RUTHFULLY YOURS

With rare exceptions they graduate more ignorant and biased than they were in high school…why waste the money? rsk
In the 375 years between 1636, when Harvard College was founded, and 2011, college enrollments in the United States rose almost continuously, rarely undergoing even a temporary decline. When the American Revolution began in 1775, only 721 students attended the nine colonial colleges. By 2010 enrollments had surpassed 20 million.

Yet from 2011 to 2016, the National Student Clearinghouse reports, total higher education enrollments declined every fall, falling to 19 million from 20.6 million. Although the declines were concentrated in community colleges and for-profit institutions, even many traditional four-year schools saw previously steady enrollment growth come to an end. Many smaller schools have even missed their annual enrollment goals.

Illustration: David Gothard

Why is this happening? Some point to demographic influences, such as a drop in birth rates during the 1990s. Others cite increases in job opportunities, which lured college-age Americans away from the academy in the aftermath of the Great Recession. But two longer-term trends are at work: The cost of college attendance is rising while the financial benefits of a degree are falling.

The evidence on rising costs is well established: From 2000 to 2016, the tuition-and-fees component of the Consumer Price Index rose 3.54% annually (74.5% over the entire period), adjusting for overall inflation. With sluggish business investment, a slowdown in income growth has aggravated the rising burden of paying for higher education. American families have taken on more than $1.3 trillion in student-loan debt—more than what they borrow with credit cards or to buy cars.

Less well known is that the earnings advantage associated with a bachelor’s degree compared with a high school diploma is no longer growing like it once did. Census data show that the average annual earnings differential between high school and four-year college graduates rose sharply, to $32,900 in 2000 (expressed in 2015 dollars) from $19,776 in 1975—only to fall to $29,867 by 2015. In the late 20th century rising higher-education costs were offset by the increasing financial benefits associated with a bachelor’s degree. Since 2000 those benefits have declined, while costs have continued to rise.

Rising costs and declining benefits mean the rate of return on a college investment is starting to fall for many Americans. Some observers have begun asking whether it might not be better for more students to forgo college in favor of less expensive postsecondary training in vocations like welding and plumbing. The New York Federal Reserve Bank says about 40% of recent college graduates are “underemployed,” often for a long time. They sometimes resort to taking jobs as Uber drivers or baristas. With some inexpensive vocational training, they could easily get jobs that pay much better.

To be sure, the payoff from a college education varies sharply depending on school and major. U.S. Department of Education data suggests recent attendees of Stanford University earn on average far more than twice as much as those attending Northern Kentucky University ($86,000 vs. $36,000). Electrical engineers typically earn twice as much as psychology majors. No wonder elite students flock to schools like Stanford and demand for graduates with engineering degrees remains robust, while many state universities, community colleges and smaller liberal-arts schools struggle to attract students. CONTINUE AT SITE

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/448246/print

EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece is reprinted with permission from Acculturated.https://acculturated.com/how-college-summer-reading-programs-are-failing-our-students-and-our-culture/

Many colleges have a “common-reading program” that assigns incoming students a book to read over the summer before starting school in the fall. The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has just released its annual study of these programs, and the findings, while not unexpected, are a disheartening indication of how higher education is shortchanging our youth — and our culture.

The Beach Books Report (BBR) is an examination of the common-reading programs of 348 colleges and universities in nearly every state in the country — 58 of them identified by U.S. News & World Report as among the top 100 universities in America, and 25 among the top 100 liberal-arts colleges. Thus, you might expect from them reasonably challenging reading assignments that reflect the highest quality education — but you would be wrong. If you assumed that the recommended books include such classics as, say, St. Augustine’s Confessions or even Ralph Ellison’s more modern Invisible Man, then you are blissfully ignorant of the intellectually shallow state of our purported institutions of higher learning.

