This way of life does not impress the ladies, he says; he has been on two blind dates in four years, both of them failures. This picture of dedication and loneliness stands in sharp contrast to the popular image.”[lix]

But isn’t a position like Mr Zhang’s just a starting point, an entry-level job with which one could work their way up the ladder to success?  Sadly, no.  As The Economist goes on to explain, “The chance of advancement is small indeed. Of China’s 6.9m civil servants, about 900,000 are, like Mr Zhang, at the lowest official rung of government above entry-level. Roughly 40,000 civil servants serve at the city or ‘bureau’ level. Many promotions are handed out on the basis of relationships, gifts and the outright sale of offices. Even when they compete for promotions on merit, some officials will pad their CVs with fake graduate degrees.”[lx]

And Mr Zhang is not alone.  A reporter for The New York Times interviewed a young community college graduate, Wang Zengsong.  Mr Zengsong is 25 years old.  He grew up in the country on a rice farm, but he managed to go to community college and earn a three-year associates degree.  But ever since graduating, now over three years, he has been mostly unemployed. He has only had a couple of short-term, low-paying jobs, such as a security guard at a shopping mall and a waiter in a restaurant.  There are factory jobs, but Mr Zengsong won’t apply for those.  Why?  As the Times reporter explains, “He will not consider applying for a full-time factory job because Mr. Wang, as a college graduate, thinks that is beneath him. Instead, he searches every day for an office job, which would initially pay as little as a third of factory wages. ‘I have never and will never consider a factory job — what’s the point of sitting there hour after hour, doing repetitive work?’ he asked.  Millions of recent college graduates in China like Mr. Wang are asking the same question.”[lxi]

There is now widespread “over-education” in China because the labor market does not have enough high-skill positions for all the graduates leaving college each year.[lxii]  In 2012, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao noted that only 78 percent of graduates from the year before had found a job.  There is a persistent “structural mismatch,” as the deputy secretary general of China’s Education Ministry has acknowledged: Too many college graduates and not enough good jobs.  The situation is not any better for students with postgraduate degrees.[lxiii]  And not only are many college graduates unemployed, under-employed, and desperately looking for work, but those college graduates who do have jobs are seeing their wages erode, as a flood of skilled laborers devalue the market.  This leaves many college graduates with a difficult choice: work in a factory or go back home to live with parents.[lxiv]

The problem of credentialism and over-education is not only affecting China.  It is happening in the U.S. too.  It is a global problem.  One has to ask, what good is an education if there is no way to use such an education to live a better life?  If higher education has been reduced to a credential that signals elite status, then why not just buy one, legitimate or fake?  But what happens when the labor market is flooded with bought degrees that signal no real learning or skills?  What happens when technological development and the globalized economy creatively destroy old industries and create new ones? 

Those who see higher education as nothing more than a credential leave themselves exposed to the mercies of the global labor market.  There is a lot that can be said about the intrinsic value of knowledge, skills, and personal development.  But leaving all that aside, and simply focusing on the labor market value of a college degree, which is what most people seem to be doing in the world, there is a frightful consequence of credentialism. 

If the individual does not actually purchase real knowledge and skills that can be creatively and purposefully used in the marketplace, then they offer employers nothing other than a piece of paper signaling exclusivity.  But if a growing minority, or even a majority, of people possess that same piece of paper, then its sole signaling purpose ceases to function and it becomes devalued, if not completely devoid of value.   At such a point, the individual becomes completely helpless as an un-skilled laborer, potentially much worse off because the college students has spent tens of thousands of dollars, at least, to purchase a now worthless credential.  What would be the national and global consequence of such a dismal situation? 

We will most likely find out over the coming decades.

Endnotes

[i] Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order (New York, 2012), 248.

[ii] James B. Palais, “Confucianism and the Aristocratic/ Bureaucratic Balance in Korea,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 44, no. 2 (Dec 1984): 427-68.

[iii] Jacques, When China Rules the World, 15.

[iv] Fredrick W. Mote, Intellectual Foundations of China (New York: Knopf, 1971); Jacques, When China Rules the World, 96.

[v] Michael Charles Kalton, The Neo-Confucian World View and Value System of Yi Dynasty Korea (Diss., Harvard University, Sept 1977), 6, 7, 9, 82; Jacques, When China Rules the World, 96.

[vi] Jacques, When China Rules the World, 96; Philip G. Altbach, “The Giants Awake: Higher Education Systems in China and India,” Economic and Political Weekly, 44, No. 23 (Jun. 6 - 12, 2009), 39-51.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] Ibid.

[ix] Ibid., 176.

[x] Ibid.

[xi] Ibid., 177.

[xii] Ibid., 179.

[xiii] Ibid., 282.

[xiv] “China’s Ruling Families: Riches Exposed,” The Economist (Nov 3, 2012), Retrieved from www.economist.com

[xv] “The Fight Against Corruption,” The Economist (Dec 8, 2012), Retrieved from www.economist.com

[xvi] Jacques, When China Rules the World, Ibid., 217.

[xvii] Keith Bradsher, “Next Made-in-China Boom: College Graduates,” The New York Times (Jan 16, 2013), Retrieved from www.nytimes.com

[xviii] Ibid.

[xix] Altbach, “The Giants Awake: Higher Education Systems in China and India,” Ibid., 42.

[xx] Bradsher, “Next Mand-in-China Boom,” Ibid.

[xxi] Altbach, “The Giants Awake: Higher Education Systems in China and India,” Ibid., 46.

[xxii] Bradsher, “Next Mand-in-China Boom,” Ibid.

[xxiii] Jacques, When China Rules the World, Ibid., 547-48.

[xxiv] “Global Flow of Tertiary-Level Students,” UNESCO Institute for Statistics, UNESCO.org (2012), Retrieved from http://www.uis.unesco.org/EDUCATION/Pages/international-student-flow-viz.aspx

[xxv] Altbach, “The Giants Awake: Higher Education Systems in China and India,” Ibid., 47.

[xxvi] “Chinese Students Admit to Little or No Idea about Ethics,” The Times Higher Education Supplement (Aug 5, 2010), 11.

[xxvii] “China’s Ruling Families: Riches Exposed,” The Economist, Ibid.; “The Fight Against Corruption,” The Economist, Ibid.; Nick Lee, Amanda Beatson, Tony C. Garrett, Ian Lings and Xi Zhang, “A Study of the Attitudes towards Unethical Selling Amongst Chinese Salespeople,” Journal of Business Ethics, 88, Supplement 3 (2009), 497-515.

[xxviii] Yojana Sharma, “New Academic Misconduct Laws May Not Be Adequate to Curb Cheating,” University World News Global Edition,  234 (Aug 12, 2012), Retrieved from www.universityworldnews.com; Yojana Sharma, “Regulation on Academic Fraud Hopes to Reduce Plagiarism,” University World News Global Edition, 253 (Jan 6, 2013), Retrieved from www.universityworldnews.com; “Fake Papers Are Rife at Universities,” China Daily/Asia News Network (March 8, 2010), Retrieved from www.news.asiaone.com

[xxix] As cited in “Fake Papers Are Rife at Universities,” China Daily/Asia News Network (March 8, 2010), Retrieved from www.news.asiaone.com

[xxx] Yojana Sharma, “New Academic Misconduct Laws May Not Be Adequate to Curb Cheating,” University World News Global Edition,  234 (Aug 12, 2012), Retrieved from www.universityworldnews.com; Yojana Sharma, “Regulation on Academic Fraud Hopes to Reduce Plagiarism,” University World News Global Edition, 253 (Jan 6, 2013), Retrieved from www.universityworldnews.com; “Fake Papers Are Rife at Universities,” China Daily/Asia

News Network (March 8, 2010), Retrieved from www.news.asiaone.com

[xxxi] Philip Altbach, “Stench of Rotten Fruit Fills Groves of Academe,” The Times Higher Education Supplement (Jan 21, 2005), 12.

[xxxii] Ibid.

