Conservative Kavanaugh Can’t Speak On Campus

By Professor Doom



     I know that sometimes rumors are true but…sometimes they’re false, and rumors pushed by our mainstream media are the ones most likely to be so (hi Trump-Russia Collusion!).


     When Kavanaugh was initially selected for the supreme court, there were no rumors about him at all. I mean, he’d already been vetted repeatedly as he worked his way up the judicial system, and nothing dark ever showed up.


     But, once it seemed likely he’d be confirmed, then suddenly all sorts of “rumors” sprang up (cf Trump, who was fine in the public eye for decades, then when Leftist power was threatened, turned into a racistsexisthomophobe). Part of the big problem with the “me too” and “believe her” campaigns is how they allow rumors to smear a person without evidence, merely testimony. Kavanaugh was actually attacked for being upset at having his name dragged through the mud, though he had good reason for his anger: such rumors, once unleashed, can never be put away. Even if, as in his case, the rumors are utterly unfounded, baseless, laughable, dated from when he was in high school, and multiple “witnesses” against him have recanted their testimony…the smear stays. It’s a really nasty thing to do to someone, and so he’s justified in being angry about it.


     It’s queer how there’s never a decent investigation into how these coordinated smear campaigns get organized, but I digress, and need to get back to higher education: when you select faculty, a college teacher, you generally would like top people in the field, if you can get them.


     Certainly someone like a Supreme Court justice would be pretty ideal to teach a college law course:


George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School hired Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh to co-teach a course this summer called Creation of the Constitution. The course will be held 3,668 miles away, in Runnymede, England, where the Magna Carta was sealed 800 years ago…




      What a privilege it would be to be enrolled in such a course. It’d be like taking a computer course with Bill Gates as a guest lecturer, or a business administration course with a Fortune 7 (i.e., one of the top 7 companies in the world) CEO as co-professor. Students must be thrilled.


      Now, he’s a Supreme Court justice, as cleared as possible from all such wrongdoing. Surely people won’t hold those bizarre rumors, mostly established as definitely false, against him, right? Reasonable people won’t, but our campuses are neither populated nor run by only reasonable people. So what happened when a conservative Supreme Court judge comes to campus?


One student told George Mason’s Board of Visitors, “It has affected my mental health knowing that an abuser will be part of our faculty.” Another said, “The hiring of Kavanaugh threatens the mental well-being of all survivors on this campus.”




      What the…? The FBI investigated, found nothing—I’m no fan of the FBI, but considering the claims against him included no dates, no confirming co-witnesses, no locations, and no corroborating evidence, I honestly don’t see how they could do much of an investigation. I remind the gentle reader multiple primary witnesses have admitted they lied in their claims.


       And yet the smear sticks, so badly that the students are protesting. I don’t really want to subject people to our criminal “justice” system, but I hope the damage the admitted-lying witnesses have done to these poor snowflakes kids will be taken into account when they are criminally sentenced. Who am I kidding, they’re smearing a conservative, so they’ll be fine. The damage they’ve done is unarguable, however.


The Washington Post reports that a petition to fire Kavanaugh has gathered almost 3,500 signatures and has the endorsement of George Mason Democrats. GMU students have created separate forms for parents and alumni to pledge that they will not donate to the university so long as Kavanaugh is teaching.




       Wait. Are there no adults on this campus able to tell these deluded students that the rumors are demonstrably false? Protesting students even defaced the statue of George Mason on campus, and still the “leaders” there failed to do their job of education:


The university’s spokesman Michael Sandler gave The College Fix a mealy-mouthed excuse saying, “We allow students to dress up the statue, so this doesn’t violate any policies that I’m aware of.” He said the university “strongly supports freedom of expression and this would seem to fall into that category.” 




      Sure, look the other way on the statue defacing…it’s easily fixed, and the students are doing it out of ignorance. Ignorance is forgivable, but now take the opportunity to let the students know that they are protesting a human being based on proven false rumors. Seriously, the people running our campuses aren’t even remotely educators now.


      Again: forgive the kids for being ignorant, and there’s no hope of the campus “leaders” educating the students. Perhaps the faculty can help?


Professor Bethany Letiecq, the head of the George Mason chapter of the American Association of University Professors, endorsed a call by UnKoch My Campus, another leftist group, for a congressional investigation of GMU’s law school’s hiring of Justice Kavanaugh as an adjunct faculty member.




     These. People. Are. Insane. Kavanaugh is a Supreme Court Justice…you want him on your campus, teaching law-related courses, regardless of accusations against him; that such accusations are false isn’t even that important.


