A Bit More on Student Debt

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I wrote a bit ago about what colleges and universities should be required to do regarding student loans and student debt.  Here’s a bit more concerning why college and university management teams’ feet should be held to the fire. Mike Brown, writing for lendedu, has some data that compares, by school, student salary expectations with salary reality. In general,

median expected salary after graduating was $60,000, but the PayScale data showed that the typical graduate with zero to five years experience makes $48,400.

Brown published salary expectation vs reality for 62 schools; here are those data for the first 15 schools in his table:

School Actual Early Career Pay (0-5 Yrs. Experience) Expected Median Salary (0 Yrs. Experience) Percent Difference
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale $49,100 $70,000 70%
Washington State University $54,600 $70,000 78%
Central Michigan University $47,000 $58,500 80%
University of Louisville $48,800 $60,000 81%
East Carolina University $47,200 $58,000 81%
University of California, Riverside $54,000 $65,000 83%
University of Tennessee, Knoxville $50,200 $60,000 84%
Binghamton University $58,900 $70,000 84%
University of Illinois at Chicago $55,000 $65,000 85%
Temple University $50,800 $60,000 85%
University of Alabama $51,200 $60,000 85%
University of Colorado Boulder $55,600 $65,000 86%
University of California, Los Angeles $60,000 $70,000 86%
Kansas State University $51,600 $60,000 86%
Oklahoma State University $51,700 $60,000 86%

 

Who sets these expectations? That’s not clear. Who allows these expectations to stand uncorrected? The management teams at those colleges and universities.

Allowing this distortion to stand uncorrected is one more reason colleges and universities should be required to publish

  • graduation rates for their students given
    • 1 year of attendance
    • 2 years of attendance
    • 3 years of attendance
    • 4 years of attendance
    • 5 years of attendance
  • by major, the average and median salary for their graduates one year after graduation and five years after graduation—note that these data are not for one and five years of employment

The data from Brown also demonstrate why colleges and universities should be required to play the decisive role in lending money to their students and prospective students. Colleges and universities should be required, with respect to borrowings taken in order to attend the college/university, to

  • be the lender for the majority of the money borrowed by each student or student’s parent/guardian and not allowed to sell or otherwise transfer the loan, or
  • be the co-signer with the borrowing student or student’s parent/guardian on loans the student or student’s parent/guardian originates, or
  • be the loan guarantor of such loans, or
  • any combination of those three

Colleges and universities must absorb the risk of students’ or parents’/guardians’ borrowing in order for the student to attend their school. It’s the colleges and universities that are misleading the students concerning the value of the degrees gained, whether that misleading is overt through their setting inaccurate expectations, or passive through their silence regarding inaccurate expectations.

First It Was….

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…the Progressive-Democrat ex-President Barack Obama and his minions dismissing vast millions of us Americans in “fly-over country” as nothing but bitter Bible- and gun-clingers—and racist in the clinging.

Then it was the Progressive-Democratic Party’s Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton dismissing vast millions of us Americans as nothing but irredeemable, deplorable, racists and misogynists—and not America.

Now it’s the Progressive-Democratic Party leader, our President, Joe Biden dismissing vast millions of us Americans as nothing but MAGA extremists.

This is the long-standing utter contempt the Progressive-Democratic Party’s politicians have for us average Americans.

This is what we need to keep in mind as we vote this fall

Vladimir Putin’s May Speech

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Read between the lines of Putin’s speech and attempted justification of his invasion of Ukraine.

Speaking to the nation from Red Square ahead of the traditional military parade here Monday, the Russian leader said the Kremlin had every indication that a clash with Ukraine, which he says is led by US-backed neo-Nazis, was inevitable, so Moscow took pre-emptive action.
“The danger was growing day by day, so Russia gave a pre-emptive response to the aggression. It was a forced, timely, and only correct decision, a decision made by the sovereign, strong, and independent country,” Mr Putin said. “We saw how the military infrastructure was being developed, how hundreds of foreign advisers began to work, regular deliveries of the most modern weapons from [the North Atlantic Treaty Organization] countries were occurring.”

And

The defense of the Motherland, when its fate was being decided, has always been sacred[.]

Ukraine, said Putin, with its population of 40 million and its military establishment of 197 thousand active and 900 thousand reserve personnel, was a threat to the existence of his Russia with its own population of more than 145 million and its own military establishment of 1 million active and 2 million reserve personnel—and all those nuclear weapons. Putin was forced, he said, to strike first before Ukraine could inflict its devastating and conquering blow.

What an amazing indictment by Putin of his nation’s military capability to protect the Motherland’s fate and defeat an invasion by a nation with barely a quarter of Russia’s population and whose total military barely matches the size of the Motherland’s active duty force.

What an amazing indictment by Putin of his own nation’s technological prowess and his own military’s most modern weapons already in being and still being produced as compared Ukraine’s military equipage and NATO’s.

This is Who

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…the Progressive-Democratic Party has become. This from Party leader, President Joe Biden (D), as he bragged about his starting out in DC happily lunching with segregationists like [James (D, MS)] Eastland and [Strom (D, SC)] Thurmond, all those guys:

[W]e ended up eating lunch together. Things have changed. We got to bring it back.

Get back to hobnobbing with segregationists. Sure. This is yet another example of the manifest racism of Party.

Dan McLaughlin, National Review Senior Writer, noted:

Segregationists were famously chill about who got to eat lunch together[.]

National Journalism Center Program Director Becket Adams had this:

[O]f course you ate lunch together. [Y]ou were allowed to sit at their counter.

David Rubin of The Rubin Report, tweeted:

Nothing like a hot lunch with a segregationist…

Not all of us, and certainly none of us average Americans are interested in bringing the old days of segregation back. That’s the desire of the Left with their identity politics racist and sexist bigotry.

Ooh—Count ‘Em

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Germany has agreed to supply the Ukrainian army with self-propelled howitzers, the Panzerhaubitze 2000, which can fire a 155mm round 25-40 miles, depending on the round selected.

All seven of the howitzers.

And, in keeping with the German government’s practice of slow-walking all aid to Ukraine in the latter’s struggle to defend itself against the Russian barbarian invasion, Germany’s Defense Ministry

did not give a time frame for the delivery of the howitzers….

The weapons aren’t even operational; they’re being taken from a “pool” that has been set aside by the Defense Ministry for repairs. The weapons will be repaired over the next few weeks. Here’s an indication of the quality of German maintenance, too, via Deutsche Welle:

Germany has more than 100 of these howitzers, of which only 40 are currently ready for deployment[.]

A 40% combat ready rate is…suboptimal…except that Germany has been satisfied with that for some time.

For comparison purposes, a modern Russian Army self-propelled 152mm howitzer battery consists of 6 guns, and a modern US Army self-propelled 155mm howitzer battery also consists of 6 guns.

Seven howitzers. Chancellor Olaf Schulz shouldn’t strain his defense establishment so much just to make an insultingly puny contribution to Ukraine’s fight for its survival.