[xxxiii] “University Sacks Prof Who Was 3 Times A Fake,” People's Daily Online (July 30, 2012), Retrieved from www.english.peopledaily.com.cn

[xxxiv] “Campus Collaboration: Foreign Universities Find Working in China Harder than They Expected,” The Economist (Jan 5, 2013), Retrieved from www. economist.com

[xxxv] Alexis Lai, “Chinese Flock to Elite U.S. Schools, CNN (November 26, 2012), Retrieved from www.cnn.com

[xxxvi] Justin Bergman, “Forged Transcripts and Fake Essays: How Unscrupulous Agents Get Chinese Students into U.S. Schools,” Time (July 26, 2012), Retrieved from www.time.com

[xxxvii] As cited in Justin Bergman, “A U.S. Degree At Any Cost,” Time (Aug 20, 2012), Retrieved from www.time.com

[xxxviii] As cited in Yojana Sharma, “Ministry Mulls Powers to Ban Student Recruitment Agents,” University World News Global Edition, 246 (November 1, 2012), Retrieved from www.universityworldnews.com

[xxxix] Ibid.

[xl] Lisa M. Krieger and Molly Vorwerck, “Sunnyvale University CEO Indicted on Visa Fraud Charges,” San Jose Mercury News (May 8, 2012), Retrieved from www. mercurynews.com

[xli] Luxi Zhang & Bob Adamson, “The New Independent Higher Education Institutions in China: Dilemmas and Challenges,” Higher Education Quarterly, 65, No. 3 (July 2011), 251–266.

[xlii] Ibid., 253.

[xliii] Beth McMurtrie and Lara Farrar, “Chinese Summer Schools Sell Quick Credits,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (January 14, 2013), Retrieved from www.chronicle.com.  I was a main source of information for this article.  Information from this source draws from both the published article and my own research in China.

[xliv] Ibid.

[xlv] Ibid.

[xlvi] Nick Lee, Amanda Beatson, Tony C. Garrett, Ian Lings and Xi Zhang, “A Study of the Attitudes towards Unethical Selling Amongst Chinese Salespeople,” Journal of Business Ethics, 88, Supplement 3 (2009), 497-515.

[xlvii] Ibid.

[xlviii] As cited in Ibid.

[xlix] China X is a pseudonym for a real organization that continues to operate an international summer school in southern China.  This chapter is based on information gleaned from the organization’s web site, organizational documents, first-hand observation of the program, and interviews with members of the organization.

[l] David F. Labaree, How to Succeed in School without Really Learning: The Credentials Race in American Education (New Haven, 1997), 43.

[li] Thomas Frank, “A Matter of Degrees,” Harpers (Aug 2012), 4.

[lii] As cited in Labaree, How to Succeed in School without Really Learning, 44.

[liii] Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry in the Value of Work (New York, 2009), 144.

[liv] Nick Lee, Amanda Beatson, Tony C. Garrett, Ian Lings and Xi Zhang, “A Study of the Attitudes towards Unethical Selling Amongst Chinese Salespeople,” Journal of Business Ethics, 88, Supplement 3 (2009), 497-515.

[lv] “Fakes and Status in China,” The Economist (June 23, 2012), Retrieved from www.economist.com

[lvi] Frank, “A Matter of Degrees.”

[lvii] Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York, 1942), 152.

[lviii] “The Golden Rice-Bowl,” The Economist (Nov 24, 2012), Retrieved from www.economist.com

[lix] Ibid.

[lx] Ibid.

[lxi] Keith Bradsher, “Chinese Graduates Say No Thanks to

Factory Jobs,” The New York Times (Jan 24, 2013), Retrieved from www.nytimes.com

[lxii] Dan Wang, Dian Liu, Chun Lai, “Expansion of Higher Education and the Employment Crisis: Policy Innovations in China,” On The Horizon, 20, no. 4 (2012), 336-344.

[lxiii] Yojana Sharma, “Concern Over Too Many Postgraduates as Fewer Find Jobs,” University World News Global Edition,  235 (Oct 28, 2012), Retrieved from www.universityworldnews.com

[lxiv] Bradsher, “Chinese Graduates Say No Thanks to Factory Jobs,” Ibid.

Educational Malpractice in South Korea

This article was a case study on Chung Dahm Learning, a private academy in Seoul, South Korea where I worked from 2009-2010. This essay is an excerpt from my book Children Dying Inside, which was originally published in 2011. In the book, I changed the name of Chung Dahm Learning to Korean English Preparatory Academy for legal purposes.

“Children die inside (test kill children)”

— Elementary student at Chung Dahm Learning

Private Education in South Korea

The post-war construction of public schooling was centered only on the elementary level.  Middle school through university was left to private institutions with private sources of funding, mostly tuition paid by parents.  Private schools constituted around 40 to 50 percent of all secondary schools in South Korea and over 65 percent of institutions of higher education.  In the two major cities, Seoul and Pusan, around 75 percent of all high schools were private academic high schools and 90 percent of university students attended a private school.  Michael J. Seth explained, "In general, the higher and more prestigious the level of schooling, the greater the share of enrollments in private institutions."[i]

Because of the frantic push for academic success, different forms of private schooling have dramatically increased over the last two decades in order to profit from “education fever."  There are four types of private education in South Korea: private K-12 schools, private colleges and universities, private tutoring, and hagwons.  Private primary schools represent a small portion of schools overall, as most students enroll in state funded institutions.  Private primary schools were actually illegal until 1962 when this ban was dropped because the state did not have the teachers or facilities to accommodate the flood of students enrolling in school.[ii]  Because public middle schools and high schools are non-compulsory and tuition-based, private schools occupy a large part of the 7th to 12th grade educational sector.  Private schools present themselves as a quality alternative to public schooling.  In the early 1990s, around 30 percent of middle school students and over 50 percent of high school students attended a private school.[iii]  Seoul National University is the only prestigious public university.  The rest are private schools.  Thus, the vast majority of university students are enrolled in a private institution, around 90 percent overall.[iv]  Outside of formal schooling there is also a robust business of private tutoring, which is legally regulated, but due to its size and highly idiosyncratic nature, it is practically free of oversight and hard to generalize.[v] 

Finally, the most popular form of private schooling is the hagwon.  A hagwon is a private, for-profit educational institution that delivers instruction seven days a week.  The legal hours of operation are 5am to 10pm, although many hagwons open after regular school hours (3-4pm) and stay open until late at night, some past 1am.[vi]  In 2008 there was a move to eliminate all restriction on hours of operation so that hagwons could stay open all night, but this measure went down to defeat, later narrowly upheld by the Constitutional Court in 2009.[vii]  Hagwons enroll students from pre-school age through high school, and they come in a wide variety of forms.  Many of them focus on single subject areas, like math, English, piano, or golf.  There are even military-style boot camps run by retired soldiers, focusing on physical drills to test the endurance and pain threshold of students.[viii]  But some of the largest hagwons present themselves as comprehensive preparatory academies, like KEPA, the focus of this study.  These comprehensive academies offer a multi-leveled array of academic classes, including English, Chinese, TOEFL exam prep, literature, history, philosophy, and debate. 

The primary purpose of most private education is to prepare students for the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) and the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), which are the formal placement exams for college.  The entire country adjusts its schedule on CSAT day: the government orders business to modify the work day to clear the roads for students heading to the test; all nonessential workers, both government and private, are told to report late to work; construction work near schools is halted; motorists are informed not to honk their horns; thousands of police are mobilized to handle traffic; the Korean stock market opens late and closes early; flights at all of the nation's airports are restricted; the U.S. military suspends aviation and live-fire training; and adults flock to churches to pray for their child's success.  The results of the CSAT are considered the "crowing life achievement" of a student.  Good scores place students in Korea's top universities, which is the primary factor in finding a good job after college.[ix]

In 1970 there were about 1,421 hagwons in South Korea, but most of these closed during the 1980s.  The autocratic President Chun Doo-hwan decreed that private education was illegal so as to promote an equal educational playing field, but this ban was later ruled unconstitutional.  Hagwons were legalized in a regulated market in 1991, and by 1996 private tutoring was also legal.[x]  In 1980, before the ban took place, about 1/5 of Korean students received some form of private education: 13 percent of elementary school students, 15 percent of middle school students, and 26 percent of high school students.  In 1997 over half of Korean students were being privately educated: 70 percent of elementary students and 50 percent of middle and high school students.  By 2003 Koreans were spending around $12.4 billion on private education, which was more than half the national budget for public schooling.[xi]  In 2003 about 72.6 percent of Korean students were privately educated.  Parents were spending between 10 to 30 percent of family income on private schooling.[xii]  By 2008 there were around 70,213 hagwons and Koreans spent almost 21 trillion won (around $17 billion) on private education.[xiii]  Because the state has never funded much of the educational system, parents bear most of the burden of educating their children in the private educational market.  Because of this, South Korean families spend more on education than in most other countries, around 69 percent of the total price, making the South Korea "possibly the world's costliest educational system."[xiv] 

