Last weekend I met a man here in town who told me a sad story from over 20 years before — how he’d graduated from college, he thought strongly, gone into graduate school with a merit based scholarship and then, before the year was gone, flunked out.  He said he’d loved the subject matter — history and philosophy — but just hadn’t been able to keep up with the speed of instruction once he left the small college near his home where he’d done his bachelor’s.

“I think the real problem,” he finally said, “was that I couldn’t really read. I mean, I could read a paragraph or two, but not for very long, and not very well. I later found out I had dyslexia. After I married, my wife helped me work on it and now I can finally read decently.”

My initial question, how did you become a scholarship holder in a graduate program if you couldn’t read, was not broached. But I was confident I knew the answer. The colleges in question were small, special interest and in this case religiously affiliated institutions. Clearly, his bachelor’s institution had not required the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and then passed him along through his degree program for attending class, while the graduate institution didn’t know his true abilities before he came because they didn’t require the Graduate Record Exam (GRE). Ultimately, due to the institutions not requiring entrance tests, this man was blissfully unaware that his level of reading was not up to par.

It is very common for such smaller, special interest colleges, which have a hard time competitng with larger public institutions such as TCU or UTA head-to-head, to carve out niches for themselves, such as concentrating on kids of a certain relgious philosophy or taking students with spotty academic records whom larger schools won’t admit.  Some schools, which need to bolster enrollments, do not require admissions testing or any meaningful evaluation of incoming students in an effort to get every possible warm body into their institutions. If you have the money, they have the desk.

Having admitted students who aren’t generally considered college-eligible, these institutions continue to promote students who can’t really handle the coursework to keep keep their tuition flowing in, which in some cases comes from the federal government in the form of loans and grants.

Sometimes, I suppose, graduating from such a  ”degree farm” might be okay, for example if your family owns a business you’re planning to go into and you already know how to do the work involved, or if you’re going into a field or work, and there are some, where college degrees are expected but the work you actually do is not  academic in nature.

If, on the other hand, you plan to do real academic or teaching work, or go to a graduate school, the results of attending a program like the one my friend went to could be heartbreaking.  One benefit of going to an established, reasonably-sized institution (say, over 500 students and over 25 years old) is that you generally know what you’re getting.

My friend who flunked out of grad school now works in the party rental industry. He has a family, loves studying philosphy and history in his spare time,  and one might say he has found his niche.  However, when he talks about his grad school experience, you can still it bothers him. “I really would have liked to be a professor, and I still would,” he says. “I had no idea at the time what was going wrong.”

And at the time, the schools he was dealing with had no intention of explaining to him, because doing so would have cut off potential students’ tuition money.