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Some excellent colleges that teach not only academics, but also morals and values: Pensacola Christian College, P.O. Box 18000, Pensacola, FL 32523-9160 (http://www.pcci.edu/) 800-PCC-INFO (800-722-4636). Email: info@PCCinfo.com Patrick Henry College, One Patrick Henry Circle, Purcellville, VA 20132 (http://www.phc.edu/) 540-338-1776. Email: admissions@phc.edu Is a college degree required for success? Professors seemed to have only two things in common: they were personally ambitious, and they had renounced religion. Universities are our great fall, The 19th century (Age of Enlightenment/Romanticism) and the early 20th century (Progressive Era) saw the ascendancy of the academy, colleges, universities, higher education. With the academy came its attendant associations where the intellectual class, especially since the 1950s and 1960s, increasingly sought to cement its newly exalted position as the controller of society and dictator of culture. Solidifying its education monopoly, the academic class over time would control the very gates of higher education, admissions, course requirements, degree offerings, graduation, licensing, college accreditation, degree certification, tenure – the very access to success in this life. Many people believe that to be "successful" in today's society, one must have a degree. Yet, did you know, dear reader, that long before the academic bureaucracy became entrenched in society ordinary people did extraordinary things without degrees? For example, as late as 1954 there was a man that sat on the Supreme Court of the United States that not only never graduated from a prestigious law school, he only had one year of law school under his belt. He had no judicial experience, yet his legal mind was so superior to his contemporaries, FDR tapped him to become a justice on the Supreme Court (1941), and Truman four years later appointed him to be chief prosecutor for the U.S. at the Nuremberg Trials (1945-46). That man was Robert H. Jackson. Other justices of the Supreme Court were appointed without graduating from law school or taking the bar exam (Benjamin Cardozo) or who lacked impressive judicial experience (Frank Murphy), the latter a lowly circuit court judge from Michigan before he was appointed to the high court by FDR. But how can this be? In art, the correlation between a college degree and artistic genius are nil. As a matter of fact, there appears to be a reverse correlation between not going to art school or getting an art degree with artistic excellence. None of the greatest artists, sculptors or architects whose works we revere today had a "degree" – not Galileo, Rembrandt, Rodin, Bonticelli, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Van Gogh, Manet, Monet, Goya, Picasso, etc. None went to what we today call "art school" or received a degree in "art studies," yet they were able to exercise their gifts without paying homage to some irrelevant, bureaucratic association or certification board that incidentally knows absolutely nothing about who or what makes transcendent art. In classical music, the same is true all of the greatest composers and musicians whose music transcends art, including Josquin, Palestrina, Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Berlioz, Brahms, Schumann, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Chopin, Wagner, Richard Strauss, Schoenberg and Berg. None graduated from a "school of music" or received a degree in composition, music performance, music education or music business, yet they ascended the very steps of Parnassus in music, and they were able to exercise their gifts without paying homage to some self-aggrandizing, bureaucratic association or certification board who with Pharisee-like fanaticism guard the portals of the academy, to graduate schools and thus to prestigious universities, well heeled positions in society and economic success, affluence and notoriety. This monopoly over the mind of We the People by the academy through higher education must be deconstructed. When an honorary Ph.D. degree was granted to Benjamin Franklin (one of the greatest inventors of the 18th century and a high school dropout), he later wrote in his autobiography that he was loath to publicly acknowledge that honor despite the fact he did path-breaking work in physics and invented bifocals, the odometer, the lighting rod, electricity and many other great innovations we still use today. Franklin also helped write the Constitution, was ambassador to France, founded the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania and the American Philosophical Society. Other geniuses of humanity that did not have the Ph.D. or in some cases no degree at all include: These associations, certification boards and accreditation institutions generate billions of dollars in annual revenue to determine college accreditation and fund the test-taking bureaucracy (MEAP, ACT, SAT, MCAT, LSAT, GRE, GMAT, KAPLAN, BAR-BRI, etc.). In this land of milk and honey, it's all about the money, power and control ... not knowledge or wisdom. Thank goodness humanity's best and brightest made their contributions before this entrenched and intractable education bureaucracy we call the academy came along with their degree requirements, academic associations, certification boards, teacher and professorial unions telling them that they had to have their stamp of approval to make such stellar contributions to humanity. If you think that I write from hyperbole, I challenge the reader to take any core curriculum, examine any canon of great works, scrutinize the credentials of any of the geniuses the academic class venerate as the foundation of their disciplines, study and codify in their textbooks or write Ph.D.s about, and you will conclude that the following somber aphorism is most true: A professor is a mediocrity that is an expert on the works of great men. The Economics Of College A front-page headline in the New York Times captures much of the economic confusion of our time: "Fewer Options Open to Pay for Costs of College." The whole article is about the increased costs of college, the difficulties parents have in paying those costs, and the difficulties that both students and parents have in trying to borrow the money needed when their current incomes will not cover college costs. All that is fine for a purely "human interest" story. But making economic policies on the basis of human interest stories -- which is what politicians increasingly do, especially in election years -- has a big down side for