The Korean hagwon sector in particular is one of the major factors driving up the costs of education.  They have begun to sell their services on the internet, thus expanding an already growing market.[xv]  By the 1990s it was one of the "fastest growing of South Korea's many booming industries."[xvi]  It is becoming so profitable that it has now begun to attract Western private equity firms.  The Carlye Group invested around $20 million in Topia Academy, Inc., one of the largest hagwons in South Korea.[xvii]  KEPA has also attracted over $2 million in foreign private equity investment.[xviii]  Hagwons are also becoming a global phenomenon, following Korean immigrants abroad and attracting non-Korean students.  In 2009 there were 183 academic hagwons and 73 art and music hagwons in Orange County, California alone.[xix]  In 2007 KEPA spun-off a new company, KEPA America, Inc., as an independent entity with its own CEO.  The mission statement of KEPA America, Inc. was to "extend the KEPA network's market to new territories like the US, Canada, Mexico, and South America."[xx]  

While many Koreans consider private education superior to K-12 public education, the private sector is not without its flaws.  For one, the ability to utilize private sector schooling is highly correlated to family income, which contributes to rising inequality through unequal access to quality education and through unequal preparation for elite universities.  Private schools, tutoring, and hagwons serve only those who can pay, so they largely benefit the wealthy.[xxi]  Hagwons also take their profit motive too far.  Business practices routinely determine educational practices.  These institutions inflate grades, teach to standardized tests, and place more emphasis on marketing than teaching.[xxii]  It also seems that these institutions have been systematically overcharging parents for services, which promoted a rebuke by the President in 2009.  The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology reported the 67 percent of hagwons overcharged, 74 percent of foreign language institutes, with more than 40 percent charging twice the standardized tuition level set by the government.  But enforcement is almost impossible, not least because of the lack of government officials.  In southern Seoul there are about 5,000 hagwons but only three civil servants monitoring the district.[xxiii] 

Hagwons also employ teachers who have limited knowledge of subject matter and no training or experience as educators.  The only qualification to teach in Korea is a bachelor's degree from a Western university, no matter the subject.  Few instructors have any previous teaching experience and most know nothing of curriculum or student learning.  One critic sarcastically claimed, "Business owners with suspect educational credentials seem content to hire foreign staff with equally suspect educational credentials to pretend to teach (more like entertain) children in some kind of a babysitting service designed more to generate fast profit rather than quality education."[xxiv]  There have also been widespread complaints by foreign teachers that hagwons do not live up to the terms of employment contracts.[xxv]

The most serious flaw with private education, and with “education fever” more broadly in Korea, is the damage done to children.  Korean culture places a lot of emphasis on exams and college placements, which creates a "pressure-cooker atmosphere."[xxvi]  Thus, most hagwons use a "teach-for-the-test" curriculum that focuses on the memorization of information, standardized multiple-choice tests, and test-taking techniques.  Diane Ravitch has insightfully critiqued such high stakes testing where the curriculum is reduced to "test-taking skills:" Students "master the art of filling in the bubbles on multiple-choice tests, but [cannot] express themselves, particularly when a question requires them to think about and explain what they had just read."[xxvii]  Linda Darling-Hammond has also noted the limitations of standardized testing: "Researchers consistently find that instruction focused on memorizing unconnected facts and drilling skills out of context produces inert rather than active knowledge that does not transfer to real-world activities or problem-solving situations.  Most of the material learned in this way is soon forgotten and cannot be retrieved or applied when it would be useful later."[xxviii] 

With such a curriculum students are "trained, not educated,"[xxix] and this training rewards students for endurance and trickery, not learning.  Korean students rarely understand the information being taught to them, they are not taught to critically analyze information, and they cannot apply information to other contexts.  Students simply become "expert memorizers" of "de-contextualized" facts that can only be used to take standardized tests.[xxx]  This teach-for-the-test curriculum "stifle[s] creativity, hinder[s] the development of analytical reasoning, ma[kes] schooling a process of rote memorization of meaningless facts, and drain[s] all the job out of learning."[xxxi]  High stakes exams also lead to widespread cheating, grade inflation, and outright bribery.[xxxii] 

But there is a much more serious problem for students.   Hagwons take up a lot of extra time for classes and homework, add additional pressure for academic performance, and induce more stress on already overburdened students.  Students already spend a lot of time studying for regular school exams, but the addition of hagwons and private tutors takes up a lot of time during the week, leaving most students with little to no free time.  Students routinely are in school, studying, or engaged in private education for up to 18 hours a day, seven days a week.  One student explained, "I have to get up at 7 in the morning.  I have to be at school by 8 and lessons finish at 4.  Then you go to a hagwon and when you arrive home, it's around 1 o'clock in the morning."[xxxiii]  The Korean Teachers and Education Worker's Union claims that high school students sleep on average 5.4 hours a day, although a recent academic study found that the average sleep time was slightly higher, around 6.5 hours a day.[xxxiv]  The Ministry of Health, Welfare and Family Affairs has issued warnings about student's irregular meals and lack of sleep.  About 40 percent of elementary and middle school students skip meals because they lack a break in their busy daily schedule.[xxxv]  There is a popular student proverb, "If you sleep for four hours a night, you'll get into the college of your choice - if you sleep for five hours, you fail." 

This pressure to perform leads to serious physical harm and psychological distress.  Parents and teachers routinely beat students that do not perform well academically.  A study published in 1996 found that "97 percent of all children reported being beaten by parents and/or teachers, many of them frequently."[xxxvi]  Many students turn to suicide as the only escape from this relentless pressure to perform.  Statistics are not routinely kept on this issue, but limited data are frightening.  Around 50 high school students committed suicide after failing the college entrance exam in 1987.  An academic study published in 1990 revealed that "20 percent of all secondary students contemplated suicide and 5 percent attempted it."[xxxvii]  And the problem is only getting worse.  Two recent surveys found that between 43-48 percent of Korean students have contemplated suicide.  From 2000 to 2003 over 1,000 students between the ages of 10 and 19 committed suicide.  Families also suffer.  In 2005 a father was so distressed over his son's bad grades that he torched himself, his wife, and their daughter outside his son's school in shame.[xxxviii] 

The Business Model of KEPA: Organizational Structure and Mission

Korean English Preparatory Academy was founded in 1999 by a private English language tutor.  It began as a small private school with only a few instructors.  Now it is a publically traded corporation in the “education industry,” and one of the most prestigious hagwons in South Korea.  KEPA has over 250 instructors and hundreds of staff on 65 campuses spread across Seoul and every major city in Korea.  Citing the success of Coca Cola and McDonalds, KEPA has also initiated the “globalization of our business” to capture a share of the international ESL market.  Towards this end KEPA has initiated a joint venture with a group from Zhing-Hwa University in China.  KEPA has also spun off a separate corporate entity, KEPA America, Inc., which was designed to export the hagwon model to the American continent.  And KEPA created an English language immersion school in British Columbia, Canada.[xxxix] 

KEPA has an integrated ESL program broken down into multiple levels, beginning with a very basic introduction to the English language for pre-school age children, all the way to college-prep history, literature, writing, and debate classes for high school students.  Placement in every level is determined by a standardized test with incremental scores correlated to the different course levels, ranging from a score of 0-31 for the introductory level to a score of 110 or higher for the college prep classes.  Outside of the academic “fundamentals,” there is also a structured program designed solely to train students for TOSEL based standardized tests, including grammar, reading, multiple choice question types, essay writing, and interview questions.

 KEPA uses a range of textbooks from Cambridge University Press, Pearson/Longman, Scholastic, Cengage, and a series of specially designed KEPA workbooks designed by their in-house research and development center.  KEPA also has a national corporate website to centralize teaching materials, on-line student homework, attendance, and grading.

