Portland U’s “Bias Response Team” Ends Free Speech

By Professor Doom



     I write often of the culture of fear on campus…because I get reminders how that fear only increases:


Making jokes at Portland State gets you reported to its bias response team



    I know, “I was just joking” is the age-old cry of the bully, and I was very much a target of the endless anti-intellectual bullying in our public schools, but this is at a university, what’s going on here is far more sinister than simply trying to protect the weak from bullying.

In one case from last September, a student overheard someone in their classroom making a comment about sometimes feeling like they having schizophrenia.

“She then stated she was not trying to make fun of schizophrenia,” the student reported, “but that sometimes she can be ‘schizophrenic.’ … She stated this in a joking manner and even laughed about it.”

     Does the above sound like bullying? There was nobody being targeted here, and the one making the complaint merely overheard a comment.  A joking, self-deprecating comment. Ok, some snowflake heard something he didn’t like, those folks are easily offended. What of it?


…The student reported the incident to the PSU Bias Review Team, keeping his or her identity a secret. But the person who allegedly made the offending remark, however, was named in the complaint to the administration.




      And *BAM* this “offense” now goes into the poor student now has a mark on her permanent record. You better believe, 30 years from now, if she runs against a certain ideological faction, this will come up again. As an added bonus, the one bearing witness against her gets to remain anonymous…good luck trying to defend against such an accusation.



     Our universities are turning from centers of teaching and research into warehouses of future blackmail information. This is demented. Perhaps this was an isolated, stray piece of data that accidentally got into the files?


In the second instance, last October a student settled into a seat in the front row of a lecture when they heard the instructor telling another student he knew a lot of “insensitive jokes” he couldn’t tell in class.




     Oh, the horror! Simply claiming to know “forbidden things” goes into the permanent record. I know it’s hyperbolic to think someday this teacher might be tortured for such information…but if something this trivial goes into the permanent record, how can we rule out (anonymous) allegations of other information?


      This is such a perversion of what higher education is supposed to be about. 


       So let’s pop over to the actual website for this diversity fiefdom and let’s see if maybe they apologize or clarify why such pathetic complaints go into the permanent record. What does this money-sucking fiefdom do?

The goals of the BRT are:

·        Develop educational and outreach programs from the data collected from bias reports;

·        Increase opportunities for communication and restorative justice for students, staff, and faculty; and

·        Address incidents and trends identified through the reports utilizing resources such as trainings, communications, and other means, that will improve the campus climate.

To report an incident, please complete and submit the Bias Incident Report Form.

     I remind the gentle reader, the entire purpose of a university is education of people, and education of humanity through research. Education and research, no more than that.


      Yes, “educational” is towards the top of the Bias Response Team's (I feel sick just typing that out…our universities should not have such things) purpose, but realistically, they’re collecting data, as they say. This is not education.



      “Increase opportunities for…restorative justice”? I’d be sick reading that if I weren’t already. Is it really hyperbole to suspect they’re collecting data for later “payback”? Again, “restorative justice” is not the purpose of a university.


      At least the line about “improve campus climate” gives me a laugh. I’m sure knowing that if you say something possibly out of line, or claim to know a forbidden topic, goes a long way towards an improved climate, at least if you think silence is an improvement.  Yet again this has nothing to do with education and research.


      I reiterate because if I say it enough times someone in power will hear: the purpose of a university is education and research. If we simply got rid of every fiefdom which does not advance these purposes, we could lower tuition 50% or more.


      I was hoping to look at the people on the Bias Response Team, but despite so many options on their web page, there is no option to review this team. Apparently not only are the accusers anonymous, the judges are as well. They list the titles of people on the BRT, but only one name: Eric Scott, the Coordinator, Equity and Compliance Investigator. I’m a little curious who the Director of the Queer Resource Center is (I’m quite willing to bet that Center does nothing for education and research, however). I remind the gentle reader of another cost-cutting measure for higher ed: eliminate positions where the title is more than twice as long as the holder’s name. To judge by how many of these titles are so long, I suspect we could eliminate the entire "team" this way.


      What a despicable abomination this particular fiefdom is, and considering how many vile fiefdoms our campuses support, to be exceptional in this regard is an achievement. 


       As I wrote before, Christians are goinginto hiding on our campuses, much as conservatives and other “undesirables” have done. In light of the above, are their actions truly unjustified?


      Longtime readers will guess how I’d suggest cutting off the funds for these fiefdoms causing so much harm to humanity, so I’ll spare you my usual epitaph here.

      



www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

The Sugarbaby Students of Minnesota

By Professor Doom



     I didn’t exactly work my way through college—I lived at home, and mowed many, many, lawns in the Florida sun, among other unpleasant jobs. They were paying the princely sum of $5 an hour for sheet metal roofing, and it only took a few weeks of that to make enough to pay the $1,000 or so yearly tuition of my late teenage years.