those people who do not happen to be in the categories chosen to write human interest stories about. The general thrust of human interest stories about people with economic problems, whether they are college students or people faced with mortgage foreclosures, is that the government ought to come to their rescue, presumably because the government has so much money and these individuals have so little. Like most "deep pockets," however, the government's deep pockets come from vast numbers of people with much shallower pockets. In many cases, the average taxpayer has lower income than the people on whom the government lavishes its financial favors. Costs are not just things for government to help people to pay. Costs are telling us something that is dangerous to ignore. The inadequacy of resources to produce everything that everyone wants is the fundamental fact of life in every economy -- capitalist, socialist or feudal. This means that the real cost of anything consists of all the other things that could have been produced with those same resources. Building a bridge means using up resources that could have been used building homes or a hospital. Going to college means using up vast amounts of resources that could be used for all sorts of other things. Prices force people to economize. Subsidizing prices enables people to take more resources away from other uses without having to weigh the real cost. Without market prices that convey the real costs of resources denied to alternative users, people waste. That was the basic reason why Soviet industries used more electricity than American industries to produce a smaller output than American industries produced. That is why they used more steel and cement to produce less than Japan or Germany produced when making things that required steel and cement. When you pay the full cost -- that is, the full value of the resources in alternative uses -- you tend to economize. When you pay less than that, you tend to waste. Whether someone goes to college at all, what kind of college, and whether they remain on campus to do postgraduate work, are all questions about how much of the resources that other people want are to be taken away and used by those on whom we have arbitrarily focused in human interest stories. This is not just a question about robbing Peter to pay Paul. The whole society's standard of living is lower when resources are shifted from higher valued uses to lower valued uses and wasted by those who are subsidized or otherwise allowed to pay less. The fact that the Soviet economic system allowed industries to use resources wastefully meant that the price was paid not in money but in a far lower standard of living for the Soviet people than the available technology and resources were capable of producing. The Soviet Union was one of the world's most richly endowed nations in natural resources -- if not the most richly endowed. Yet many of its people lived almost as if they were in the Third World. How many people would go to college if they had to pay the real cost of all the resources taken from other parts of the economy? Probably a lot fewer people. Moreover, when paying their own money, there would probably not be nearly as many people parting with hard cash to study feel-good subjects with rap sessions instead of serious study. There would probably be fewer people lingering on campus for the social scene or as a refuge from adult responsibilities in the real world. Those who argue that the taxpayers should be forced to subsidize people who go to colleges and universities seldom bother to think beyond the notion that education is a Good Thing. Some education is not only a good thing but a great thing. But, like most good things, there are limits to how much of it is good -- and how good compared to other uses of the resources required. In other words, education is not a Good Thing categorically in unlimited amounts, for people of all levels of ability, interest and willingness to work. Nor is there any obvious way to set an arbitrary limit. These are questions that no given individual can answer for a whole society. The most we can do is confront individuals with the costs that their choices are imposing on others who want the same resources for other purposes, and are willing to pay for those resources. Those who cannot bring themselves to face the tough choices that reality presents often seek escape to some kind of fairy godmother -- the government or, more realistically, the taxpayers. When the idea of conscripting taxpayers to play the role of fairy godmother (like Obama plans to do) for some arbitrarily selected favorites of the intelligentsia, "the poor" are often used as human shields behind which to advance toward their goal. What will happen to the poor if there are no government subsidies for college? If this argument is meant seriously, rather than being simply a political talking point, then there can always be some means test used to decide who qualifies as poor and then subsidize just those people -- rather than the vastly larger number of other claimants for government largesse who advance toward the national treasury, using the poor as human shields. Another option would be to allow students to sign enforceable contracts by which lenders would pay their college or university expenses in exchange for a given percentage of their future earnings. That way, students would be issuing stocks to raise capital, the way corporations do, instead of being limited to borrowing money to be paid back in fixed amounts -- the latter being equivalent to issuing corporate bonds. Not only would this get the conscripted taxpayers out of the picture, it would also make it unnecessary for parents to go into hock to put their children through college. Still, the financially poorest student in the land could get money to go to college, with a good academic record and a promising career from which to pay dividends on the lender's investment. More fundamentally, it would confront the prospective college student with the full costs of all the resources required for a college education. Those who are not serious -- which includes a remarkably large number of students, even at good colleges -- would have to back off and go face the realities of the adult world in the job market. But not as many jobs would be able to require college degrees if such degrees were no longer so readily available at someone else's expense. If individuals issuing stock in themselves sounds impossible, it has already been done. Boxers from poor families get trained and promoted at their managers' expense, in exchange for a share of their future earnings. Even some college students have already gotten money to pay for college in exchange for a share of their future earnings. However, in the current atmosphere, where college is seen as a "right," there has been resentment at having to pay back more than was lent when the recipient's degree brings in large paychecks. What is truly repugnant to some people about college students issuing stocks as well as bonds is that this not only takes the government out of the picture, it takes the intelligentsia out of the picture as prescribers of how other people ought to behave. Reality can be hard to adjust to. The most we can do is see that the adjustments are made by those who get the benefits, instead of making the taxpayer the one who has to do all the adjusting. Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His Web site is www.tsowell.com. Is Prestige Worth It? The obsession of many high school students and their parents about getting into a prestige college or university is part of the social scene of our time. So is the experience of parents going deep into hock to finance sending a son or daughter off to Ivy U. or the flagship campus of the state university system. Sometimes both the student and the parent end up with big debts from financing a degree from some prestige institution. Yet these are the kinds of institutions that many have their hearts set on. Media hype adds to the pressure to go where the prestige is. A key role is often played by the various annual rankings of colleges and universities, especially the rankings by U.S. News & World Report. These rankings typically measure all sorts of inputs-- but not outputs. The official academic accrediting agencies do the same thing. They measure how much money is spent on this or that, how many professors have tenure and other kinds of inputs. What they don't measure is the output-- what kind of education the students end up with. A new think tank in Washington is trying to shift the emphasis from inputs to outputs. The Center for College Affordability and Productivity is headed by Professor Richard Vedder, who gives the U.S. News rankings a grade of D. Measuring the inputs, he says, is "roughly equivalent to evaluating a chef based on the ingredients he or she uses." His approach is to "review the meal"-- that is, the outcome of the education itself. The CCAP study uses several measures of educational output, including the proportion of a college's graduates who win awards like the Rhodes Scholarships or who end up listed in "Who's Who in America," as well as the ratings that students give the professors who teach them. Professor Vedder admits that these are "imperfect" measures of a college's educational output, but at least they are measures of output instead of input. Some academic institutions come out at or near the top by either input or output criteria but there were some large changes in rankings as well. Among national universities, the top three are the same-- but in different order-- whether ranked by U.S. News or by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. They are Harvard, Yale and Princeton, according to Professor Vedder's think tank, and Princeton, Harvard and Yale in the U.S. News rankings. Among the liberal arts colleges, however, there were some big changes. Although Williams and Amherst were the top two in both rankings, Washington & Lee moved up from 15th to 6th when ranked by Professor Vedder's group and Barnard climbed from 30th to 8th. Whitman College, which was ranked 37th by U.S. News on the basis of the college's inputs, jumped to 9th when evaluated on its output by Vedder and company. Wabash College jumped from 52nd to 10th. West Point rose from 22nd to 7th. One of my own favorite measures of output-- the percentage of a college's graduates who go on to get Ph.D.s-- was not used by either set of evaluations. Small colleges dominate the top ten in sending their alumni on to get doctorates. Grinnell College, which was not among the top ten on either the U.S. News list or on Professor Vedder's list, sends a higher percentage of its graduates on to get Ph.D.s than does either Harvard or Yale. No given criterion tells the whole story. In fact, the whole idea of ranking colleges and universities is open to question. To someone who is making a decision where to apply, what matters is what is the best institution for that particular individual, which may not be best-- or even advisable-- for that applicant's brother or sister. "Choosing the Right College" is by far the best of the college guides, partly because it does not give rankings, but more because it goes into the many factors that matter-- and which matter differently for different people. What Professor Vedder's study does is provide yet another reason for parents and students not to obsess over big-name schools or their rankings-- or to go deep into hock over them. Education and Entrepreneurship "...we need a completely new stream of teachers to staff a new vision of what our high schools should look like." I have been losing interest in the contests between Democrats and Republicans in Washington. I am more anxious about the outcome of the struggle between innovators and incumbents in the field of education. The incumbent policy is more of the same. Both parties in Washington champion more government involvement in primary education and more subsidies for existing colleges and universities. The innovative policy is to support any alternative to our current education system. Ultimately, we would trust consumers to keep the best alternatives and discard the rest. Wizard-of-Oz Diplomas One politically popular idea is to try to send more young adults to college. This may seem appealing, but in reality we already have too many students in college who lack sufficient basic skills. In November, after grading a batch of papers, I posted the following notice to the web site for an economics course that I teach at George Mason University: Many students did poorly with writing quality. If it were up to me, a lot of you would be taking remedial English classes. I would advise everyone to think twice about using the word "on." For example, it is wrong to say, "The book discusses on economic growth" when the proper sentence is "The book discusses economic growth." My recollection from my career in government and business is that written communication skills still matter. Out of over 100 students in my class at George Mason, no more than a handful could function in any capacity in a job that