      Honest, if Benito Mussolini, Karl Marx, or Charles Manson were on campus giving talks on Fascism, Socialism, or Sociopathy (bear with me on the logistics here), such a campus would be world-renowned, and students/faculty, the smart ones, would be fighting to hear what these vicious murderers would have to say (note: I’m not saying anyone would agree with these notable’s beliefs…but they clearly were close to the top of their “profession,” much as Kavanaugh is). And these people have very serious crimes to answer for.


     Kavanaugh does not.


Fortunately for civility, Dr. Angel Cabrera, the university’s president, said that there were no legitimate grounds for an investigation by the university. He threw a bit of pablum to the protesters by saying: “I respect the views of people who disagreed with Justice Kavanaugh’s Senate confirmation due to questions raised about his sexual conduct in high school. But he was confirmed and is now a sitting Justice.”




     Wow, even the Poo Bah will not take the opportunity to inform the misguided souls on campus that the rumors against Kavanaugh are mostly proven false (with the remainder exceedingly dubious).


      The article I’m quoting from ultimately explains why the raging Leftists do not want this man speaking on campus, and it has nothing to do with fake rumors:


GMU students and faculty may also be disturbed about what Justice Kavanaugh is going to teach. In the course, Creation of the Constitution, he will explain how much the Magna Carta influenced the founders of our nation. The 1215 Magna Carta limited the power of central government and it forced a reigning monarch to grant his English subjects rights. It contained a list of 63 clauses drawn up to limit King John’s power, resulting in making royal authority subject to the law instead of reigning above it. It laid the foundations for limited constitutional governments, an idea offensive to most leftists.




      I’ve spoken with many Leftists who honestly believe to their very core that rights flow only from government (their god, for the atheist Leftists), and that humans have no rights but those which are granted by government. Thus, I understand why they feel Kavanaugh must be silenced, by any means possible. As far as they are concerned, he speaks heresy, and no facts, no education, no opinion, can allow for such talk.


     At least our rule of law, for now, just barely, will let him speak.



www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

The Long Overdue Crisis of Confidence In Higher Ed…Being Buried

By Professor Doom



     While I’ve been writing about it for years, and known about it for many years, it’s only recently that the general population has come to realize we have a real problem in higher education. Recent polls confirm this:


A Crisis in Confidence in Higher Ed



     The above link is from Gallup; granted, the last election showed us polls, even from long established as (supposedly) legitimate polling organizations, can easily be pure rubbish (I do have some friends in these organizations, incidentally, and they’ve yet to get back to me on what exactly happened…). In any event, when a poll confirms what my own eyeballs tell me, I tend to believe it.


Confidence in higher education in the U.S. has decreased significantly since 2015, more so than for any other U.S. institution that Gallup measures.



     Hard to believe the decline has only been significant in the last few years, but that is really the nature of the system. Allow me to roughly explain why it took so long:


     Our big schools took centuries to build up a solid reputation. Over the course of decades, I saw wave after wave of administrators come in, figure out how to sell out the reputation to maximize growth, and, once they’ve mined as much as they could, move on…only for another wave to come in and debase the school further. The students had no idea how bad the corruption was, all they saw was they got their easy grades and degrees. They weren’t about to reveal the corruption. BUT…once those students graduated, went into the real world, and eventually achieved positions of some power where they could hire the next generation of college students? That’s when the corrupted train finally crashed—these new managers knew the higher education many of their applicants received was bogus. So, those jobs dried up, at least for most college graduates.


This drop in confidence in the higher education industry comes after Gallup detected a similar decline in the public's view that higher education is available to those who need it,




      This is a weird thing to say. Many schools list their textbooks and course syllabi online. Old (and by “old,” I mean 5 years, mostly with information that was well-known a century ago) editions of those books can be purchased cheaply, or borrowed for free from the library. Anyone who wants a classical education can get it for free, and has been able to do so for a long time. I concede it’s easier when you have a professor available to explain things, but in the modern world higher education is available to anyone who wants it, at least in the U.S.


…a recent study conducted by the Association of Governing Boards and Gallup, finds that three in four trustees (74%) are concerned or very concerned about the future of higher education in the U.S. Their concerns remain focused largely on one main challenge: affordability…




     74% of trustees might be concerned, but I suspect the percentage of trustees who are utterly clueless is quite higher. Affordability? The profit margins on “education” as it is presented today, are huge. Please understand most state schools get free land, free buildings, endless tax breaks, and taxpayer support…and yet we have for-profit schools still managing to compete with the state schools at comparable prices. There are layers and layers of fatty administrators who can be safely cut out, any time our “leaders” of higher ed are ready to really address “affordability.”


When asked about the top issues influencing the public's negative perceptions of higher education, large majorities of trustees cite news or media about college student debt (72%) and news or media about the price of tuition (64%).




