Steve Buttes

For the Journal & Courier

On Feb. 18, Purdue University President Mitch Daniels announced that Steve Klinsky, the founder of the private equity firm New Mountain Capital, and his wife, Maureen Sherry, provided a $1 million gift to create the “Klinsky Scholars” program at Purdue.

The Klinsky Scholars will be students who successfully complete Purdue’s new “Fast Start” program, a rebranding of Klinsky’s program at ModernStates.org. Students complete a set of courses Klinsky asked edX, the education nonprofit owned by MIT and Harvard, to create. These courses are what are known as MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses, where tens of thousands of students may be completing a course at the same time. Students in the Purdue-branded Klinsky program then take College Level Examination Program (CLEP) exams administered by the College Board (the maker of the SAT).

If they receive a passing grade on five or more of those exams, they will receive both automatic admission at Purdue's West Lafayette campus and a college course for each exam successfully passed. Five exams are one semester. Ten exams are the full freshman year. And this is what Klinsky’s philanthropy calls the “Freshman Year for Free™” (note the trademark!).

While this is the official description of “Fast Start,” what Klinsky and President Daniels actually announced on Feb. 18 is this: Klinsky and Sherry are paying Purdue $1 million dollars so that Purdue can pay the College Board $1 million dollars to cover Indiana high school student CLEP exams. And they will be receiving their freshman year at Purdue for free not from Purdue professors but instead from those Klinsky has chosen.

In other words, this titan of private equity has just been given authority by Purdue to decide what the freshman year at Purdue looks like, at least in terms of curriculum, with nary a faculty member in sight. Designed in a process controlled and accountable only to Klinsky and his family, this curriculum sidelines Purdue faculty, their expertise and their commitment to student learning.

Everyone wants rural students, low-income students and first generation students to graduate from college. But access does not mean success. The students who are the least prepared for college need the most support. A MOOC is not the environment for time-intensive support. That’s kind of the point. Purdue’s response to this is to provide “access to Purdue alumni and friends for mentoring if desired.” Purdue-branded Klinsky courses, when unclear from the MOOC professor, will not be taught by Purdue’s world-class faculty but instead by well-meaning though unknowledgeable and unpaid volunteers who may lack the minimum requirement of a master’s degree in the subject area (or a master’s degree and a minimum of 18 graduate credit hours in the subject area) as required for Purdue’s accreditation. This, for example, is required of high school teachers wishing to offer high school courses accepted for college credit at public universities in Indiana.

At the press conference announcing Fast Start, Klinsky said this volunteer model is one he’d like to see at “universities nationwide.” What this model envisions is that one person and his family can zap money out of the public system by using their own fortune to create the “Freshman Year for Free™” and then support politicians committed to slashing public investment even further.

But there is the more cynical version of this. The title of the article written by Nathan Vardi and Antoine Gara in the Nov. 30, 2019, issue of Forbes sort of says it all: “Clever New Deals And An Unknown Tax Dodge Are Creating Buyout Billionaires By The Dozen.”

The article explains at length a new Wall Street financial scheme in which private equity firms sell “slivers” of themselves. These “sliver schemes” free up money from long-term investments while also converting regular income into “capital gains,” which receive what the Forbes reporters call “the most absurd tax break in America.” Thirteen new billionaires were created in 2019 using the private equity “sliver scheme,” and Vardi and Gara list Steven B. Klinsky as one of them. Were taxes not dodged, Klinsky would have contributed much more than the $1 million he is paying Purdue to pay the College Board for CLEP exams, and that revenue could have increased access. “Fast Start” is not about “providing access” but instead about limiting education to what Klinsky imagines every student should have, an education accountable only to him.

The Klinsky theory of education is the College Board’s CLEP test as college credit. The CEO of the College Board cheered this “visionary partnership” and the guaranteed infusion of Wall Street cash. This, of course, comes in the context in which many universities are deciding to make entrance tests (like the College Board’s SAT) optional or to forego them altogether due to the demonstrated bias against low-income and first generation students. While the College Board CEO might see financial salvation for his organization in Klinsky’s model of MOOC + CLEP, it is not difficult to imagine future studies that might see similar biases against low income and first generation students.

Fast Start is framed as placing access to higher education at the forefront. However, given the number of Purdue’s recent initiatives supposedly dedicated to this — Kaplan Higher Education’s Purdue Global, cut rate master's programs through edX, FastStart through Modern States — we would all stand to benefit from a clear and transparent explanation of the financial relationships underscoring these initiatives.

How precisely are Klinsky, Modern States, the College Board, Purdue, Kaplan Higher Education, edX and its sponsor institutions financially linked to each other? While answers to these questions must be provided in the coming weeks, some things are immediately clear: Giving control of the curriculum to one man and his family is unwise and undemocratic, and sidelining faculty in favor of expensive, high stakes testing is unlikely to lead to better graduation rates or, more importantly, excellent student learning.

Steve Buttes is an associate professor of Spanish at Purdue University Fort Wayne.