The NAS study revealed that colleges rarely assign classic works anymore; in fact, all the books in the common-reading programs for the academic year 2016-2017 were published during the students’ lifetime — 75 percent of them since 2010. Moreover, a significant number of the readings demonstrates the degree to which “high culture” has capitulated to pop culture: many are graphic novels, young adult novels, books based on popular films and TV shows, and books associated with the left-leaning National Public Radio (NPR).

The NPR factor comes into play because the books’ themes are increasingly politicized and heavily weighted toward social-justice activism. Indeed, as FrontPage Magazine’s Jack Kerwick notes in his article about the BBR, the reading programs’ mission statements emphasize “non-academic goals” such as “building community or inclusivity.”

The BBR’s authors note that the themes strongly reflect “the common reading genre’s continuing obsession with race . . . and its progressive politics.” The “most popular subject categories this year were Civil Rights/Racism/Slavery (74 readings), Crime and Punishment (67 readings), Media/Silence/Technology (34 readings), Immigration (32 readings), and Family Dysfunction/Separation (31 readings).” The most routinely assigned text is Bryan Stevenson’s nonfiction work Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. Its theme is “African-American” and its subject categories are “Civil Rights/Racism/Slavery” and “Crime and Punishment.” In fact, those two were the most popular subject categories for the last three years in a row.

The report laments that the “ideologically-constrained” reading selections have become “homogenous” and “predictable,” and that the programs promote progressive dogma and activism rather than encourage “the virtues of the disengaged life of the mind.” The BBR’s damning conclusion is that this politicization makes “the common reading genre parochial, contemporary, juvenile, and progressive.”

By contrast, the National Association of Scholars appends its own list of 80 recommended books appropriate for college common-reading programs. It includes such classics as the aforementioned Confessions and Invisible Man, and Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (once the most widely-read work in English besides the Bible), as well as the usual — or perhaps not so usual anymore — suspects such as Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Orwell.

Steering our youth toward ideological activism is not education — it is indoctrination.

Disturbingly, however, students for decades now have been too often brainwashed into shunning the wisdom of Dead White Males, disconnecting themselves from our common culture, and instead, embracing a historical narrative of oppression and victimhood that molds a false identity for them based on tribal classifications of skin color, class, and gender. That way lies the death of the individual, of culture, and of civilization itself.

Last Thursday, a Muslim college student in New York alleged that he was robbed by three masked men who “shoved him into a van” and “hurled racial epithets” at him.

The New York Post reported on his story with great gusto:

The 21-year-old student at New York City College of Technology in Brooklyn was walking on 165th Street near 81st Avenue in Hillcrest Thursday at 4:35 p.m. when a black van pulled up alongside him.

The goons jumped out of the vehicle and threw the victim — who they repeatedly punched in the face — in the back of the vehicle.

“Get out of my country, you f–king sand n—er!” one of the attackers yelled at the victim, who is from Pakistan, police sources said.

The trio stole his backpack and his wallet, which contained his school ID, and $6 before kicking him out of the van and speeding off.

The NYPD Hate Crime Task Force investigated the incident as a possible bias attack and PIX11 converged on the alleged crime scene “as detectives canvassed the neighborhood, talking to residents and taking with them home surveillance video that may have caught on tape the ugly crime.”

Well, there was an “ugly crime,” all right. Making a false report about a “hate crime” is a crime, after all.

It didn’t take long for the Pakistani-American’s tale of woe to fall apart. On Saturday, PIX11 reported that the student recanted his entire story. Police sources say the incident never happened. He made the whole thing up.

For some reason, the “victim’s” name was never released.

As we are in the midst of a college “hate crime hoax” epidemic, wouldn’t it behoove the media to tread a little more carefully when a college student alleges a hate crime — so they don’t have egg all over their faces when the inevitable recantation takes place?

When did capitalism become anathema to young people—and why? About a year ago the Institute of Politics at Harvard released survey results showing that more than half of respondents between 18 and 29 do not support capitalism, the free-market system that underpins our economy. An astonishing one-third said they support socialism.