In corporate advertising and outreach materials, KEPA presents itself as a college preparatory academy with professionally trained teachers and a 21st century curriculum.  Corporate advertising routinely pictures the same image: an ordered classroom setting with uniformed students actively engaged with energetic teachers wearing suits and ties.  Outreach materials are professionally and fashionably designed in full color on expensive paper.  These materials break down the curricular aims of the academy through trendy catch-phrases, like “critical capability” and “communicative capability.”  The “critical” component is broken down into “critical reading/listening” and “critical speaking/writing,” with each part further packaged into three broad student outcome “deliverables:” “English fluency,” “knowledge,” and “critical thinking.”  The “communicative” component focuses on the interactive process of classroom instruction, which includes class discussion, debates, group work, research, group presentations, peer evaluations, “skill” training, online instruction, and webzine postings.[xl]   

The CEO of KEPA has positioned his company in response to his perception of the global economy.  He points to three highly abstract macro-economic developments, "the globalization trend," the "information revolution," and an "economic crisis that arose in the last 50 years."  He states that these macro-economic changes have produced a "paradigm shift" in global and national markets, which in turn has created demand for a new set of skills.  Thus, the CEO created KEPA to capitalize on these developments, selling the "skills" students will need to compete in a globalized world and to protect themselves from "economic crisis."[xli] 

What are those new skills?  The CEO identified only two: "English expression" and "critical thinking."  To impart these two skills, the CEO created a new "methodology" that would focus on both skills from "the beginning" of language training, thus, creating a "blended learning system" that would "amplify learning efficiency."  The CEO vaguely explained, "The Critical Learning system is a new attempt to accomplish the learning objective through the merger and improvement of system and contents."  This learning system also blends classroom instruction with "on-line learning," which includes grammar exercises, writing, and a national blog to post projects and comment on classroom assignments.[xlii]        

While language acquisition is fairly straightforward, what is critical thinking?  The CEO defines this practice as "disregarding intuition and emotion" in order to use logic to solve problems via a "topical approach."  At a basic level, logic is the ability to understand main ideas "while avoiding comprehension of minor details" in order to "execute an oral or written summary."  At a higher level, logic is an "attempt" at "in depth comprehension" by analyzing "purpose," "tone," and "identifying logical fallacies."  The topical approach is explained simply in terms of learning language through the study of a specific informational topics, such as endangered species, cloning, or cyber bullying.[xliii]

What is the "learning objective" for KEPA?  This is somewhat unclear.  The CEO has described the KEPA mission in very vague and abstract language: "Cultivating communicative capability by escaping from self-rationalization, which can be a blind spot of critical thinking, and reinforcing resolution through compromise."  Another corporate document uses equally abstract but more humanistic terms, "Our mission is to help people realize their potential and thereby discover new meaning in their lives."[xliv]  In the more concrete terms of classroom methodology, students learn vocabulary and grammar through reading or listening to a specific topic, while they practice speaking skills.  The culmination of each classroom activity is a "critical thinking project," which is a group project that is supposed to demonstrate "solving problems" through "discussion, evaluation, and the logical presentation of an organized conclusion."[xlv]

In a widely disseminated image used in teacher training meetings, KEPA explains its organizational mission in terms of a bowl of rice.  The rice is critical thinking, and just like rice, critical thinking is "necessary for survival."  The bowl is the "delivery system," which is a combination of internet technology and faculty. The role of teachers is to "deliver" the product of "critical thinking."  However, the rice is also presented in a different slide as a trio of knowledge goals: critical thinking, cognitive language, and relevant content.  This is the official trio of the Korean Association for Teachers of English (KATE).[xlvi]  This image reveals KEPA's basic content-centered pedagogical framework: the "banking concept of education."  Knowledge is an object that the teacher holds and "deposits" into the passive "receptacle" of a student.[xlvii]   

While KEPA markets itself as an educational institution, internal documents and the CEOs own language paint the organization as a profit seeking business.  In an internal corporate magazine, KEPA Culture, the CEO of the company made it clear that the most important part of KEPA’s success was the “self-confidence and invincible attitude to maintain market leadership,” including the ability to diversify the company to reach multiple markets in the private education sector.  Corporate leadership does not discuss teaching or curriculum in educational terms.  Instead they refer these parts of the business as “products” and “contents.”  The company is not focused on any academic or learning principles.  Instead administrative leadership discusses their corporate mission in terms of an “ESL lifestyle business.”  As such, this organization is focused on launching “new products” to generate revenue, creating “strategic marketing campaigns” in order to “create value,” becoming a “content leader” in their niche, and muscling out other ESL “competitors” to capture greater market share.[xlviii]  In internal documents, the CEO primarily refers to KEPA as a “publically listed company.”  He calls KEPA a “corporate organization comprised of business divisions, R&D centers, and performance-driven IT and management infrastructures.”  Different campuses are referred to as “franchises” and “subsidiary companies.”[xlix]  There is rarely any mention of teaching, learning, or curriculum, and never any attempt to characterize KEPA as an educational institution.  As far as corporate leadership and administrative staff are concerned, KEPA is a profiting seeking business. 

After sorting through corporate memos, teacher training presentations, administrative staff comments, and teacher comments, it is clear that KEPA sends mixed messages about the multiple and often highly abstract objectives of this organization.

Most administrators and teachers have no clear idea about what the company stands for or what to prioritize in the classroom.  It is clear that KEPA has lofty business and instructional goals, but the corporate vision does not fully connect with the more concrete methodology employed in the classroom.  Further, due to the vast confusion over organizational goals, most staff go with whatever corporate directive has been most recently issued, while adhering to the monolithically proscribed instructional routine for classroom management.  Thus, despite the lofty rhetorical goals KEPA espouses in outreach documents, corporate memos, and teacher training seminars, the real organizational emphasis of this company seems to fall on two interlocking objectives: making profit while rigidly adhering to the KEPA "delivery system."[l]  The later is a teacher-proof curriculum and classroom management structure known internally to teachers and staff as the "KEPA method."

Teaching without Teachers: Authority, Structure and Surveillance

Externally, KEPA advertises itself as a state of the art English language academy with professionally trained teachers, a 21st century curriculum, and engaged students.  Internally, corporate executives claim to have created a new ESL curriculum that is supposed to train students to become proficient in the English language (listening, speaking, reading, and writing), as well as in critical thinking and argumentative debate.  However, behind the corporate rhetoric lies a different, darker reality.  Only vaguely understood by most organizational actors, there is an institutionalized "hidden curriculum"[li] created by KEPA's CEO and organizational structure that undermines KEPA's corporate rhetoric and frustrates student learning.  

The CEO wants to make KEPA a “united” organization with a “central focus.”[lii]  As one middle manager explained, "It is crucial that we all 'row this big ship together for smoothing sailing.'"[liii]  But to maintain order and discipline, the CEO admits that he has to use an “authoritarian” management style and to be “strict on the staff and faculty.”[liv]  Why?  Because KEPA employs an inexperienced, untrained, and transient workforce. 

Most middle managers, administrative staff, and instructors leave the company within a year.  Some middle managers leave the company after only three to six months.  At my particular branch, four different people occupied the upper-middle manager position and three different people occupied the lower-middle manager position within twelve months.  Few entry-level administrative staff have any knowledge of English or education, and most cannot even speak English.  These low-paid, primarily young office workers rarely stay for more than six to nine months.  All of the English instructors are recruited from overseas on one-year contracts, and the majority stay for only a single year.  If an instructor persists for more than a year then they are automatically considered an "expert instructor."[lv]  Most of these instructors have only a bachelor’s degree in fields other than English and no previous teaching experience or knowledge of student learning.  Some have extremely limited reading, speaking, and writing skills and they are not fit to teach.  Most if not all instructors are employed at KEPA because they could not find employment in their home country.  Some come overseas to primarily "party," while waiting for a better opportunity back home.[lvi]  For the majority of instructors, working at KEPA is all about the money, and for the most part, KEPA pays a higher wage and offers better working conditions than many other Korean Hagwons.  Given instructor's lack of skills, inexperience at teaching, and mercenary motives, combined with the traditional hierarchical culture of Korean corporations, the CEO's decision to maintain an "authoritarian" organization seems reasonable.  To deal with an unskilled and transient workforce, the organization is built on the foundation of authoritarian managers who enforce a rigid classroom management method.  Instructors and administrative staff are but the interchangeable and temporary "bowls" delivering the standardized product that makes KEPA a hefty profit.

