RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/reskilling-america

Should fewer Americans go to college? In 2022, 37.6% of adults without a disability had at least a bachelor’s degree. In 1990 only 20% of the older-than-25 population had a bachelor’s degree, and in 1970 the share was 11%. And yet according to the Strada Institute for the Future of Work, a decade after graduation with four-year degrees 45% of Americans work in jobs that do not require college diplomas. These unfortunate young Americans have wasted four years of their lives and tuition money, and in some cases have incurred sizable student loan debt, in exchange for coursework that is essentially worthless.

What explains the large-scale miscredentialing of the American workforce? The endless greed of tuition-hungry universities is one factor. But the main cause is the insistence of many American employers, including federal, state, and local government, that new hires have college diplomas—even for jobs that are currently filled by workers without four-year degrees.

Like other forms of inflation, degree inflation reduces the inflated unit of currency. Today a worker earning between $40,000 and $60,000 in inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars is as likely to have a bachelor’s degree as a worker in 2006 who earned between $60,000 and $80,000, when there were fewer college graduates as a share of the workforce. According to the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP): “Between 1990 and 2021, all occupational categories except one—teachers and librarians—experienced degree inflation, meaning the proportion of prime-age workers with a bachelor’s degree increased.”

There is no reason to believe that receptionists and bank tellers with B.A.s in popular majors like communications or business, to say nothing of gender studies, are more productive and skilled than their non-college-educated predecessors who had high school educations plus on-the-job training.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/what-now-on-campus

With Donald Trump’s election victory, U.S. college campuses have been humbled. The day after, the atmosphere at Columbia University was mournful, as Student Services handed out free pizza for students who needed support processing the results.

Students’ dismay at Trump’s victory contrasts with their jubilant, headline-grabbing anti-Israel activism over the past year. Ironically, student activists probably helped the Trump campaign by alienating moderates and creating an “uncommitted” movement, whose followers may have declined to vote for Kamala Harris.

Regardless of how many young people left the presidential line blank or voted for Jill Stein, college-educated voters generally were one of Democrats’ strongest cohorts in 2024. They were one of the few groups among whom Harris did not lose ground relative to Joe Biden in 2020, roughly matching Biden’s 12-point advantage in 2020. She outperformed Biden among white college-educated voters, which offset her relative underperformance among college-educated racial minorities.

College-educated voters’ preference for Democratic candidates is no surprise. Campuses incubate opposition to many of the ideas associated with the Trump campaign: patriotic pride in America and its history; a desire for the government to treat all Americans equally; and a preference for the interests of U.S. citizens to those of foreigners. DEI grandees and their acolytes consider such views retrograde and even racist; they believe, evidence notwithstanding, that Trump won by riling up a hateful white base. The broader electorate doesn’t see it that way. Their choice of Trump delivered a strong message to students, particularly at so-called elite schools: ravings about decolonization and gender theory are nonstarters for ordinary Americans.

https://www.jns.org/americas-future-depends-on-trumps-promise-to-punish-woke-universities/

A leftist-dominated educational establishment and its media enablers fear that he will make good on his vow to defund institutions that embrace DEI and tolerate antisemitism.

Occidental College seemingly waved the white flag last week in its efforts to defend itself against charges of tolerating antisemitism on its Los Angeles campus. The school agreed to a “sweeping settlement” with the Anti-Defamation League and the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law that acknowledged the ongoing hardships, harassment and discrimination faced by Jewish students since the Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Occidental’s apathy to all this, which was little different from what has been happening at dozens if not hundreds of other American institutions of higher learning, violated its obligations to prohibit such discrimination under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

But for many observers, the context for the agreement was not so much a belated interest by one school to address the wrongs suffered by its Jewish students. Rather, it was the fact that it came a few weeks after the election victory of Donald Trump. As one headline in a news article about the settlement put it, “College settles antisemitism claims before Trump can make good on accreditation threats.”

Trump repeatedly made clear during the 2024 election campaign that the educational establishment would be as much a target for his second administration as the denizens of the Washington “swamp” such as the liberal-dominated federal bureaucracy that did so much to sabotage and obstruct his first four years in the White House.

More will hinge, however, on whether he makes good on this promise than the fate of school administrators or even the safety of Jewish students.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/28/universities-have-a-2025-rendezvous-with-reality/

Universities have suffered a cataclysmic decline in public approval and support.

A Gallup poll taken this year found that only 36 percent of Americans polled either expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education—once the agreed-on touchstone to upward mobility.

Gifting to most universities has been down for two consecutive years.

There is zero intellectual diversity on most university campuses.

Speakers with conservative viewpoints are often either disinvited or shouted down—and worse.

The federally guaranteed student loan program is in shambles. Some $1.7 trillion in outstanding loans were taken out by half of all college students.

Nearly a fifth are now not being paid back.

Marriage, child-rearing, and home ownership are all delayed by some 40 million indebted graduates, who can take decades to pay loans back.

The Biden administration demagogued the issue by illegally granting rolling student loan amnesties to win votes just before both the midterm and general elections. That proposed debt relief would be covered by taxpayers, over half of whom never went to college.