Clearly the tenets of capitalism are deeply and fundamentally misunderstood. No system has done a better job addressing the very issues that its critics think are important. Capitalism has stabilized our communities, created jobs, lifted people out of poverty, and empowered them to fulfill their dreams.

Consequently, the merits of America’s free-market system are inspiring economies around the world. According to the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes and Trends study, a global median of 66%, from developing and advanced countries, believe people are better off under capitalism. This view is particularly prevalent in emerging economies like Kenya, Nigeria and Vietnam, where growth has been ignited by expansion of the free market. Yet here at home capitalism is now condemned as an elitist system that enriches a few at the expense of the many.

At the same time that young people are rejecting capitalism and free markets, they celebrate entrepreneurs and free enterprise. This disconnect is at best confusing; at worst it’s troubling. Without access to capital, budding entrepreneurs see their ideas wither; without capital, there is nothing to fuel innovation. Capital is the lifeblood of our economy. It must flow freely to ensure the economy’s vitality and health.

I recognize that young people have come of age during some troubled economic times. I suspect this contributes to their discontent and their misguided belief that government interference is the answer. In truth, government meddling is a large part of the problem. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, passed in 2010, has made it harder for firms to lend money and for small and mid-cap companies in particular to access the capital markets. The 2012 JOBS Act tried to make it easier for smaller companies to issue equity in the public markets, but it is not enough. My father, Jack Stephens, used to say, “A great idea never fails for lack of capital, because capital will always find it.” Sadly, I’m not sure that’s true today.CONTINUE AT SITE

Videos from Evergreen State College in Washington state show mobs of students—mostly but not only black—haranguing their professors and accusing them of racist abuse. The college president, George Bridges, is heckled, insulted, mocked, and ordered to stand with his arms firmly at his sides because his gestures are considered threatening to the students, who have invaded his office and refused to leave. Bridges complies meekly with all demands, including buying gumbo for his captors.

It’s tempting for anyone who cherishes the liberal (in the original sense of the word) purpose of the university to view the outrage at Evergreen (and Middlebury, and Berkeley, and Claremont McKenna, ad nauseam) as an American recurrence of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, when students were encouraged by the ruling class to torment any teachers suspected of reactionary deviance. But the modern college campus is staffed and led by progressives, who have created the conditions for, and invited, students’ PC tantrums. In Marx’s classic formulation, history is repeating itself, but as farce.

By academic training, George Bridges is a sociologist whose work has focused on the criminal-justice system from the standpoint of race theory. In one of his most cited articles, “Racial Disparities in Official Assessments of Juvenile Offenders: Attributional Stereotypes as Mediating Mechanisms,” published in 1998 in American Sociological Review, Bridges observes that white youth are excused for delinquency on the basis of “external factors,” such as poverty or family problems, while black youth in similar trouble are blamed for “internal factors” like poor impulse control or inherent criminality. Thus, according to Bridges, black youthful offenders unfairly receive harsher punishments than their white counterparts. Judges and probation officers, he says, should second-guess their professional judgement through the lens of critical race theory, which holds that the doctrine of white supremacy influences every aspect of society and the legal system.

In the Evergreen videos, we see Bridges struggling to be as passive and compliant as possible with the crowd of angry students occupying his office. When he is yelled at for saying “Please,” he apologizes. When he admits to having a claustrophobia-induced panic attack, he is derided and told to “get to work” transcribing the mob’s demands. Bridges could have called the campus police at any time to end the illegal occupation of his office and his imprisonment, but he ordered them to stand down—presumably because, according to his own academic doctrine, police intervention is necessarily fascist and racist.

The spectacle of Bridges’s humiliation is initially horrifying, but it isn’t clear that he disagrees with the students. In fact, he seems to appreciate, or even enjoy, being forced to submit to what he, after all, likely acknowledges as a just cause. In an August 2016 op-ed in The Seattle Times, Bridges condemned the dean of the University of Chicago for dismissing the importance of “safe spaces” for students on campuses. “Trigger warnings can alert students to genuinely distressing content that could otherwise cripple their learning,” he wrote, worrying that students “often lack confidence in their capacity to succeed, believing that they don’t belong at a major college or university (the so-called ‘impostor syndrome’).”

