Education Bubble: Government Cause Inflation

Joe Biden, Obama's VP has admitted that government subsidies have caused the cost of education to rise more than 400% in the past 40 years.



HatTip, NewsAlert.com

Maryland GOP Petitioning to Have Instate Tuition for Illegal Workers Overturned in 2012 General Election

It seems that my Maryland GOP is attempting to do something that hasn't been sucessful in 20 years.  Have a ballot initiative placed on the 2012 general election ballot that will overturn the Legislatures very narrowly passed bill that gives instate tuition to illegal immigrants.

Sponsored by a group of Maryland’s most liberal legislators, Senate Bill 167 allows illegal immigrants who graduated from the state’s schools to enjoy in-state tuition rates at the state’s community colleges. It is estimated the bill could cost state taxpayers upward of $3 million per year by 2016, although those who drew up the bill’s fiscal note conceded they couldn’t accurately gauge the impact.

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In 2009, after a bill allowing speed cameras in work and school zones was passed, organizers of a petition drive to send that bill to voters in 2010 fell just short at the 1/3 threshold. The last time a petition succeeded in making the ballot was 1991, while one has to go back nearly forty years to find the last time a ballot initiative succeeded in overturning legislation. So petition organizers knew history was against them.

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So you can imagine the shock that Annapolis liberals received when Parrott and his local petition organizers announced last week they were turning in 62,496 signatures at the May 31 milepost. While supporters of the Senate bill like the immigrant advocacy group CASA de Maryland are publicly holding their cards close to their chest, it’s likely they will turn to the courts if the petition drive succeeds in getting the signatures required. In the meantime, they’re attempting to impede progress any way they can.

Here's a first-hand account of the attempt to disuade people from signing the petition in Rockville, MD, a suburb of Washingtond, DC. 

Special thanks to the volunteers from Montgomery, Baltimore and Harford Counties that spent time collecting signatures at the Rockville Hometown Holidays event today. Hundreds of Democrats and Republicans signed the petitions today to stop in-state college tuition for illegal immigrants.


How do we know we are winning growing public support on this important issue? A few days ago the head of CASA of Maryland, Gustavo Torres, was quoted in the press that the petition drive would fail and therefore was not a worry to his group and the illegal alien community.

Today that changed!

One of Torres’ top drones, the taxpayer subsidized Kim Propeack, Community Organizer of some sort, came by our tent today and actually tried to force herself between petition signers and our volunteers!

Propeack screamed that we were ‘Immigrant Bashing” and called the MD Petitioner volunteers “Haters”! One of our volunteers Shakil, a first generation immigrant from Bangledesh (his parents are legal immigrants!) was extremely offended by the vile words used by CASA of Maryland.

Fortunately our cool headed volunteers ignored Propeack and continued about their business of collecting signatures from concerned citizens.

Also snooping in the background was Delegate Luis Simmons (D- Mntgomery County). Simmons did not try to stop citizens from signing petitions like CASA’s Propeack, but he was certainly putting the “evil eye” on our volunteers. Simmons was an early supporter of in-state tuition as well as many other taxpayer funded programs for Hispanic illegal immigrants. [Simmons was one of those who got the sweetheart bond bill to benefit Identity, Inc and apparently two of its board members, here.]

I know that in my neck of the woods, a heavily Jewish suburb of Baltimore, calle Pikesville (no jokes please, I've heard them all), the above peice of legislation is VERY unpopular.  Many parents here are having real trouble affording college tuition in the first place, and are very angry that the bill passed at all.  I think that if this measure makes it onto the ballot in 2012's general election it will pass, much to the consternation of our very liberal state legislative leaders.

I've added the PotomacTeaParty to my blogroll to the right.  I hope that you'll take a moment to click on over and have a read...

Glenn Reynolds On Higher Education Bubble

Here's Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com fame's lecture on the higher education bubble that he delivered at Clemson University.


Glenn Reynolds - The Higher Education Bubble and What Comes Next from Clemson Institute on Vimeo.

More Women Admitted to Colleges & Universities Than Men

The percentage numbers of men attending have been dropping for the past three decades.  Recently, the Philadelphia Inquirer carried a story relating this.  It goes on at great length about how men are only making up roughly 35% of enrolements at major universities while at other institutions, female enrolement is topping 70%. 

