Rahm Inflating Numbers

Even the Slum Times has their doubts about these numbers - and Fran Spielman believes just about EVERYTHING Rahm tells her:

• Sixteen months ago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel set a high bar for his new City Colleges chancellor Juan Salgado: a 25 percent graduation rate by 2019 in a system that, not too long ago, graduated just 7 percent of its students. Now, the mayor and Salgado are claiming to be within striking distance of that ambitious goal with a graduation rate of 22.9 percent.
  
  But the veracity of their claim is being called in question by a series of investigations over the years that have accused the system of inflating graduation rates. Last fall, an investigation by the Better Government Association concluded that City Colleges issued thousands of degrees after lowering credit-hours requirements and diluting education standards. Math requirements were eliminated altogether. The number of credit hours required to complete general education course requirements were reduced from 30 to 20. Classroom credit hours required to secure degrees were reduced from 21 hours to 15 hours, the investigation concluded.
  
  The BGA also concluded that more than 2,800 City Colleges degrees were belatedly and mysteriously issued to students long gone from the system. Known as “automated conferral,” the program sent degrees to students, some of whom had not attended City Colleges in a “year or even decades,” the investigation concluded.

It is a source of endless amusement here that Rahm has McCompStat lie about crime numbers for years and the media believes it all, then he lies about money on a near constant basis, lies about tourism numbers, attendance figures, everything under the sun. And then when he decides to run on bullshit graduation numbers from the money pit known as the "city colleges," that's where Spielman and the Slum Times draw the line?

[bad phrasing corrected]