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Harvard Rescinds Admission Offer to Students Over Offensive Messages Social media has become a minefield for young people who overshare By Melissa Korn

Harvard University rescinded admission offers for at least 10 incoming freshmen after they discovered the students had posted sexually explicit and otherwise offensive messages in a private Facebook chat.

The news was first reported by the Harvard Crimson on Sunday. A Harvard spokeswoman said the school doesn’t comment on individual admission decisions.

According to the Crimson, a handful of admitted students formed a messaging group online in December allowing them to send provocative and offensive memes and images to one another. The messages mocked sexual assault and the Holocaust, among other sensitive subjects. At least one joked that abusing children was sexually arousing, while another called the hanging of a Mexican child “piñata time.”

Social media has turned into a minefield for prospective college students and grads looking for jobs, as well as those already gainfully employed. Drunken party photos–especially for those still not of legal drinking age–or inappropriate racial comments can torpedo an otherwise solid candidate, admissions officials and HR experts warn.

Following the lead of career coaches, many high school guidance counselors now recommend students review their Facebook, Twitter , Instagram and other accounts for embarrassing or outright offensive material before submitting applications.

Many colleges create official Facebook groups for newly admitted students, allowing the high schoolers to begin meeting one another before arriving on campus. The “closed” Harvard College Class of 2021 group, managed by Harvard’s office of admissions and financial aid, had 1,518 members as of Monday.

The official group description says the school is “not responsible for any unofficial groups, chats, or the content within,” and reminds participants that the school “reserves the right to withdraw an offer of admission under various conditions including if an admitted student engages in behavior that brings into question his or her honesty, maturity, or moral character.”

According to the Crimson, roughly 100 admitted students formed a private messaging group, not moderated by school officials, to share pop-culture memes, and then the more provocative chat was an offshoot of that group. At one point, the paper said, the group was titled “Harvard memes for horny bourgeois teens.”

The Crimson reported that admissions officials asked students to disclose images of the messages sent sometime in April, disinvited them to admitted-students weekend in late April and withdrew the offers of admission for at least 10 shortly thereafter.

Owning Their Future: The Joy of DECA, Part I By Jay Nordlinger

Editor’s Note: In our May 29 issue, we published a piece by Jay Nordlinger about DECA. The organization held its big international conference in late April. This week, Mr. Nordlinger expands his piece in his Impromptus.

Sixteen thousand high-school students have converged here in Anaheim, Calif. — but they’re not going to Disneyland. Well, some of them are. But mainly they’re here to participate in a giant career-development conference. The theme of this conference is “Own Your Future.” The participants, the high-schoolers, are walking around in blue blazers, which have a patch that says “DECA.”

What does “DECA” stand for? “It stands for truth, justice, and the American way,” says John Fistolera, an official with DECA. It’s a good quip. “We’re about free enterprise,” says Fistolera, “and free enterprise is the American way.”

For decades, DECA has been known as “DECA,” plain and simple. (The word is pronounced “Decka” — like the record label, Decca.) But, once upon a time, the letters stood for “Distributive Education Clubs of America.”

The term “distributive education” is now antique — even more antique than “voc-ed” (for “vocational education”). The preferred term now is “career education,” or “career and technical education.” I myself had never heard the term “distributive education” until a few years ago, when I was interviewing Harold Hamm.

He is the 13th and last child of cotton sharecroppers in Oklahoma — and the leading oilman in the United States. When he was in high school, in the early 1960s, he took part in a D.E. program. It meant that you got school credit for working. And the classes you took probably related to the work you were doing. Young Hamm was working at a truck stop. And he wrote a paper on oil exploration.

His D.E. teacher was a man named Jewell Ridge. The teacher meant a lot to Hamm, and to many other students, most of them poor. When Ridge died, Hamm delivered a eulogy at his funeral. Recounting all this to me, Hamm got tears in his eyes.

For the piece I wrote about Harold Hamm, go here. (Incidentally, he has devoted a lot of the money he has earned to providing educational opportunity to the poor.)

DECA was founded in 1946, when going to college was not de rigueur. Young people needed skills for the work world. They still do, of course. But college is a box that increasingly must be checked. Most DECA students are college-bound. Nonetheless, the organization still serves kids who aren’t.