    Read the above carefully: it’s not the debt and price of tuition which our “leaders” think is the problem with higher ed, it’s the fact people are learning about it from the news or media. Where do they find these people to rule our campuses?


In the U.S., enrollment across all higher education sectors declined by 1.4% in 2018, consistent with recent trends, and Moody's predicts that an increasing number of private colleges and universities will close on an annual basis in the near term.




     Allow me to clarify what’s being said above: the minor drop in sales of 1.4% will lead to the increasing rates of closure of private colleges and universities. It’s certainly true, the gentle reader needs to understand those schools (as well as many state schools) completely deserve to be closed. They had a huge bounty of student loan money flowing into campus for several decades. A very few schools wisely invested that money, but most just spent every penny on palaces and pay raises for the people at the top.


      They didn’t just spend every penny they had, they spent quite a bit they didn’t have, but assumed they would get it later based on the (incredible) growth trends of the last few decades. These morons didn’t consider that our aging population and sheer limit of how many people you can slam into higher ed, much less increasingly widespread knowledge of higher education corruption, would cause the growth to stop. 


     So, yes, a 1.4% decline in sales, unpleasant for most businesses, is utterly devastating to our epically mismanaged higher education system.


In the past five years, WGU has increased the cost of annual tuition by only $600, while total enrollment has more than doubled, to over 100,000 students.




     I haven’t mentioned WGU in my blog much; it’s a big online school with a “unique” system of generating worthless degrees/student loan revenue. I’ll just wait until the big scandal breaks on what’s going on there before discussing in detail; it might be a while, though, as they are extremely politically connected and very tech-savvy (sponsoring a number of fake “independent” sites which exist solely to say how great WGU is…). Of course, because the school is so big and automated, you could just pop over to term paper warehouse and pick up all the course assignments cheaply if you want a degree from WGU.


     It’s curious that WGU has numerous full time staff to squelch and blow smoke on any student complaints posted online, but doesn’t put much effort into making it not so easy to cheat through the classes, but let’s get back to this mysterious “crisis of confidence” article from Gallup:


In its 2015 report, Gallup demonstrated a clear relationship between student debt levels and graduates' perceptions that their degree was worth the cost. Graduates with more student loan debt were less likely than other graduates to believe their degree was worth the cost.




     The ones who paid the most think they were overcharged. Yeah, no kidding, right? You must believe Gallup here because it lines up with what you already know.


     This was rather the problem in the last election. Polls kept telling us nobody liked Trump, and Hillary was loved by all…but anyone with eyeballs could see far more “Trump for President” bumper stickers (i.e., placed by actual supporters) than those for Hillary, and Trump rallies were getting tens of thousands of people while Hillary could only draw a few dozen attendees (although our mainstream media ignored the former, and used clever camera work on the latter, to disguise her numbers).


      But, this poll just tells me what we already know: the more you pay for something worthless, the more you feel ripped off. Yes, Gallup, I believe you. Now, about those last election polling numbers…


…proving that the significant investment can be worth it for some grads.




     Wow, way to polish that turd. Strong language like “proving” followed up with a double-weasel-word (“can,” “some”) clause ends this report, enough to confuse a gullible reader, I suppose. 


      I still maintain the crisis of confidence, reluctantly discussed by Gallop and nearly dismissed, is being under-reported here. It would hardly be the first time the legitimate results of even major polls were manipulated into being less than the reality anyone with eyeballs can see.



www.professorconfess.blogspot.com



         

Learning From The Enemy: A Look At A Diversity Guide

By Professor Doom



     Of all the corrupt, money-sucking fiefdoms on campus, none are more dangerous than the Diversity fiefdoms. Most people think our campuses are divided into departments and those certainly exist, but the departments only generate revenue for the school, providing classes for students to take. Much of that revenue pours in “institutes,” little fiefdoms which few, if any, students know about, and are given such a blank check to spend money that it’s not unheard of to have multiple embezzlement schemes in the same fiefdom.


      These places are also hotbeds of Social Justice Warrior activity, and are generally packed with “NPCs” all thinking the same thoughts and chanting the same words. Recently, a Diversity fiefdom at Amherst college, the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, released a guide to have shared language about identity. I’ll just say “I can’t make this stuff up” only a single time, right here, though so many of these “definitions” are beyond belief as well as my apparently quite limited imagination.


This is a list of carefully researched and thoughtfully discussed definitions for key diversity and inclusion terms…




     I want to point out from the above, these aren’t the ramblings of some late-stage psychotic alchemist or something, a group of lunatics actually thought about what they were writing, considered it, and published it. Granted, these people are self-evidently insane…but I feel like picking on them all the same.