U.S. policy-makers have long pushed more high-school students to go to college, citing data showing that college graduates earn more money over their lifetime, pay more taxes, enjoy better health and are more likely to vote.

But in reality, students who rush into college, incur debt and drop out without a degree can be worse off than those who didn’t go at all—fueling an increasing backlash to the one-size-fits all push for students to go straight from high-school to the college quad.

A new Gallup report released Thursday highlights the amount of buyers’ remorse many people feel about their college experience.

More than half of 90,000 people surveyed between June 2016 and March 2017, said they would change at least one decision they made about their education if they had to do it all over again: 36% would choose a different major, 28% would choose a different institution and 12% would pursue a different degree.

The people with the most misgivings are liberal-arts majors who earned bachelor’s degrees, 48% of them said they would have chosen a different major and 57% said they would have made at least one decision differently.

The random-sample survey was funded by the Strada Education Network, a nonprofit in Indiana dedicated to helping young people complete college and launch their careers.

“The voice of the consumer is absent in higher education,” said Carol D’Amico, an executive vice president with Strada and a former assistant secretary for adult and vocational education in the George W. Bush administration. “We’ve gotten the message out that many good paying jobs require credentials after high school, what’s less clear is the options open to them to follow their passion.”

Perhaps the most profound finding to emerge from the survey is that going to college to find yourself has become a luxury many Americans can no longer afford. Instead, those who expressed the least regret were best able to align their education with a career. CONTINUE AT SITE

he racist, Leftist hotbed of Evergreen State College is spiraling out of control.

First, students threatened the safety of a professor who disagreed with an event that demanded whites not come to campus for a day. Then they were caught on video threatening administrators and shouting racist demands.

Did the school’s president contact the police and start issuing expulsions?

Nope. As Campus Reform reports, he rewarded the racist mob with HOMEWORK EXEMPTIONS:

Videos from Evergreen have since continued to leak, painting a chaotic portrait of campus in which protesters try to bully administrators into kowtowing to their demands, and in one case even tell the school’s president, George Bridges, to “shut the fuck up.”

…

“All of us are students and have homework and projects and things due. Have you sent an email out to your faculty letting them know?” one student protester asks, saying “what’s been done about that” and noting that she and her peers were participating in the meeting “on [their] own time.”

“It’s the first thing I’ll do. I have not done it yet, I will do it right now,” Bridges replies while one protester declares that professors “need to be told that these assignments won’t be done on time and we don’t need to be penalized for that.”

Later in the video, which appears to be taken after student protesters had submitted a list of demands to Bridges, one student declares that if Bridges were to avoid responding to the demands on deadline he would subsequently “need to pay for a potluck.”

Disgraceful.

Mr. Bridges, the correct answer is that students who commit crimes will be referred to authorities, and that students who have so little regard for academia are using up valuable space at your school and should withdraw.

The professor in question, Bret Weinstein, did nothing wrong. He disagreed with the event, and stated he preferred the way it had been handled in previous years when minorities voluntarily left campus to show just how vital they were to the school’s daily operations. So he is apparently a “progressive” himself, but just not extreme enough for the mob.

The snowflakes brook no disagreement with their opinions. Free speech doesn’t exist in their little bubbles. They aren’t open-minded, or tolerant, or liberal, or forward-thinking; they are old-fashioned, textbook totalitarians.

There’s now a proposal to privatize the school, removing all state funding, from Republican State Representative Matt Manweller. The bill will be introduced alongside a letter calling for an investigation into civil rights violations for intimidating an entire ethnic group off campus. Bravo.

That inchoate but pervasive ideology known as “Political Correctness,” a dogma that is enshrined in and enforced nowhere to the extent that it is in academia, truly is toxic. It is a poison that all decent people concerned with the future of Western civilization should resist with every fiber of their being.

