Tag Archives: college

Another College Post

13 Sunday Oct 2019

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Bill Sardi comments on the continuing and worsening scam of college education. He particularly concentrates on economics.

Free college education is now being handed out to high school graduates and will lead to the ruination of many unwary young Americans.

Here is what happens when higher education becomes commoditized:

Having redefined my definition of “Americans” to only include Americans, I’m tempted to say they’re already ruined, young or old. He goes with twelve very good reasons why what passes for the college experience is generally a waste for most people, again centering on the moneyed aspects. He’s 99.999% right.

As for the debts that will never be repaid, just remember that the Fed, in the past two weeks, has created more than enough fiat to get rid of all student loans. Or, do we owe those to ourselves too?

College Lame Day

12 Saturday Oct 2019

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Before the Big Game!, consider the declining quality of education at the schools.

College graduates are responsible, in part, for a “knowledge crisis” regarding basic civic literacy in the United States, according to a recent survey that revealed “alarming results.” For example, less than half of college graduates surveys knew the term lengths of U.S. Senators and Representatives.

A recent survey has uncovered “alarming results” which point to “a crisis in civic understanding and the urgent need for a renewed focus on civics education at the postsecondary level,” according to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), which commissioned the survey.

Two terms: one in office, one in prison! Haha. Sad…

When they’re not learning anything, at least the kids can make demonic fools of themselves. And, of course, there’s the football thing, which should be converted into a minor league and severed from the … schools. (I keep wanting to type “schools” as with the K-12 “schools.”)

College Makes You Dumber?

25 Wednesday Sep 2019

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Basically the finding of a newly published study.

We examined trends over time in vocabulary, a key component of verbal intelligence, in the nationally representative General Social Survey of U.S. adults (n = 29,912). Participants answered multiple-choice questions about the definitions of 10 specific words. When controlled for educational attainment, the vocabulary of the average U.S. adult declined between the mid-1970s and the 2010s. Vocabulary declined across all levels of educational attainment (less than high school, high school or 2-year college graduate, bachelor’s or graduate degree), with the largest declines among those with a bachelor’s or graduate degree. Hierarchical linear modeling analyses separating the effects of age, time period, and cohort suggest that the decline is primarily a time period effect. Increasing educational attainment has apparently not improved verbal ability among Americans. Instead, as educational attainment has increased, those at each educational level are less verbally skilled even though the vocabulary skills of the whole population are unchanged.

Someone should build a graph showing the relationship between declining verbal skills and increasing student loan usury.

Grading the Colleges 2019

21 Wednesday Aug 2019

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Dr. Walter Williams has the dirt on the schools:

For many parents, August is a month of both pride and tears. Pride because their teenager is taking that big educational step and tears because for many it’s the beginning of an empty nest. Yet, there’s a going-away-to-college question that far too few parents ask or even contemplate: What will my youngster learn in college?

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni provides some answers that turn out to be quite disturbing. ACTA evaluated every four-year public university as well as hundreds of private colleges and universities. That’s more than 1,100 institutions that enroll nearly 8 million students, more than two-thirds of all students enrolled in four-year liberal arts schools nationwide. ACTA’s findings were published in their report “What Will They Learn? 2018-19.” It doesn’t look good.

No “A” schools in the Ivy League. My undergrad alma mater got an A. My grad school university a D (based on the undergrad programs).

THE REPORT

The College Trap

08 Thursday Aug 2019

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Maybe some Gen Zers aren’t falling for it anymore. Good.

At 19 years old, Vivek belongs to Generation Z. And while her experience isn’t yet common, Gen Z is becoming more open to doing college differently or not going at all, according to a new study by TD Ameritrade TD, +0.68%

The study surveyed over 3,000 U.S. teens and adults, including approximately 1,000 Gen Z (ages 15 to 21), 1,000 young millennials (ages 22 to 28), and 1,000 parents (ages 30 to 60).

About one in five Gen Z and young millennials say they may choose not to go to college. Many others see a less conventional path through education as a good idea. Over 30% of Gen Z — and 18% of young millennials — said they have considered taking a gap year between high school and college.

What’s more, 89% of Gen Z, along with nearly 79% of young millennials, have considered an education path that looks different from a four-year degree directly out of high school. For millennials, that’s up 18% from 2017. (Gen Z was not surveyed in 2017.)

“There are more options today,” Dara Luber, a senior retirement manager at TD Ameritrade, told MarketWatch. “More students are looking at online courses, doing classes at community college, commuting from home, or going to a trade school.”

Approximately 19.9 million students will attend college in the fall of 2019, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, down from 20.3 million a decade ago when some people likely decided to further their education during the Great Recession.

While college attendance has risen from 14.8 million two decades ago, the NCES expects it to remain relatively steady over the next five years. But the $1.5 trillion in student debt has given younger students pause for thought.

It’s a shame the test subject is a paperwork American, but I guess we take what we can get. And, of course, the idiot Boomers are still 96% behind the worn lies and tripe. They were on the cutting edge, stealing all they could, before the value oversupply debasement, the 500% increase in tuition, the financial wizardry, and the anti-Western biases set in.

Little Avail: The College Problem

25 Thursday Jul 2019

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Books and papers have already been written on this predictable outcome in higher education.

An astonishing number of students start college in America without finishing it: Roughly 40 percent of college enrollees don’t go on to get a degree within six years of starting to work toward one.

