In this EconLog post, George Mason University economics professor Bryan Caplan observes that the “college earnings premium” is said to be 34%, but that the “marriage premium” for men is substantially higher — 44%. So if it is good policy to promote college attendance and graduation because people will earn more, why not do the same for marriage? The “marriage premium” helps to show the silliness of the notion that just because someone does something (getting a college degree, getting married), he will therefore vault into a higher earnings bracket.
Read this piece in yesterday’s IHE, and see if you can believe it.
Apparently, a D of Ed statistical study was conducted to examine the impact of race as a factor in student loan default rate, and results were published accordingly. One small problem emerged inadvertantly last December however when, as part of the discovery process in litigation involving the department, it turned out that the study had omitted any data with regard to black students.
Now, let’s note slowly, carefully and specifically what happened here: 1) the US Department of Education conducted a survey in which it sought to demonstrate the impact of race on repayment rates of student loans and 2) it reached its conclusions without including any figures about black students in the analysis. I think I’ve got it right.
One of the commenters noted that a private business enterprise might well face criminal charges for work like this, while several others suggested that the missing data were deliberately excluded because the results would have been politically inconvenient.
At the very least, the episode doesn’t leave you brimming with confidence about the D of Ed’s capacity to produce reliable and accurate quantitative work, especially if it’s going to figure in their rating of individual programs’ eligibility for student loans.
Looks as if Secretary Duncan had better mandate some crash remediation in statistical analysis for his data crunchers, eh?
What exactly is “bullying?” I once thought I knew, but that was long, long ago and far, far away. I could never be quite precise, but I wouldn’t have thought that the idea comprehended activity like eye-rolling, “teasing” or criticizing politicians online.
Well, get ready, because as CEI’s Hans Bader argues here, there’s a whole host of eager anti-bullying enforcers who haven’t yet found any limits to “bullying,” and they aim to protect us from a purported epidemic that’s sweeping the country.
Most of what Bader describes comes from the K-12 context, although even there, he indicates that some major concerns have arisen with respect to freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
But you just know that it can’t be very long before the anti-bullying bullies show up on college campuses already awash in sensitivity training, speech and harassment codes, kangaroo-court judicial procedures, anonymous accusations and knee-jerk administrations eager to jump in head first. You can easily imagine how the “anti-bullying” surge is likely to play out in this environment.
Word came late yesterday that the US Supreme Court had unanimously reversed three lower-court decisions ordering Texas to reconfigure in-state legislative boundaries along racial lines. Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity expalins the specifics here. As he notes, it’s beyond irony that the 1965 Voting Rights Act, intended to outlaw racial segregation once and for all, was invoked in these cases to effectively mandate it.
Although this decision is not directly concerned with academic matters, it’s obviously of interest to us in light of another Texas case, Fisher v. Texas, for which we’ve signed onto an amicus brief petitioning the SC to reverse a lower court’s upholding the use of race-based admissions in the University of Texas. To date, the SC has not granted certiorari, and you can’t assume that because the court issued this decision today, it will follow suit and accept the Fisher appeal tomorrow.
Still, we’re moderately hopeful that the court will do so, and reverse or at least trim back its unfortunate ruling in the 2003 Grutter case, which was not a good day for opponents of racial preferences.
Legal education, with its ever heftier tuition, is getting a hard critical look from those in the know these days, and here’s a couple of them who don’t like what they see at all.
In this piece, Hans Bader of the Competitive Enterprise Institute describes how trendy ideologies, such as feminism, “critical legal studies” or globalization have displaced traditional legal subjects such as property or torts, leaving law school graduates unprepared for their bar exams and actual legal practice.
Over at Minding the Campus, Charlotte Allen examines the growing controversy over allegations that law schools, even some in the top-tier, have been fudging job-placement statistics with respect to their recent graduates, many of whom end up stuck with debts of 100K or more.
As Bader has argued previously, it may be past time to think about abandoning the current iron-clad requirement that all candidates for the bar exam must first obtain a law degree. All of that steep tuition, only to find out that your “legal education” hasn’t prepared you anyway? As he concludes, there’s got to be another way, and I have to think that a lot recent law graduates would agree.
That’s the title of this review over at Phi Beta Cons by NAS board member Thomas Lindsay.
It assesses The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why it Matters, a new book by Benjamin Ginsberg also reviewed last August by Peter Wood at this site.
What catches Lindsay’s eye is the role of administrative expansion in driving up the costs of higher education, as layer upon layer of managerial types continue to proliferate, even in times of budgetary shortfalls.
In this essay on Minding the Campus, emeritus professor Robert Weissberg delivers a powerful indictment of the idea embraced by the American Political Science Association that knowledge is race-based and political science must adapt by changing its standards.
This shows just how far the race hustlers have gone in (as Tom Wolfe put it) “mau-mauing” the American university.
You can watch our Illinois affiliate president Jonathan Bean here, as he discusses the role of business in breaking down racial barriers.
Jonathan is professor of history at Southern Illinois University, where he has frequently defended academic freedom and free speech.
His newest book is the anthology Race & Liberty in America.
Candace de Russy notes at Phi Beta Cons that Columbia has dropped a course from its list of Spring offerings that would have been devoted to the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Apparently, this was proposed, and would have been taught by, an enthusiastic supporter of OWS. What’s the annual tuition at Columbia? It’s an Ivy League school, right?
With Candace, I’m glad that this “course” has been axed. But I’m still marveling that it was ever allowed to fly in the first place.
So we read in this piece in today’s IHE, where our Beach Books reports for 2010 and 2011 were the topic of conversation, often sympathetic. If you haven’t yet seen these two studies, take a look here and here.
In brief, both reports survey the Common Readings which entering freshman have been asked to read over the summer, in preparation for their first semester college. With few exceptions, it’s been pretty thin stuff: overwhelmingly contemporary, intellectually vapid and heavily freighted with politically correct thematic material. It’s encouraging to read that so many at the MLA gathering apparently think that something’s wrong as well.
Kudos to NAS Communications Director Ashley Thorne, whose Herculean research labors made both studies possible.
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