Toilet paper degrees to undeserving students pad administrator salaries

By Mark Malaszczyk

There was a time when a university degree signified intellectual rigor, sustained critical discipline, and a genuine mastery of an academic discipline. To earn a degree, a student had to wrestle with dense texts, synthesize complex theories, write cogent prose, analyze quantitative data, and face the agonizing possibility of failure.

Failure was not an insult; it was a necessary educational boundary. It was the precise mechanism that gave success its value.

Fast forward to the modern landscape of higher education, and the entire enterprise feels like it has collapsed into a hyper-monetized, consumer-driven racket. Today, high-grade paper, ornate calligraphy, and official raised seals are routinely stamped onto certificates that carry all the academic integrity and transactional weight of a roll of cheap, single-ply toilet paper. Higher education has traded its soul for tuition revenue, churning out credentials to virtually anyone who can secure a federal student loan, all to fund the bloated, unchecked expansion of an administrative managerial class that eats away at the institution from the inside.

The Great Credential Inflation and the Death of Standards

To understand how higher education devolved into a diploma mill with an ivy-covered facade, one must look at the relentless degradation of academic standards. The customer-service model of higher education has replaced the pursuit of truth with the pursuit of student retention. In this inverted reality, the student is no longer a scholar in training, but a paying customer—and as the old corporate adage goes, "the customer is always right."

When students are customers, failing them becomes a corporate liability. A student who receives an 'F' or a 'D' might drop out, transfer, or leave a scathing review that jeopardizes an instructor’s fragile employment. To prevent this financial leak, universities have quietly instituted a regime of systemic grade inflation and compromised rigor.

Courses that once required hundreds of pages of heavy reading a week and rigorous primary source analysis have been hollowed out. Assignments are simplified, deadlines are rendered meaningless by perpetual "grace periods," and objective evaluation has been replaced by soft, subjective rubrics where merely submitting something guarantees a passing grade.

The result is a tragic paradox: students arrive on campus reading below grade level and graduate four years later with high honors, completely unequipped to analyze a basic text, write a coherent memo, or construct a logical argument. They have been handed a piece of paper that certifies skills they do not possess. When everyone receives an 'A,' the grade loses all meaning; when every student gets a diploma regardless of effort or mastery, the degree becomes nothing more than toilet paper—flushed of all value the moment it enters the real world.

Undeserving Students: Victims and Co-Conspirators

Calling students "undeserving" in this context is not an attack on their inherent worth as human beings, but an indictment of their academic readiness and engagement. Millions of young adults who have neither the interest, the preparation, nor the aptitude for higher academic inquiry are funneled into four-year institutions by a cultural narrative that insists a college degree is the only pathway to a middle-class life.

High schools pass along functional illiterates, leaving colleges to do the remedial work that should have been completed years earlier. But rather than offering rigorous remediation, colleges simply lower the bar further.

A culture of intellectual entitlement has taken root. A significant portion of the modern student body views higher education not as an opportunity to be challenged, but as a four-year extended resort experience complete with state-of-the-art facilities, endless amenities, and high-end dining halls. Learning is treated as an inconvenience that gets in the way of social life.

When confronted with actual academic demands, the response is often not increased effort, but outrage. Instructors who dare to hold the line—who enforce attendance, grade strictly on merit, and demand original thought—are branded as "unfair" or "unsupportive." The system rewards apathy and penalizes rigor, creating an environment where undeserving students are carried across the finish line on a conveyor belt of lowered expectations.

The Administrative Leviathan: Bloat, Bureaucracy, and Six-Figure Salaries

Where does all the money go? If academic standards are falling, class sizes are expanding, and facilities are being outsourced, why has tuition skyrocketed by hundreds of percent over the past few decades?

The answer lies in the explosive, cancerous growth of the administrative managerial class.

While full-time, tenured faculty lines are systematically eliminated and replaced by underpaid, overworked adjunct instructors who earn poverty-level wages, the administrative ranks have ballooned to astronomical proportions. Universities today are crawling with associate vice provosts, assistant deans of student engagement, directors of campus climate, compliance officers, branding specialists, and executive coordinators of administrative oversight.

These administrative positions rarely contribute directly to the core mission of a university: teaching and research. Instead, they exist to justify their own existence. They hold endless meetings, draft meaningless mission statements, issue top-down mandates, create endless paperwork, and build administrative empires that require even more sub-administrators to manage.

And what are these administrators paid? While an adjunct professor might earn a few thousand dollars to teach a 15-week course—struggling to pay rent while holding a doctorate—the deans, provosts, and vice presidents pull down hefty six-figure salaries, complete with performance bonuses, housing allowances, and generous retirement packages.