Accomplice: A term coined by Indigenous Action Network to critique the ways in which “ally” as an identity term has been deployed absent of action, accountability, or risk-taking.




      Is that really the definition of accomplice the gentle reader is familiar with? I’m not even sure what’s trying to be said here. Keep in mind, they thought about this new definition, and thought it superior to the usual definition of the word.



Collusion: Thinking and acting in ways that support dominant systems of power, privilege, and oppression. Both privileged and oppressed groups can collude with oppression. Example: Able-bodied people who object to strategies for making buildings accessible because of the expense.




     Whew, good thing there was an example there. Seriously, how does anyone think like this? Maybe this is why the Russian “collusion” investigation fell apart? Even when the definition starts out pretty clear, they toss in extra stuff to create confusion:


Equality: treating everyone exactly the same. An equality emphasis often ignores historical and structural factors that benefit some social groups/communities and harm other social groups/communities.




      As near as I can tell, these aren’t so much definitions as they are total crap something else. For the most part, this guide is just weird, but sometimes it goes off the deep end:



Myth of Scarcity: Used to pit people against each other, this is the fostering of the belief that resources are limited…




      The “belief” that resources are limited? Seriously? Yes, they’re serious. I hardly know how to manage the cognitive disconnect here. If they honestly believe resources are not limited, then how can they ask for affirmative action, inclusion, reparations or anything else? What does it matter if there are infinite resources?


       It just goes on and on:


Reverse Oppression: There is no such thing as reverse oppression….



      ?????????? They literally define an existing term as not existing. The “definition” of this alleged non-concept finishes with an example of it not happening:


…women cannot be “just as sexist” as men because they do not hold political, economic, and institutional power.




      Wow, Hillary Clinton never held any political power as Secretary of State? No institutional power in The Clinton Foundation? What? I’m just so puzzled here. The term Social Justice is used often, and thankfully (?) the guide gives us a huge definition:



Social Justice:

1.      An anti-oppression orientation to social and political organization.

     For this first part, note how “social justice” usually leads to anti-white discrimination. I’d call this reverse discrimination, or reverse oppression, but apparently that doesn’t exist. Good thing I have this guide to assist the way I think, Orwellian-style. The definition continues:

2.      The process and goal of addressing the root causes of institutional and structural “-isms.”

We’ll have to get to ‘isms’ later…but how can you address them without oppression?

3.      A vision of the world where all groups of people can live (and be perceived) as fully human on all levels (personal, social, institutional, and structural).

      Huh, isn’t this a bit circular? I mean, if they are people, they’re human, right? The fourth definition is long, and completely demented. I’ll edit it down for semi-coherence:

4.      A vision of the world not rooted in the dominance of any one group…not be rooted in a scarcity model that devalues things that are abundant…and highly values that which is scarce or rare.

       This is a viable model? Human reality has always valued the scarce over the common, it’s how things have worked for thousands of years. I really want to point out that all communist movements make the above claim and, in short order, food becomes very scarce, every single time. What also happens every single time is this scarce commodity only ends up in the hands of the people at the top. You’d have to be a lunatic to think of this as a “model” humans should pursue, and yet we have a whole fiefdom here which thinks this way.


      So let’s get to those –isms. Ageism is simple enough, but things quickly turn weird:


Cissexism: the system of belief that cisgender individuals are the privileged class and are more natural, normal or acceptable than transgender, genderqueer, nonbinary, and/or gender-nonconforming people. This believe manifests as denial of rights to trans and nonbinary people and their routine mistreatment.




       I’ve mentioned before that words like “normal” and “natural” are well-defined terms, and absolutely apply to what this manifesto is referring to as cisgender (i.e., heterosexual) people. As far as rights, well, we do have a system of law here, I really don’t think people who are not cisgender are “routine” in having such rights denied. It’s an unsurprising definition, since the insane often have hallucinations.


       If you ever want to know what racism is, the guide provides a huge definition. Hysterically, this definition includes the unequal distribution of resources—fundamentally impossible if you believe resources are infinite. Again, mental inconsistency is par for the course for the irrational.


      It’s a 40 page guide, and after a mere 8 pages I feel much stupider for reading it. I will not continue. I only include the link for the particularly iron-willed to peruse. I have my doubts concerning the ability to get useful information about the lunatics slowly taking over our campus, for one simple reason: these people are nothing if not hypocritical. They don’t believe or adhere to any of this stuff the second it doesn’t suit them, ever.


