Tag Archives: responsibilities

Assess or Not?

Posted on by
Reply

Jason Riley had some thoughts in his Wall Street Journal op-ed concerning Harvard’s decision to not bother with any serious assessment of prospective students before choosing which to admit and which to…not. The subheadline on his piece summed up his column:

How do you help young people move forward without honestly assessing where they stand?

I had some thoughts in answer of that question, too, and they’re rather more pithy than Riley’s.

“You” don’t, but that’s not the point of the Left’s identity politics, most explicitly seen in academia. This is just the utter contempt Leftist identity politics purveyors have for blacks and Hispanics, considering them intrinsically inferior and so, paraphrasing Woodrow Wilson’s infamous words, they should be grateful for the protections of no assessments. It’s also the raw jealousy the Leftist identity politics purveyors have for Americans with Asian heritage, viewing them as intrinsically superior to the rest of us.

It’s a completely disgusting and dishonest display, and in a moral world, it would get institutions that employed such as these cut off from Federal and State funding, and alums with any sense of propriety and self respect would stop donating to them.

Student Loan Responsibility

Posted on by
Reply

Melissa Korn and Andrea Fuller wrote about student loan burdens in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal, using New York University as a worst-case illustration. Their subheadline made a good summary of their thesis.

By many measures, the elite Manhattan school is the worst or among the worst for leaving families and graduate students drowning in debt….

A female graduate sold her eggs to cover some of her NYU costs even as she borrowed to cover more; she’s still selling her eggs to cover expenses and try to pay on her student loan debt as she remains essentially unemployed five months after graduation. In another example, a single mother of three had a $40,000/year income when her son started school in 2018. The mother still has her own $34,000 in loans from her own bachelor’s degree and she’s borrowing another $140,000 in Parent Plus loans to help her son pursue his degree.

And this:

An NYU master’s in publishing leaves recent graduates with median debt nearly triple that of the school with the next highest loan burden for which the Education Department released data. At NYU, the graduates borrowed a median $116,000 and earned a median $42,000 two years out.

And this:

NYU’s 2015 and 2016 public-health graduates who took out federal loans borrowed a median $106,000 for the degree, the Journal’s analysis of Education Department data found; half earned roughly $61,000 or less two years after graduation.

And this deflection from NYU spokesman John Beckman:

Not everyone seeking an advanced degree is going into a lucrative field, and universities have no control over how our society values particular professions.

NYU is especially bad in this arena, but only by a matter of degree. The problem itself is both widespread and very serious.

The overall situation is one more argument for getting government all the way out of the student loan business, whether making the loans or guaranteeing them. That and the alternatives below are perfectly straightforward to implement, if exceedingly difficult to effect politically. But that just requires us sovereign citizens to put our foot down and fire the politicians who won’t go along and elect those who will.

After getting government out of the way, do these things:

  • make the schools publish the average and median 5-yr-after-graduation salaries for each of its majors
  • make the schools publish the per centages of their graduates finding employment in their major areas of study within one year of graduation
  • make the schools be the ones extending loans to their students or serve as co-borrower on any private financial institution student loans
  • let graduates discharge their loans through bankruptcy—stop disguising the risks from the lenders (and borrowers), and stop inuring the lenders from those risks.

One more Critical Item; although this is a change in mindset for all of us, not only school managers and politicians. Recognize for whom college is most appropriate. There’s a crying need for a whole lot of tradesmen, and good livings to be made there—and nothing an architect draws up or an engineer designs gets built without tradesmen. Doctors and lawyers have no place to ply their trades, other than in their homes, without tradesmen. Those homes don’t get built without tradesmen. And neither do the roads/bridges, power grids, communications grids, and on and on that connect those homes to those offices and office buildings—or mines and farms to anywhere—without those tradesmen.

Ego and Job Avoidance

Posted on by
Reply

The Senate has before it some 50 nominees for various ambassadorships that still need floor confirmation votes. Senator Ted Cruz (R, TX) is holding them up by refusing to give unanimous consent to their confirmation unless and until he gets a floor vote on sanctioning constructors of the Russian Nordstream 2 pipeline. In response, Majority Chuck Schumer (D, NY) is…threatening.

Democrats are working to clear as much of the backlog as possible by consent. If we cannot make much progress, we may need to stay and hold votes on nominees this weekend and next week until we do[.]

