A POTEMKIN UNIVERSITY.  Chicago State University, the perfect case study of what happens when retention for its own sake meets ward-heeler politics, stakes its claim as the paradigm of excess capacity in the subprime sector.

Chicago State University, which was at risk of losing its accreditation because of troubling enrollment and retention figures, intentionally let failing students stay on the rolls to boost its numbers, a Tribune investigation found.

Chicago State has a policy that students with a grade-point average below 1.8 will be dismissed "for poor scholarship," but records obtained by the newspaper show students were allowed to continue registering for classes with GPAs as low as 0.0.

University Diaries has been following the story, wherein the investigation has come to the deplore-but-do-nothing stage, that only after the Chicago Tribune started asking questions, and she's got the perfect summation.

Chicago State is what UD calls a Potemkin university. It exists almost entirely as a group of administrators collecting state and federal government money. As a kind of bonus, it ruins its students’ lives.

As a special bonus, it ruins the lives of the most vulnerable students, claiming to offer second chances to all the underserved populations supposedly most in need of special care.