The Public Good
Contrary to the popular mythology propagated by the New College of California marketing department, the private school is anything but a community. Rather, it is a business—a highly successful one when one considers what one gets in return for one’s $20,000 annual tuition. But more importantly, New College exemplifies how the moral theatrics industry intersects with Democratic Party politics in order to fund fame and fortune for those who’ve built careers on serving the underprivileged. To put it bluntly, it is a social service school built on the backs of students whose federal loans pay 90% of the college’s bills.
In 2003, New College received a U.S. Department of Education appropriation, in the amount of $397,400, in the form of a Congressional set-aside award obtained through Representative Nancy Pelosi’s office. A letter of support for New College from Representative Pelosi, dated May 20, 2000, addressed to Commissioners of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, was used by the school for “demonstrating the consistent support she has extended to New College in pursuing the objective that it continue to make its distinctive and significant contributions to higher education and to the public good in the wider community.”
In further attempting to sway WASC regulators from holding the school accountable, New College PR people prepared a lengthy report casting a beneficent fog over its devious dealings. In this report, the school emphasized it’s use of the word sacred in its multifaceted marketing plan to distinguish itself from its competitors in higher education. Somehow, we think they define the word differently than we do.
[...] fraud is an interesting angle to consider in remedying the false marketing of the school. New College was not progressive; it didn’t provide student or alumni services, [...]