That would really eat into Senators’ Christmas break. Oh, the angry sacrifice.

At 30 hours of debate per confirmation vote, though, those 50 nominations would require more than just a couple of weeks’ intrusion into playtime. Those 1,500 hours accumulate to a bit over two months to get all of them voted on, even were the Senate in session 24/7 for those two months.

Unanimous consent occasionally is an administrative convenience for getting minor matters done—post office and park namings, for instance—however, it’s far too often a mechanism for ducking being on the record on substantive issues. Nominee confirmation votes on controversial nominees, for instance.

Cruz is entirely correct to not give his unanimous consent, especially given his terms.

All Schumer has to do is allow a vote—a vote, mind you, not a guarantee of passage—on a Nordstream 2 sanction. The Progressive-Democrat Senators and the Progressive-Democrat Vice President would promptly vote down the sanction, and the nomination consents could proceed. Of course, this would put the Progressive-Democrat Senators on the record as opposing sanctioning Putin’s pet project, and that might not play well in Arizona, or Georgia, or Nevada, or….

Apart from any of that, this is just Schumer exercising his ego in trying to face down a Republican Senator.

It’s not all bad, though. If Schumer backs up his threat, at least the Senators would remain in session doing their jobs, which includes voting, explicitly on the record, on substantive matters so their constituents have material with which to evaluate them in the coming election.

Playing Chicken with Trains

Posted on by
Reply

Bob Brody wrote of playing chicken with railroad trains when he was a high schooler and of the thrill of running those risks. Until he and his buds who saw an animal corpse on the tracks, an unfortunate who had neither won nor lost its race with fate, but who had run to a tie.

Brody then went on regarding the need for analysis rather than blind risk-taking.

He’s right, to a point, but only to a point.

You can win, or you can lose, but you’ll die if it’s a draw. And the train won’t chicken out.

Take all the risks you deem useful, hopefully after a risk-reward analysis. Just don’t settle for breakeven.

Advice

Posted on by
Reply

Rebecca Grant, DC-based national security analyst, had some for President Joe Biden (D) vis-à-vis Russian President Vladimir Putin on the subject of the latter’s threatened invasion of Ukraine. The venue for that advice is the summit between the two men that occurred yesterday.

Grant is naively optimistic, though.

The 30-nation Euro-Atlantic alliance is primed to deter and counter rash Russian actions.

No, it’s not. Johnson is just posturing, and the UK, a signatory to the Budapest Memorandum (as is Russia), already has betrayed Ukraine by acquiescing to Russia’s occupation of Crimea and eastern Ukraine rather than enforcing the Memorandum. Beyond that, Germany is already in the bag for Russia, and France is carefully quiet.

America is already involved.

Indeed, we are. We’re also a signatory to the Budapest Memorandum, and under the Obama-Biden administration, we’ve also betrayed Ukraine by declining to enforce that memorandum. Beyond that, ships in the Black Sea are ducks in a pond for any force on the shores.

Biden and NATO can do more to deter Putin.  Start with immediate air exercises in Ukraine with US and NATO aircraft.

It’s a start, did Biden have the integrity and moral courage to do so, but more is needed, a yet sterner test of Biden’s…strength. Economic sanctions are insufficient and unlikely to be enacted, anyway. The more that’s actually needed is moving US (because we can’t count on a NATO whose European members won’t even honor their own commitments to fund and equip the alliance) troops into Poland, south toward Ukraine and north toward Kaliningrad, and moving US naval forces to within air strike range of Kaliningrad.

Grant closed her advice with this:

Heat up one tank engine and we’ll know about it.

Certainly. But what will Biden do about it? Grant opened her piece with this:

Ukraine’s borders are a parking lot for Russian tanks, trucks, and artillery ready for a three-pronged blitzkrieg.

Even after that first tank has lit off and crossed the border, that parking lot, for the next number of days, will remain a parking lot of targets. Von Moltke learned that problem in 1914, and even though Putin’s generals likely will have learned from that, the same or worse bottlenecks exist in western Russia and eastern Ukraine.

Biden is unlikely to do any of that, though. He got his marching orders from Putin via Colonial Pipeline, and he already has kowtowed to Putin via Nordstream 2.

Biden will only kowtow again.

In any event, we’ll be hearing, today and in the coming days, the claims of the two participants. We’ll learn empirically, in the coming weeks and months, the outcome of the summit.