      Those days are long gone, of course, and now average annual tuition runs $25,000 or more (it varies wildly, of course). Most people can’t work their way through college. That said, if you’re a winsome lass with malleable morals, you can find employment of sorts, as a sugarbaby, a female whose tuition (and other expenses) are paid for by a sugardaddy, in exchange for, well, “companionship.”


      I know, this is just a variant of the oldest profession, but it’s gone from stories of “that one girl” on campus to a distinct sub-culture. NYU is most notorious for its sugarbabies, with around 1,300 students (about 5% of the female students there, to put things in perspective…many classes would have at least one such student/sugarbaby).


     Of course, 2018 tuition at NYU is over $50,000, and is a private, for-profit university with a notorious reputation for putting the screws to the students. You’re not going to scrape together that kind of money mowing lawns. I know, it’s not my business how a young woman wants to make a living but this strikes me as wrong all the same.


      What about our state schools? These are built and supported as a public benefit. Tuition at University of Minnesota is a “mere” $14,000 or so, surely they don’t have a sugarbaby community?


The bittersweet life of sugar babies at the University of Minnesota



     NYU is private, and I haven’t read their mission statement, so perhaps creating whores sugarbabies is one of their goals…but were the taxpayers of publicly funded UM told their money was going to increase the number of people in this profession?


     Again, stuff happens, so I suppose “that girl” has always existed on campus. We don’t have many of them at UM, right?


Ava is one of the 542 students at the University of Minnesota who were registered on…

--“Ava is a fake name, and I’ll avoid mentioning the several sites that specialize in supporting this profession.




     UM has the same enrollment as NYU, tuition is about 33%, and we have about 50% of the sugarbabies…that’s a surprisingly high number. Can we get a handle on how many sugarbabies we have around the country?


Approximately 3 million college students in the United States are registered on…



--that’s JUST ONE SITE.




      Perhaps not all sugarbabies are female (or identify as female, whatever, bear with me as I make a possibly false assumption about gender here), but that translates to around 15% of college students.


      Are there truly no “leaders” in higher education willing to take a look in the mirror and ask about their own responsibility for doing this?



“I found it exciting. It felt good getting paid money,” Ava said. “It was kind of fun in a weird way. I would feel hyped after using it.”




      A Minnesota sugarbaby gets about $100 for a date, which need not include much beyond dinner. I suppose one such date is harmless enough if that’s all that goes on, but…these are still formative years, I’m not so sure our young ladies’ education should include an expectation of being handed money directly from males, particularly since this expectation is far less likely to be valid as one leaves her 20s. Perhaps I’m a bit old-fashioned in this regard, I concede.


     Granted, I suspect many sugarbabies ae discarded after a few years, and then the university discards them a few years after that, perhaps…what is the only job experience they have after they receive their all too often worthless degree? Is it such a stretch to worry about what profession they’ll have no choice but to enter? It’s not like I haven’t identified a clear link between prostitution and student loans before.


      In case the gentle reader is wondering how the sites are sure they’re getting college students, well, students get free memberships by using their university-provided e-mails. Um…should our universities be in the business of validating prostitution credentials?


      I’m sorry to ask so many rhetorical questions here, I’m trying not to be judgmental as so many concerns come to mind.


Sarah Polowin, a graduate of Carleton University in Canada who wrote her doctoral thesis on [a sugarbaby site[ in 2017, found that money is the primary motivating factor for college students using the service.




      I concede I haven’t read the thesis, but I had to chuckle at the Ph.D. level conclusion there of “prostitutes do it for the money.” Yeah, no kidding. For what it’s worth, I think the article is wrong here, as it appears to be a Master’s thesis…I’ll chuckle less, conceding that kind of result is indeed Master’s level.


      I also note she writes of the phenomenon in Canada…this issue is not strictly an American problem.


      The article dances around the negative impact on the students who engage in this practice, beyond the usual “this one whacko became a stalker…” story one would expect.


      I know my blog is read by far more than the clicks I get directly from Blogspot would indicate. Anybody out there know, is, or better yet was, a sugarbaby? Please contact me, I’d love to ask a few questions about how all this works out.




www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Immigration, Higher Education, and Trump?

By Professor Doom



      You know you’ve made a great achievement in science or mathematics when you relate two things that don’t look like they’d be the same thing at all. The basic example of this is a formula (some scribblings on a page) that perfectly describes some physical thing actually happening in the real world. 


      A recent article tries to relate two things always in the news, and the thing I talk about that just never seems to make the front page. They solidly fail to make the link, but say a few things worth reading all the same:


Trump Derangement Syndrome Blocks Action On Immigration, Higher Ed Crises (They're Related)



     Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) refers to the psychological condition of irrational hatred of everything Trump-related. The best example of this would be a CNN host believing Trump is a monster because he had an extra scoop of ice cream, but this pathology is not restricted to CNN, sufferers are all over the place.


