THINK TWICE BEFORE GOING TO COLLEGE

THINK TWICE BEFORE GOING TO COLLEGE

by Thomas Walsh is a Mason resident. 

One hundred years ago, only 10 percent of the U.S. population had a high school diploma – none of my grandparents graduated from high school. In those days, you could graduate from high school, get a job at a bank, and, 35 years later, become bank president.

My parents graduated from high school. My dad could have attended college on the Montgomery G.I. Bill after World War II, but family legend has it that my mother refused to move 75 miles away from her parents. It was left to me to be the first in my family to get a higher education.

My timing was perfect. Fifty years ago, universities were considered to be only for the elite. Very few – 3 percent to 4 percent – of high school graduates earned a bachelor’s degree. It made no difference what your major or GPA were – you were a college graduate.

I had a “nothing degree” and a modest GPA. I was hired by IBM – the Google of the day, and had a very successful career in information technology. Ironically, I had never seen a computer before I was hired.

Fast forward to today. About one in four high school graduates – 23 percent – will earn a bachelor’s degree.

Given the rise in the number of alums and the impact of the Great Recession of 2008, there is a serious imbalance between supply and demand of suitable jobs.

Recently I was doing volunteer work in a suburban high school that sends 80 percent of its graduates to college. I shared the supply and demand numbers with the principal. His response was, “We certainly don’t want the students to hear that.” Prospective employers can pick and choose from a vast army of applicants, and they aren’t going to hire many art history majors with a 2.3 GPA.

College today is a competition.

According to the Department of Labor, about half of graduates with a bachelor’s degree are not going to get a good job. The game has changed.

Here are the new rules for high school graduates:

There are exceptions, but you will probably need some kind of credential to get a good job.

Unless you are in the top 10 percent of your class, think twice before choosing the traditional four-year degree as that credential. (The master’s is rapidly becoming the standard for a good job if you are following the traditional college route.)

If you think you are up to the competition at the traditional four year college, choose a rigorous, marketable major and work hard to get good grades. (If your passion is “puppeteering,” try to resist the urge to choose this as your major.) Otherwise, consider alternative credentials. You don’t need a traditional four-year degree to make a good living in computer programming. See Udacity.com as one example. The trades – welders, plumbers, etc. – cannot find enough applicants. Check out Mike Rowe at profoundlydisconnected.com. Do you want to be an airline pilot? The military will train you for free.

Whatever credential you choose, avoid excessive student loan debt ($20,000 is a lot of student loan debt).

There are thousands of good jobs available that don’t require a bachelor’s degree because many parents and students start with the wrong objective. Focus on becoming financially self-sufficient instead of which colleges accept you.

Abandon the scholar-athlete charade

Abandon the scholar-athlete charade

By Walter E. Williams

Last year’s column “Dishonest Educators” (Jan. 9, 2013) reported on the largest school cheating scandal in U.S. history. In more than three-quarters of the 56 Atlanta schools investigated, teachers changed student answers on academic achievement tests. Cheating orders came directly from school administrators. The cheating was brazen. One teacher told a colleague, “I had to give your kids, or your students, the answers because they’re dumb as hell.” Atlanta’s not alone. Teacher cheating has been discovered in other cities, such as Philadelphia, Houston, New York, Detroit, Baltimore, Los Angeles and Washington.

Rampant academic cheating is not confined to primary and secondary schools. Cheating occurs in the nation’s colleges, as discovered during an investigation at the Chapel Hill campus of the University of North Carolina, the state’s flagship university. Over two decades, more than 3,100 students enrolled in and received credit for taking nonexistent phantom classes in the university’s department of African and African-American studies. Nearly 50 percent of the students taking the phantom classes were athletes on the university’s football and basketball teams.

Students officially enrolled in African and African-American studies lecture courses that never met. According to a university-commissioned report, Deborah Crowder, the department’s administrative assistant, required students to turn in a single paper. The papers were often largely plagiarized or padded with fluff. The students were given A’s or B’s after a cursory read. The classes were widely known on campus as “paper classes.” The department’s chairman, Julius Nyang’oro, was the professor of record for many of the fake classes. The university’s academic support program for student-athletes notified both Nyang’oro and Crowder of what grades students needed “to remain academically or athletically eligible.”