Since the late 1970's when political correctness became the course de rigour for the American left, and by extension, American universities, the our educational system has developed a bias that emphasises the importance of women.  Our entire society has become geared that way.  Just look at any of the sitcoms that have been broadcast since 1980.  The show "Father Knows Best" has given way to "Tim Taylor the Tool Guy" a man so inept that nothing he does works as he intends...

In the Inquirer piece, several academics are quoted,

Margaret Anderson, a sociology professor and an acting associate provost at Delaware, echoed a common sentiment among students and administrators when she said women seemed more motivated to go to college and more assertive about how to get in.  I think women do know they need some education to have security in their lives," she said. "If you don't get an education, you know you're going to be dependent on someone." But that is not the same message young men seem to be getting.

Because it's not.  Men, in our public educational system are not treated at all the same.  They are often relegated to second class status and  young women are pushed much harder to finish high school.

Michael Kimmel is a sociologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and author of Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men...And a recent report shows the gender gap is no longer widening. But inside the numbers is another story.   According to Kimmel, upper-income men are going to college at the same rate as their female counterparts. But black men make up only 35 percent of black college students. Latino men make up 40 percent of Latino students. And working-class men make up only one-third of working-class students. "The crisis of attendance is not uniform but affects poor and minority students more significantly," Kimmel said.

Men, he believes, have not figured out how to navigate a changed economy that increasingly demands a college degree for a good job. And more often, studies show, they shrug off the value of a college education, Kimmel said. "They think that studying is wimpy, that studying and caring about what happens in classes is sissy." [emphasis is mine, ed.]

And that view point is common in academic circles.  That is how academia views the vast numbers of American men.  That men are too stupid to understand what is good for them and play sports...womeen do books   This stems from the plethora of "**** Studies" degree programs that have supplanted many more traditional areas of study.  Many of these "Studies" programs emphasize that men and Western men in particular are the source of evil in the world today.  The view that school is "sissy" stems from the bias that women "do better" that has insinuated itself and become endemic throughout the system.

An additional problem is the looming education bubble.  With tuition rates having grown since the early 1970's by more than 450% while inflation has risen by less than 30% means that far fewer people are afording education, and those that do manage to complete a degree program, often have a tremendous level of debt sometimes rising above $250,000.00.  After all, if you get a psychology degress (one of the most prevelent degrees today) you generally end up flipping burger in McDonalds because unless you get at least a masters degree there aren't enough jobs to go around.  If your degree is a "***** Studies" diploma, anything less than a Ph.D. means much the same thing.  Today, less than 20% of liberal arts degrees gain employment in the field in which they studied.

But, of course Big Brother must investigate that some universities and colleges have "lower admittance standards" to gain more male students.  That's discrimination...not realizing that this is EXACTLY what is being done for "affirmative action" wherein minority students are given spots in universities, often with much lower admission requirements than a male of European descent.  But if male students are given a preference, then

"Colleges will then be unable to attract the female students they want most - or so they fear," wrote Gail Heriot, a professor of law at the University of San Diego and a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.  Alerted by media reports that some admissions officers may be accepting less-qualified male students over female applicants, the Civil Rights Commission is investigating whether women are being discriminated against in college admissions.  "Everybody should feel very uncomfortable by the notion that it is more difficult for a woman to get into a college than a man," Heriot said in an interview.

Thus...the guv'mint will now be involved, trying to undo what they did in the first place...Catch 22...if you really want to FUBAR something...let the government get involved.  Better yet, let CONGRESS try and "fix" it. 

From the comments comes the most succinct argument: 

djdekok
The article COMPLETELY misses the reason for the lack of men attending college: The feminization of K-12 education. From the earliest grades onward, men are minimized, dismissed, and otherwise left out of the equation. Anyone who disputes this--try being the only male faculty member at an elementary school (I've been there). To begin with you're looked upon with suspicion (Why is he so interested in teaching little kids? Why doesn't he have a real man's job? hmm...). Teachers without a clue try to apply the same teaching and discipline techniques to boys as they do to girls and then wonder wny the boys act out. These boys are labeled ADHD (when in most cases it's simply a matter of wanting to be treated like a boy), drugged into submission, put into special education classes, and from there the downward spiral speeds up. Fewer boys are ready for honors or AP classes; fewer boys are ready for college upon graduation (if they DO graduate at all), and the result is what you're seeing today. It's not a new phenomenon, and the solution is neither easy nor politically expedient.

