The media are carrying a lot of stories about rape on campus lately. The latest is a retraction by Rolling Stone of a story about University of Virginia. The stories fall into various broad categories:
- a high percentage of women who live on campus are being raped
- universities falsify statistics and/or cover up rape reports
- kangaroo courts set up by university administrators, at the behest of their federal overlords, are overly skeptical regarding rape allegations brought by women, resulting in men being wrongly acquitted
- kangaroo courts set up by universities are insufficiently skeptical, resulting in men being wrongly convicted
If we combine the above concerns with the multi-decade trends of tuition costs outpacing inflation and parents wanting to supervise their child’s every moment (“helicopter parents”), it seems as though there is no better time to be marketing online education.
Western Governors University, for example, charges about $6000 per year, barely enough to pay for library coffee bar lattes at the universities that are featured in the news. Why wouldn’t they buy ad space next to stories about on-campus rape? The headline could be “Wouldn’t you rather keep your 20-year-old darlings safe at home? (and save $250k)”
The purpose of most students attending universities is to get an education, and ultimately, with a degree in hand, to get a job. Compared to traditional brick and mortar schools, online universities might indeed offer the benefits mentioned, but a far bigger roadblock to more student enrollments in online universities might be how receptive industries are toward students who graduate from online universities. Would companies like Apple, GE, Boeing, and etc, be equally receptive to graduates with University of Phoenix diplomas as they are to graduates from MIT, Stanford, University of California, or the typical public state university? If the answer is no, then tuition savings and security from sexual assault would not be enough to raise enrollment in online universities.
Recently, there had been some news about how some online universities are taking advantage of veterans(some seriously disabled) and their Montgomery GI Bill benefits(source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/education/educating-sergeant-pantzke/for-profit-colleges-under-scrutiny-again/ ). That could not have helped the reputation of online universities. In order for more students to enroll in online universities, there would have to be a greater degree of recognition and trust between potential students, the online universities, and the enterprises that will potentially hire the graduates of these institutions.
Why not send your kid(s) to National Taiwan University where they will be safe source and you will spend less than $10K USD per year to send them to one of the top 50 universities in the world? source? They might even master Mandarin which should be a useful language in the coming years.
//Wouldn’t you rather keep your 20-year-old darlings safe at home? (and save $250k)”//
Actually, getting them out of the house is a big part of the allure of college for the parents 🙂 I don’t know of any studies, but I have to think a kid that lives at home while attending college (whether online or as a commuter student locally) is much more likely to stay in the basement after graduation.
Bob: If the prestige of traditional bricks-and-mortar is key, the same ad campaign could be used by landlords who own apartment buildings near bricks-and-mortar campuses. They could also offer a lock-down service where a report is texted to the parents any time that an undergraduate does not return to the apartment building by 9 pm and/or any time that an undergraduate has a visitor who hasn’t left by 9 pm. A student who doesn’t live in a dorm or a fraternity and who doesn’t attend on-campus parties isn’t likely to get into trouble. There are not a lot of allegations regarding rapes in classrooms and labs during daylight hours, are there?
Just imagine the boost in academic performance as well! Maybe the apartment building could also offer a homework-checking service. An employee would go around to talk to each student at around 9:15 pm and make sure that homework had been done, TV was not being watched, Facebook was not open, etc. Everything that the helicopter parent would have done if the student still lived at home.
At least one such place (that supervises all aspects of student life) already exists or existed, all my information is rather old—Bob Jones U. Someone told me, back in the sixties, that campus police were armed with submachine guns there. I once met a student that was packed and expelled all in one afternoon for a speech and opinion infraction.
You’ve been beaten to the punchline.
Instapundit, 9/20/14: WORRIED ABOUT BEING RAPED ON A COLLEGE CAMPUS? Try Reynolds Online University: “The One Where Nobody Gets Raped.”
http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/195284/?wc=GQprEwx/ax1FGx1uAgEdFBcP
Somehow my daughter and I once discussed this subject and she explained to me (as if I didn’t know) that all of these “rapes” on campus were not really rapes, so that I had nothing to worry about. For guys, although the cases where men were falsely accused and expelled are horrifying, your odds of being victimized in this way are also pretty low. Each year, out of an undergrad population of thousands at a given university, they pick out one or two guys for a show trial pour encourager les autres. America has always been good at mass hysterias (and then anti-hysteria backlashes), from witch trials to Communists to satanic day care workers, but each hysteria fades quickly like a pop song that’s been played too much on the radio.
