I remember how it was -- JR
What About Ditching College?
It seems that more high school students and their parents are coming to terms with the fact that not everyone has to go to college. A few years ago, many parents assumed the only question for their child after high school was which college to attend. Now, the after-graduation question is whether to attend college at all.
The number of students going directly from high school to college in 2020 dropped 21% from the prior year. Many high school graduates chose to work or pursue other endeavors over taking and paying for a year of college on their laptop.
This drop was due in large part to COVID and our poor management of the pandemic. Other trends indicate that this turn away from college is not an aberration but perhaps an opportunity for us to free ourselves of the damaging idea that a costly college education is a must in our society.
“Are you going to college?” “Where did you go to college?” “What did you study in college?” Ever been peppered with these questions? It is endemic in our country to assume that everyone is going, has been, or aspires to go to college. Having a college degree is portrayed as a Wonka ticket that magically opens career doors and feeds you gobs of money and success. It’s far from it.
It’s hard to know when our nation’s cultural obsession with college began. Maybe in the 1990s, when co-President Hillary Clinton openly mused that every child should have the chance to go to college. But it’s evident now that colleges and universities and lenders see public high schools as little more than feed stations for the higher education industry. The people who enroll in college are called students, but they’re really customers. The academics want to indoctrinate them in the leftist agenda. The administrators want to expand the campus to attract new clients. The lenders want to put financial hooks into them that stick for decades.
In a recent poll of people who have graduated from college in the last five years, 19% said they were under-qualified for their first job. Over half had not applied to an entry-level job in their field because they felt unqualified.
Additionally, three out of every eight students who started college will drop out before completing their degree. And a Gallup poll from last year revealed that 45% of parents want to see more non-college options for their children.
Armed with these and other dismal facts, parents and potential students must ask themselves: What’s it all for? College doesn’t guarantee success and happiness, nor does a lack of college guarantee failure and misery. Far from it. Furthermore, high school students stand as good a chance at success in learning a trade and going straight to work — and without the massive debt that cripples the economic lives of so many college graduates.
The college bubble’s been ready to burst for a while. The economic value of a college education was already dropping before COVID. Enrollment is dropping and the costs are growing to unsustainable levels, but the higher education industry still believes it can keep things going.
Colleges are lowering the hurdles of entry for less academically qualified students. This is framed as reaching out to “underrepresented populations,” and it gives institutions something to brag about when they solicit donations from alumni networks and Pell grants from the federal government. By the way, doubling the Pell grant is one of Joe Biden’s line items in next year’s budget. Of course, exclusivity in obtaining a quality education is one of college’s selling points. If anyone can get in, exclusivity goes away. Or, as Syndrome put it in “The Incredibles,” “If everyone is special, no one is.”
Colleges are cutting costs in other areas as well: trimming staff, getting faculty to take pay cuts and take on a larger student load, and, of course, raising tuition. In the end, though, it’s all about enrolling students. Enrolled students are paying students. And that’s all colleges and universities really care about.
Remember: Higher education is neither a public service nor a prerequisite to a better life. It’s a business. And not everyone is required to be a consumer. The pathway to success is wide and varied, and it may indeed run through a college campus. But it certainly doesn’t have to.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/87479-what-about-ditching-college-2022-04-07
*************************************************NY State is holding NYC’s schoolchildren hostage
The Legislature got its way, keeping renewal of mayoral control of New York City public schools out of this year’s budget, leaving the issue to the rest of the session in a juvenile slap at Mayor Eric Adams. When will they stop playing games with children’s futures?
Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul had pushed for a four-year extension of mayoral control along with the budget. It’s really a no-brainer, since no one seriously argues that defaulting back to the old, unaccountable city Board of Education would be an improvement — and any transition would leave the system in limbo for weeks if not months.
Control should be permanent: The main hostility to mayoral control stems from the United Federation of Teachers, whose power prospered under the BOE.
But the Legislature enjoys making mayors come crawling every few years to beg lawmakers to do the right thing and/or to bribe the UFT with wage hikes or other concessions to give its Albany puppets the go-ahead.