The expansion of student loan debt roughly correlates with universities raising their annual costs higher than the rate of inflation—largely due to administrative bloat.

Although the Supreme Court recently struck down the practice of using race and gender to adjudicate applications and hiring, universities are already seeking ways to circumvent the ruling.

Asian- and white-Americans for decades have been systematically, overtly, and supposedly with justification, discriminated against by ignoring or not requiring test scores and downplaying grade point averages.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/dei-corrupts-education-research

Government agencies should choose which research projects to fund based on merit, not ideology. But my investigation into U.S. Department of Education grants reveals that administrators prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) when evaluating grant applications. In some cases, reviewers considered the racial make-up of research personnel when assessing applicants’ qualifications.

These applications were directed to the Education Innovation and Research (EIR) program, through which the department allocates research funds to schools and other nonprofits to develop inventive solutions to educational problems. The EIR program had a $284 million budget for new awards in fiscal year 2023.

The federal government’s diversity obsession has distorted EIR’s priorities. As a result, American taxpayers are funding projects that promote equity in AP Computer Science, so-called “restorative justice” initiatives for misbehaving students, and “culturally responsive” teaching. EIR has embedded racial considerations into the grant-evaluation process. It does so by assessing applicants’ “Quality of Project Personnel” (QPP), a 10-point evaluation category that accounts for almost 10 percent of an applicant’s total score. The department uses this category, which first appeared in grant evaluation documents in 2022, to measure whether prospective grant recipients would “encourage[] applications for employment from persons who are members of groups that have traditionally been underrepresented based on race, color, national origin, gender, age, or disability.” The department notes, almost as an afterthought, that “the Secretary [also] considers the qualifications, including relevant training and experience, of key project personnel.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/anthropology-in-retreat

Many anthropologists place social-justice ideology over verifiable facts, from denying the sex binary to spinning false narratives of mass child graves in Indian schools to recasting “indigenous knowledge” as a source of scientific evidence. To this list add acceptance of Native American oral myths and creation stories. Arising from an ideology that divides humanity into oppressors and oppressed and rejects the concept of objective truth, such myth acceptance increasingly factors into questions of repatriation and reburial—whether, say, to give ancient skeletal and artifact collections to modern tribes whose connection to the remains may be obscure. The result: woke anthropologists and tribal activists exploit government rules to derail science, all in the name of social justice.

The long, complex history of Indian tribes has been one of change and contradiction. Once at war with American settlers and later subject to assimilation policies, Indian tribes today possess legal powers comparable with those of no other group. Activist elements within tribes wield this power to suppress research on the anthropology of American Indians that contradicts traditional religious beliefs.

Some of the research on Paleoindians, for example, reveals that these earliest Americans were genetically distinct from later arrivals. Yet these findings have come under attack from Indian activists who cite oral myths declaring that they have been in North America since time immemorial. Research that portrays past North American Indians unfavorably, meantime, also faces censorship pressures. Any paper marshaling evidence on intertribal warfare, cannibalism, slavery in pre-contact America, or environmentally devastating land-use practices will face numerous challenges, as tribes push for research on topics “relevant to tribal interests.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/at-the-university-of-michigan-getting-tough-with-hamas-supporters/

In the academic year 2023-2024, campuses across the country, beginning on October 8, 2023, were engulfed by pro-Hamas demonstrators. Their faces contorted by hate, members of these mobs waved their signs, screamed their slogans about Israeli “genocide,” and insisted that “there is only one solution/Intifada revolution,” which is an unambiguous call for violence. They demanded a “free Palestine” “from the river to the sea,” which, properly understood, means the eradication of Israel and its replacement by a twenty-third Arab state. They invaded and vandalized campus offices. They surrounded Jewish students and would not let them escape while yelling at them. Some Jewish students were physically attacked. They burst into classrooms of Israeli and Jewish faculty, interrupting their lectures.

College administrators in the last year have been maddeningly slow to react. Many administrators did nothing, showing themselves to be unwilling to lay down the law to such violent troublemakers. Three university presidents, from Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania, were asked at a congressional hearing if calling for the “genocide of Jews” in their view “violated their campus codes of conduct.” All three answered that “it depends.” Some universities offered slap-on-the-wrist suspensions for a handful of demonstrators who physically harassed Jewish students; some administrators, as at Brown University, even offered to meet with demonstrators to discuss their demands on cutting all ties to Israel. Nothing appeared to calm down the pro-Hamas anti-Israel demonstrators. After a long investigation into antisemitism and anti-Israel activities on campuses, conducted by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, a long report was issued on antisemitism on American campuses, a report that was damning in its evidence both of antisemitic acts by pro-Palestinian demonstrators, and of the failure of university demonstrators to take a firm stand against those demonstrators.

Now a few universities have begun to lay down the law by starting to punish Hamas supporters in a way that will have an impact. At the University of Michigan, the leading pro-Hamas group now faces a four-year suspension from the campus that should weaken its ability to conduct its anti-Israel propaganda campaign to win over impressionable students.