Here in Anaheim, I meet a young man who is going straight to the Air Force. Another one is joining the family business, to learn the ropes.

DECA has 200,000 members in 3,500 high schools. The members, I should make clear, are students. And they pay dues, as members of organizations often do. The dues are $8 a year. If a student can’t afford this sum, he can work for it, for example in a DECA-run school store.

There is also a college division, though smaller: 15,000 members in 275 colleges and universities.

The Campus Speech Police Come to Fresno State On campuses across the country, the same illiberal attitude toward disagreeable speech is growing, and the broader public must take notice. By Jake Curtis

There is certainly no shortage of examples of progressive attempts to silence “unacceptable” political speech. From Charles Murray to Ann Coulter to David Horowitz, the Left has upped its game when it comes to censoring, and in some cases even silencing, its political opponents. Some Yale students have even gone so far as to “petition” for a repeal of the First Amendment in its entirety.

Nobody, however, has done more to reveal the true nature of modern progressives’ illiberalism than Fresno State professor Gregory Thatcher. Thanks to cell-phone video and a timely complaint filed by the Alliance Defending Freedom, Thatcher’s utter contempt for contrary political thought was exposed after he directed students to scrub pro-life messages that had been scrawled on campus sidewalks by the Fresno State chapter of Students for Life. This sort of mentality is endemic in American academia — and increasingly in society at large.

A month prior to the incident, Students for Life e-mailed the appropriate authorities at the University, asking for permission to move forward with their “chalking” plans. Their request made clear that the plan would aim to convey “different facts about development in the womb” and “celebrat[e] pregnant and parenting students’ hard work as they pursued their education” with messages such as “Support Pregnant and Parenting Students,” “Pregnant on Campus Initiative,” and “Know Your Title IX Rights.” Ultimately, Fresno State’s Event Review Committee approved the request, just as it had approved many other similar requests in the past.

Pursuant to the approval, the students proceeded to chalk a sidewalk near Fresno State’s library on the morning of May 2. The messages included provocative statements such as “love them both,” “choose life,” “save the baby humans,” and “unborn lives matter.”

As seen in the video, after Students for Life chalked around three dozen of these hate-filled messages, students who admitted they had been deputized by Thatcher began scrubbing the sidewalk. Professor Thatcher then came rushing out to the pro-life students, demanding they put an end to the messages and directing them to an unidentified “free-speech area.” After the pro-life students informed him that they had received university approval for their activities, Thatcher himself began scrubbing, and told the students, “You had permission to put it down. . . . I have permission to get rid of it. . . . This is our part of free speech.” As if that weren’t enough, Thatcher concluded by emphasizing that “college campuses are not free-speech areas.”

Let that sink in for a moment: “College campuses are not free-speech areas.” If Thatcher’s right about that, it’s only because he and his progressive ilk have succeeded in perverting the sacred academic mission of free and open inquiry beyond recognition. Thankfully, they don’t seem to have thus succeeded at Fresno State, which in the wake of the incident reaffirmed its policy that “freedom of expression is allowed in all outdoor spaces on campus,” essentially throwing Thatcher under the bus.

On campuses across the country, the same illiberal attitude toward disagreeable speech is growing, and the broader public must take notice.

The Diminishing Returns of a College Degree In the mid-1970s, far less than 1% of taxi drivers were graduates. By 2010 more than 15% were. By Richard Vedder and Justin Strehle See note please

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

How College Summer-Reading Programs Are Failing Our Students — and Our Culture Most universities have cut out the classics in favor of indoctrinating students. By Mark Tapson —

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.

Latest Hate Crime Hoax: Pakistani-American College Student Recants ‘Bias Attack’ Story By Debra Heine

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?

Why Do the Young Reject Capitalism? At the same time, they celebrate entrepreneurs and free enterprise. It’s a curious disconnect. By Warren A. Stephens

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

The Revolution’s Angry Children From Evergreen to Middlebury, the circular shooting party continues. Seth Barron

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’).”