The KEPA instructional method is a carefully guarded "confidential" trade-secret that was created by the CEO and developed by the Research and Development staff.  Only top corporate managers, R&D staff, and Training Center instructors have full access to the rationales behind the KEPA method.  All middle management and instructors are given a brief, standardized version of the KEPA method, which is a "class structure" that must be rigidly followed.  Instructors are not told how or why the method works.  They are simply told to follow the method.  Every three hour class has the same standard format and is planned down to the minute.  Instructors are told to follow the "class structure" without question and without modification.  The main task of middle-management is surveillance.  They monitor instructors via CCTV to make sure every part of the "class structure" is accomplished according to a standardized "observation report," which is a checklist based on the "class structure," with the addition of three additional factors, enthusiasm, professionalism, and student management.  But the main rubric that all middle management cling to and incessantly enforce is whether or not an instructor "follows KEPA methodology for class structure and instruction," which means does an instructor do each prescribed activity on the checklist for the exact length of time allotted for each task.[lvii]

The KEPA method is the centerpiece of the organization.  The CEO claims that the KEPA method is a "new product" that has enabled KEPA to become a "content leader" in the ESL market.[lviii]  The KEPA method is not only a "new" and effective way to teach ESL for the 21st century,[lix] it is also "the most effective ESL methodology in East Asia."[lx]  On what does the CEO base his claims?  What knowledge or training does the CEO possess to invent such a revolutionary educational model?  The answer to both questions, sadly, is nothing.  The CEO earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy.  He mostly focused on G. W. F. Hegel, the German romantic who believed the world was infused with transcendental spirit, and the CEO is prone to sending Hegelian inspired, abstract emails to faculty and staff.  After working for a number of years as a private tutor, the CEO was able to start his own hagwon business.  He seems to think of himself primarily as an entrepreneur, not as an educator, and he refers to KEPA primarily as a business.  After starting the company, he hired a number of program marketers and researchers that helped him invent and market a "new" ESL product.  But these program developers only had bachelor’s degrees, mostly in fields other than English or Education.  According to one former R&D staff member, these people had almost no knowledge of the disciplines of English, English as a Second Language, or Education, yet they were designing the curriculum.[lxi] 

So, if the method was not created by knowledgeable ESL or educational experts, then what is the KEPA method based on?  I was able to get a copy of the "confidential" General Trainer's Manual through an informant.  This official document is the company Bible because it contains the complete curricular rationale and framework for the KEPA method.  This Manual was developed by the CEO, R&D, and program marketers, and it is only given to the elite, veteran KEPA instructors who are company certified to train incoming recruits. 

The 45-page Manual contains only 12 pages of conceptual framework.  Many pages present information that has been plagiarized, and only 6 pages contain 18 partially documented secondary sources.  Of these sources, 17 are cited as either an author's last name or in parenthetical notations with an author's last name and year of publication.  There is no bibliography, and only one title is presented.  The one fully sourced reference is improperly placed in the middle of a page between two summary paragraphs.  Despite some citations, there is no indication that these references are used with any professional or academic reasoning.  No author's academic credentials, discipline, or expertise is mentioned.  There is no discussion of research methodology and there is no critical analysis of research findings.  All references are cited at the end of brief summaries (most are one sentence long), which present a list of generalized knowledge claims.  All of these generalizations are superficial and display no substantial understanding of the subject matter (such as student self-efficacy, student behavior, or student learning).  Some of the generalized claims are simply nonsense: "A cognitive phenomenon strongly supported by psychological research, has broad applicability within education."  There is obviously no knowledge of professional academic standards on plagiarism, summary, critical analysis, or referencing, let alone any expertise in the content of ESL education or student learning.  The few authors that are named are referred to generally as "professors," which seems to lend a general aura of credibility and authority to the claims being presented.  But these claims are presented randomly in a list with no overarching thesis, integration, or coherence.[lxii] 

The single most repeated and authoritative source cited in the Manual is the CEO.  In Asian corporate culture, leadership is revered.  The CEO of KEPA is treated like a demigod. When he makes his yearly appearance at each branch the entire staff lines the entrance to greet him.  Every corporate email or memo is treated as revealed truth.  But a close inspection of his unfounded and illogical claims in the Manual shows that he is no expert on education, ESL, or anything else.  The CEO claims that East Asian ESL speakers are very different from "other ESL regions" because only East Asians use English for "business and academic communication."  Thus, he claims there is a specific need for a "distinctive" East Asian ESL method for these purposes.  Furthermore, he claims to have invented "the most effective ESL methodology in East Asia."  On this foundation, the CEO defines several key concepts and makes several knowledge claims that form the foundation of the KEPA curriculum.  This information is presented as self-evident truth and there is no attempt to reasonably explain any concept or claim, let alone conclusively proving them true. 

The Manual violates every elementary principle of expository writing, logical analysis, and critical thinking.  Superficial and abstract knowledge claims are randomly strung together in lists with no thesis or coherence, and the whole document is grounded on a fallacious appeal to the authority of the CEO and the KEPA corporation.  In this regard, the section on critical thinking is highly ironic.  It tells the reader that "'Critical Thinking' is most essential to KEPA ESL Methodology."  It warns against "dogmatic thinking," which is defined as "accepting one perspective blindly," and just "reiterating" a single perspective as truth.  Yet in defining and explaining critical thinking, this document merely quotes the CEO from a marketing memo and then ends with a long quote from late 19th century proto-sociologist William Graham Sumner, who is referred to authoritatively in the present tense as an "American academic and professor at Yale."  The General Trainer's Manual is transparently an exercise in uncritical, dogmatic thinking.  It presents a highly selective, superficial, disorganized, and unfounded list of incoherent information as "the most effective ESL methodology in East Asia," and new recruits are sternly told to follow it to the letter.  

Perhaps the most telling aspect of the General Trainer's Manual is the fact that only 12 out of 45 pages are devoted to any type of content-based information on ESL, student learning, or instruction.  The rest of the Manual is a prescriptive checklist.  It follows the same rigid logic as the standard classroom KEPA method and it is consistent with the overall authoritarian ethos of the organization.  The Manual tells the trainer exactly what to do every day of training down to the minute.  There is a regimented "Training Check List" to follow for every component.  It even tells the trainer how many new recruits should fail the program (10%).  But of course, the final outcome of training is not controlled by the actual trainers.  All pass/fail decisions are made by the Director of the Training Center who receives trainer recommendations and reviews all training sessions via CCTV.  This training structure is similar to the general management structure of KEPA where a large group of middle managers watch CCTV to monitor and evaluate staff.  But when it comes to final evaluations, disciplining, rewarding, or firing staff, only corporate managers have the real power to make decisions.   

Many instructors put up with this rigid structure because of the pay, and because of the "upward advancement opportunities" to "climb the corporate ladder."  Like other Korean corporate organizations, KEPA prizes loyalty above competence.  Almost all senior administrators and middle managers worked their way up from being an instructor, which is seen as the entry position to earn one's place within the "business culture" of KEPA.[lxiii]  Others stay on because it is an easy job with good hours (4-10pm), relatively good pay, and most instructors only work four days a week.  These instructors have plenty of time and money to pursue a range personal activities and to explore a fascinating foreign culture.  Some find working with ESL students very rewarding and a few say they want to be teachers upon returning home.  Finally, some instructors buy into KEPA's corporate rhetoric and find this organization a worthwhile and satisfying experience.  As one instructor explained, "I picked up valuable skills...diversifying my experience at KEPA.  I was selling a product that I actually believed in... teaching."[lxiv]

"Children Dying Inside": Instructional Ritual and Student Resistance 

To deal with an unskilled and transient workforce, the organization is built on the foundation of authoritarian managers who enforce a rigid classroom management routine called the "KEPA method."  Almost every three hour class follows the same basic structure and each activity is rigidly planned down to the minute.  This class structure is repeated for 9 weeks, on the 10th week a standardized achievement test is administered (speaking, reading, listening, and writing), and then the 11th-13th weeks are back to the normal routine.  Every three month term follows the exact same structure, and there are never any breaks between terms.