     That said, the link is very hard evidence that such maniacs really do exist on our campuses, and are paid huge sums of money to come up with this dross. They’re paid from the student loan scam. End it.



www.professorconfess.blogspot.com









    

Backwards Higher Ed Goes Test Optional

By Professor Doom



     While the SAT, a placement test to get into college, is destroying itself in an attempt to become more relevant…it’s pointless, as today’s topic addresses.


     It’s always fascinating to watch the mismanagement which comes from government control and interference. When a privately held business finds sales lagging, for example, it reduces prices. You can see this every day, from retail sales to airline tickets. On the other hand, if government finds it’s not making enough revenue from, say, public transit…it raises the prices. 


     The difference is government knows it has a captive audience, the only people using public buses have no choice in the matter, or so I’ve supposed. Higher education doesn’t truly have captives, though many of the people going into it are slaves to indoctrination, mentally as much trapped in the system as someone in the inner city with no other way to get to his job.


      People are breaking the indoctrination, however, and enrollments are finally dropping. The higher tuition is one reason for this, but the cost is not truly the problem: if the degrees and education sold were worth the cost, then the price would ultimately be irrelevant.


      A normal market response to falling enrollments, falling sales, would be to either lower the price, or increase the value of the education. The people running our schools are wildly incapable of such thinking, despite their self-assessed-as-prestigious degrees in Administration.


     So what’s their idiotic response?


New Push for Test Optional




     Many schools still have some nominal entrance requirements, namely tests like the ACT or SAT, but they’re getting rid of them. Obviously, they’re doing it to increase enrollments, but what reason do the rulers give for debasing education still further?


The survey also showed many admissions leaders are concerned about the trends in test scores by race and ethnicity.




     Heh, test scores are RACIST so we have to get rid of them. This is just more edu-fascism, the merger of administrative and ideological interests on our campus: the looters want more enrollments, while the social justice warriors want more room to get more like-minded believers on campus.  Eventually, the SJWs take over and push out the looters…but not before the looters get their share of lakefront property.


Scores on the SAT of Asian Americans are increasing at a much faster rate than are scores for other groups. And those suing Harvard University and other critics of affirmative action like to point to test-score averages to suggest discrimination against Asian Americans. Seventy-five percent of admissions leaders surveyed by Inside Higher Ed said they were concerned by the "persistent gaps" in SAT and ACT scores by race and ethnicity.




     One thing that’s always overlooked by the “Asian superiority” on tests is how their culture emphasizes study. Instead of eliminating the tests, we could ask all applicants to study as hard as Asians. Perhaps Asians are smarter, but IQ tests are often challenged as RACIST (with some validity, I concede)…what is never challenged is the simple fact Asians, both in the East and in the US, spend far more time studying than other cultures.

Bingo! The SAT shows objectively that the Asian kids need to score 450 points higher than African American students. Even more outrageous is that lots of Asian kids are coming from much poorer backgrounds and the "preferred" minorities are children of doctors and lawyers.

So what to do about the glaring objective evidence? Don't require the SAT!

--from the comments section. 450 is an exaggeration. I think.




      Nah, asking applicants to study is too hard and would reduce admissions. Let’s just cry RACIST instead. The trend of crying RACIST instead of rationally thinking it through is only increasing:


In calendar year 2019, the pace is now one such announcement every 10 days, more than twice the pace at comparable points in past years, said Robert Schaeffer, public education director of FairTest: National Center for Fair & Open Testing, a group that is perhaps the leading critic of standardized testing in college admissions.




    Parents, if you’re considering where to send your kids, please send them to a school which restricts admissions. A school without admissions has no choice but to eventually become a school without standards: if the leaders at the top are willing to debase education just to get kids to come to campus, I assure you those same leaders will continue to debase education to keep the kids on campus. 


       And if your kid can’t score high enough on the test, or more accurately isn’t willing to study hard enough to do so? Then take that as a sign that your kid isn’t really academically inclined…this is not a bad thing, I assure you. Our country is filled with great academics working for less than minimum wage as college adjuncts. 


      Send your kid to trade school instead—if he’s willing to get his hands dirty, then he’ll make more than enough to hire a few fools with M.A.s, maybe even Ph.D.s, in Gender Studies to carry his stuff.   


The new institutions going test optional also show the breadth of the colleges pursuing the approach.




      I’m quoting Inside Higher Ed above, which cluelessly takes debasing education as an “approach.” Wow, we’ve been debasing education further and further for decades, and it’s becoming ever more clear that much of higher education is failing because of it.


     Our leaders, in the face of colossal failure from debasing education…decide to debase education further. I can’t make this stuff up.

In the winter of 2017-18, only one college announced it was going test optional. In the winter of 2018-19, Bucknell was one of eight colleges making such a shift.

