Category Archives: education

Colleges and College Majors

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There appears to be a big difference between generalist (I’m being generous here) college majors and specialist college majors, based on the level of post-graduation, on the job satisfaction of the graduates with their majors.

Among arts and humanities majors, nearly half wished they’d studied something else, while STEM graduates tended to feel they made the right choice.

Note that this is far from a properly done survey, limited as it is to just two cities. However, there’s a large hint here, if today’s colleges and universities will pay attention. Or even if they won’t.

Progressive-Democrat Lies

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These two are especially egregious in this final runup to voting in two weeks.

The first is by Joe Biden, our Progressive-Democrat President:

The most common price of gas in America is $3.39, down from over five dollars when I took office[.]

No, the most common price of gas in America as of the week ending January 25, 2021, the week Biden was inaugurated, was $2.39 [hit the full history XLS link for “U.S. Regular Gasoline Prices*(dollars per gallon)”, and select Data 3 in the resulting spreadsheet]. (Lots of good data on the US Energy Information Administration site.) Biden knows the actual price of gasoline, both then and now.

The second is by Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan’s Progressive-Democrat Governor. In last Tuesday’s debate with Republican gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon, Dixon said Whitmer kept Michigan schools closed longer than any other State. Whitmer claimed

That’s just not true…. Kids were out for three months.

Whitmer made that claim even knowing that tens of thousands of Michigan’s students still can’t get in-person/in-school learning in the present school year, which has been in progress for two months.

In fact, Whitmer didn’t even recommend, much less require, schools open for in-person learning until March 2021, a year after she ordered schools closed in March 2020. In March 2021, also,

23% of Michigan schools were fully in person, compared with 47% in Ohio, 54% in Wisconsin, and 76% in Indiana.

Those three surrounding States were reopening, strongly, for in-school learning. Whitmer knew this at the time she made her claim, even as she tried after the debate to weasel-word her answer:

[Whitmer] referred only to her or her Health Department’s orders in making the “three months” statement.

Never mind that she took no overt countervailing action for that subsequent year and more.

Apologies

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Elliot Kaufman had an op-ed in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal that talked about the utility of apologies from Stanford University and the various failures of that school in its serial mistreatment of Jews along with the several machinations the school used to push that mistreatment.

I’m less interested in apologies from schools like Stanford than I am in changes in the schools’ behavior.

Such changes, though, won’t be possible without a complete turnover in school management, from the President/Chancellor/what-have-you on down through middle management, along with removal/replacement of Department Chairs and their seconds, and elimination of frivolous departments like the plethora of DEI and related claptrap.

Absent that—all of that—words of apology will only be, can only be, empty chit-chat and cynical distraction from the problem.

Snowflakes

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A New York University chemistry professor—at NYU after four decades at Princeton—has been fired because his students, many of them doctor wannabes, circulated a petition complaining about how hard his class was. Their petition read in pertinent part,

We are very concerned about our scores, and find that they are not an accurate reflection of the time and effort put into this class….

Neither should grades be a reflection of the time and effort; they should be a reflection of actual performance and learning. Imagine a patient whose illness was prolonged, or who was maimed, by a botched treatment being told “So sad, but I tried really hard.” Or the survivors of a patient who died from that botched treatment being told, “Too bad, but I put in a lot of time on your son.”

The seemingly unjustified firing because some precious snowflakes didn’t want to work is not the only problem here, though. The other problem is NYU itself.

I wouldn’t hire anyone who had New York University on his resume. NYU appears unconcerned that its graduates cannot think critically, or that its graduates are afraid of the hard work the real world contains, even as it appears to take student whining seriously. NYU graduates would seem to be a waste of any enterprise’s payroll.

Duplicity

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The American Civil Liberties Union and Southern Poverty Law Center are at it, this time.

‘Way back in 2019 the Tennessee legislature created Education Savings Account pilot programs for Davidson and Shelby Counties. The ESAs grant money to students accepted into the programs; the funds facilitate students’ departure from poorly performing schools in favor of better schools.

The two county governments promptly sued to block the ESAs from taking effect, and the Tennessee Supreme Court ultimately ruled, last May, that the ESAs were jake, and in June that court denied the counties’ petition to reconsider.

Now the ACLU and SPLC are suing on the legally frivolous (IMNSHO) premise that that delay, manufactured by the county governments, is sufficient reason to further delay implementation of the ESA pilot program.

That’s how desperate the Left is to keep poor and minority kids—especially in Shelby County, although Davidson has a significant poor and minority population—trapped in bad schools instead of letting them transfer and actually get an education.

Nor am I sympathetic to the county school districts’ imagined plight. Those school districts really did have all that time since 2019 to prepare their budgets: they had no reason to ignore the possibility that the ESAs would be upheld and to prepare accordingly. It’s also not at all beyond the districts’ capabilities to have prepared two budgets, with one being centered on no ESA impact and one centered on an ESA impact.