Tag: education

Theft by bureaucrat

Keep this in mind the next time a bond issue comes up for a vote:

Cities and states across the country are using money designated for specific purposes—such as fixing roads or sewers—in order to fill financial holes elsewhere, according to public officials and records. The moves are exposing municipalities to controversy, as federal regulators and local auditors are more heavily scrutinizing their finances to protect bond buyers and taxpayers.

This isn’t exactly new. When voters pass a school bond, they usually do so under the impression that the school will hire more teachers or buy computers. But, as has increasingly been the case over the last three decades, the school districts are hiring employees with no teaching function, to such an extent that half of all public school employees now are not teachers.

The corruption in America is both endemic and structural. This was probably the most shocking thing I realized after moving to Europe, where the corruption is more readily recognized and apparent. It wasn’t that there was more corruption, but that it was only a different form of it.

The amusing thing is the notion, popular among bureaucrats, that it isn’t stealing if you put it back after you get caught. “The city is cooperating fully with the investigation,” said Ivan Harris, an attorney at Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP who is representing Miami in the SEC matter. He said the city “stands by the accounting for the transfers” because some of the funds had been unused for their designated purposes and other funds were replaced.

I’m surprised more bank robbers don’t give that excuse a whirl.

Republicans: the debate summary

Stephen Green renders it unnecessary for anyone to actually watch the debate:

6:09PM From Twitter: Explain and Co-opt Occupy Wall Street.

6:10PM Cain: Get a job, you filthy hippies.

I paraphrase, but not by much.

6:11PM Paul: “Cain has blamed the victims.” And then something about the Federal Reseve and bubbles and SQUAWK SQUAWK SQUAWK SQUAWK.

6:11PM There were wild cheers, a few, to the chicken part.

6:12PM Paul: “I work on the assumption” that government is bad at almost everything.

And now I relove him.

This is the difference between a man who understands the core principles involved and a man who has absolutely no idea why things are the way they presently are. According to the principles of the international free traders and the Wall Street supporters, the jobs those “filthy hippies” should be pursuing are now in Korea, India, and China. The problem is that there are no shortage of highly educated, less expensive Koreans, Indians, and Chinese available to work those jobs.

Many young Americans went into debt, and were heavily encouraged to go into debt, in order to obtain unnecessary degrees for nonexistent jobs. Given that I was one of the first media figures to publicly call into question the value of a college education while many readers on this very blog argued vociferously against the anti-college case I was presenting, it is astonishing that so many people suddenly want to blame the young college graduates for believing in the inflated value of a college education and doing exactly what they were expected and instructed to do.

Education and the Iron Law

In which millions of university students are going to learn that they should have taken economics in high school:

MILLIONS of school-leavers in the rich world are about to bid a tearful goodbye to their parents and start a new life at university. Some are inspired by a pure love of learning. But most also believe that spending three or four years at university—and accumulating huge debts in the process—will boost their chances of landing a well-paid and secure job….

The supply of university graduates is increasing rapidly. The Chronicle of Higher Education calculates that between 1990 and 2007 the number of students going to university increased by 22% in North America, 74% in Europe, 144% in Latin America and 203% in Asia. In 2007 150m people attended university around the world, including 70m in Asia.

It’s not rocket science. If supply is increasing faster than demand, then wages for university graduates are going down even as tuitions rise. Any given university degree may or may not still be worth buying, but it is as stupid to attempt to determine if going to college today is worth it or not based on your experience of 20 years ago as it is to think you’re going to get a gallon of gas for $1.14. Value isn’t merely subjective, it’s dynamic.

Supply, demand, and education

It is ironic indeed that those who make a fetish of education are themselves so badly educated that the are unaware of the Law of Supply and Demand. It genuinely appears to surprise them that increasing the supply of university graduates would lower the value of a university degree.

More than a quarter of graduates do not have a full-time job three and a half years after leaving university. A staggering 115,000 youngsters who graduated in 2007 have been consigned to the unemployment scrapheap, lumbered with a dead-end part-time job or are still in education, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA).