The others are: Creighton, DePauw, Fairleigh Dickinson and Ferris State Universities; Evergreen State College; and the Universities of Denver and of Minnesota at Crookston.

--a helpful list of schools to avoid.




      While the article cites “diversity concerns,” at no point does it come close to suggesting removing more entrance requirements is simply a ploy to increase enrollments. 


     I’m willing to bet actual gold coins that the schools listed above have lost enrollment the last few years. Evergreen State College is the standout on that above list; they’ve lost so many students that they have one administrator per 6 students now, and have lost over 20% of their student base, doubtless due to the race riots.


       So, yeah, “increasing diversity” is what they’ll try, rather than the good decisions of cutting down on administrative positions and focusing on providing quality education.


      There is, of course, a more sinister reason for abandoning entrance tests, again missed by what supposedly is a specialized site for higher education:


"The events of the past few weeks highlight the critical importance of checks and balances in the admissions process," she said. "Standardized assessments make this kind of fraud much harder to pull off and much easier to identify. Imagine how much easier it would be to game the system without that kind of independent check on the process."




     The recent higher ed admissions scandal revealed that parents are quite willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, even millions, to send their kids to a quality school (or at least a school with perceived quality).


     The leaders of our institutions looked at that scandal, and realized there was a huge problem there: not nearly enough of the bribe money was going into administrative pockets. Much of the bribe money was going to coaches, already grotesquely paid.


      Another reason for the bribe money not going to admin is admin was restricting admissions to those with scores on standardized tests. While these could be subverted, it meant more bribe money going to corrupt proctors and “substitute” students to take the tests. Dangit, more money not going to admin!


      Remove that objective admission standard, and now parents will need to pay admin directly to get into the school. With such huge amounts of bribe money clearly on the table, I hardly blame admin for making the system even more ripe for corruption.


      In any event, for most gentle readers the takeaway is very clear: avoid schools which are getting rid of test score entrance requirements.


www.professorconfess.blogspot.com



           

SAT To Measure Whiteness…Seriously?

By Professor Doom




     The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) is a test which measures, at the risk of being patronizing, scholastic aptitude. For those very few colleges which still care about admissions, the SAT is often used to determine which students have the aptitude to survive a legitimate college program.


     No, it’s not a perfect test by any means, but with the massive cheating and grade inflation going in our public school system, it’s a useful tool, a weak but objective measure of how well the student is suited to study.


     Objective tools get in the way of power and wealth accumulation, and must be destroyed:


The SAT will assign a new score that factors in where you live and the crime level in your neighborhood



     Um…no? The whole point of the test is to measure the student, not the neighborhood the student comes from—or perhaps where the student claims to come from. The possibility there for “racing to the bottom” in student origin shouldn’t be overlooked, as it’ll be much easier to claim to be in a bad neighborhood than to study hard for months, after all.


       Why should “where you live?” and “crime level” be on the test? I mean, if you have that information already, just make it another part of admissions. As I pointed out above, the test is called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, not the Stupid Adversity Test…but the latter is what it will be now.


       How did this madness even get remotely on the table? Why aren’t campuses completely outraged at this debasement of a test which has worked well enough for decades?


      It’s easy enough to explain. Our campuses basically operate on the principle of edu-fascism, the merger of administrative and ideological interests. The administrative caste only wants growth, and anything which will allow a workaround of admissions restrictions is approved of by them. The ideological interests, of course, are fascinated with virtue-signaling.


       And so they both applaud their cooperation with this horrible evil thing they are doing. Evil? Yes, evil. Let me count the ways:


       First, this is evil because it’s hurting kids. The kids who get on campus because of a murder on their block instead of study are going to get creamed when they walk into a college course on a legitimate campus, and probably drop out after a semester or two of being some place where they shouldn’t be. Just as a lightweight boxer has no business going into the ring with a heavyweight but can have a fine career within their weight class, these kids would probably do much better on a campus more suited to their needs. Why do that to them? If the edu-fascists cared about the kids, they wouldn’t encourage this at all.


       Second, this is evil because it’s putting the kids into debt slavery. They won’t simply leave college after wasting a year of their lives, they’ll leave with $10,000 or so of inescapable debt, possibly much more. It’s evil and cruel to do this to them…but edu-fascists don’t care.


      Third, this is evil because it hurts the actually apt students on campus. The slow students will absolutely slow the class down…why should these innocent students who actually studied to come on campus be penalized? It’s evil to punish the innocent like this.


      Fourth, this is evil because it harms the alumni. The influx of unqualified students will invariably lead to a reduction in standards, in turn leading to a reduction in value of the degrees the alumni earned when the SAT was legitimate. Again, punishing the innocent is evil.


