THE CRIMINAL FRAUD OF COLLEGE

So enormous has been the harm done by the fraudsters running public K-12 schools, you’d think fraud in higher education couldn’t possibly be worse.

You’d be mistaken.

College tuition and fees increased 1,120 percent between 1978 and 2012 — twice as much as health care, four times as much as the cost of living.

Recent college graduates earn 15 percent less than did grads in 2000.  Since 2006, for Americans aged 25 to 34, the economic advantage of a bachelor’s degree has fallen 11 percent for men, 19.7 percent for women.

That’s partly because so many do work for which no more than a high school diploma is required.  Thirty percent of flight attendants, 17 percent of bartenders and bellhops, 14 percent of waiters and waitresses, 5 percent of janitors have bachelors degrees or higher.

At least they have jobs.  Only 16 percent of 2013 grads do, according to the management consulting firm Accenture.   Just two thirds of 2011 and 2012 grads have full time jobs, Accenture says.

The job killing policies of the Obama administration are mostly to blame. But 38 percent of U.S. employers surveyed by ManpowerGroup have jobs they can’t fill because applicants "are lacking in motivation, interpersonal skills, appearance, punctuality and flexibility."

Applicants can’t think critically and creatively, solve problems or write well, said managers surveyed by St. Louis Community College.

Colleges and universities don’t offer curriculums that adequately prepare students for the workforce, said 59 percent of senior executives surveyed by the Adecco Group, a staffing company; 77 percent of senior managers surveyed by Global Strategy Group.

Garbage courses and majors have sprouted like mushrooms on a manure pile. Stanford offers more courses in yoga than in Shakespeare.

 "Core curricula that once discussed the great tradition in literature, art and science have been elbowed offstage by banal courses in feminism, black studies and queer theory," said Stephan Kanfer of the Manhattan Institute.  "The result: students who can spout a line of political correctness designed to dazzle their peers and professors. With that and $1.50 they can get a bus ride downtown to the unemployment offices. "

College today is like Lake Wobegon, where everyone is above average.  Grades have inflated like Reichsmarks in Weimar Germany.  The median grade at Harvard last year was an A-.  A student who turns in a poorly reasoned term paper with misspellings and grammatical errors can still expect a good grade.

Their study of 2,300 students at 24 colleges and universities found 45 percent learned next to nothing in their first two years; 36 percent precious little after four, said Professors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa.

College students in 1961 spent 25 hours a week studying, on average.  More than a third in the Arum/Roksa study spent less than 5.

"Colleges have dumbed down their classes, reduced the amount of required work and generally abandoned academic rigor because they have shifted their prime missions from education to retention," said Craig Brandon, who taught journalism at Keene State College in New Hampshire.

Only about a third of students come from high school with the basic academic skills required to do college work.  That’s partly why college courses have been dumbed down; mostly why 41 percent who start college drop out; why it takes most students six years to get a bachelor’s degree.

"The average student takes six years to complete a four-year program because students are allowed to drop classes they find too demanding and because they take less than a full load of courses," said Mr. Brandon, who’s written a book about "The Five Year Party: How Colleges Have Given Up on Educating Your Child and What You Can Do About It."

In 1970, 1.3 million high school graduates (52 percent) enrolled in college.  By 2012, that number had nearly doubled, to 2.1 million (66 percent).  This was made possible by the federal student loan program.  Just $7 billion in 1981, federal student loans totaled more than $105 billion last year.

The vast increase in federal cash is mainly why college costs so much, said Dr. Richard Vedder of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.  "It gives every incentive and every opportunity for colleges to raise their fees."

"Colleges set their prices the same way OPEC does. How high a price can we charge and get away with it?" Craig Brandon said.  "There is no incentive to keep costs down."

The student loan program has been a boon to college faculty and professional staff, whose ranks have swelled by more than 400 percent since 1960, and the Democrat party, which gets votes and campaign contributions from both.

But not for the ostensible beneficiaries.  The percentage of graduates from the lowest income quartile has fallen from 12 percent in 1970 to 7 percent now. The average graduate leaves college $24,000 in debt.  It’s hard for those with shlock degrees and dismal job prospects to pay that back — harder still for dropouts.

Student debt — $1.2 trillion in 2013 — is our problem too, because young people burdened with it can’t buy houses, must delay starting families, are more likely to default on credit card and other debt.

The proportion of Americans older than 25 who have a college degree has increased from about 10 percent in 1970 to about 30 percent today.  But only 20 percent of jobs require a college education, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates. 

To encourage young people who lack the preparation – and often the aptitude and motivation – to do college work to borrow money to obtain a degree that will provide them with no economic advantage, as President Barack Hussein Obama does, is criminal.

The crime is magnified when the degree the student borrows money to get is intellectually vapid and devoid of economic utility. A woman who borrows $97,000 for an "interdisciplinary degree in religious and women’s studies" is chiefly responsible for the hardship coming her way.  But colleges – and politicians — who take advantage of such saps are bigger fraudsters than those who sell them subprime mortgages, or beachfront property in Arizona.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette