A different kind of March madness

Brits have it easier.  Going to one of the Russell group universities is advantageous but the main advantage comes from where you got your High School education.  As long as you went to a good private school, you are one of the chosen

Please, let’s stop pretending that the college cheating scandal is just an indictment of overindulgent, wealthy helicopter parents.

The Justice Department has accused dozens of super-rich parents of making $25 million in illegal payments — and, in some cases, taking a tax break to boot — to get their children into selective colleges.

If true, these parents broke the law. They could face some prison time. But in the coming weeks, a lot of parents and their children, who’ve been legitimately accepted to pricey colleges, will make a move to put themselves in another type of prison.

Certain madness takes over this time of year — between late March and early April — when the college acceptance letters are sent out. Hearts are elated if children are accepted to prestigious public and private universities. Then comes the financial reality: Going to these dream colleges often means taking on substantial student loans.

Outstanding student-loan debt at the end of last year was $1.5 trillion. Education debt ranks second in consumer debt nationwide behind mortgages.

Parents will sentence themselves and their children to decades of debt because they believe attending a select school is a must for their children to succeed. They will trade financial stability for the status symbol of a brand-name college education.

The recent admissions scam has been used to underscore the pressure parents and students are under to get into “better” schools, as if the thousands of other colleges and universities in the country just aren’t good enough. Heaven forbid you suggest a student attend a community college first, if money is woefully lacking. The pushback is typically substantial — and illogical.

Dripping with disdain, parents and students say that if the acceptance to an elite college doesn’t happen, there is always the “safety school.” What’s financially sound and safe about struggling under the weight of enough debt to equal the price of a home?

And the financial imprisonment is even harder for low-income families, particularly minorities. Many students from these homes run out of money before they can graduate. They end up with debt and no degree.

Last fall, I met a mother at a financial-literacy program in Delaware who was very concerned about how to pay her parent PLUS loans. She had taken out more than $100,000 to help send her child to the top-rated University of Michigan to study to be a teacher.

I asked her why she didn’t send her daughter to a school in her home state or somewhere close by so she could commute and reduce the cost of attendance.

“It’s where she really wanted to go, and she worked hard to get into Michigan,” the mom said with pride.

But studies have shown that the determination and hard work that the child demonstrated would have helped her succeed wherever she ended up going to college.

“A sort of mania has taken hold, and its grip seems to grow tighter and tighter,” wrote New York Times op-ed columnist Frank Bruni in his 2015 book “Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be.”

It’s the “elite edge” that drives many parents and students to put themselves in financial jeopardy, Bruni pointed out.

What about the connections a child will make at a premier institution, you might ask?

Gallup asked 5,100 graduates about the career helpfulness of their undergraduate alumni networks.

Just 9 percent of graduates said the school network has been very helpful or helpful to them in the job market, according to Gallup, which released the findings earlier this year.

Just one in six alumni from schools ranked in the top 50 by U.S. News and World Report reported that their alumni network has been useful to them in the job market.

“While these alumni are slightly more likely than alumni from lower-ranked schools to perceive their alumni network as helpful, the differences are relatively minor and unlikely to offset the significant differences in tuition costs,” Gallup said.

What can markedly make a difference in job success for a student?

What helps tremendously is an internship during college in which a graduate can apply what he or she is learning, Gallup said.

Long before the current admissions scandal, Bruni wrote, “The admissions game is too flawed and too rigged to be given so much credit. For another, the nature of a student’s college experience — the work that he or she puts into it, the skills that he or she picks up, the self-examination that’s undertaken, the resourcefulness that’s honed — matters more than the name of the institution attended.”

Stop the madness. Don’t succumb to admissions mania that can condemn you and your kid to a life of crushing debt.

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Deflating College Degrees

The value of a college degree decreased considerably as academic merit became secondary.

What is a college degree really worth these days, as opposed to how much it costs? One of the Democrats’ favorite policy platforms recently has been the call for “free college.” That this message is so popular with the younger generation may be an indication that the increasing cost of a college degree and the ballooning student debt associated with it (now more than $1.5 trillion) has not placed graduates on the fast track to the higher-paying jobs educated professionals once enjoyed. Instead, more and more college graduates are finding themselves ill prepared to successfully engage in a dynamic free-market world that rewards innovation, enterprise, and hard work.

In other words, a college degree no longer provides, in and of itself, a path to earning income that is greater than that of those without a college degree. Nor is that income sufficient to pay off student loans — now grossly inflated by government guarantees, which preclude any liability to educational institutions. Those institutions should be co-liable for student loans rather than being enriched by them while taxpayers bear the burden of default. And worse, millions of young people incur several years of student debt and never finish their degree. (The Trump administration has proposed limits on student loans as a first measure to resolve this debt crisis.)

It didn’t used to be this way. To put it bluntly, education standards have slipped considerably. How else can one explain why Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who majored in economics and graduated cum laude from Boston University, fails to understand the most rudimentary economic principles?

But why have the standards slipped? One of the main factors is that academic merit, which should be the primary and sole criteria for admission into institutions of higher learning, has become secondary. Academic merit has been displaced by financial considerations, athletic ability, favored racial-minority status, and legacies. The results are predictable: When students are admitted who fail to meet the higher academic standards, what eventually occurs is that those standards are gradually lowered. Secondarily, the requirements for gaining a degree begin to slip as well. For example, in 2017, Yale changed its course requirements for English majors so that it is now possible to graduate without ever having read or studied Shakespeare.

Unlike the recent case where students cheated the admission system, in this case the admission system has cheated the students.

In recognizing this dumbing down of higher-education standards, Harvard University Professor Harvey Mansfield, who has been teaching for over 60 years, applies a unique practice to demonstrate how the pressure to lower academic standards has produced deficient students. Mansfield gives all his students two grades — the first grade goes into their official transcript and is one that has been artificially inflated; the second is the grade they have actually earned. His reason: to honestly show his students how they really did.

It would seem that too many colleges and universities today are more concerned with producing “woke” activists than sober academics.

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Australian Grade school BANS parents from buying and delivering their children McDonald's and KFC fast food for lunch

Bureaucratic ignorance and snobbery.  Fast food is highly nutritious

A primary school has been forced to ban fast food to stop parents from delivering McDonald's and KFC meals to their children at lunchtime.

Canley Vale Public School in Sydney's west recently posted to Facebook asking parents to stop feeding students unhealthy food.

Principal Ben Matthews said parents should provide their kids with a packed lunch or to order from the school canteen.

'Lately a significant number of parents have been delivering fast food to the school for their child's lunch. This includes McDonalds, KFC etc,' Mr Matthews wrote on social media.

'Please note that as of today we are no longer accepting these deliveries.'

A parent of a Canley Vale student said 'the kids love' fast food.

'McDonald's is commercial junk and shouldn't be at school,' the parent told the Daily Telegraph.

Parenting expert Dr Justin Coulson said parents had a responsibility to provide their children with a healthy lunch.

'This doesn't seem like it in the interest of the children at all,' he said.

Nutritionist Joel Ferren said parents should be providing their children with packed lunches including sandwiches, salads, fruit, vegetables, eggs and yoghurt.

A New South Wales Department of Education spokesman said students were advised about making healthy choices at school.

'Canley Vale Public School promotes healthy eating and active lifestyles. As such, it has requested parents not deliver fast food to the school,' the spokesman said. 

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