> I have to think a kid that lives at home while attending college (whether online or as a commuter student locally) is much more likely to stay in the basement after graduation.
This is something that I’ve never understood – why is it that adult (male – is it only male?) children who live at home have to live in the basement? Why can’t they stay upstairs in their childhood bedrooms any more? I don’t think any of my kids are moving home again, but I’d like to know the societal rules on this just in case.
Really the solution is
1. better leadership at universities
2. eliminate alcohol or strict rules regarding alcohol
3. Acknowledge there is a law above the university. Smugness, desire to only look at positive things, and assumptions that the university knows best often gets it in trouble.
Isn’t the new media focus on rape on campus actually a good thing? Rather than merely sweeping the issue under the rug (as has been done for decades), universities are finally recognizing that campus sexual assault is a serious problem, and they are working on the best ways to prevent rape and help rape survivors. I don’t expect that these issues will go away overnight, but hopefully we can make the current system better for everybody, men and women. I’d think that parents would be encouraged by these developments..”brick and mortar” universities are recognizing the problem and trying to address it! Or do people really think rape never happened on campus in the past, and the new media focus is the result of some recent rape epidemic?
@Izzie L: How do you and your daughter know that “all the rapes on campus are not really rapes?”
Karen: I think the media attention would be a good thing if it prompted universities to shut down dorms and frats and concentrate on education and research. There are plenty of great universities worldwide that don’t try to provide a 24-hour environment for students.
If the media attention leads to universities trying to put Band-Aids on the current system then I don’t think that is productive. If you provide an environment for 20-year-olds to get drunk and stay up until 4:00 am it is probably guaranteed that they will do some pretty bad stuff.
Karen – I’m sure there are a few actual rapes on campus, though mostly not committed by students. Some colleges are located in high crime areas. Just recently at the University of Virginia, a coed was abducted and murdered by a thug from the local community.
But if 20% of college women were really being raped at some university, I assure you I wouldn’t allow my daughter any where near such a school. But thank goodness, none of my daughter’s friends have ever been the victim of such an attack. What she was saying (and I agree with her) is that it what is being called “rape” is really something quite different. If there is really a rape, it is a serious felony (some states used to have the death penalty). The police come and arrest the perpetrator and he may be convicted and sent to prison for a number of years. But in these college phony-rapes that make up the alleged “1 in 5”, the worst that happens is the perp is brought before a campus tribunal and suspended for a semester or expelled, so everyone apparently (implicitly) understands that these are not really rapes.
We now have a worst of all worlds system . For real genuine rapes, such a slap on the wrist is totally inadequate, but for men falsely accused , even such mild punishment is too much.
Phil,
What kind of school would you like your daughter to go to?
Paddy: It would be the same answer for my daughter as for any other young person… a school where project-based learning was central and a professor’s primary job was working with students. For engineering that would be Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Massachusetts. For art and architecture, I think that would be almost any school. For liberal arts it might be St. John’s College in Annapolis or Santa Fe. For science, I’m not sure. Maybe Caltech is the closest.
(And the fact that a school sponsored alcohol-soaked late-night parties and then ran some sort of quasi-judicial process to clean up the resulting mess would not be a plus in my mind. If a young person wants to rave all night, he or she can certainly do that without paying $50,000 per year in tuition.)
Per an article in Slate, the 20% figure is of dubious lineage.
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/12/college_rape_campus_sexual_assault_is_a_serious_problem_but_the_efforts.html
(A previous article by the same author blamed a lot of the ‘rape’ issues on serious alcohol consumption, but apparently it’s been largely swept under the rug as victim-blaming.)
The more I think about this, the more it reminds me of the GM ignition key issue. Once they were aware of the defective switches, GM could have eliminated the problem simply by moving to keyless ignitions on all of its cars. But instead of an engineering fix that was guaranteed to work they relied on a variety of managerial, public relations, and legal maneuvers.
Why argue about the percentage of women who become crime victims in college dorms and fraternities when those dorms and fraternities are not core to the mission of the schools?
This article about Walter Lewin is timely, and sad:
http://tech.mit.edu/V134/N60/walterlewin.html
Rape is a crime, a serious crime. Why is this an issue for universities to handle? Rape cases should be reported to and investigated by the police. A rape conviction will send the perpetrator to jail for decades. I don’t think they are many demonstrators at campuses demanding that the institution “be more aware of murder.”