This year, Adams also peeved the leadership with his truth-telling on the urgent need for fixes to their recent criminal-justice reforms: They insist their work was near-perfect and get hissy at suggestions that it paved the way for soaring crime. (Spoiler: It did.)
It surely didn’t help that Adams has also said he wants to slash the city’s bureaucracy, putting unionized jobs at risk (public-employee unions all hold great sway in the Legislature). And he and Chancellor David Banks mean to do the same with the school system, where they also intend to institute serious measures of accountability, further enraging the UFT.
Perhaps worst for the teachers union, Adams is friendly to charter schools, and Banks even ran one. That’s a major threat to all adult interests that feed off the public schools.
It’s also a reminder of why mayoral control is so vital. Adams, who won without the UFT’s blessing, is free to choose what’s best for the kids, not for Mike Mulgrew’s union. (Indeed, he’s already faced down the UFT by refusing to even think about school closures over the phantom Omicron threat.)
Again, it’s unlikely the Legislature will risk disaster by letting mayoral control lapse. But its leaders are all too likely to demand concessions to serve the special interests, leaving the system’s future in doubt for weeks or months.
Yes, New York’s top lawmakers are so small-minded as to leave the fate of nearly a million schoolchildren in limbo simply to cut down to size a mayor they deem uppity. We’d call it shameful, but they plainly have no shame.
https://nypost.com/2022/04/07/albany-is-holding-nycs-schoolchildren-hostage/
*******************************************************Biden's Student Loan Decision Contradicts His Bragging About the Economy
As Madeline reported earlier on Wednesday, the Biden administration is set to extend the government's pause on student loan repayments to the end of August after previously extending the "relief" targeted at those who have federal student loans.
As The AP noted, "Democrats on education panels in the House and Senate recently urged President Joe Biden to extend the moratorium through the end of the year, citing continued economic upheaval." But...the White House has been bragging about how effective Biden's Build Back Better agenda is and how the country is doing better than ever?
Not so, according to members of Biden's party in Congress:
Sen. Patty Murray said more time is needed to help Americans prepare for repayment and to rethink the government’s existing system for repaying student debt.
“It is ruining lives and holding people back,” she said in a statement last month. “Borrowers are struggling with rising costs, struggling to get their feet back under them after public health and economic crises, and struggling with a broken student loan system — and all this is felt especially hard by borrowers of color.”
Once again, the White House's spin on economic data doesn't match reality for Americans, nor does it match the rest of the Biden administration's actions. Democrats on Capitol Hill and even the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis are warning that "[s]erious delinquency rates for student debt could snap back from historic lows to their previous highs in which 10% or more of the debt was past due" if student loan payments are restarted.
Compare what congressional Democrats and others have said with what Biden said just five days ago following the release of March's jobs report from the Department of Labor:
Americans are back to work. And that’s good news for millions of families who have a little more breathing room and the dignity that comes from earning a paycheck — just the dignity of having a job.
And more and more Americans get jobs — as they do, it’s going to help to ease the supply pressures we’ve seen. And that’s good news for fighting inflation, it’s good news for our economy, and it means that our economy has gone from being on the mend to being on the move.
On the move, huh? If the American economy is now done being mended, in Biden's mind, why are pandemic response measures being extended another three months? "Our policies are working," Biden also claimed on Friday. "And we’re getting results for the American people...Record job creation. Record unemployment declines. Record wage gains...People are making more money. They’re finding better jobs," Biden said.
Of course, his claims don't match reality and are undercut if not discredited by his administration's decision to extend student loan forbearance. The American people already know that wage gains are entirely erased by inflation that has left them, on average, with a two percent drop in real wages in the last year. The jobs supposedly created are really just jobs that are being recovered — and the economy is still not back where it was before the pandemic started.
Biden's decision to extend the pause on student loan repayment is an admission of sorts that Biden's economic agenda hasn't achieved the goals his campaign promised. But that doesn't stop the White House from continuing its furious spin to try and claim victory ahead of the midterms. President Biden and his aides either think the American people are too naive to know better or too simple-minded to see the glaring contradiction between what the White House says and what the White House does.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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