required writing a memorandum. Over half of the students are utterly incompetent when it comes to grammar and syntax. They have no ability to communicate complex ideas. Yet I do not fail these students. I feel that I must reserve my F's for the students who do not turn in papers at all. I fear that many of the students who pass will go on to earn Wizard-of-Oz diplomas, which signify nothing. Students will claim to be educated, but employers will know otherwise. The phenomenon of the Wizard-of-Oz diploma has discredited the college degree. My oldest daughter discovered that her degree qualified her for secretarial positions. She soon decided to try law school instead. As her experience illustrates, although the average salary differential between college graduates and non-graduates remains high, the marginal college graduate is earning little or no premium. More Differentiation While politicians champion more homogeneity in education (national standards; send everyone to college), my guess is that what we need is more differentiation. Students are heterogeneous in terms of their abilities, learning styles, and rates of maturation. Putting every student on the same track is sub-optimal for large numbers of young people. Some students -- probably more than we realize -- are autodidacts, meaning that they teach themselves at their own pace. One of the brightest students in my high school statistics class simply cannot handle the structure of a school day. He is motivated to learn on his own (he was curious to read my book on health care and asked me for a copy), but he is demotivated by most of his classes. Some students are not suited for academic study. We speak of the proverbial auto mechanic, but in fact the best career path for many of these students in today's economy would be in the allied health fields. Unfortunately, this career path is blocked by occupational licensing requirements, which prevent many otherwise capable students from pursuing careers in dental hygiene, physical therapy, or similar professions. If we had the equivalent credentialism at work in auto repair, you would need four years of college plus two or three years of post-graduate education just to work on a car. Carl Schramm, quoted above, believes that many young adults would benefit from courses in entrepreneurship. Certainly, this would be at least as developmentally beneficial as the community service requirements imposed on so many students today, particularly if the entrepreneurship classes were hands-on and not merely theoretical. If it is difficult to imagine today's educators providing entrepreneurial experiences to students, then Schramm would argue that the solution is to replace many of today's educators. In my economics class at George Mason, the first exercise I give students is to plan a start-up business. My goal, however, is not to teach them to be entrepreneurs. It is to help them appreciate the central role of entrepreneurs in the economy and to understand that a business is not a rich uncle, but an enterprise that wrestles with sales and costs in an attempt to make a profit. Another educational issue that ought to be subject to experimentation is the mix among lectures, small classes, and self-paced instruction. Computers and the Internet create possibilities that did not exist 20 years ago. In theory, I could bring outstanding economics lecturers to my students over the Internet, and then break my class into discussion sections for close personal interaction. Entry Barriers Education suffers from major barriers to entry. Any industry that has strong entry barriers will suffer from a lack of innovation and sub-par productivity. Some of the entry barriers are natural. Reputation is important in affecting the choices of parents and students, and the costs of building a reputation as a school or university are high. However, many entry barriers in education are artificial. One of the biggest entry barriers is that government aid to education is given to incumbent institutions, rather than to parents and students. It is difficult for an entrepreneur to compete with a school or college that receives a hefty subsidy from the government. Changing the form of government aid from institutional assistance to vouchers would be a major step toward removing entry barriers in the field of education. Another entry barrier is the accreditation process, which is controlled by the incumbents. Imagine what would happen in another industry, such as supermarkets or landscaping services, if in order to start a new business in that industry you had to become accredited by a board consisting mostly of incumbents in that industry. Nobody likes competition, and it is easy to think of excuses not to accredit a newcomer, especially an innovative upstart. If we had such an accreditation system in place in other industries, competition would be stifled, and the incumbents would be under no pressure to improve service or reduce costs. Creating a consumer-oriented accreditation board would help to lower this important entry barrier. In my view, the key to improving education is removing entry barriers and allowing alternative schooling experiments (such as apprenticeships, tradeschools, etc.) to flourish. From this perspective, the politicians of both parties who are most strongly "pro-education" are in fact the biggest obstacles to improvement, since their policies serve only to entrench the educational establishment. Preserving liberty and restoring constitutional precepts are impossible as long as the welfare mentality prevails, and that will not likely change until we've run out of money. But it will become clear, as we move into the next century, that perpetual wealth and the so-called balanced budget, along with an expanding welfare state, cannot continue indefinitely. Any effort to perpetuate it will only occur with the further erosion of liberty. The role of the US government in public education has changed dramatically over the past 100 years. Most of the major changes have occurred in the second half of this century. In the 19th century, the closest the federal government got to public education was the Land Grant College program. In the last 40 years, the federal government has essentially taken charge of the entire system. It is involved in education at every level through loans, grants, court directives, regulations, and curriculum manipulation. In 1900 it was of no concern to the federal government how local schools were run at any level. After hundreds of billions of dollars, we have yet to see a shred of evidence that