The research will raise serious questions about the value of getting a degree when tuition fees increase from £3,290 to £9,000 next year…. It follows a study last week which revealed that one in five graduates earns less than a person who left school with as little as one A-level.

There is no question about it. The value of getting a degree declines with every additional degree that is granted. And as the number of less educated, more highly skilled workers declines, their value will increase. Furthermore, the expansion in the number of university graduates has coincided, unsurprisingly, with a significant decline in the quality of the educations they have received.

Those well-educated atheists

There goes another atheist claim. It turns out that the areligious in Britain are the least likely to go to to college:

A study of more than 13,000 young people found that 77 per cent of those who described themself as Hindu at the age of 15 went on to higher education, compared with 45 per cent of Christians. Some 63 per cent of Sikh teenagers and 53 per cent of Muslims went on to study at university, but just 32 per cent of those who had no religion at 15 undertook higher education.

This is, of course, further evidence in my point about the two churches of atheism. I expect that the college attendance rate of High Church self-identified atheists will be higher than the Christian rate, and perhaps even as high as the Hindu rate. It’s all about the restrictions on the group selected. No doubt the rate of Hindu college attendance is rather lower in India, where most Hindus actually live, than in Britain, where the Hindus are a small and self-selected group.

This is why it’s always necessary to pay attention to the Atheist Dance. When they want to talk up their numbers, they refer to Low Church “no religion”. When they want to talk up their objective qualities, they refer to High Church self-identified atheism. It’s rather like making a distinction between Christians and Catholics. The latter is a subset of the former.

The end of the public school

It is becoming increasingly difficult for parents with even a vestigial respect for traditional morality to sentence their children for 12 years of gay and feminist propaganda complemented by intellectual lobotomization:

Public schools in California will be required to teach students about the contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans starting Jan. 1 after Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday signed a controversial bill to add the topic to the social sciences curriculum. Textbooks now must include information on the role of LGBT Americans, as well as Americans with disabilities, though California’s budget crisis has delayed the purchasing of new books until at least 2015….

Gay rights advocates said they will be vigilant about making sure schools across California comply.

Again and again, the wicked are forced to learn the hard way that the fact that God is slow to anger does not mean that He can be safely mocked. I wouldn’t be surprised if those gay textbooks are never printed.

It’s certainly informative to know that in a time of educational crisis, when many California schoolchildren can’t read, write, or even speak English, they will be well-trained to serve as fodder for the California chickenhawks.

Ten years ago, I argued that the public school system should be outlawed, the school buildings dismantled, and the grounds sown with salt. I suspect that not a few of those who disagreed with me then are finally beginning to come around and realize that the purpose of public school is not education.

Uprooting the intellectual cancer

Even Stanley Fish, the leading academic writer at the New York Times, admits that there is a solid case to be made for eliminating academic tenure:

Tenure, like academic freedom, depends on a certain picture of what goes on in college and university classrooms — high-level discussions tied to cutting edge research into intellectual problems. Tenure protects the freedom of instructors to engage in such research. But in many classrooms, dedicated to vocational or corporate or political goals, that’s not what’s going on, and the instructors who preside over those classrooms need neither academic freedom nor tenure. Only those engaged in the “search for ultimate truths” do.

But wait (I mimic the key moment in late-night infomercials), there’s more. So-called “advanced researchers,” who by this argument alone merit academic freedom and tenure, are churning out work with no connection to a real social need. Riley quotes approvingly the judgment of educational theorist Richard Vedder: “…most of the research done to earn tenure is darn near useless. On any rational cost-benefit analysis, the institution of tenure has led to the publication of hundreds of thousands of papers that are … read by a dozen people.”

So it turns out that the very people who, under traditional definitions and standards, would be protected by academic freedom and tenure, shouldn’t be in colleges and university classrooms in the first place because they are selfishly pursuing their own narrow interests and contributing little to the well-being of either students or society.

Given that the entire concept of classroom education is outdated, it is abundantly clear that there is no justification for tenure, especially since the vast majority of “research” being produced is entirely useless. A bankrupt nation will not benefit from forcing young people to go into lifetime debt servitude in order to finance upper middle-class lives for a small number of aging intellectuals who have historically done more harm than good.