If the latest happenings at Evergreen State College aren’t enough to convince any and every person who isn’t a leftist fanatic of this, then nothing else can.

Even before UC Berkeley, Evergreen should be extolled as the poster school for academic corruption, a picture worth the proverbial thousand words as to all that’s gone wrong with Higher Education. In the latest events at Evergreen we have on display the radical subversion of academia’s historical mission as the premiere civilizing cultural institution, for at Evergreen, it is now savagery that rules.

As it turns out, every year for the last several years, Evergreen would hold its annual “Day of Absence.” On this occasion, non-white students and faculty would stay home while white students and faculty would attend “anti-racism” seminars and the like. This year, however, someone decided to reverse the agenda by encouraging non-whites to come to campus and coercing whites to stay home.

Biology professor Bret Weinstein, himself a white leftist, protested the new arrangement through an email that he sent to a Rashida Love, the college administrator who organized this year’s “Day of Absence:”

“There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and under-appreciated roles…and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away. The first is a forceful call to consciousness which is, of course, crippling to the logic of oppression. The second is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.”

Weinstein continued:

“You may take this letter as a formal protest of this year’s structure, and you may assume I will be on campus on the Day of Absence. I would encourage others to put phenotype aside and reject this new formulation, whether they have ‘registered’ for it already or not. On a college campus, one’s right to speak—or to be—must never be based on skin color.”

Weinstein even offered to come to campus to hold a discussion on race and evolution.

None of this, however, went over very well with those black students who were determined to keep whites off of campus. The militants videoed themselves harassing Weinstein, who calmly pleaded with them to engage in “dialectic,” not “debate” with him. In a debate, he noted, each party is “trying to win.” Dialectic, in contrast, transpires when each party listens to the other with the intention of trying to “discover what is true.” “I am only interested in dialectic,” Weinstein said, “which does mean I listen to you, and you listen to me.”

Twice in the past year, the David Horowitz Freedom Center has placed posters on the campus of San Francisco State University, as well as at a dozen additional schools, exposing the links between the anti-Israel terror group Hamas and the Hamas-funded hate group, Students for Justice in Palestine. These poster campaigns took place last October and this May. Now the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, a group known for supporting Palestinian terrorism and calling for the end of American aid to Israel, is charging that the Freedom Center’s posters are “racist, Islamophobic, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian” and create a “hostile environment” for Muslim and Arab students on the campus.

The Freedom Center’s posters are not aimed at Muslims but at terrorists. The posters placed on campus in October identified BDS activists who are supporting the Hamas-inspired and funded boycott movement. They also charged that the campus group Students for Justice in Palestine supports Hamas terrorists “whose stated goal is the elimination of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.” The Hamas charter states this goal explicitly and SJP receives funding and organizational support from a Hamas-funded front group, American Muslims for Palestine (AMP). SJP also supports the Hamas-inspired Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

A second poster placed on campus in both Fall and Spring depicts a gun-toting Hamas terrorist holding the strings of a puppet labeled “American Muslims for Palestine” which in turn controls a marionette labeled “Students for Justice in Palestine.” Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is described as “The chief sponsor of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish activities on campus.” Hamas is identified as “A terror organization pledged to wipe out Israel” (a goal explicitly stated in the Hamas charter) while AMP is the “Hamas-created chief organizer and funder of SJP.” All these statements are documented in the Freedom Center pamphlet: SJP: A Campus Front for Hamas Terrorists.

Even in the radicalized world of anti-Israel student movements, SFSU stands out for its extreme actions and rule-breaking and its pro-terrorist sympathies. In April 2016, when Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat appeared on campus, a mob from SFSU’s General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS)—an SJP surrogate—protested Barkat’s visit by shouting “Intifada” and chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!,” itself a call for the obliteration of the Jewish state, forcing the cancellation of his speech. When SFSU President Leslie Wong called tepidly for an investigation into the protestors who shut down Barkat’s speech, GUPS responded by asserting that this request “criminalize[s] anti-racist speech on campus.”