The unofficial online home for fans of the Old Dominion University Monarchs. Part of Collegiate Sports Nation (CSN).

(09-12-2022 04:20 PM)monarx Wrote:  

(09-12-2022 04:16 PM)The Flagship Wrote:  

(09-12-2022 01:38 PM)monarx Wrote:  

(09-12-2022 12:17 PM)The Flagship Wrote:  With low graduation rates, and high Pell Grant attendees, the school is fleecing many students. It's a money grab. The school is complicit in this scam. It's time to require many students to attend community college to determine their commitment to a degree, and their worthiness of taxpayer funded financial support.

If you think about it, if you are one class short of a degree, you aren't much more employable than if you hadn't attended at all. And therefore, the grant money wasted, and the debt accumulated, becomes a poor investment, and tragedy.

Ive heard one interesting idea floated that would solve this issue quickly. It wont happen, but what if the feds got out of the loan game and student loans were issued by the schools themselves? Then the college would be on the hook for people who dont pay or who get jobs that dont pay enough to pay their bills. Or take the fin aid money and give it to the schools to distribute through loans and scholarships as they wish, earmarking it all to financial qualifications. Part of the rankings issue is ODU has a disproportionate amount of students on Pell grants, and loan repayment is also a factor in the rankings (I guess ability to pay is looked at as a measurement of degree quality). But lots of these loans either never result in a degree being completed or are used for non-lucrative majors.

And fwiw, I still have hope in Dr. Hemphill. He seems to care about the academic reputation and also the upcoming merger could be a game changer. Dr. Runte seemed to care about academics and student experience though, and they ran her off. And the folks I know within the school seem to think that was the right move, though Im not sure why.

Having the schools on the hook may not be the answer. They are in charge of the grades. I wouldn't want them passing someone that didn't earn it just so they become "degreed" and can hopefully pay the loan back.

Just to be clear, I'm not against Pell Grants. I just think they need to be given to students that have shown some academic worthiness, whether in high school or community college.

The bottom line is that we will not make the climb that we hope for. As we improve, other schools improve as well. It's just not going to happen. The last gasp effort was adding dorms and football. But after 10+ years of those initiatives, it seems we are barely keeping up.

We did make some progress, just the schools we used to be equal too (VCU/GMU) made even more progress at the same time. What ticks me off is losing ground. And a lot of it. We need to set a serious goal of top 200. Thats not too much to ask.

The only way that happens anytime soon is by dropping enrollment by about 4000 students. And that isn't going to happen because the budget counts on their tuition fees.