Thursday, March 12, 2020



Coed Receives 'Onslaught' of Hate, 'Threats of Violence' for Saying Socialism More Dangerous Than COVID-19

Given that socialism has killed roughly 25,000 times more people than the COVID-19 coronavirus has, and that there are a lot more people pushing for socialism than there are for COVID-19, it might seem uncontroversial to insist that socialism is more dangerous than COVID-19. Except for a very few radical environmentalists, COVID-19 doesn't exactly have anyone cheering it on. Socialism, despite its massive death toll, still enjoys millions of adherents and proponents, many right here in the USA.

Most alarmingly, you'll find them clustered on our college campuses, where you'd think that people would be smart enough and well-informed enough to understand that 100,000,000 (deaths due to socialism) is a much bigger number than 4,000 (deaths due to COVID-19). But of course you wouldn't actually think that, because as a devoted consumer of news, you're undoubtedly aware that our former institutions of higher learning have become hotbeds of dangerous silliness.

That's why University of Chicago student Evita Duffy found her physical safety under threat for having had the gall to publicly state the obvious to the willfully oblivious.

The university's Institute of Politics ran an Instagram campaign last week, giving students a chance to fill in the blank after "I vote because..." Duffy can be seen in the video holding a sign that says, "I vote because the coronavirus won't destroy America, but socialism will."

You can probably guess what happened next, but it was serious enough that Duffy -- who describes herself as a conservative Hispanic woman -- had to take it public with an op-ed in the student paper. She wrote that she hoped her "vote" message might "encourage a lively and robust debate on economics," but instead she received an "onslaught of online hate and threats of violence" from her tolerant, progressive friends.

She continues:

Fellow students attacked my character, my intellect, my family, my appearance, and even threatened me with physical violence, using foul and offensive language. I was called a racist and a xenophobe. Some compared me to animals. Others declared that they would personally stop me from voting, and many defended the personal attacks, saying I deserved to be bullied and that I don’t belong at the University of Chicago on account of my beliefs. I was told by many that I was the most hated person on campus. It was frightening. It was also hurtful, since some of the attacks came from people I considered friends.

It gets worse. Duffy says one commenter warned she should have to face "a brick wall," which is clearly a euphemism for summary execution, something at which socialists excel. They also told her she must "support a movement [socialism] that eliminates violence on a systemic level or face the consequences."

I'll let you try and wrap your head around that sentence while I pour myself a shot of something strong. Needless to say, claiming that you're eliminating violence on a systemic level by threatening with violence everyone who doesn't go along...

...you need a drink, too?

But these are deeply stupid times we live in, and we could use more smart souls like Evita Duffy to combat the stupid.

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On Collegiate Death and Dying

Recently, Concordia College in Portland, Oregon announced it was closing its doors at the end of this academic year. This was shocking to many in the Portland community and beyond, and has led to probable class action litigation from students arguing they were deceived by the school that failed to warn them of the impending death of the institution.

Concordia seemingly had done all the right things. It was a small school that over the last decade introduced several popular new programs, including a law school in Boise, Idaho and a program in homeland security, leading enrollments to expand to about 7,000 students by 2014. It promoted online offerings for an adult audience. Yet it had mounting expenses, partly related to companies helping it market and promote its online programs. An Inside Higher Ed article by Rick Seltzer shows it lost an extraordinary $11 million in 2017. From 2015 to 2019, revenues fell nearly 40% as the school started facing steep enrollment declines. The Lutheran Church bailed out Concordia for several years, but finally said, in effect, “enough is enough.”

Concordia in Portland (as distinct from the Minnesota-based Concordia) is, of course, far from unique. Many other private colleges such as Green Mountain (Vermont), Sweet Briar (Virginia) and Hampshire (Massachusetts) have either closed or barely stayed open after announcing plans to close. Most (Sweet Briar is a partial exception) lacked a significant endowment cushion to help cushion the school from unanticipated enrollment losses.

Even more precipitous declines have occurred in the for-profit sector, where schools like the University of Phoenix used to have hundreds of thousands of enrollees, and many have gone out of business or have been drastically changed (Kaplan, for example, is now owned by public Purdue University and run as Purdue Global).

But the private schools are far from the only endangered species in higher education. Small public universities living in the shadows of more prominent (and often wealthier) state universities have been particularly vulnerable. Take the 14 schools comprising the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education. Total enrollment in these schools dropped more than 20% from 2010 to 2019. Moreover, the drop has been highly uneven. West Chester University’s enrollment is up, but six of the schools have had enrollment declines of 32% or more: Cheyney (the oldest historically black American college or university), Mansfield, Lock Haven, Edinboro, Clarion, and the large Indiana University of Pennsylvania, which lost nearly 4,800 students. Several of these schools are on life support or approaching intensive care. Cheyney was on probation until recently from its regional accrediting agency.

The problem is equally acute in the industrial Midwest. Southern Illinois University at Carbondale had more than 24,000 students in 1990. Now it is a shadow of its former self, with fewer than half that number of students.