Let's face it: this is a major societal screwup, and the sooner we grasp what it is to raise a boy to become a man, and that it IS different than raising a girl to become a woman, the better off we'll be as a society. Don't know where to begin? Start in the home, start at your place of worship, with someone you TRUST--but for society's sake, START. [emphasis is mine, ed.]

You really want to fix higher education?  Institute an admittance test.  If you pass it, you get in, if you don't you don't.  Even better would be to remove all names from applications, use only SSN's for identify applicants.  That way, their records would speak for themselves...not their names or photographs.

Useless College Degrees: Universities Should Cosign/Guarantee Repayment of Loans

As many of you are aware, I'm a big fan of Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit. Here he has an excellent idea for bursting the higher education bubble. His idea is to make colleges and universities partly responsible for repayment of student loans when newly minted graduates enter the work force.


Far too many have what are essentially worthless college degrees that they have paid, well into the low 6 figures.

"With a college education now functioning, essentially, the way a high-school diploma used to, a law degree is the closest graduate equivalent to the traditional liberal-arts B.A. The biggest problem, though, is the staggering expense. Not all law schools are that expensive, but even state schools are pricey now, and for out-of-staters may cost as much as private schools. If I were looking at law school today I absolutely wouldn’t go into debt except for an absolute top school — like Yale, Stanford, Harvard. And even then I’d be wary. The debt is too enormous, and the prospects too uncertain — not only because of the economy, but because of the uncertain future even of big law firms.

Meanwhile, I have a structural solution: Make institutions of higher education partially liable when students are unable to pay student loans. A really strict system would make the school a co-signer, but making it even 5 or 10% liable for missed payments would really change the dynamic. Give schools some skin in the game. . . ."

This is a great idea...it would basically curb the present trend of "XXXXX Studies Degree" that are useless. These programs don't produce much, except for graduates who have developed a sense of entitlement that "someone owes them something."   The status quo is that colleges/universities have no incentive not to produce useless degree programs, while they have every reason to further  them.  If they were to basically have to help pay back loans that permitted the present glut of graduates with useless degrees, there would be far fewer such degrees awarded.

The Failure of Title IX

Education in the United States has become one vast entitlement system.  Minorities are entitled to exemptions because they have been oppressed.  Women are entitled to exemptions becauses ALL MEN HAVE OPPRESSED THEM FOR AEONS.  On the other hand we have created a system that gives preferment to women and minorities nearly to the exclusion of men in higher education.  

A recent study of graduation rates in higher education have disclosed a startling conclusion: Women are graduating college at rates that nearly equal 1.5 to 1. 

For last year’s graduating Class of 2009, women dominated at every level of higher education. Here’s the national breakdown: for every 100 men, 142 women graduated with a bachelor’s, 159 women completed a master’s and 107 women got a doctoral degree.

This is creating an education gape that if we don't begin to tackle now...will create in huge imbalance down the road.  Think about it...more women, in much higher paying jobs will be forced to "settle" on men who make much less...in other words...your wife is a lawyer and you work at Mickey D's because that's the best job you can find.  While that's an extreme case, its not as far fetched as you imagine.  Russia is already contending with this issue now, nearly 70% of the doctors there are women, while less than 40% of the men are college graduates. 

This chart shows how these number will continue to skew in ever larger percentages.  Since we as a nation have decided to toss out merit and focus soley on sex... then to quote Glenn Reynolds,

Obviously, we need to extend Title IX beyond athletics . . . .You think I’m kidding but I’m not sure I am. Since we’ve given up on merit and instead focus on group representation nowadays, what’s the argument against such an approach?

Merit, no longer has anything to do with college entrance/acceptance.  Once upon a time, passing a college entrance examination was what was needed to gain acceptance at a university...no longer.  We have become a nation whose higher education has become predicated on sex and minority status, not merit.  Unless we do something about that soon...in 20 years we will see male college education rates sink below 30%...

Hat Tip: Instapundit