the drift toward central control over education has helped. By all measurements, the quality of education is down. There are more drugs and violence in the public schools than ever before. Discipline is impossible out of fear of lawsuits or charges of civil rights violations. Controlled curricula have downplayed the importance of our constitutional heritage while indoctrinating our children, even in kindergarten, with environmental mythology, internationalism, and sexual liberation. Neighborhood schools in the early part of the 20th Century did not experience this kind of propaganda. The one good result coming from our failed educational system has been the limited but important revival of the notion that parents are responsible for their children's education, not the state. We have seen literally millions of children taken from the public school system and taught at home or in private institutions in spite of the additional expense. This has helped many students and has also served to pressure the government schools into doing a better job. And the statistics show that middle-income and low-income families are the most eager to seek an alternative to the public school system. There is no doubt that the way schools are run, how the teachers teach, and how the bills are paid is dramatically different from 100 years ago. And even though some that go through public schools do exceptionally well, there is clear evidence that the average high school graduate today is far less educated than his counterpart was in the early part of this century. Due to the poor preparation of our high school graduates, colleges expect very little from their students, since nearly everyone gets to go to college who wants to. Public school is compulsory and college is available to almost everyone regardless of qualifications. In 1914, English composition was required in 98% of our colleges; today it's about one-third. Only 12% of today's colleges require mathematics be taught, where in 1914, 82% did. No college now requires literature courses. But, rest assured plenty of social-babble courses are required as we continue to dumb down our nation. (No wonder U.S. students rank 36th in the world!) Federal funding for education grows every year, hitting $38 billion this year, $1 billion more than requested by the administration and 7% over last year. Great congressional debates occur over the size of a classroom, student and teacher testing, bilingual education, teacher's salaries, school violence, and drug usage. And it's politically incorrect to point out that all these problems are not present in the private schools. Every year there is less effort at the federal level to return education to the people, the parents, and the local school officials. For 20 years at least, some of our presidential candidates advocated abolishing the Department of Education and for the federal government to get completely out of the public education business. This year we will hear no more of that. The President got more money for education than he asked for, and it's considered not only bad manners but also political suicide to argue the case for stopping all federal government education programs. Talk of returning some control of federal programs to the state is not the same as keeping the federal government out of education as directed by the Constitution. Of the 20 congressionally authorized functions granted by the Constitution, education is not one of them. That should be enough of a reason not to be involved, but there's no evidence of any benefit, and statistics show that great harm has resulted. It has cost us hundreds of billions of dollars, yet we continue the inexorable march toward total domination of our educational system by Washington bureaucrats and politicians. It makes no sense! It's argued that if the federal funding for education did not continue education would suffer even more. Yet we see poor and middle-class families educating their children at home or at a private school at a fraction of the cost of a government school education, with results fantastically better--and all done in the absence of violence and drugs. A case can be made that there would be more money available for education if we just left the money in the states to begin with and never brought it to Washington for the bureaucrats and the politicians to waste. But it looks like Congress will not soon learn this lesson, so the process will continue and the results will get worse. The best thing we could do now is pass a bill to give parents a $3,000 tax credit for each child they educate. This would encourage competition and allow a lot more choice for parents struggling to help their children get a decent education. -- From "A Republic, If You Can Keep It" by Dr. Ron Paul Freefall of the American University: How Our Colleges Are Corrupting the Minds and Morals of the Next Generation (Hardcover) It's happening in colleges all across the country. Instead of being educational institutions designed to encourage the free discussion of ideas, universities have become prisons of propaganda, indoctrinating students with politically correct (and often morally repugnant) ideas about American life and culture. This book exposes the liberal bias in today's universities, providing hard evidence, in clear and unimpeachable terms, that shows how today's colleges are covertly and overtly proselytizing with leftist slants on sexuality, politics, and lifestyles. By naming names and providing specific and credible insights from faculty members, administrators, professional observers, and analysts who have witnessed and chronicled the intellectual and ethical collapse taking place within the academy, this book offers a broad overview of the issues, the history of the problems, analysis from a broad range of academics and professionals, and also observations of the university students themselves, in their own words, from schools all across the nation. A classic example is in the Philippines a bachelor's degree minimum is required to cook the fries at Mc Donald's or to be a cashier at Metro Gaisano's, and a master's degree or Ph.D. is required to progress higher (manager, etc.) -- and it doesn't matter what the degree is in, since it's just an arbritrary hurdle to reduce the number of applicants for any given position. The consequences of this are that many families and students virtually starve, and go into debt for long times, to send their kids for meaningless degrees. This is happening here also, with almost every parent being brainwashed into thinking that they are somehow "depriving" their children if they don't send them to college right after high school. Some colleges, such as Yale University, recognize that many students are not mature enough to know what they want to do in life and suggest that they work for a few years until they know themselves better, rather than waste money and get a meaningless degree in liberal studies or liberal arts. They may also find that they are not suited for college -- wait! Did I say something politically incorrect? Surprise -- some kids are not suited for college. They are much better off spending their parent's money going to trade school and becoming a skilled tradesman (or woman), or becoming an apprentice and learning on the job. A good tip-off is that they hate books and only read glossy dating magazines. Many students do not realize that learning is a lifelong commitment and think that once that get that "piece of paper" that this is the end of it. Employers routinely replace people who feel that way and won't continue to educate themselves through self-education, books (yes, you oftentimes actually have to even spend your own money to buy them, although a growing number of employers will reimburse for them -- but the important part is that you need to have the initiative and drive to ask for them, and then to study them once you get them.) Getting a diploma and then not keeping your knowledge up to date is a complete waste -- a waste of your time, future earnings (paying off student loans) and your parent's money. If you are not a studious person who enjoys or has the drive to keep your newly acquired knowledge current, I strongly advise you to reconsider your motivation for wanting to attend college. Another less-known fact is that going to a state junior college, and then transferring to a state four year university afterwards (if required for your particular occupation) is much less expensive and every bit as good quality-wise; any vocational counselor will admit that if asked. It's what you put into your education that you get back from it (providing you select good teachers and they use good books that you can relate to -- but nothing says you can't buy your own additional books to help you understand the instructor's-chosen book, and I strongly advise you to do so if you cannot understand the required book). Also, once you get your foot in the door and get hired in your chosen profession (with a high school or A.Sc. degree), many employers will reimburse your tuition to continue your education, so that you can use more of your earnings towards a house, car or savings instead of spending many years paying back student loans. Many students cause great hardship to themselves and their parents by refusing to consider less expensive alternatives that are every bit as good. Another thing that both parents and students are usually not aware of is that, although the average salary differential between college graduates and non-graduates remains high, the marginal college graduate is earning little or no premium (see above article "Education and Entrepreneurship" regarding "Wizard-of-Oz Diplomas". Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (Paperback) Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism is Corrupting our Future (Hardcover) Our universities have largely abandoned the search for truth and many former radicals seek to brainwash their students. Same sex dorms and bathrooms do demystify relations between the sexes and deter romantic love. Many pop stars are tarts and actively promote alternative lifestyles. Paris Hilton is "a fabulously rich slut" and Rap music is not indicative of black experience in America. Television definitely is a cesspool, Hollywood champions homosexuality in many a film and Pornography has a glamour today it does not deserve. The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised As Freedom (Hardcover) From the Back Cover University of Destruction: Your Game Plan for Spiritual Victory on Campus (Paperback) Of Knights and Fair Maidens: A Radical New Way to Develop Old-fashioned Relationships (Paperback) "Jeff and Danielle prove that God's plan for relationships is not out-of-date or old-fashioned--it's for the adventurous, courageous and most importantly, romantic Christian single who wants God's best in relationships and marriage." Congressman and Mrs. Jim Ryun I Kissed Dating Goodbye (Paperback) Joshua Harris's first book, written when he was only 21, turned the Christian singles scene upside down...and people are still talking. More than 800,000 copies later, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, with its inspiring call to sincere love, real purity, and purposeful singleness, remains the benchmark for books on Christian dating. Now, for the first time since its release, the national #1 bestseller has been expanded with new content and updated for new readers. Honest and practical, it challenges cultural assumptions about relationships and provides solid, biblical alternatives to society's norm. Tired of the game? Kiss dating goodbye. Going out? Been dumped? Waiting for a call that doesn’t come? Have you tasted pain in dating, drifted through one romance or, possibly, several of them? Ever wondered, Isn’t there a better way? I Kissed Dating Goodbye shows what it means to entrust your love life to God. Joshua Harris shares his story of giving up dating and discovering that God has something even better—a life of sincere love, true purity, and purposeful singleness. Boy Meets Girl: Say Hello to Courtship (Paperback) From Publishers Weekly The ACLU vs. America: Exposing the Agenda to Redefine Moral Values (Paperback) Success Without College: Why Your Child May Not Have to Go to College Right Now--and May Not Have to Go At All (Paperback) "In this brilliant, brave, and oh-so-needed book, Linda Lee explodes the myth that all young people must stay on the same conveyor belt through college or perish. That myth has led to the demise of many a young person, and their parents along with them. Now Ms. Lee shows us another way. This book is a godsend. Millions of parents and their children will benefit from discovering the alternative paths explained in this book. Written with the warmth of a mother, and the research, analytic skill of a New York Times editor, Success Without College appears like an angel in the midst of massive suffering. At last, a guide to a better way." Proving You're Qualified: Strategies for Competent People Without College Degrees (Paperback) Proving You're Qualified is a career book for competent people who have learned their jobs, on the