Debt, not equity

Aligning Compensation Incentives in Higher Education: Is Higher Education Debt or Equity?

It’s debt. You can’t sell a degree or use it as collateral. So, it’s debt… or more precisely, it’s a set of wildly overpriced consumer services that is marketed as a product and is usually paid for with a particularly onerous form of debt. So, however you want to describe it, “equity” isn’t a reasonable way to do so. Sweet Black’s, but how I despise lawyers. They are very seldom anywhere nearly as clever as they would like to believe themselves to be.

The debt police

It’s interesting to see how the education sector is one that is leading the move towards debt-based totalitarianism. Student loans are about the only loans that aren’t discharged by bankruptcy, and I tend to doubt that the Department of Education’s SWAT teams (!?!) are going to be invading any homes over unpaid credit card debts:

Kenneth Wright does not have a criminal record and he had no reason to believe a S.W.A.T team would be breaking down his door at 6 a.m. on Tuesday.

“I look out of my window and I see 15 police officers,” Wright said. Wright came downstairs in his boxer shorts as the officers team barged through his front door. Wright said an officer grabbed him by the neck and led him outside on his front lawn. “He had his knee on my back and I had no idea why they were there,” Wright said….

Wright said he later went to the mayor and Stockton Police Department, but the city of Stockton had nothing to do with Wright’s search warrant. The U.S. Department of Education issued the search and called in S.W.A.T for his wife’s defaulted student loans.

This raises numerous questions:

1. Why is the U.S. Department of Education permitted to issue warrants or call SWAT teams?

2. Why would the SWAT team assault an individual who is not responsible for the debts?

3. Upon which specific date was America pronounced dead?

If this doesn’t convince you that the U.S. Constitution is dead, America is dead, and we are watching the galvanic twitchings of a corpse, I don’t know what will. Personally, I’m rather looking forward to the first press conference by the Department of Education explaining why they accidentally killed an old woman who never went to college over the unpaid student loans of some clueless wonder with a useless college degree.

Of course, the youfs are so utterly stupid that even events like this won’t slow down the rate at which they are applying for student loans. Because an education is the best investment anyone can possibly make….

Homeschool or die vol. 7

If any other activity was this directly connected to increasing the teen mortality rate, it would be illegal:

Every two hours, a teenager in America takes his or her own life. Suicide is the third leading cause of death among youth, and the rate of teen suicide has roughly tripled since 1960…. Scientists have identified many contributing factors: Discrimination, the number of sexual partners, substance abuse, being dumped by a romantic partner, parental divorce, child physical and sexual abuse, bullying and even excessive video-gaming play a role. Scholars at the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center have offered a novel contributing factor to teen suicide: high school.

In a careful and persuasive paper released last fall called “Back to School Blues: Seasonality of Youth Suicide and the Academic Calendar,” Benjamin Hansen and Matthew Lang point out that suicides for 14- to 18-year-olds drop abruptly during June, July and August.

“The decrease in suicides for 14- to 18-year-olds during the summer months is stark, while the 19- to 25-year-olds see a slight rise in suicide rates during the summer,” the authors point out. “The fact that 15- to 18-year-old suicide rates decrease in the summer, but the 19-year-old suicide does not, suggests that the high-school calendar is playing a prominent role in youth suicide,” they conclude.

Given that the summer vacation reduces the teen suicide rate from 6.22 per 100,000 to 4.71, this means that banning public school would save 1,092 lives per year. This is far more lives than can be saved by most of the usual actions advocated by the save-the-children crowd. Since we are so often told that various laws are justified if just one child’s life is saved, and we also know that homeschooling is an academically superior method of education, how can anyone possibly argue in good conscience that eliminating the public schools is not an imminent moral imperative?

Banning public school will save more children’s lives on an annual basis than every vaccination program put together, in fact, it would save more children’s lives than seatbelt laws and child safety seats. Banning public school, or at least barring public school attendance after sixth grade, would reduce the third leading cause of youth death by 25 percent. And let’s face it, it’s not as if they’re even learning how to read or do math there anyhow.