Tag Archives: universities

Current Events

Send Your Kids to College Parents

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That way, they’ll never leave you because they will need a place to live without a job.

If this is not the saddest article I have ever read about the educational system of the richest country in the world, I don’t know what is. And this all happened right before our eyes, and with the help of the U.S. Department of Education. It’s absolutely pathetic. Taking out a loan to pay a university/college thousands of dollars for a degree in something you think is cool at the time, and then have to go flip burgers at McDonald’s and live with mom and dad because the parchment paper is worth anything in the job market. But you were cool and had fun, right? And now that mean old government wants its loan paid back. What a cruel world it is.

Of course, you could join the military. Oh, but wait. The latest stats I’ve read suggest that 70% of 18-25-year-olds are not physically or mentally qualified to join the military. Oops

The academic world is as much to blame for this as are the foolish students. While all this goes on, the Harvards and the Yales get richer and richer.

From the Wall Street Journal 2/9/2025

Why Unemployment is Rising Among Young College Grads

It’s the best of times for Wall Street bulls and the worst of times for young college grads. The Dow Jones Industrial Average on Friday smashed a record and crossed 50000 amid renewed optimism about the economy. Meantime, unemployment among young college grads has risen to recession levels. Behold a tale of two labor markets.

Unemployment declined last year for college non-graduates and ticked up slightly for older grads, though it is still lower than average historically. Yet new data from the New York Federal Reserve Bank last week showed that unemployment among college grads age 22 to 27 rose to 5.6% in December, roughly what it was in February 2009 during the financial panic.

Artificial intelligence isn’t taking their jobs. Young grads’ struggles started before AI went mainstream. Between 1990 and 2014, unemployment for young college grads was generally 1 to 3 percentage points lower than for all workers. The gap started to tighten around 2014 and reversed in late 2018. Unemployment for young college grads is now about 1.4 points higher than for all workers.

The real problem is a mismatch between labor supply and demand. Government subsidies and public schools have funneled too many young people to credential mills, which churn out grads who lack the skills that employers demand. Many would be better off training in skilled trades, for which demand is enormous.

More than half of high-school grads matriculate to college, even though only 35% of 12th graders score proficient in reading and 22% in math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. This suggests that many college students aren’t academically prepared or even inclined. But colleges ensure they graduate just the same by handing out A’s for no effort.

U.S. colleges awarded 2.2 million bachelor’s degrees last year, about twice as many as in 1990. That’s also double the number of associate’s degrees. Another 860,000 Americans last year received a master’s degree, nearly triple the 1990 figure. Nearly 40% of Americans with a bachelor’s now have an advanced degree.

Colleges have added graduate programs in fields like urban planning, sustainability and fine arts to rake in more federal dollars. Students had been allowed to take out unlimited federal loans for graduate studies until last summer’s GOP tax bill capped borrowing at $200,000 for professional degrees (like medicine or law) and $100,000 for others.

One result: Young college grads enter a labor market that is saturated with heavily credentialed workers. But they have less work experience and are often less productive than their older counterparts. Many skated through college by relying on AI to do their work. Take ChatGPT away, and they struggle to function.

Some also struggle with executive functioning because of disability accommodations in high school and college that allowed them extra time to complete tests and assignments. More than 20% of undergrads at Harvard and Brown and 38% at Stanford have registered disabilities.

Employers are required by law to make accommodations for disabled workers, but that doesn’t mean they have to hire someone who can’t meet a deadline or doesn’t want to work on a weekend because she’s “cooked.” Or for that matter, someone who needs his hand held all the time—a common employer gripe about recent grads.

Next, consider the demand side of the labor market. Retirements are increasing as the population ages. Last year the number of Americans on Social Security increased by two million, about double the average increase over the prior decade. Resulting job vacancies in the trades are going unfilled because of a dearth of skilled workers.

The National Federation of Independent Business reported last week that 31% of small-business owners had job openings they couldn’t fill, compared with a historical average of 24%. A Montana construction firm told the survey: “The biggest issue for our business is finding workers who want to work and finish an apprenticeship.”

An Ohio manufacturer noted that “skilled machinists are not available. We tried for years to get one.” A Connecticut manufacturer mused that “the need for trades is desperate in order for businesses to continue in this country. When the older workforce finally feels able to retire and live a comfortable life, who is going to take their place?” Not young college grads.

The Federal Reserve’s latest survey of businesses observed that while demand for workers has softened, “firms reported continued challenges finding skilled labor, particularly in engineering, health care, and other trades.” The report added: “AI’s current impact on employment was limited, with more significant effects anticipated in the coming years rather than immediately.”