Except for the college prep courses, every class follows the same basic routine.  The first five minutes is attendance and homework review.  The homework is a combination of vocabulary exercises, filling in blanks, and writing a paragraph summary.  Grading homework consists of a quick glance at a workbook to make sure all blanks are filled in (there is no inspection for understanding or accuracy).  Students earn an A+ if all homework is completed and an F is nothing is done.  If at least some blanks are filled then they earn a B.  These are the only three grades an instructor is allowed to give.  Next is a "review" test on vocabulary.  Students are assigned 45 vocabulary words, 45 synonyms, and 10 phrase length "chunks" to memorize each week.  The average score is 50 percent (10/20 questions), which earns a B grade.  A score of 10 percent (2/20 questions) earns a C- grade.  These grades are set by R&D.  Then there is a 10-minute-long whole class "student counseling" discussion, in which instructors explain homework, "motivate" students by publicly recognizing high performers and scolding low performers, and if there is time, conduct "student rapport" activities, such as language games, like 20 questions, telephone, or riddles.  The next two hours are devoted to a brief skill lecture and then reading or listening exercises, leading up to a reading or listening comprehension quiz.  The final activity of each class is a group "critical thinking project" based on the day's content theme.  Students are given prompts and asked to prepare a group oral presentation, which they will speak in front of the class.  The class is supposed to evaluate each group and a winning group is chosen by the instructor.[lxv]

On the surface, this basic structure seems to pack a range of language-based activities into a well-organized three-hour block.  Time is given to vocabulary, skill acquisition, skill practice, skill test, writing, group work, and oral presentations.  And in fact, high performing students are able to use this structure to practice and polish their English skills.  However, there is almost no time for individual feedback or correction, thus, there is very little opportunity for students engage the material and learn new skills.  Furthermore, KEPA's curricular materials are inappropriately advanced for most students, thus, students struggle to understand the lesson's conceptual topic and advanced vocabulary words.  Elementary students in the basic reading and listening programs are taught about beneficial bacteria, hyperinflation, competing scientific theories of species extinction, or cryogenics.  In the more advanced classes, elementary and middle school students use American college textbooks with sophisticated essays and they are introduced to logic, argumentation, fallacies, and expository writing.  Most students are completely overwhelmed, not only by the advanced conceptual topics, but also by the extremely advanced vocabulary.  The majority of students in every class routinely fail the reading or listening comprehension quiz.  The average score hovers around 50 percent or lower.  Students struggle to comprehend the material thrown at them each week, let alone developing their language skills.

The KEPA pedagogical structure itself is to blame.  Due to the rigid time and activity structure, there is no opportunity for instructors to explain each week's topic, nor is there any time for the class to engage in discussion.  The whole focus of the class is preparing students to take the standardized multiple choice question test during the second hour, which is meant to prepare them for the standardized final exam week 10.  In fact, the whole KEPA curriculum is built around the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), and a host of other standardized tests, which are the formal placement exams for academic high schools and colleges.  Despite KEPA's rhetoric about language acquisition, blending learning, and critical thinking, this hagwon is only concerned about one goal: preparing students to take standardized tests in the English language.  Thus, the primary instructional activity that KEPA management places at the center of the KEPA method is "test-taking skills."  In training secessions and from management comments, the primary instructional activity is to help students "refine fundamental test-taking skills" so that they can "obtain the best iBT score possible."  This is the central mission of KEPA.  Classroom activities focus not on discussion or understanding written texts or oral texts, instead they focus on standardized test question types, strategic approaches to text taking, note taking, and summary writing.  This also explains the difficult nature of the textbooks because TOEFL and other standardized tests use "excerpts from college-level textbooks."  Thus, students read or listen to college-level texts, not because it is developmentally or educationally appropriate, but because it is necessary to acclimatize them to standardized test taking.[lxvi]

There is no room in the KEPA method to make weekly topics interesting, relevant, or even understandable to most students.  This alienates and frustrates even willing students.  But most classrooms are not filled with willing students, especially when they reach middle school. There is an underlying reality behind Korean private schooling: it is culturally mandatory.  Because of the general "education mania" in Korea, parents enroll students in private education all week long.  Some students go to hagwons and private tutors seven days a week for up to six to eight hours a day.  After an informal class discussion on how students are overworked in Korea, I had one of my students approach me after class.  He informed me that he has to go to 13 hagwons a week, each assigning homework, plus his regular school and homework.  He said he had no choice.  His parents make him go.  Many students report that they are always going to hagwons or doing homework, they have no free time, and they sleep only four to six hours a night. 

Thus, many students in KEPA classrooms are completely unresponsive and do the very least just to get by because they know schooling is simply a test of endurance, and they how to work the KEPA system.  As long as students fill out their book, stay quiet during class, and do at least some homework then they will earn passing grades.  Many students will just stare at the walls during class.  The week 10 standardized achievement tests are also rigged to accommodate these unresponsive students.  The same tests are used over and over again, grading is curved, and students will advance to higher classes if their parents complain.  KEPA offers a highly ritualized environment that demands very little from students other than displaying the proper behavior.  There is a subtle truce between instructors and students.  Many students play the hagwon game to keep up the appearance of schooling; however, a close look into their blank eyes reveals a silent, enduring resistance.  Sometimes this resistance turns into open hostility.  One student explained, there is "conflict between teachers and the students which leads to an uncomfortable learning environment."[lxvii]

I engaged students often about their educational circumstances in order to understand how they perceive schooling, hagwons, and the pressure to perform.  92 percent of the students I surveyed (n = 59) said they went to school 6 days a week, while on average spending just over 5 days a week at private education (either a hagwon or a tutor).  19 students (32%) spent 7 days a week at private education.  Students averaged about 4.2 hours a day at private education, with 6 students (10 %) spending an average of 7+ hours a day at private education.  On average students went to 4 different hagwons or private tutors, with 7 students going to 7+ hagwons or private tutors.  On average students spent 4.2 hours a day on homework, although over 20 percent said they spent 7+ hours a day on homework.  When asked how much "free time" students had during the day, the average response was 2.5 hours, with 39 percent responding only 1 hour.  On average students got 7.6 hours of sleep a night, with 15 percent saying they got only 5-6 hours of sleep.

I also asked students to write about what they liked or disliked about the hagwan.  Most students repeat the same basic evaluations: too much homework, too many tests, too much stress to perform, and not enough break time to eat and go to the bathroom.  On student wrote, "They spend lots of time in doing KEPA homework, no time to do school homework, and no time to study other subjects."  Most disturbingly were the repeated comments about how much "stress" all the class time, homework, and tests put on students.  One college prep student wrote, "The Korean school system puts too much pressure on students.  The stress that the students have to carry on their backs is very heavy that some students fall down, never reaching their goals.  Do we have to do it this seriously?  I absolutely DON'T think so."  Another college prep student wrote something similar, "Everyday I have to go academies... every day I have to finish homework...I get tired, stressed usually, when I am busy.  I am hated of doing this uninterested thing...Usually I feel negative of this busy life.  But I'm continuing this life because I'm being forced."  Two elementary students verbalized in quite shocking language how this stress makes them feel: "Children dying inside" and "Children die inside (test kill children)."  A couple of students said they "hate" KEPA and want to "destroy it."[lxviii]

Conclusions

Taking the ethical vantage point of Amartya Sen's "impartial spectator,"[lxix] I want to make a few observations about the South Korean pursuit of "education fever" and the social role of hagwons, like KEPA, in order to ask a basic question: Is the South Korean educational model just or fair?  Specifically, I want to use Sen's "capability approach" to look at the means and ends of "satisfactory human living" and the extent to which an individual not only "ends up doing," but also what that individual is "in fact able to do" and whether or not that individual is able to freely choose any particular course of action.[lxx]  As Sen explains, "A theory of justice - or more generally an adequate theory of normative social choice - has to be alive to both the fairness of the processes involved and to the equity and efficiency of the substantive opportunities that people can enjoy...Neither justice, nor political or moral evaluation, can be concerned only with the overall opportunities and advantages of individuals in a society."[lxxi]

The ends of South Korean education look very attractive.  Today, South Korea has one of the highest percentages of school-age population enrolled in both K-12 and higher education, around 99 percent enrollment in middle school, over 96 percent in high school, and close to 70 percent in some form of higher education.[lxxii]  South Korea has also been the site of a "miracle" socio-economic transformation from an underdeveloped, autocratic third-world backwater into a developed, free-market, high-skilled economy and democratizing society.  South Korea deserves credit for its highly educated population, soaring industrial productivity, and innovative technology, but at what cost and who pays the cost?