The Muslim Brotherhood Connection: ISIS, “Lady al Qaeda,” and the Muslim Students Association by Thomas Quiggin

“It should be the long-term goal of every MSA [Muslim Students Association] to Islamicize the politics of their respective university … the politicization of the MSA means to make the MSA more of a force on internal campus politics. The MSA needs to be a more ‘in-your-face’ association.” — Hussein Hamdani, a lawyer who served as an adviser on Muslim issues and security for the Canadian government.

Several alumni of the MSA have gone on to become leading figures in Islamist groups. These include infamous al Qaeda recruiter Anwar al Awlaki, Osama bin Laden funder Ahmed Sayed Khadr, ISIS propagandist John “Yahya” Maguire and Canada’s first suicide bomber, “Smiling Jihadi” Salma Ashrafi.

What they have in common (whether members of ISIS, al Qaeda, Jamaat e Isami, Boko Haram, Abu Sayyaf or others) is ideology often rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood — as findings of a 2015 U.K. government review on the organization revealed.

In August 2014, ISIS tried to secure the release from a U.S. federal prison of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui — a Pakistani neuroscientist educated in the United States — formerly known as the “most wanted woman alive,” but now referred to as “Lady al Qaeda”, by exchanging her for American war correspondent James Foley, who was abducted in 2012 in Syria. When the proposed swap failed, Foley was beheaded in a gruesome propaganda video produced and released by his captors, while Siddiqui remained in jail serving an 86-year sentence.

Part of an FBI “seeking information” handout on Aafia Siddiqui — formerly known as the “most wanted woman alive.” (Image source: FBI/Getty Images)

ISIS also offered to exchange Siddiqui for a 26-year-old American woman kidnapped in Syria while working with humanitarian aid groups. Two years earlier, the Taliban had tried to make a similar deal, offering to release U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in exchange for Siddiqui. These efforts speak volumes about Siddiqui’s profile and importance in Islamist circles.

Her affiliation with Islamist ideology began when she was a student, first at M.I.T. and then at Brandeis University, where she obtained her doctorate in 2001. Her second marriage happened to be to Ammar al-Baluchi (Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali), nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks.

During the 1995-6 academic year, Siddiqui wrote three sections of the Muslim Students Association “Starter’s Guide” — “Starting and Continuing a Regular Dawah [Islamic proselytizing] Table”, “10 Characteristics of an MSA Table” and “Planning A Lecture” — providing ideas on how successfully to infiltrate North American campuses.

The MSA of the United States and Canada was established in January 1963 by members of the Muslim Brotherhood at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign campus. Since its inception, the MSA has emerged as the leading and most influential Islamist student organization in North America — with nearly 600 MSA chapters in the United States and Canada today.

The first edition of the MSA Starter’s Guide: A Guide on How to Run a Successful MSA was released in 1996. A subsection on “Islamization of Campus Politics and the Politicization of The MSA,” written by Hussein Hamdani, a lawyer who served as an adviser on Muslim issues and security for the Canadian government, states:

“It should be the long-term goal of every MSA to Islamicize the politics of their respective university … the politicization of the MSA means to make the MSA more of a force on internal campus politics. The MSA needs to be a more ‘in-your-face’ association.”

In early 2015, Canadian Minister of Public Safety Steven Blaney suspended Hamdani from the Cross-Cultural Roundtable on National Security. No reason was given for the suspension, but Hamdani claimed it had been politically motivated — related to his support for Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party. The French-language Canadian network TVA suggested, however, that the suspension was actually due to activities in which Hamdani had engaged as a university student, and radical organizations with which he was associated. During the 1998-9 academic year, Hamdani was president of the Muslim Students Association at the University of Western Ontario; in 1995, he was treasurer of the McMaster University branch of the MSA.

Several alumni of the MSA have gone on to become leading figures in Islamist groups. These include infamous al Qaeda recruiter Anwar al Awlaki, Osama bin Laden funder Ahmed Sayed Khadr, ISIS propagandist John “Yahya” Maguire and Canada’s first suicide bomber, “Smiling Jihadi” Salma Ashrafi.

Rush to College Might Be a Mistake Adults with the most student debt have the most qualms about their higher education choices, according to a Gallup pollBy Douglas Belkin

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