Professor Nyang’oro retired in 2012, after news of the scheme came to light. A grand jury indicted him on a felony charge for taking money for a class he didn’t teach. Recently, the state’s district attorney’s office dismissed the charges against Nyang’oro because of his cooperation with former federal prosecutor Kenneth Wainstein’s investigation into athletic and academic issues at the university. So far, nine university employees have been fired or are under disciplinary review. Let’s look at the motivation for this gross academic fraud. If you said follow the money, go to the head of the class. UNC’s basketball team generates $20 million in profits for the university. Football generates $22 million. Basketball and football coaches are paid salaries in excess of $2 million. The only way a university can pay those salaries and generate that kind of revenue is to assemble a winning team. That means many universities are more interested in an athlete’s playing skills than in his academic skills. In other words, whether a student can read, write and compute means little compared with whether he can slam-dunk a basketball or make touchdowns.

Last week, UNC Chancellor Carol Folt issued an apology and an institutional mea culpa. It has a hollow ring. She must have been aware of the efforts of Mary Willingham, the whistleblower academic adviser at UNC who had spoken out against the gross fraud regarding the academic performance of revenue-sport athletes. Plus, former UNC basketball player Rashad McCants told ESPN that he received top grades in classes that did not require attendance and that he turned in papers that tutors wrote for him.

This cheating scandal raises another issue, namely that of exploiting athletes for the benefit of universities. I think that the time has come to abandon the athlete-scholar charade. Universities ought to pay athletes a competitive salary in line with everyone else involved in college sports. Most basketball and football players will see their playing days end when they leave college. Many players who participate in university fraud in order to maintain their player eligibility are black. Where will they end up when they graduate in possession of a fraudulent college degree other than sad, embittered, used and having nowhere to turn?

While UNC’s cheating agenda has been fully exposed, I’d bet the rent money that similar fraudulent practices are widespread at other universities, and whistleblowers should come forth.

Lou Holts Nails It!

Lou Holts Nails It!

The Democrats are right, there are two Americas. The America that works, and the America that doesn’t. The America that contributes, and the America that doesn’t. It’s not the haves and the have nots, it’s the dos and the don'ts. Some people do their duty as Americans, obey the law, support themselves, contribute to society, and others don't. That’s the divide in America.
  It’s not about income inequality, it’s about civic irresponsibility. It’s about a political party that preaches hatred, greed and victimization in order to win elective office. It’s about a political party that loves power more than it loves its country.

That’s not invective, that’s truth, and it’s about time someone said it.

The politics of envy was on proud display a couple weeks ago when President Obama pledged the rest of his term to fighting “income inequality.” He noted that some people make more than other people, that some people have higher incomes than others, and he says that’s not just. That is the rationale of thievery.
  The other guy has it, you want it, Obama will take it for you. Vote Democrat. That is the philosophy that produced Detroit .

It is the electoral philosophy that is destroying America . It conceals a fundamental deviation from American values and common sense because it ends up not benefiting the people who support it, but a betrayal.
  The Democrats have not empowered their followers, they have enslaved them in a culture of dependence and entitlement, of victim-hood and anger instead of ability and hope. The president’s premise – that you reduce income inequality by debasing the successful–seeks to deny the successful the consequences of their choices and spare the unsuccessful the consequences of their choices. Because, by and large, income variations in society is a result of different choices leading to different consequences. Those who choose wisely and responsibly have a far greater likelihood of success, while those who choose foolishly and irresponsibly have a far greater likelihood of failure. Success and failure usually manifest themselves in personal and family income. You choose to drop out of high school or to skip college – and you are apt to have a different outcome than someone who gets a diploma and pushes on with purposeful education. You have your children out of wedlock and life is apt to take one course; you have them within a marriage and life is apt to take another course. Most often in life our destination is determined by the course we take.

My doctor, for example, makes far more than I do. There is significant income inequality between us. Our lives have had an inequality of outcome, but, our lives also have had an in equality of effort. While my doctor went to college and then devoted his young adulthood to medical school and residency, I got a job in a restaurant. He made a choice, I made a choice, and our choices led us to different outcomes. His outcome pays a lot better than mine. Does that mean he cheated and Barack Obama needs to take away his wealth? No, it means we are both free men in a free society where free choices lead to different outcomes.
  It is not inequality Barack Obama intends to take away, it is freedom. The freedom to succeed, and the freedom to fail. There is no true option for success if there is no true option for failure. The pursuit of happiness means a whole lot less when you face the punitive hand of government if your pursuit brings you more happiness than the other guy. Even if the other guy sat on his arse and did nothing. Even if the other guy made a lifetime’s worth of asinine and short sighted decisions.

Barack Obama and the Democrats preach equality of outcome as a right, while completely ignoring inequality of effort.
  The simple Law of the Harvest – as ye sow, so shall ye reap – is sometimes applied as, “The harder you work, the more you get." 