The good news is that in recent decades things have gotten a bit less bad. By one calculation, at four-year state schools that didn’t make the top 50 public universities in U.S. News & World Report’s rankings, the graduation rate within six years rose from about 40 percent for students starting in the early 1990s to about 50 percent for students starting in the late 2000s. (The phenomenon was not limited to non-elite schools.)

When Jeff Denning, an economist at Brigham Young University, started looking closely at the data on college-completion rates, he was a bit perplexed by what, exactly, was driving this uptick. He and some of his BYU colleagues noticed that a range of indicators from those two decades pointed in the direction of lower, not higher, graduation rates: More historically underrepresented groups of students (who tend to have lower graduation rates) were enrolling, students appeared to be studying less and spending more time working outside of school, and student-to-faculty ratios weren’t decreasing. “We started thinking, What could possibly explain this increase?” Denning told me. “Because we were stuck with not being able to explain anything.”

An academic technocrat who can’t explain anything. Might that be part of the problem? Emerson had all this ages ago: “One of the benefits of a college education is to show the boy its little avail.”

Whither Voltaire?

18 Thursday Jul 2019

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Certainly not the modern Post-American university. PCR explains:

When I was a student liberal professors found Voltaire to be an exemplar of the correct attitude toward free speech. Voltaire quotes were used everywhere in the halls of learning:

“Think for yourself and let others enjoy the privilege of doing so too.”

“I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to say it.”

“Cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it.”

“Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.”

“It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.”

Today Voltaire is never heard from. Dogma has shoved aside tolerance and taken control of American universities in which Political Correctness, an ideology or religion in which emotional-based beliefs of certain “preferred” groups with aristocratic or Vatican privileges, such as black activists, abortionists, and sexual deviants, cannot be “offended” by facts or by someone’s contrary opinion.

For any SJWs unfortunate enough to have found this page, Voltaire was America’s fourth president, a racist and slave owner. You know what to do.

Know the Target and What’s Behind the Target

03 Wednesday Jul 2019

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Dr. Walter Williams correctly notices that the brainwashed are bitching about things that they know nothing of.

Western civilization was founded on a set of philosophies that focus strongly on the sanctity of individuals and their power of logic and reason. This belief led to a desire to trust things that could be proven to be true or legitimate, from government to science. Judeo-Christian morality has formed the basis of most Western notions of ethics and behavioral standards. Thus, the attack on Western civilization must begin with the attack on the church and Christian values, and, just as important, the family unit must be undermined. The reason why the church, Christian values and family are targets of the left is they want people’s loyalty and allegiance to be to the state. The church, Christianity and the family stand in the way. Let’s look at some of the left’s agenda.

Do read on about the left. But first, understand the right’s agenda (of purpose and of oversight). Safely ignore the use of “Judeo-Christian,” which doesn’t exist. Williams means well and is not trying to deceive. But, some are. Before getting to those philosophies, know that the West is: Christian (period), Greco-Roman, and European. Take a one and the house falls; take them all away, as would the ignorant youth and their herders, and you have nothing left at all.

The Effects of (Really) Counting the SAT and ACT

26 Wednesday Jun 2019

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Steve Sailer opts for a potential “take it if you can” approach towards the end of a very good article on some new (if unsurprising) research about elite college admissions.

We live in an era in which we are constantly lectured that white males are always ruining everything for everybody else by their feelings of entitlement and privilege. But when it comes to fancy colleges, the opposite is true. At any above-average test score, 18-year-old white guys are less likely to attend a prestige college and more likely to enlist in the military, enter a trade, or go to a local non-elite Directional State college.

And, there’s still the Asians v. Harvard case. Me, I’m not so sure about the idea of reclaiming the Ivy League. He’s probably right – for now. Whether it will matter in the future, as with all the rest of these thorny issues, remains to be seen.

The College Basket Case

17 Monday Jun 2019

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As I’ve pointed out a few times before, the American education system is, by and large, broken, from kindergarten to graduate school. A new survey reveals the magnitude of the underlying issues facing the modern college student.

A 2018 survey at 140 educational institutions asked almost 90,000 college students about their health over the past 12 months. The survey found that more than three in five (63%) respondents reported experiencing “overwhelming anxiety” in the past year, while two in five (42%) reported feeling “so depressed that it was difficult to function.” Students also reported that anxiety (27%), sleep difficulties (22%) and depression (19%) had adversely affected their academic performance.

In the same survey, 12% of college students reported having “seriously considered suicide.” Another study, which looked at college students with depression, anxiety and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) who had been referred by college counseling centers for psychopharmacological evaluation, found that the same proportion—12%—had actually made at least one suicide attempt. Half of the students in the latter study had previously received a prescription for medication, most often antidepressants.

Colleges are feeling the squeeze, with demand growing nationally for campus mental health services. A study by Penn State’s Center for Collegiate Mental Health reported an average 30% to 40% increase in students’ use of counseling centers between 2009 and 2015 at a time when enrollment grew by just 5%. According to Penn State’s report, the “increase in demand is primarily characterized by a growing frequency of students with a lifetime prevalence of threat-to-self indicators.”

This is a system terminally out of control. The schools and their students are mirrors, reflecting a changed, fractured, and fragmented culture and society. Our enemies have done their jobs well, over many decades. None of this will be fixed soon nor easily.