Wednesday, May 27, 2015
Don't Go!
Townhall.com ^ | May 27, 2015 | John Stossel
It's graduation time! Have we learned much? No.
College has become a scam.
Some students benefit: those with full scholarships and/or rich parents so they don't go deep into debt, those who love learning for its own sake and land jobs in academia and those who get jobs that require a college credential.
But that's not most students.
Half today's recent grads work in jobs that don't require degrees. Eighty thousand of America's bartenders have bachelor's degrees.
Politicians such as Hillary Clinton promote college by claiming that over a lifetime, college graduates "earn $1 million more." That statistic is true but utterly misleading. People who go to college are different. They're more likely to have been raised by two parents. They did better in high school. They'd make more money even if they never went go to college.
Economist Bryan Caplan argues that there isn't much evidence that college grads are paid more because they learned anything at college that is valuable to their jobs.
Getting into elite universities and graduating from them is mostly a "signaling" device, he says. It tells employers you're a smart person, so employers can begin teaching you things you really need to know. Employers, not the colleges, turn out to be the ones making students valuable contributors.
This suggests college is more like a hurdle than an investment. It would be better if companies found cheaper ways to screen for talent than four years of college.
Most of America's prestigious universities started out as training centers for the priesthood and ways of confirming your status as part of the upper crust. In many cases, that's still true today. Taxpayers shouldn't be forced to subsidize that. But we are.
Now President Obama proposes spending more of your money on "free community college." Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders goes further, proposing "free tuition" at four-year public colleges.
Of course, "free" just means taxpayers are forced to pay.
This is nuts. When government subsidizes services, people supplying those services get wasteful. Colleges now spend millions on manicured lawns and fancy gyms.
A University of Missouri admissions officer bragged to my TV show crew about the university's "day spa" and said when it comes to recruiting students, "more important than reading, writing and arithmetic" is giving "our Tigers spring break every time they step into the student recreation complex."
I'm happy that Missouri's students like their luxurious gym, but I don't want to help pay for it. If the school thinks its "day spa" is crucial for recruiting, let them sucker their own alumni into making voluntary contributions for it. Leave taxpayers alone.
Government subsidies encourage students who don't belong in college to go anyway. Many don't graduate, feel bad about themselves and end up deep in debt. The subsidies also invite schools to increase the cost of tuition.
Democrats complained we need Obamacare because health care costs "were skyrocketing." But while the cost of health care rose 296 percent over the past 30 years, college tuition rose 553 percent. College is now a grotesque spending bubble, funded by government, that's about to burst.
Law professor Glenn Reynolds, author of "The Education Apocalypse," writes, "The rapid increase in college tuition began just about exactly the time the federal government started helping to subsidize college ... (Y)ou don't want to engage in subsidies that make universities more bloated and more inefficient."
But that's what Obama and Sanders propose to do.
A more compassionate move would be to warn people that college is not as valuable as colleges advertise themselves to be.
PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel encourages students to escape the college trap by paying them $100,000 not to go to college and instead to found their own capitalist ventures.
If we really want to build a better future and not just keep going through the same old motions, experiments like that are a much smarter idea than throwing more money at the college bubble.
It's graduation time! Have we learned much? No.
College has become a scam.
Some students benefit: those with full scholarships and/or rich parents so they don't go deep into debt, those who love learning for its own sake and land jobs in academia and those who get jobs that require a college credential.
But that's not most students.
Half today's recent grads work in jobs that don't require degrees. Eighty thousand of America's bartenders have bachelor's degrees.
Politicians such as Hillary Clinton promote college by claiming that over a lifetime, college graduates "earn $1 million more." That statistic is true but utterly misleading. People who go to college are different. They're more likely to have been raised by two parents. They did better in high school. They'd make more money even if they never went go to college.
Economist Bryan Caplan argues that there isn't much evidence that college grads are paid more because they learned anything at college that is valuable to their jobs.
Getting into elite universities and graduating from them is mostly a "signaling" device, he says. It tells employers you're a smart person, so employers can begin teaching you things you really need to know. Employers, not the colleges, turn out to be the ones making students valuable contributors.
This suggests college is more like a hurdle than an investment. It would be better if companies found cheaper ways to screen for talent than four years of college.
Most of America's prestigious universities started out as training centers for the priesthood and ways of confirming your status as part of the upper crust. In many cases, that's still true today. Taxpayers shouldn't be forced to subsidize that. But we are.
Now President Obama proposes spending more of your money on "free community college." Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders goes further, proposing "free tuition" at four-year public colleges.
Of course, "free" just means taxpayers are forced to pay.
This is nuts. When government subsidizes services, people supplying those services get wasteful. Colleges now spend millions on manicured lawns and fancy gyms.
A University of Missouri admissions officer bragged to my TV show crew about the university's "day spa" and said when it comes to recruiting students, "more important than reading, writing and arithmetic" is giving "our Tigers spring break every time they step into the student recreation complex."
I'm happy that Missouri's students like their luxurious gym, but I don't want to help pay for it. If the school thinks its "day spa" is crucial for recruiting, let them sucker their own alumni into making voluntary contributions for it. Leave taxpayers alone.
Government subsidies encourage students who don't belong in college to go anyway. Many don't graduate, feel bad about themselves and end up deep in debt. The subsidies also invite schools to increase the cost of tuition.
Democrats complained we need Obamacare because health care costs "were skyrocketing." But while the cost of health care rose 296 percent over the past 30 years, college tuition rose 553 percent. College is now a grotesque spending bubble, funded by government, that's about to burst.
