California community colleges rely too much on part-time faculty; misspend funds
Unfortunately, this article misses the mark and distracts from the overall problem.<p>If you poll that vast number of college dropouts regarding the issues for why they dropped out, you will find a common picture. Its finances or its unfairly structured or misrepresented classes.<p>Some professors structure their courses in an optimized to fail way. These are often called Weed-out classes, Engineering has the most, Economics has a decent amount, and the degrees with no real business applications have the least.<p>Structure aside, students need two things to succeed. The classes must be taught and tested in a determinable way, that means you either teach the methodology or heuristics to come to a single answer for questions involved, or you test the material which has one right answer. You don&#x27;t have an open-ended question that has 3 correct answers, where you have to guess which one is correct because there&#x27;s no single unique answer that is correct. Or vocabulary used with multiple meanings depending on how you read it, or lecture material that mismatches what&#x27;s actually on the exams.<p>Also, you set expectations of how much time spent per class is needed must be accurate up front. If either of those two core things are not enforced (and I can tell you neither of those are enforced in any legitimate way now or for the past 20 years), then students will consistently fail or withdraw.<p>The general rule of thumb is a 3 unit course should require no more than 9 hours of work &#x2F; week. That is not always the case, some classes are structured in a way where no matter how much time you spend, you won&#x27;t be able to prepare for the material being tested. If you are a full time student with 4 classes and you have one class like this, then its possible the class will cause you to fail the other 3, or you could potential have financial aid clawed back unless you self-fund at which case its a simple loss.<p>You cannot succeed in school without being able to control basic academic outcomes. Courses structured with 24 mostly equal assignments and a final exam have to get at least a 70% on each assignment on average. The results that fall in that range (above 70%, are 30% with slight deviations depending on weightings of the total points). So you end up with a .3 probability raised to the 24th or 25th power. That&#x27;s somewhere around ~8.4 * 10^-14. Not taking into account factors like difficulty of the individual questions or other factors.<p>Most classes that are generally labelled Weed-out courses have such a low probability of success that they should never have been sold to the student, but the student couldn&#x27;t identify the issues until after its too late. Put another way, this is fraud on the colleges part, and while there are pathways to appeal issues with specific professors; it rarely works out because there is an informal structure that punishes people for going this route, with no real enforcement or accountability. I&#x27;ve gone to a chair person and Dean before and had them say they don&#x27;t have the seniority to challenge a tenured professor that&#x27;s been teaching for 25 years (who structured their class so the only way to pass was academic dishonesty, where a blind eye was turned to the passing around of answer keys in class from student&#x27;s that previously failed)... In other words, you only pass&#x2F;get a degree if you are on the take. You know what happened with each successive exam after that, they were all fails, and the professor stopped covering the material or providing any help during office hours.<p>Over the past two decades, I&#x27;ve attempted 53 units where I had to withdraw. Slightly more than half are from courses like what I describe. I started on the engineering route, then failing that business, and now its just any degree to supplement a decade of professional experience. There&#x27;s no accountability, and the people capable of making changes have no incentive, there&#x27;s a reason graduation rates hover between 5% and 30% a year. Its optimized to fail people for captive repeat customers.<p>If as a student, the course is structured so you cannot control basic academic outcomes, you shouldn&#x27;t have to pay, but that will never happen; and an entire industry of exploitative behavior has adapted to this over the past 20 years. Its sad because its completely unnecessary and serves only one purpose to profit off people in a way that they can&#x27;t seek bankruptcy protection, which causes debt slavery, where they cannot succeed&#x2F;have opportunities without a qualifier (such as a degree).