By Professor Doom
7-28-14

So last time I was looking at a third community college, in Los Angeles, to see if maybe the fraud I’d seen at community colleges in New York and Louisiana was in California as well.

Instead of seeing things were as bad as in the first two states, I see it’s worse.

At LACC, they’re selling high school material as 2^nd year college work. This is nuts. Any accreditor that bothered to even look at the course offerings could see this. Oh right, accreditation is bogus and has nothing to do with education.

Let’s continue to review the course offerings:

Statistics (227). It’s hard to tell from the description if this is really college material. I strongly suspect, however, that this is a very weak course—students in this course don’t need to have passed high school algebra to take this course. A reasonable person would wonder how this college math course doesn’t require high school math. Since everything in this course I learned in high school after I took high school algebra (and I didn’t take any AP math courses), I’m going to not call this college, but opinions can vary on this one course. 16 sections.

Mathematics for the Liberal Arts Students (230). The title alone tells you what kind of course this is, and the course description lets anyone know that it’s a very simple course well below high school. 2 sections.

Calculus for the Business and Social Sciences (236). It’s funny, this used to be the freshman math class for incoming, very weak, college students, and now it’s a 200 level (i.e., second year) course. Very curious, and many students that took calculus in high school have told me this course is much weaker than high school. What used to be a first year math course is now a second year course. Just 1 section, but I’ll call it college material.

Trigonometry (240). This is 11^th grade material for many students; some will take it in 10^th grade or senior year. 3 sections. I encourage any who doubt me to pick a university campus that even offers pure trigonometry as a college course, and see with your own eyes it’s not a second year course, and neither is the next course, the one I’ve been looking for:

College Algebra (245). At last, we come to college algebra, or as math faculty know it, “The algebra you should have learned in high school.” Every topic listed in the course description, I learned in high school. The course is actually missing a few topics common to other “College Algebra” courses I’ve seen elsewhere, but those seem to be covered in the many, many, non college sections I’ve covered earlier. 3 sections.

I really need to emphasize this. This is the algebra I took in high school. This is the remedial algebra I taught at a university in the 80s. This is the first year college course I taught at university in the 90s and 21^st century.

And now it’s a second year course. It’s official: community college is high school now; a person graduating with a 2 year degree from LACC will probably take this course as capstone material, and be at the level of many high school students I’ve known. Note: high school students, not high school graduates, as the algebra in this course is generally learned at the 10^th or 11^th grade.

When a student from LACC goes to university with his 2 year degree, the university is going to laugh at the student thinking he’ll only need 2 more years for a 4 year degree. “You fool,” will say the university, “you’ve just spent the last two years in high school, paying dearly for the privilege, and now you are at best as good as the high school graduates who just came here in the first place.”

And community college administrators lure suckers in by saying they’re “cheaper than university.” It’s not cheaper if everything you did at the community college goes right in the trash.

I want to point out: mathematicians have been notorious for trying to keep standards in higher education, and despite their struggle, “algebra” has now turned into a second year course at LACC. Mostly they’ve lost because Educationists have been taking over the math classes, for what it’s worth.

I’m just looking at math here, but does the gentle reader honestly believe Gender Studies courses are filled with 2^nd year material? I’ll be looking at such a course soon, though Gender Studies is hardly the only fake course on campus. Thorough studies have shown many college courses are content free and have no requirements. You just pay your tuition and get your A…and that’s at accredited schools.

No wonder so many waiters and parking lot attendants have worthless college degrees. They were suckered into thinking high school was “higher education.”

Rather than provide higher education, our institutions of higher education have “redefined” higher education ever downward. It isn’t simply that college today is equivalent to the high schools of thirty years ago…it’s that in many cases, college today is equivalent to high school of today.

How can anyone look at this and not see fraud?

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