As I have said before: there is a massive flight to quality in higher education. As students realize that a college degree is not a guaranteed path to vocational success, schools where students often drop out or end up getting desultory low-paying jobs are being avoided, while the selective admission schools are flourishing. Harvard, Northwestern and Stanford are not facing enrollment problems.

What is the solution? We are probably over-invested in higher education, and Schumpeterian creative destruction of schools will continue until we have fewer viable institutions and students, especially fewer ones majoring in topics that are politically correct but vocationally highly questionable: who wants to hire majors in gender studies?

Schools in serious decline face a moral dilemma. If they do not make their financial and enrollment situation transparent and clear to all applying, they could be considered guilty of deception or fraud. Yet advertising their weaknesses reduces applications even further—hastening their demise. Thus schools in distress hype their few strengths, hide weaknesses, and perhaps desperately try new programs or features for students (Esport centers, for example).

It is no wonder that the average tenure of college presidents has fallen sharply in recent times, to under five years. Running a university in this environment of falling enrollment is tough, perhaps legitimatizing the rapid increase in salaries of top university executives observed in modern times.

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Australian universities must be brought to book on funding

For waste and perverse incentives it’s hard to go past the nation’s 39 universities, which, recent events notwithstanding, wallow in billions­ of taxpayer dollars.

As productivity growth and graduate starting salaries stagnate, it’s time to question whether reforms­ to higher education have worked in the interests of tax­payers and students.

They’ve certainly worked in the interests of universities, whose swol­len bureaucracies have be­come­ ground zero for highly paid BS jobs in “strategy, engagement, culture” et cetera. Almost 60 per cent of the 120,000 staff at our universities are administrators, rather than teachers or researchers.

Direct commonwealth funding for universities has more than doubled since 2009, when the Labor government removed a cap on publicly funded places, to about $9.8bn this financial year.

An even bigger problem is the surging take-up of Higher Educa­tion Loan Program loans, whose number exploded from 308,000 in 2010 to 522,000 in 2015. From 2010 to last year the stock of outstanding HELP loans soared from less than $20bn to more than $62bn.

Taxpayers are making huge losses on these loans — only $75 in every $100 is expected to be repaid. That means many graduates, who have to begin paying loans back when their incomes rise above about $46,000 a year, aren’t earning­ enough to do so.

The Parliamentary Budget Office­ warned in 2016 that the cost to the budget of these loans would rise to about $11bn a year by 2025 — more than double the budget surplus pencilled in for this financial year.

For all the deluge of public funds, little was done to ensure quality control. Many academics concede privately that standards have fallen — grade inflation is rife and there is pressure to pass stud­ents, especially from overseas.

That’s not surprising given more of the population is being pushed into university education, when the students and the economy might be ultimately better served by an alternative vocational career. Economist Andrew Stone offers­ two excellent ideas for improving value for money in his new book Restoring Hope, a must-read for anyone sick of hearing vague calls for “reform” without specifics.

Universities should have more skin in the game, he argues. At the moment they enjoy direct and indirec­t taxpayer funding, via HELP loans and grants to universities, without having to worry too much about whether students and taxpayers benefit.

If universities want to be “businesses”, they should have to accept risks like businesses do.

“The current financing system gives universities a large financial incentive to enrol students who academically ought not to be there, and by failing to impose any accountability for whether or not these students actually receive any benefit from their studies,” Stone writes.

Put unis themselves on the hook, in part, for students debts. HELP loans would become joint loans, under Stone’s plan. Universities would be required to pay an annual interest charge on loans that weren’t being repaid. This would focus the minds of univer­sity administrators on the quality of their courses and the wisdom of enrolling students who are likely to benefit little from them.

Second, the government should oversee a standard set of tests accessible to all that people could use to demonstrate their literac­y and numeracy to employers — and far more cheaply and quickly than slogging through a three-year arts degree.

University is mainly about signal­ling one’s ability to employers compared to others, and too often not about learning anything vocationally useful. Employers can’t simply ask job candidates how good they are.

Sure, students with degrees tend to earn more than those ­without them, but that has little to do with what they have actually been taught at university. Anyone can sit in university lectures, for free, and binge on knowledge for as long as they want. But without the piece of paper at the end, it’s all, vocationally speaking, a waste of time.

“Young people feel the need to obtain tertiary qualifications — potentially spending several years in further study, accruing sizeable debts and forgoing substantial earnings — even though the training they receive is of little or no value, either educationally or in terms of specific job skills ­acquired,” Stone says.

In economic language, a big chunk of university study is consumpt­ion, not investment.

Each year, samples of graduat­ing students from all 39 univer­sities should also be required to sit these new, standard tests, so university grades could be compared consistently. Public and private high schools are already subject to similar quality control through ­national standard tests.

Outside narrow disciplines such as medicine, it’s hard to see how much of what is taught at universi­ty today is useful for any occupation. The vast bulk of graduate jobs, which are typically white-collar, require skills that are learned on the job.

Universities, understandably, will recoil at these two ideas, but they are both very much in the interests of the broader community. Especially as the economy turns down, we can’t afford to keep mindless shovelling scarce resources — both money and people — at universities.

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