Obama would turn that upside down. Those who achieve are to be punished as enemies of society and those who fail are to be rewarded as wards of society. Entitlement will replace effort as the key to upward mobility in American society if Barack Obama gets his way. He seeks a lowest common denominator society in which the government besieges the successful and productive to foster equality through mediocrity. He and his party speak of two Americas , and their grip on power is based on using the votes of one to sap the productivity of the other. America is not divided by the differences in our outcomes, it is divided by the differences in our efforts.
  It is a false philosophy to say one man’s success comes about unavoidably as the result of another man’s victimization.
  What Obama offered was not a solution, but a separatism. He fomented division and strife, pitted one set of Americans against another for his own political benefit. That’s what socialists offer. Marxist class warfare wrapped up with a bow. Two Americas , coming closer each day to proving the truth to Lincoln’s maxim that a house divided against itself cannot stand. 

"Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it."
  Lou Holtz

Leo "Lou" Holtz (born January 6, 1937) is a retired American football coach, and active sportscaster, author, and motivational speaker.

THE 'Y' CHROMOSOME - The DOWNSIDE OF EVOLUTION

THE 'Y' CHROMOSOME

• People born before 1946 are called -
• The Greatest Generation.
  
  People born between 1946 and 1964 are called -
• The Baby Boomers.
  
  People born between 1965 and 1979 are called -
• Generation X. 
• And people born between 1980 and 2010 are called -
• Generation Y.

Why do we call the last group -Generation Y ?

• Y should I get a job?
• Y should I leave home and find my own place?
• Y should I get a car when I can borrow yours?
• Y should I clean my room?
• Y should I wash and iron my own clothes?
• Y should I buy any food?
• But perhaps a cartoonist explained
• It most eloquently below...

Rather than fight inequality, seek opportunity

Rather than fight inequality, seek opportunity

By Cathy Young

Jewish World Review - In the early 1990s, after Soviet communism collapsed, many Western pundits argued that a market economy wouldn't work in Russia because hostility toward wealth was so entrenched most people would rather be poor but equal.

On my trips to Moscow back then, I met many Russians who disagreed. The problem, a middle-age cabdriver told me, was that the average person had no chance to make a decent living: if he and his family were doing well, what did he care if some other guy was super-rich.

Twenty years later, inequality is the focus of debate in the United States. The war on inequality was the centerpiece of Bill de Blasio's campaign for mayor of New York — and of his inauguration speech on New Year's Day. President Barack Obama, too, has embraced the cause. In a speech last month, he deplored "a dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility" jeopardizing the American idea that "if you work hard, you have a chance to get ahead."

But is inequality the problem — and is the American dream really in decline?

Part of the debate focuses on how to measure inequality. Analysts on the left, such as economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, cite data showing that incomes for the very rich have skyrocketed while those of other Americans have stagnated or even dropped. Those on the right, such as John C. Goodman, an economist with the National Center for Policy Analysis, counter with other figures — taking into account taxes, government programs, noncash benefits such as health insurance, and changes in household composition — suggesting that inflation-adjusted income gains over the past 35 years have taken place across the board.

Still, even the estimates preferred by conservatives, such as Congressional Budget Office numbers, show a dramatic growth in income disparities. From 1979 to 2007, incomes for the top 1 percent have nearly tripled, while increasing by 65 percent for the rest of the top one-fifth of the population, by less than 20 percent for the bottom fifth, and by 40 percent for those in the middle. Is this a problem if everyone's fortunes improve — and if people have a chance to move up the ladder?

That brings us to the second part of Obama's claim: that America is lagging in upward mobility. Indeed, the classic rags-to-riches story is relatively rare: Fewer than 10 percent of Americans raised in families in the bottom fifth of incomes end up moving into the top fifth. Almost 60 percent, however, do at least move up from the bottom fifth. And since the studies track mobility across generations, they leave out immigrants — for whom the American dream remains very much alive.

While the situation is not as dire as many liberals claim, conservative arguments often understate the problem. If low-income Americans are only kept from falling further behind by government programs, that's not something to cheer for if you deplore welfare dependency. Indeed, growing numbers of conservatives recognize the need to address the social, cultural and economic forces keeping the very poor trapped at the bottom — as well as the bane of long-term unemployment. But the solutions have to include, above all, job creation and economic growth.

Much of Obama's speech focused on the need for more opportunity and fewer barriers to advancement. Yet naming inequality itself a key issue was a rhetorical bow to a segment of the left that sees large income disparities themselves as morally offensive. It is a divisive rhetoric that plays not only to left-wing grievances but also to right-wing stereotypes of liberals as socialists. Enhancing opportunity, not battling inequality, should be our goal.