In 2008 Korean families spent almost 21 trillion won (around $17 billion) on private education.[lxxiii]  South Korean families spend more on education than in most other countries, around 69 percent of the total price, making the South Korea "possibly the world's costliest educational system."[lxxiv]  And students are pushed from as early as kindergarten or the 1st grade to not only perform well in regular schooling, but also to go to private tutors and hagwons so that they can prepare for the high stakes testing in middle school, high school, and the college entrance exam.  Most students study all day for seven days a week and get less than eight hours of sleep a night.  These students are pushed to study and succeed on standardized tests, they are pushed to become fluent in English, and they are pushed to get into the most prestigious high schools and universities.  Students are slaves to their parents' ambitions, whether or not some students actually internalize "education fever."  Students are under so much pressure that a large percentage of students, somewhere between 20 to 48 percent, actively contemplate suicide each year, and a significant minority actually kill themselves because they cannot take the pressure to succeed or the burden of failure.

And what are South Korean children actually learning in this "pressure-cooker atmosphere"?[lxxv]  Public and private schools use a "teach-for-the-test" curriculum that focuses on the memorization of information, standardized multiple-choice tests, and test-taking techniques.  Korean students rarely understand the information being taught to them, they are not taught to critically analyze information, and they cannot apply information to other contexts.  Students simply become "expert memorizers" of "de-contextualized" facts that can only be used to take standardized tests.[lxxvi]  This teach-for-the-test curriculum "stifle[s] creativity, hinder[s] the development of analytical reasoning, ma[kes] schooling a process of rote memorization of meaningless facts, and drain[s] all the job out of learning."[lxxvii]

And what are the ends of this education system?  Students are ultimately competing for a limited number of high paying jobs with top corporations or government agencies.  But economic and social inequality has intensified over the last several decades, and there is “a growing disparity” between rich and poor measured by consumption patterns, residential segregation, and access to quality education, especially quality higher education.[lxxviii]  Not only are the numbers of impoverished and underemployed still a problem, there has also been increasing unemployment and growing job insecurity for white collar workers.  Women still find it hard to compete in the labor market.  Over the past decade, Koreans have suffered setbacks from less protective labor laws, increased competition in the skilled labor market for fewer full-time jobs, and the introduction of neoliberal business models, like increased use a flexible, contingent, and low-paid labor force that can be easily hired and fired in reaction to business cycles.[lxxix]  Plus, the educationally driven culture of South Korea turns out many more college graduates than can be adequately employed in the economy.[lxxx]

But schooling in South Korea has traditionally been about social status and class, not employment in the labor market.[lxxxi]  Koreans have had a "faith in education," seeing it as the only avenue to social advancement, if not economic opportunity.[lxxxii]  A successful student not only raises his or her own status, but also brings social benefits to the entire family.  Thus, Denise Potrzeba Lett has argued that economic goals are not "the primary motivation" behind Koreans' pursuit of education.  Instead, Koreans' "pursuit of education was more than anything else a pursuit of status."[lxxxiii]  Lett calls the modern manifestation of the process the "yangbanization" of Korean society: "as South Korea's middle class has become more affluent, it has come to exhibit characteristics more typically associated with an upper rather than a middle class."[lxxxiv]  The pursuit of formal education, especially higher education, becomes the primary marker of class distinction, which helps position an individual within the highly regimented labor market.[lxxxv]

The ends of the South Korean education system seem perversely clear: a successful student spends 16 years of intense intellectual labor, earns a degree from a prestigious university, and gains entry to one of the top 50 corporations, only to raise a family and push his or her children onto the same path.  But only a minority of South Korean students actually fulfill this career trajectory.  In a society defined by social status and the attainment of success markers, what is the quality of life for the majority who fail to reach the cultural pinnacles of success?  And is educational, social, and economic success truly just if it is not freely chosen?

And even if one of the lucky few achieve all of these markers of success, what then?  Are they happy, fulfilled, content, complete? 

I am reminded by the words of the French philosopher Pascal: "The present is never our end.  Past and present are our means, only the future is our end.  And so we never actually live, though we hope to, and in constantly striving for happiness it is inevitable that we will never achieve it."[lxxxvi]  South Korean society is obsessed with status and education seems to be the primary vehicle to attain this future end.  But if the process to obtain a desired end causes only misery than what happiness can come when the end is reached?  As John Dewey noted, most people see education as simply "the control of means for achieving ends."[lxxxvii]  However, Dewey explained that education is connected to the development of human beings, and as such, it is a process of discovery, and should have "no end beyond itself."[lxxxviii]  If education is treated simply as a means to an end then personal development and learning will not happen - education will be reduced to a perverse ritual that tortures the young to conform to competitive social pressures. 

Sadly, education in South Korea seems to be a demonstration of Dewey's point: "Education fever" is not about education at all.  Schooling is but the means for the relentless pursuit of social status and prestige.  Thus, the recently debated phenomenon of "tiger mothers" in the United States should give us pause to think about the means and ends of education.[lxxxix]  The education system in South Korea should serve as a warning to the world.  It helps us understand how education can be used and abused in the pursuit of social goals, and how children can suffer from their parents' pursuit of an ideal end.  South Korea should not be seen as a global educational exemplar.  In contrast, the South Korean educational model should serve as a warning.  Beware the reduction of education to economic mobility and social status.  Beware the grip of "education fever."

Endnotes

[i] Seth, Education Fever, 82-83, 135.

[ii] Ibid., 88.

[iii] Sorensen, “Success and Education in South Korea,” 18.

[iv] Seth, Education Fever, 82-83, 135.

[v] Lee Soo-yeon, "Hagwon Close, but Late-Night Education Goes On," Joong Ang Daily (Aug 17 2009).

[vi] Bae Ji-sook, "Should Hagwon Run Round-the-Clock?" Korea Times (March 13 2008).

[vii] Kim Tae-jong, "Seoul City Council Cancels All-Night Hagwon Plan," Korea Times (March 18 2008); Park Yu-mi and Kim Mi-ju, "Despite Protests, Court Says Hagwon Ban Is Constitutional," Joong Ang Daily (Oct 31 2009).

[viii] John M. Glionna, “South Korean Kids Get a Taste of Boot Camp,” Los Angeles Times.Com (Aug 21 2009).

[ix] James Card, "Life and Death Exams in South Korea," Asia Times Online (Nov 30 2005). Seth, Education Fever, 1.

[x] Casey Lartigue, "You'll Never Guess What South Korea Frowns Upon," Washington Post (May 28 2000); Card, "Life and Death Exams in South Korea;" Seth, Education Fever, 185.

[xi] Koo, “The Changing Faces of Inequality in South Korea,” 12, 14.

[xii] Joseph E. Yi, "Academic Success at Any Cost?" KoreAm: The Korean American Experience (Oct 1 2009); Lartigue, "You'll Never Guess What South Korea Frowns Upon."

[xiii] Moon Gwang-lip, "Statistics Paint Korean Picture," Joong Ang Daily (Dec 15 2009); "Lee Seeks to Cut Educational Costs," Korea Herald (Aug 14 2009).

[xiv] Seth, Education Fever, 172, 187.

[xv] Choe Sang-hun, "Tech Company Helps South Korean Students Ace Entrance Tests," The New York Times (June 1 2009).

[xvi] Seth, Education Fever, 185-86.

[xvii] Hwang Young-jin, "Equity Fund Bets on Cram Schools," Korea Times (n.d.), KEPA papers.

[xviii] KEPA, "The KEPA America Mission," corporate email (Nov 13 2007), KEPA papers.

[xix] Yi, "Academic Success at Any Cost?"

[xx] KEPA, "The KEPA America Mission."

[xxi] Koo, “The Changing Faces of Inequality in South Korea,” 31.

[xxii] KEPA papers.

[xxiii] Kim Tae-jong, "Hagwon Easily Dodge Crackdown," Korea Times (Oct 26 2008); Kang Shin-who, "67 Percent of Private Cram Schools Overcharge Parents," Korea Times (April 14 2009).

[xxiv] "Unforeseen Dangers of Korea's Hagwon Culture," Asian Pacific Post (Jan 10 2006).