To maintain these bloated payrolls, the university must continually harvest tuition dollars. And to harvest tuition dollars, the university must keep the enrollment numbers up at all costs. The math is simple and brutal: lower the standards, keep the retention high, and guarantee the tuition flow that funds administrative paychecks. The toilet paper degrees handed out to undeserving students are the literal currency used to fund the golden parachutes of campus bureaucrats.

The Cannibalization of the Faculty

In this corporate higher-education dystopia, the traditional heart of the university—the faculty—has been marginalized and disempowered. Universities have undergone a structural shift toward a corporate model where the faculty are treated as replaceable gig workers and administrators act as corporate executives.

Tenure, once designed to protect academic freedom and ensure intellectual courage, is being systematically dismantled or allowed to wither away. In its place, universities rely on a permanent underclass of contingent faculty. Adjunct professors, working without job security, benefits, or office space, are forced to teach six or seven courses across multiple campuses just to stay afloat.

This structural shift directly impacts educational quality. An adjunct professor who depends on positive student evaluations for next semester's contract cannot afford to give honest 'F' grades to students who fail to do the work. To enforce standards is to risk user dissatisfaction, which leads directly to non-renewal of contracts. Administrators know this. They have engineered a system where the instructors are financially disincentivized from demanding excellence.

The faculty are caught in a vise: squeezed from above by administrators demanding high retention rates and corporate efficiency, and squeezed from below by students who demand high grades for minimal effort. The few faculty members who attempt to speak out against the bloat and lowering of standards are quickly silenced, marginalized, or pushed out of governance altogether.

The Human and Economic Toll: A Generation Debt-Bonded for Cheap Paper

The ultimate tragedy of this credential scheme is the devastating impact it has on society at large and on the very students it claims to serve.

Graduates step off the commencement stage holding a degree that cost them tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt. They enter a workforce that quickly sees through the illusion. Employers, realizing that a bachelor’s degree no longer guarantees basic literacy or work ethic, begin demanding master’s degrees for entry-level positions, pushing the credential inflation cycle even further into absurd territory.

These young adults are saddled with non-dischargeable debt for decades, delaying major life milestones—buying a home, starting a family, saving for retirement—all for a credential that failed to provide them with actual skills or intellectual capital. They were sold a dream of upward mobility, but were delivered a product designed primarily to keep administrative paychecks clearing every two weeks.

Meanwhile, society suffers a catastrophic loss of trust in institutions. When higher education becomes synonymous with bureaucratic grift, ideological posturing, and financial exploitation, the public loses faith in expertise itself. Real scholarship is tarnished by association with the assembly line of toilet paper degrees.

Reclaiming the University: A Call for Radical Restructuring

If higher education is to survive as a meaningful institution, the current model must be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up. Restoring integrity requires radical, uncompromising measures:

• Purge the Administrative Hierarchy: Universities must aggressively cut non-essential administrative positions. The ratio of administrators to faculty should be returned to historical norms, and academic decision-making must be restored entirely to the faculty.

• End Grade Inflation and Restore Merit: Grades must reflect actual mastery, not attendance or emotional satisfaction. Universities should publish grading distributions by department to hold instructors and administrators accountable for artificial grade inflation.

• Decouple Funding from Retention Metrics: State and federal funding mechanisms must stop penalizing institutions for failing or dropping students who do not meet standards. Funding should be tied to rigorous post-graduation outcomes and academic integrity, not raw body-count retention.

• Transition to Full-Time, Tenured Instruction: The exploitation of adjunct faculty must end. Real teaching requires security, academic freedom, and living wages. If an institution cannot afford to hire full-time professors to teach its core courses, it has no business operating.

Until we confront the uncomfortable truth that our higher education system values administrative bloat over intellectual substance, we will continue to watch universities hand out meaningless pieces of paper to students who learned nothing, funded by a public that gets cheated out of a generation's potential. It is time to stop pretending that every credential represents achievement, and start demanding that higher education earn back its value.

The author is a retired Advanced Placement Teacher from the Babylon Union Free School District. Holding an earned doctorate in Modern World History, he is currently an adjunct professor at Nassau Community College and Southern New Hampshire University.

______________________________________________________________________________________________

NOTE to readers:

If you would like to help Stephen Stone, President and Editor of RenewAmerica.com with his medical expenses, please consider sending a gift of any size to:

• GoFundMe.

• Steve’s PayPal account using his email address (editor@renewamerica.com)—that would especially help.

• Or if you’d rather send a check, you could send it to:
  Stephen Stone
  PO Box 50502
  Provo, UT 84605-0502
  

Please let us know if you send a check, by emailing Stephen using the above email address, so that we'll know when to check our PO box in town.

Thank you, and God bless,

RenewAmerica staff


© Mark Malaszczyk