      I could go on with discussing how this affects the faculty, who will see their tireless work of preserving the schools against the plundering edu-fascists undermined at the core level by the SAT, or how this affects the parents who worked hard to get their kids to study, or how this cheats the people who made donations to what they thought was a legit school, or how this cheats all the kids who studied hard to do well on the SAT…you get the idea, any honest look at this change to the SAT would lead to condemnation as quintessential evil, but there will be none of that from the edu-fascists, who only care about money and power, or power and money, depending on whether we’re talking about admin or ideologues.


“…comes amid heightened scrutiny that colleges are facing over the admissions process and the diversity of their student bodies….”



     The most relevant scrutiny is how the admissions process is corrupted; the change to the SAT will simply allow for greater corruption. How incompetent must our leaders be to respond to corruption by adding to the corruption?


       “Diversity” is not a concern, and never should be at a university, which was built to support education and research. That said, Diversity as a goal could be justified if there was some research indicating Diversity somehow helped to achieve those goals. Seeing as, so far, every change to university policies to “increase diversity” has caused the institutions to further turn away from their explicit goals, I doubt such research will ever be produced.


       Nobody in control cares if there’s no evidence supporting it, and common sense destroys it, as more Diversity allows more student loan money to flow into edu-fascists pockets, so it always must be improved.

Students are scored on a scale of 1 to 100 based on data from records like the US census and the National Center for Education Statistics. According to the College Board, a score of 50 would be considered average, while a number above 50 indicates more hardship. 

The score takes into account information from the student's background, but it does not include race. 

     Au contraire! This will have everything to do with race. I promise the gentle reader, if this change becomes fully accepted, whites will assuredly score lower on this scale. White privilege, you see, so a white growing up in a crime-ridden neighborhood will still not endure as much hardship as a non-white (by this I mean not Asian as well, they’ll also get penalized for their ethnicity) in the same neighborhood.

      Nobody is stupid enough to believe that last line, and the people pushing it know it. If race isn’t a factor, how could this change possibly help Diversity? And thus I casually destroy the claim that the change isn’t about race.

Colleges will be able to see the number when considering applicants, but students themselves won't be told their scores.

     I reiterate that this change will increase the corruption in admissions, not reduce it. Why else would they make this new fudge-factor number secret?


      Asian students are upset because it’s become painfully obvious they’ve been discriminated against, to the point that they need higher test scores than “non-Asians” to get into top schools. The associated lawsuits are likely to work because those test scores are known by the Asians, proving their case. 


      This new system will allow for secret discrimination. Good luck with a lawsuit, now.

Jeremiah Quinlan, the school's dean of undergraduate admissions, told the Wall Street Journal that Yale has nearly doubled the number of low-income students and those who are first in their families to attend college to about 20% of new students.

"This (adversity score) is literally affecting every application we look at," Quinlan told the Journal. "It has been a part of the success story to help diversify our freshman class."

--the gentle reader should note how the admin’s title is very nearly twice as long as his name, and thus he should be fired immediately as per my guidelines for reducing excess administrators on our campuses. Yes, that guideline is capricious and I further capriciously applied it, but seeing as these people advocate for capricious admissions guidelines, it’s certainly fair.

Note carefully how “…help diversify our…class” once again simply assumes such diversification is a good thing, will help Harvard to better reach its goals of education and research by destroying them. Again I ask for a study showing that making the SAT bogus is going to help. 

I should also point out that tests like the SAT have been testing on strange things, the better to represent the indoctrination going on in our public school system. I don't comment much on what's going on in our public schools, so I'll let a friend describe it:

History is written by the victors...and the "victors" in academia are the SJWs...and thus, the new version of "history" will be their own.

….Last month, a buddy's high school daughter was panicking about her upcoming AP History exam….My buddy is upset because he's flipped through her book and its full of "modern" biases, coy wordings and outright inaccuracies. It isn't a high school history text. It's an indoctrination manual. But here's the rub. In order for his daughter to excel in her AP class, she must memorize these "new truths" and regurgitate them back to her SJW teachers and on her AP exam.

…If you love history or literature, you should covet the old texts while they still exist…

---"Robert, an ex-teacher in California, 10 years in special education"





     Just as in the 2016, the Left controlled the media, the schools, the internet, and social media, and still couldn’t win the election, leading to the massive “Trump-Russia hoax” and general mass insanity rather than just face the reality of a lost election, we’re seeing the same thing in our schools. 