job. More than 75 percent of the workers in America are without college degrees. Many are highly skilled and capable, yet they are often passed over for promotion for lack of a degree, which has nothing, whatsoever, to do with their performance. This book offers a frank discussion of educational merit and actual performance in a workplace caught in the grip of frightening change. Proving You're Qualified enables the reader to better understand the nature of power in hierarchies, to gain insight into methods for fighting credentialism, and Academic Cesspools The average taxpayer and parents who foot the bill know little about the rot on many college campuses. "Indoctrinate U" is a recently released documentary, written and directed by Evan Coyne Maloney, that captures the tip of a disgusting iceberg. The trailer for "Indoctrinate U" can be seen here. "Indoctrinate U" starts out with an interview of Professor David Clemens, at Monterey Peninsula College, who reads an administrative directive regarding new course proposals: "Include a description of how course topics are treated to develop a knowledge and understanding of race, class, and gender issues." Clemens is fighting the directive, which applies not to just sociology classes but math, physics, ornamental horticulture and other classes whose subject material has nothing to do with race, class and gender issues. Professor Noel Ignatiev, of the Massachusetts School of Art, explains that his concern is to do away with whiteness. Why? "Because whiteness is a form of racial oppression." Ignatiev adds, "There cannot be a white race without the phenomenon of white supremacy." What's blackness? According to Ignatiev, "Blackness is an identity that can be plausibly argued to arise out of a resistance to oppression." Bucknell professor Geoff Schneider agrees, saying, "A lot of our students, I think, are unconsciously racist." Both Ignatiev and Schneider are white. The College of William & Mary and Tufts and Brown universities established racially segregated student orientations. At some universities, students are provided with racially segregated housing, and at others they are treated to racially separate graduation ceremonies. Under the ruse of ending harassment, a number of universities have established speech codes. Bowdoin College has banned jokes and stories "experienced by others as harassing." Brown University has banned "verbal behavior" that "produces feelings of impotence, anger or disenfranchisement" whether "unintentional or intentional." University of Connecticut has outlawed "inappropriately directed laughter." Colby College has banned any speech that could lead to a loss of self-esteem. "Suggestive looks" are banned at Bryn Mawr College and "unwelcomed flirtations" at Haverford College. Fortunately for students, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has waged a successful war against such speech codes. Central Connecticut State College set up a panel to discuss slavery reparations. All seven speakers, invited by the school, supported the idea. Professor Jay Bergman questioned the lack of diversity on the panel. In response, two members of the African Studies department published a letter criticizing Bergman, saying, "The protests against reparations stand on the same platform that produced apartheid, Hitler and the KKK." Such a response, as Professor Bergman says, is nothing less than intellectual thuggery. For universities such as Columbia and Yale, military recruiters are unwelcome, but they welcome terrorists such as Columbia University's invitation to Colonel Mohammar Quadaffi and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Yale admitted former Taliban spokesman Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi as a student, despite his fourth-grade education and high school equivalency degree. On other campuses, such as Lehigh, Central Michigan, Arizona, Holy Cross and California Berkeley universities, administrators banned students, staff and faculty from showing signs of patriotism after the 9/11 attacks. On some campuses, display of the American flag was banned; the pledge of allegiance and singing patriotic songs were banned out of fear of possibly offending foreign students. Several university officials refused to be interviewed for the documentary. They wanted to keep their campus policies under wraps, not only from reporters but parents as well. When college admissions officials make their recruitment visits, they don't tell parents that their children will learn "whiteness is a form of racial oppression," or that they sponsor racially segregated orientations, dorms and graduation ceremonies. Parents and prospective students are kept in the dark. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (http://www.isi.org/) has published "Choosing the Right College," to which I've written the introduction. The guide provides a wealth of information to help parents and students choose the right college. Academic Cesspools II In last month's column "Academic Cesspools," I wrote about "Indoctrinate U," a recently released documentary exposing egregious university indoctrination of young people at prestigious and not-so-prestigious universities (www.onthefencefilms.com/movies.html). I said the documentary only captured the tip of a disgusting iceberg. The Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a frontline organization in the battle against academic suppression of free speech and thought, released information about what's going on at the University of Delaware, and probably at other universities as well, that should send chills up the spines of parents of college-age students. The following excerpts are taken from the University of Delaware's Office of Residence Life Diversity Facilitation Training document. The full document is available at www.thefire.org. Students living in the University's housing, roughly 7,000, are taught: "A racist: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities or acts of discrimination. (This does not deny the existence of such prejudices, hostilities, acts of rage or discrimination.)" This gem of wisdom suggests that by virtue of birth alone, not conduct, if you're white, you're a racist. If you're white and disagree with racial quotas, preferences and openly racist statements made by blacks to whites, and you call it reverse racism or reverse discrimination, here's the document's message for you: "Reverse racism: A term created and used by white people to deny their white privilege. Those in denial use the term reverse racism to refer to hostile behavior by people