Law professor Glenn Reynolds, author of "The Education Apocalypse," writes, "The rapid increase in college tuition began just about exactly the time the federal government started helping to subsidize college ... (Y)ou don't want to engage in subsidies that make universities more bloated and more inefficient."
But that's what Obama and Sanders propose to do.
A more compassionate move would be to warn people that college is not as valuable as colleges advertise themselves to be.
PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel encourages students to escape the college trap by paying them $100,000 not to go to college and instead to found their own capitalist ventures.
If we really want to build a better future and not just keep going through the same old motions, experiments like that are a much smarter idea than throwing more money at the college bubble.
Hillary the Arms Dealer!
Canada Free Press ^ | 05/27/15 | Matthew Vadum
Clinton Foundation payola funds State Department approval of arms shipments to repressive governments.
While presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was America’s top diplomat the Department of State that she oversaw approved $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to 20 nations whose governments forked over millions of dollars to the now-embattled Clinton Foundation.
According to an International Business Times report by David Sirota and Andrew Perez, “at least seven foreign governments that received State Department clearance for American arms did donate to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was serving as secretary.” The article identified the seven nations as Algeria, Australia, Kuwait, Norway, Oman, Qatar, and Thailand.
Mainstream media’s surprisingly probing coverage of the unfolding Clinton Foundation donations-for-favors scandal suggests that reporters have turned on the Clintons in the age of Obama.
And the fact that the IBT piece was co-authored by Marxist author and radio talk show host David Sirota adds to the growing pile of evidence that some of the more ideologically pure progressives in the Democratic Party are ganging up on Mrs. Clinton in order to help as yet undeclared presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).
Clinton Foundation payola funds State Department approval of arms shipments to repressive governments.
While presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was America’s top diplomat the Department of State that she oversaw approved $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to 20 nations whose governments forked over millions of dollars to the now-embattled Clinton Foundation.
According to an International Business Times report by David Sirota and Andrew Perez, “at least seven foreign governments that received State Department clearance for American arms did donate to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was serving as secretary.” The article identified the seven nations as Algeria, Australia, Kuwait, Norway, Oman, Qatar, and Thailand.
Mainstream media’s surprisingly probing coverage of the unfolding Clinton Foundation donations-for-favors scandal suggests that reporters have turned on the Clintons in the age of Obama.
And the fact that the IBT piece was co-authored by Marxist author and radio talk show host David Sirota adds to the growing pile of evidence that some of the more ideologically pure progressives in the Democratic Party are ganging up on Mrs. Clinton in order to help as yet undeclared presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).
(Excerpt) Read more at canadafreepress.com ...
An Iraq War veteran pens a powerful defense of the decision to invade, remove Saddam
Canada Free Press ^ | 05/27/15 | Dan Calabrese
The detail hindsight forgets, and the fiction murky memories create
We’ve been coming back to the Iraq War lately for two reasons. One is that the media keep bringing it up in the form of a knowing-what-we-know-now gotcha question aimed at Republican presidential candidates (although they offer no such question to Hillary Clinton concerning the 2011 withdrawl of all U.S. troops . . . not that she would answer). The other, more pertinent reason, is that ISIS is overrunning Iraq at the moment, taking advantage of the absence of a residual U.S. force and Barack Obama’s refusal to wage a real fight against them.
Conventional wisdom long ago decided that George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq was a mistake, and that for all his faults, Saddam Hussein’s presence was preferable to what came after - not to mention the price we paid in blood and treasure to remove him. I have remained one of the steadfast defenders of the decision to invade Iraq and take Saddam out, and I discussed that in some detail last week.
But I am just a guy who remembers what was happening at the time and found the post-event revision of history unconvincing. David Patten was there, fought in the war and remembers in much clearer details why we fought, and why the current revisionist narrative is total B.S. Many of the post-invasion decisions the Bush Administration made were mistakes, and resulted in a very difficult four-year post-invasion period that only turned our way with the 2007 surge. Patten doesn’t deny that and neither do I. But anyone who now argues that we would have been better off leaving Saddam in power is forgetting the true nature of his regime and the destablizing force he represented in the region.
The detail hindsight forgets, and the fiction murky memories create
We’ve been coming back to the Iraq War lately for two reasons. One is that the media keep bringing it up in the form of a knowing-what-we-know-now gotcha question aimed at Republican presidential candidates (although they offer no such question to Hillary Clinton concerning the 2011 withdrawl of all U.S. troops . . . not that she would answer). The other, more pertinent reason, is that ISIS is overrunning Iraq at the moment, taking advantage of the absence of a residual U.S. force and Barack Obama’s refusal to wage a real fight against them.
Conventional wisdom long ago decided that George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq was a mistake, and that for all his faults, Saddam Hussein’s presence was preferable to what came after - not to mention the price we paid in blood and treasure to remove him. I have remained one of the steadfast defenders of the decision to invade Iraq and take Saddam out, and I discussed that in some detail last week.
But I am just a guy who remembers what was happening at the time and found the post-event revision of history unconvincing. David Patten was there, fought in the war and remembers in much clearer details why we fought, and why the current revisionist narrative is total B.S. Many of the post-invasion decisions the Bush Administration made were mistakes, and resulted in a very difficult four-year post-invasion period that only turned our way with the 2007 surge. Patten doesn’t deny that and neither do I. But anyone who now argues that we would have been better off leaving Saddam in power is forgetting the true nature of his regime and the destablizing force he represented in the region.
(Excerpt) Read more at canadafreepress.com ...
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