      Despite the warping of “history,” the debasement of education in our schools to the point that our typical high school graduates read at the 7^th grade level…they can’t accept the reality that not all people do all things with all the same ability. Rather than face reality, they’ll insert insanity into the SAT. What will happen here is what has happened with everything else they touch: it gets destroyed as people walk away. The SAT was the premier college entrance exam, but I strongly suspect that will not be the case in just a few years.



www.professorconfess.blogspot.com











     

Five Facts About Today’s College Graduates

By Professor Doom



      Apparently semesters go even faster when you’re not teaching, and graduation is coming up soon if not over for most college students.  A 2014 article highlights the situation for graduates on our campuses, and I doubt much has changed in the last 5 years, so let’s get to it:



5 Facts About Today’s College Graduates



     The article starts with a nice picture, which lists 6 year graduate rates (i.e., where students are in their education after 6 years), by school  type:

And now some more facts:

Only about 56% of students earn degrees within six years.



     To clarify: this is strictly referring to graduates. There’s much talk about worthless degrees, and it’s valid talk, but it overlooks the simple fact a very large percentage of students get absolutely nothing out of college but debt. The main reason for this is our schools have removed all entrance requirements in the quest to get every last student loan dollar.



…lowest (39.9%) among those who started at two-year public institutions.



     I’m hard on state community colleges because time and again they are standout failures, in this case having the absolute lowest 6 year graduation rates—particularly abysmal considering these schools offer 2-year degrees. 


      The reason these types of schools are such failures is because they are built from the ground up with fraud in mind, with no care to the harm they do to our citizens. For-profits at least pass out degrees, generally worthless…but still more valuable than the “nothing” our state community colleges offer.


Business is still the most common major.



     One of the main reasons so many college degrees are worthless is because they are so common now. My father, the first in my family to graduate college, had a business degree—he was a little ashamed of it, truth be told, but he did get it in a time when not everyone could get into college, much less get a degree.


      Anyway, if you’re looking to get a degree with value due to scarcity, the article helpfully supplies the rarest degrees:


            The least common bachelor’s degrees, according to the NCES, were in library science (95 conferred in 2011-12), military technologies and applied sciences (86) and precision production (37).



     Ok, maybe library science isn’t so great an idea (libraries are sort-of on the way out thanks to the internet, which has also made encyclopedias little more than overpriced wallpaper/insulation). But do check out the others if the old standby for useful degrees, engineering, isn’t for you.


…about 44% of grads were working in jobs that didn’t require a college degree — a rate that, while about what it was in early 1990s, increased after the 2001 and 2007-09 recessions. Only 36% of that group were in what the researchers called “good non-college jobs” — those paying around $45,000 a year — down from around half in the 1990s. The share of underemployed recent grads in low-wage (below $25,000) jobs rose from about 15% in 1990 to more than 20%. About one-in-five (23%) underemployed recent grads were working part-time in 2011, up from 15% in 2000.




       The above highlights the ultimate problem with today’s college degree system. Let’s just look at the best-case scenario, the 36% of 44% (i.e., 16% or so) who are making $45,000 a year. Sounds good, but they spent around 6 years getting that degree, and leave college $30,000 in debt on average.


      They’re making more a year, supposedly, but factor in the 6 years of lost wages a janitor could have made (at $25,000 a year), the interest they’re paying on the student loan (another $2000 a year, perhaps), the taxes they pay on the higher income, and the janitor will have a higher net worth for at least a decade, quite possibly more. Because of compound interest, if the janitor can invest a little, he’ll probably be ahead of the “smart” college graduates until his 50s…and that’s assuming he doesn’t get a pay raise in his 20+ years of washing floors. Janitors also won’t spend as much time “between jobs”—no matter who owns the building, someone has to clean it up, after all. So even a graduate who gets a job with his degree might well lose a year or two of wages when between jobs.


     And those are the lucky college graduates…


     The final fact the article provides is that most grads think their degree was worth it but…this is misleading. I ask the gentle reader to consider this chart:

           



       Seriously, how is the trend not noticeable? Yes, the drop in belief the degree is worth it is slight but steady…now look at that “hope” percentage. The millennials are clearly thinking their degrees will pay off, while the boomers and Gen Xers have already scored their gains. The issue is, the older generations went through a generally legit system…the millennials are hopeful, but are about to get a big dose of reality, as the higher education system of the 21^st century is vastly more corrupt than what the previous two generations went through.


      You want to bet Generation Z, born after the millennials, are already of the mind that a college degree isn’t worth it?


       A short post, as I wrote this while in Houston, the grand center of all things cancer treatment, awaiting tomorrow’s appointment at Cancer Death Camp. I suspect I’ll be advised to do something very painful, involving months of misery, and with a low chance of success but that’s not any demonstration of psychic powers on my part, that’s what every treatment so far has been.




www.professorconfess.blogspot.com