of color toward whites, and to affirmative action policies, which allegedly give 'preferential treatment' to people of color over whites. In the U.S., there is no such thing as 'reverse racism.'" I agree with the last sentence. Racism is racism irrespective of color. A white University of Delaware student might not have an ounce of ill will toward any race. According to the university's document, he's a racist anyway. "A non-racist: A non-term. The term was created by whites to deny responsibility for systemic racism, to maintain an aura of innocence in the face of racial oppression, and to shift responsibility for that oppression from whites to people of color (called 'blaming the victim'). Responsibility for perpetuating and legitimizing a racist system rests both on those who actively maintain it, and on those who refuse to challenge it. Silence is consent." Then the document asks, "Have you ever heard a well-meaning white person say, 'I'm not a member of any race except the human race?' What she usually means by this statement is that she doesn't want to perpetuate racial categories by acknowledging that she is white. This is an evasion of responsibility for her participation in a system based on supremacy for white people." I doubt whether this racist nonsense is restricted to the university's housing program. Students are probably taught similar nonsense in their sociology, psychology and political science classes. FIRE's outing of the University of Delaware's racist program elicited this official response from Vice President Michael Gilbert, "The central mission of the University, and of the program, is to cultivate both learning and the free exchange of ideas." (According to thefire.org, as a result of public exposure, and without condemning this racist program, on Nov. 2 President Patrick Harker ordered the mandatory re-education halted pending a review.) It's a safe bet the university did not highlight this kind of learning experience to parents and students in its recruitment efforts. Nor were generous donors and alumni informed that they are racists by birth. I'd also guess that this kind of "education" was kept under wraps from the state legislators who use taxpayer money to fund the university. Dr. Williams serves on the faculty of George Mason University as John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and is the author of More Liberty Means Less Government: Our Founders Knew This Well. Academic Intimidation There is an article in the current issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education -- the trade publication of the academic world -- about professors being physically intimidated by their students. "Most of us dread physical confrontation," the author says. "And so these aggressive, and even dangerous, students get passed along, learning that intimidation and implied threats will get them what they want in life." This professor has been advised, at more than one college, not to let students know where he lives, not to give out his home phone number and to keep his home phone number from being listed. This is a very different academic world from the one in which I began teaching back in 1962. Over the years, I saw it change before my eyes. During my first year of teaching, at Douglass College in New Jersey, I was one of the few faculty members who did not invite students to his home. In fact, I was asked by a colleague why I didn't. "My home is a bachelor apartment" I said, "and that is not the place to invite the young women I am teaching." His response was: "How did you get to be such an old fogy at such a young age?" How did we get from there to where professors are being advised to not even have their phone numbers listed? The answer to that question has implications not only for the academic world but for the society at large and for international relations. It happened because people who ran colleges and universities were too squeamish to use the power they had, and relied instead on clever evasions to avoid confrontations. They were, as the British say, too clever by half. "Negotiations" and "flexibility" were considered to be the more sophisticated alternative to confrontation. Most campuses across the country bought that approach -- and it failed repeatedly on campus after campus, when caving in on one set of student demands led only to new and bigger demands. The academic world has never fully recovered. Many congratulated themselves on the restoration of "peace" on campus in the 1970s. Almost always, it was the peace of surrender. In order to appease campus radicals, all sorts of new ideologically oriented courses, programs and departments were created, with an emphasis on teaching victimhood and resentments, often hiring people whose scholarly credentials were meager or even non-existent. Such courses, programs, and departments are still with us in the 21st century -- not because no one recognizes their intellectual deficiencies but because no one dares to try to get rid of them. One of the rare exceptions to academic cave-ins around the country during the 1960s was the University of Chicago. When students there seized an administration building, dozens of them were suspended or expelled. That put an end to that. There is not the slightest reason why academic institutions with far more applicants than they can accept have to put up with disruptions, violence or intimidation. Every student they expel can be replaced immediately by someone on the waiting list. In case of more serious trouble, they can call in the police. President Nathan Pusey of Harvard did that in 1969, when students there seized an administration building and began releasing confidential information from faculty personnel files to the media. The Harvard faculty were outraged -- at Pusey. To call the cops onto the sacred soil of Harvard Yard was too much. It just wasn't politically correct. And, as a later president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, could tell you, being politically correct can be the difference between remaining president of Harvard and having to give up the office. Authority in general, and physical force in particular, are anathema to many among the intelligentsia, academic or otherwise. They can always think of some "third way" to avoid hard choices, whether on campus, in society, or among nations. Moreover, they have little or no interest in the actual track record of those third ways. Having to learn to live with intimidation by their own students is one of the consequences. |
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