I completely agree with the position that schools should get out of the business of providing housing. University students are adults and they should be able to handle their living arrangements (as they take care of so many other things, travel, clothing…).
>Rape is a crime, a serious crime. Why is this an issue for universities to handle?
This is the situation – the “rapes” that are being committed could never be prosecuted, because they don’t meet the legal standards for rape or proof beyond a reasonable doubt could never be obtained. And yet the women involved in these incidents sincerely feel that they have been wronged and want to see the male somehow punished. They can’t have the fellow castrated (which, truth be told, would be their #1 preference) or even jailed, but at least they can get him expelled from school before the Kollege Kangaroo Kourt that uses (that is REQUIRED by the Federal government to use) a lower threshold of proof.
This article concerning “factitious sexual harassment” goes a long way toward explaining the origin of (despite the mythology, often false) claims of sexual harassment or rape. http://www.jaapl.org/content/24/3/387.full.pdf
If the Rolling Stone reporter had read this article before writing her “Jackie” story (today’s Washington Post puts a few more nails into RS’s coffin) she might have saved herself a world of trouble.
Wow, this thread really blew up!
One point: Phil and others seem to think that if the schools in question simply eliminated dormitories and frats/sororities, most of the crimes discussed would just disappear.This seems like an odd conclusion to draw. The whole point of the dorms is to provide a semi-supervised (by resident assistants) place for students to live and study. (I won’t make a case for frats..those places really should be eliminated..ug)
But if schools eliminated dorms and frats/sororities, all the students would probably end up renting crummy apartments in poor, cheap areas close to campus. Any supervision provided by RA’s or student assistants would be gone. Would parents really feel more secure knowing that instead of staying at a dorm, their 19 year old daughter was sharing a crappy apartment with some random stranger she found on Craigslist? I know where I’d rather be! And yes, all the drinking/partying/whatever by students would continue regardless of where students were living. Maybe if schools did this they would avoid having to deal with repercussions of criminal activity, but i’m not sure the net effect would be an increase in safety for students.
A suggestion: if you want your kid to live safe at home while paying a non-exorbitant amount of money in tuition, why not try a community college for a few years? I know many Ivy-League types turn their nose up at CC’s, but I went to one for two years as a dual credit program in H.S. and had a uniformly positive experience.The teachers were wonderful, entirely dedicated to students. Class sizes were small, and I took standard university courses in physics and math, alongside interesting electives like woodshop. I rode my bike every day to class and did homework at home. My parents yelled at me when they thought I was watching too much Netflix. I did not stay out all night partying on weekends.
Karen: I didn’t mean to imply that crime would be eliminated if dorms and frats were, only that on-campus evening crime would be drastically reduced. And it would no longer be associated with the school so victims would call 911 instead of the university’s kangaroo court system, thus resulting in a more serious investigation.
Would the “drinking/partying/whatever” that you refer to continue? I agree with you that it would. But at least in urban areas where a lot of the biggest schools are, students wouldn’t be quite as concentrated. A commercial apartment building with at least some people who had to get up at 7 am and go to work wouldn’t want to host a loud party that lasted until 4 am. And as I think I noted in an earlier posting, just living next to working adults might be helpful to students. They could find out about what it was like to have different kinds of careers.
I think that it would be less fun for students, but college is now so expensive and society is so intolerant of some of the consequences of “student fun” that maybe this aspect of college life needs to be sacrificed?
I live near Villanova University, which at one time was more of a commuter school, but has become more residential – college kids don’t want to live at home any more. Nearby there are some apartment buildings that have gradually become virtually 100% student occupied (because the school did not have enough on-campus dorms for upperclassmen – uh, upperclasspersons). They are the kind of places where loud music is played, etc. so that all the non-students have moved out. So they are just as Karen said – unsupervised dorms.
If one student “rapes” another student, the campus tribunal has jurisdiction wherever it takes place. There was one case at Stanford where the “rape” occurred in the students’ home state of Alaska over the winter break.
http://juneauempire.com/local/2014-08-10/da-no-charges-stanford-rape-case
The prosecutor declined to prosecute but the alleged assailant receive a 5 quarter suspension from Stanford. The victim then organized protests on campus because she thought this was inadequate.
it seems like many of the posts refer to concerned parents. I would like to remind everyone that many parents have kids of college age serving in the military in places far less secure than US universities. There are also many parents who through not fault of their own have to live in neighborhoods where violence is prevalent. I don’t think there are many American campuses highlighted on crime maps.