Which suggests the job market for young grads could get worse in the years to come. If rote work is all that college grads are capable of, why not employ AI instead? ChatGPT, after all, never complains or gets cooked.

By Allysia Finley

Current Events

Words From a Legend

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Good morning gang, hope your celebration of America yesterday went as planned. We went to church, then literally took the day off. Edgar and I sat in a recliner and watch golf all afternoon — something I have never done before as I am not a golfer, only played five times in my life. However, it was a relaxing, enjoyable day for both of us.

I guess everyone has off today, but of course the swamp creatures never take a day off. They remain alert to attack anyone who disagrees with their agendas. But I care not to publish any of their diatribe or goings on today, but to post comments from a legend and forever hero of mine. The infamous Lou Holtz of Notre Dame. In his own words. Enjoy.

When I coached football, I’d tell my players that “life is 10% what happens to you, and 90% how you respond to it.” It was a way to get them to focus on themselves and on the things they could control – and to get them to understand that they were ultimately the authors of their own destinies.

It didn’t mean they weren’t on a team: football isn’t a game for committed individualists. It did mean, though, that when events unfolded – when they found themselves far downfield and wide open, or when they found themselves knocked flat by linemen twice their size – the measure of themselves was revealed in the very next moment.

You don’t know a player by what’s done to him. You know him by what he does.

It’s a lesson America could use now. My teams looked a lot like America – and they worked a lot like how America is supposed to work.

Every race, every ethnicity, and every point of origin was represented among our players across my career. They all had two things in common. The first was that they were passionately committed to making Notre Dame Football the country’s best – and a few times, they succeeded. The second was that each of them earned their spot. Yes, they were diverse, but the diversity wasn’t the reason for their presence. Every single player who wore the Notre Dame uniform deserved to do it.

That’s meritocracy. But why use the five-dollar word? I was born in West Virginia and raised in Ohio: out there, we just call it the American way.

There are a lot of enemies of the American way these days – right here in America. They’re men and women, mostly elites from academia and media, who would, if they could, walk into a football locker room and tell the players the exact opposite of my counsel: “life is 90% what happens to you, and 10% how you respond to it.” Then, having said that, they would probably demand to know why the team was gender imbalanced. Then, having said that, the team – now dispirited and infused with a victim mentality – would head out to the field to lose.

What’s true of a football team is true of a country. America’s promise has always been the opportunity for self-definition, self-advancement, self-creation. Where we’ve fallen short of that ideal – and we have – we’ve labored to correct ourselves. On the whole, we’ve done a pretty good job.

It’s fashionable now to lament failures in our history, but that myopic focus ignores the triumph of the present. In my lifetime alone, this country has defeated three malevolent empires, ended de jure racial segregation, and crafted a society so rich in opportunity that people from all over the world risk everything to get in.

Set against that record, unmatched anywhere, anytime, by anyone, we have the proponents of national decline and national lamentation – whether going by the name of critical-race theorists or the 1619 Project – arguing that America was flawed from the start and requires a wholesale purge of its own society before it is worth saving, or admiration.

We should be charitable to this crowd. Some of them genuinely believe the country requires a reckoning. Some of them are simply hucksters, selling books and clawing forth column inches in the timeless American tradition of media by any means. All of them, though, see themselves as on top and enriched when the reckoning comes. These aren’t radicals sacrificing for a better world: they’re power-seekers making their bid to rule with the acquiescence of a compliant elite.

That’s why we have to fight them. That’s why we have to win. When a football team believes that “life is 90% what happens to you, and 10% how you respond to it,” it loses. When a nation believes it, it ends. The stakes are that existential.

The creed set forth by the other side transforms our national life from a glorious constellation of mutual cooperation and community flourishing into a grim and zero-sum exercise of group versus group, with no winner – and many losers.

Football, I used to tell my players, is a rehearsal for life. That’s true for nearly any endeavor in which we strive and contend for the betterment of ourselves, our families and our communities. Our duty is to see that it’s a rehearsal for a triumph – not a decline. To make it happen, we must be willing to tell simple truths: among them, that no impersonal “structure” is the author of our fate, that each of us possesses the dignity and opportunity to make our own best lives, and that America is the greatest republic in the history of man.

Those used to be truisms. Today they’re radical dissents. But then, America was born in radical dissent. I couldn’t be happier to stand in that tradition. 

Lou Holtz is a legendary college football coach and chairman of the Center for 1776 at the America First Policy Institute

The comments from the FOX news page where I retrieved this might be worth reading. Simply reinforces there are many of us out here who refuse to give up.  Press ON!

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/july-fourth-america-truths-fight-lou-holtz

Originally posted 2021-07-05 12:15:03.

Conservatism