[xxv] Ibid., Limb Jae-un, "English Teachers Complain about Certain Hagwon," Joong Ang Daily (Dec 8 2008).

[xxvi] Seth, Education Fever, 192.

[xxvii] Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education (New York: Basic, 2010), 107-108, 159.

[xxviii] Darling-Hammond, The Flat World and Education, 70.

[xxix] Ibid., 109.

[xxx] Rose Senior, "Korean Students Silenced by Exams," The Guardian Weekly (Jan 15 2009); Card, "Life and Death Exams in South Korea."

[xxxi] Seth, Education Fever, 170.

[xxxii] Card, "Life and Death Exams in South Korea."

[xxxiii] Hyun-Sung Khang, "Education-Obsessed South Korea," Radio Nederland Wereldomroep (Aug 6 2001).

[xxxiv] Bae Ji-sook, "Should Hagwon Rune Round-the-Clock?;" Soonjae Joo, Chol Shin, Jinkwan Kim, Hyeryeon Yi, Yongkyu Ahn, Minkyu Park, Jehyeong Kim, and Sangduck Lee, “Prevalence and Correlates of Excessive Daytime Sleepiness in High School Students in Korea,” Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences 59 (2005): 433-440.

[xxxv] Bae Ji-sook, "Should Hagwon Rune Round-the-Clock?."

[xxxvi] Seth, Education Fever, 168.

[xxxvii] Seth, Education Fever, 166.

[xxxviii] Card, "Life and Death Exams in South Korea."

[xxxix] “Blog commentary by administrative staff in response to CEO interview,” KEPA papers; CEO, “The Road Not Taken,” Corporate email, KEPA papers; S. T., "My KEPA Story," (Dec 12 2007), KEPA papers.

[xl] Promotional handouts and advertising documents, KEPA papers.

[xli] CEO, "From Blended Learning to Critical Learning" (May 15 2009), KEPA Papers.

[xlii] Ibid.

[xliii] Ibid.

[xliv] KEPA, "Critical Learning," ESL Learning Center Business Division (July 2 2009), KEPA papers.

[xlv] CEO, "From Blended Learning to Critical Learning" (May 15 2009), KEPA Papers.

[xlvi] Ibid.; KEPA, "Critical Learning." See also Korean Association for Teachers of English, <www.kate.or.kr/>

[xlvii] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1993), ch 2.

[xlviii] “Interview with KEPA CEO,” KEPA CULTURE MAGAZINE (June 2006), KEPA papers; KEPA, "Critical Learning," ESL Learning Center Business Division (July 2 2009), KEPA papers.

[xlix] CEO, “The Road Not Taken,” Corporate email, KEPA papers.

[l] KEPA, "Critical Learning," ESL Learning Center Business Division (July 2 2009), KEPA papers.

[li] James E. Rosenbaum, Making Inequality: The Hidden Curriculum of High School Tracking (New York: Wiley, 1976); Henry Giroux and David Purpel, Eds., The Hidden Curriculum and Moral Education (Berkeley: McCutchan, 1983).

[lii] CEO, “The Road Not Taken,” Corporate email, KEPA papers.

[liii] Faculty Manager, "Email to Branch Staff," (Jan 7 2010), KEPA papers.

[liv] “Interview with KEPA CEO,” KEPA CULTURE MAGAZINE (June 2006), KEPA papers.

[lv] KEPA, "KEPA Branch(ISE) Head Instructor Guidelines and Expectations," (Aug 18 2009), KEPA papers.

[lvi] C. S., "My KEPA Story," (March 10 2008), KEPA papers.

[lvii] KEPA, "General Trainer's Manual" (Oct 12 2009); KEPA, "Reading and Writing: Track A Program Guide" (Aug 19 2009); KEPA, "CCTV Observation Report" (Feb 2009); KEPA, "KEPA Branch(ISE) Head Instructor Guidelines and Expectations," (Aug 18 2009).  All KEPA Papers.

[lviii] “Interview with KEPA CEO,” KEPA CULTURE MAGAZINE (June 2006), KEPA papers; KEPA, "Critical Learning," ESL Learning Center Business Division (July 2 2009), KEPA papers.

[lix] CEO, "From Blended Learning to Critical Learning" (May 15 2009), KEPA Papers.

[lx] KEPA, General Trainer's Manual (Oct 12 2009), KEPA Papers.

[lxi] CEO, “The Road Not Taken,” Corporate email, KEPA papers; Interview with Informant #1 (Nov 1 2009); Interview with Informant #2 (March 6 2010).

[lxii] KEPA, General Trainer's Manual (Oct 12 2009), KEPA Papers.

[lxiii] S. T., "My KEPA Story," (Dec 12 2007), KEPA papers; C. S., "My KEPA Story," (March 10 2008), KEPA papers; C.B., "Success Story," (Nov 14 2007), KEPA papers.

[lxiv] KEPA, KEPA Culture, (May 2009), KEPA papers.

[lxv] KEPA, "Reading and Writing: Track A Program Guide," (Aug 19 2009); KEPA, "Student Counseling Guidelines," (June 25 2009).  KEPA papers.

[lxvi] KEPA, "Global Track Overview: Standardized Tests, What Are They and Why Do Students Take Them?" (n.d.); KEPA, "Effective Questioning," Faculty Handout (n.d.); KEPA, "IBT Reading Question Types," Faculty Handout (n.d.); KEPA, "TOFEL iBT Reading," Faculty Handout (n.d.).  KEPA papers.

[lxvii] "Student Writing," KEPA papers.  On the antagonistic power struggle between students and teachers see Willard Waller, The Sociology of Teaching (New York: Russell & Russell, 1961).

[lxviii] "Student Writing," KEPA papers.

[lxix] Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 124.

[lxx] Ibid., 234-35, 238.

[lxxi] Ibid., 296-97.

[lxxii] UNESCO, South Korea; Hye-Jung Lee, “Higher Education in Korea,” Center for Teaching and Learning, Seoul National University (Feb 2009).

[lxxiii] Moon Gwang-lip, "Statistics Paint Korean Picture," Joong Ang Daily (Dec 15 2009); "Lee Seeks to Cut Educational Costs," Korea Herald (Aug 14 2009).

[lxxiv] Seth, Education Fever, 172, 187.

[lxxv] Seth, Education Fever, 192.

[lxxvi] Rose Senior, "Korean Students Silenced by Exams," The Guardian Weekly (Jan 15 2009); Card, "Life and Death Exams in South Korea."

[lxxvii] Seth, Education Fever, 170; Darling-Hammond, The Flat World and Education, 70.

[lxxviii] Hagen Koo, “The Changing Faces of Inequality in South Korea in the Age of Globalization,” Korean Studies 31 (2007): 1-18.

[lxxix] Koo, “The Changing Faces of Inequality in South Korea in the Age of Globalization”; Andrew Eungi Kim and Innwon Park, “Changing Trends of Work in South Korea: The Rapid Growth of Underemployed and Job Insecurity,” Asian Survey 46, no. 3 (May/June 2006): 437-56; Nelson, Measured Excess; Dennis Lett, In Pursuit of Status: The Making of South Korea’s “New” Urban Middle Class (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1998).

[lxxx] United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), South Korea, revised version, World Data on Education, 6th ed. (Paris: UNESCO, Oct 2006), 30; Cho Jae-eun, "Too Many Grads Fight for Too Few Jobs," Joong Ang Daily (Oct 18 2010).

[lxxxi] Seth, Education Fever, 100;

[lxxxii] Seth, Education Fever, 102.

[lxxxiii] Lett, In Pursuit of Status, 159, 164; Cho Jae-eun, "Too Many Grads Fight for Too Few Jobs," Joong Ang Daily (Oct 18 2010).

[lxxxiv] Ibid., 212, 215.

[lxxxv] Ibid., 218-19.

[lxxxvi] Pascal, Pensees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 21.  For similar conclusion by a modern academic who studies the "science of happiness" see Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (New York: Vintage, 2007).

[lxxxvii] John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Feather Trail Press, 2009), 28.

[lxxxviii] Ibid., 29.

[lxxxix] Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (New York, 2011); Sandra Tsing Loh, "My Chinese American Problem - and Ours," The Atlantic (April 2011) 83-91.