     Now, Trump’s campaign platform was largely based on stopping illegal immigration; I’m pretty sure he’s too little, too late, as the mathematics of the demographics involved all but guarantee the break-up of the United States into more ethnically homogeneous sections in a generation or two (i.e., when the children of the immigrants grow up), but I respect the effort, or would if he’d put some more into it.


     Reforming Higher Ed, on the other hand, was never part of his campaign platform, and while he’s done a few piffling things so far, it’s hardly been enough for me to mention.


Nobody much in Washington, DC seems to be interested in it the stinking, steaming, fetid mountain of dog poop that is our higher-education system. I watched the YouTube video of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos giving a twenty-minute address at the Manhattan Institute on Wednesday. She hardly said anything about Higher Education.




      Those are some harsh, but alarmingly accurate, words from the article I’m quoting above. DeVos is a Trump appointee, and she really hasn’t done much to fix the system.

Immigration’s been a mess for decades; but it’s on Trump’s watch that is has descended into full chaos.



      I have to be a little suspicious of the article’s motives when it says stuff like the above. If we didn’t have full chaos before, why did we decide a mass amnesty in 1986 would be a solution? If that didn’t solve the chaos, why are we discussing it again today?


     So what’s the link here, anyway?


There’s was an immigration angle in the news last week related to the college-admissions cheating scandal.




     Wow, that admissions cheating scandal sure does have legs…and it really shouldn’t. Bottom line, Harvard can only have so many students, it really seems natural that those last few open positions will go to the highest bidder. It’s a private school, they’re under no obligation to serve more than they can possibly serve.


      One of those highest bidders was over the top:


A billionaire tycoon from communist China…surname of Zhao, paid six and a half million to the fixers to get his daughter Molly a place at Stanford.




     China is more socialist than communist now, but for some reason our media doesn’t like to use that word in any negative context. In any event, under socialist/communist regimes, it’s understood that you’re going to have to pay bribes, sometimes huge bribes, just to get basic things done. So while Americans would balk at paying millions in bribe money, a wealthy Chinese person might not.


     I reiterate the real problem with the college admissions scandal isn’t the bribes the wealthy were paying to get their kids into school: this has been going on for a long time. The real problem is the bribe money is no longer going to education. In the past, some magnate would donate a few million to the school to get his kid in; the money would build a library perhaps, but it also would go to scholarships and scholars.


      Now the money just pours into in administrative pockets…and that’s the problem.


That’s why they can afford all those Administrative Assistants to the Secretary for the Associate Dean of Diversity and Inclusion. That’s why they have Departments of Gibberish Studies where ineducable low-IQ students can play at educating themselves. That’s why they have sports coaches on seven-digit salaries.




    The article makes another misstep regarding where this money is coming from:

Where does all the money come from? Four sources:

1.    Alumni with fond memories of their salad days, paying to get a plaque with their name on it affixed to some desk in the college library.

2.    Federal, State, and corporate grants and tax breaks paid for by working Americans.

3.    Middle-class American students beggaring themselves all the way to retirement and beyond with huge tuition loans. [Seniors owe billions in student loan debt: “This will follow me to the grave”, by Mark Strassmann, CBS News, May 1, 2019]

4.    Rich foreigners like Molly Zhao paying full ticket.

       While four reasons are listed above, I assure the gentle reader it’s reason #3 (and not just the middle class), the student loan scam, which is the key source of money. Total student loan debt goes up around a hundred billion a year…Zhao’s lousy six million hardly registers next to that, and it would take over 150 suckers like Zhao before we’d even close to a billion dollars.


       With this dubious link between immigration and higher ed established, the article then heads off the rails:


And they are linked, as the case of Molly Zhao illustrates. Where higher education is concerned, we need to think about how to starve the beast. A good, easy starting point would be to stop issuing visas to foreign students. Those full-tuition foreigners are great for the colleges’ balance sheets, but they take up classroom seats Americans should be sitting in.




     No, emphatically no. It’s not the full-tuition foreigners who are the problem in higher ed, as hundreds of my blog posts show. Not to put too fine a point on things, but a university is supposed to allow all scholars…not just those from a certain region. If we eliminate all the scholars “not from around here,” we run the very real risk of falling even further behind other countries. This is a stupid solution.


      The article then rants against the money being thrown away on Diversity Institutes and such, but this valid rant is a distraction: the money for these abominations isn’t coming from foreigners trying to hurt us, we’re destroying ourselves with student loan money. 


     End the student loan scam. It really is that simple.




www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Another Conservative Speaker Shut Off Campus

By Professor Doom



     I’ve mentioned many times the lockdown the Left (aka “Progressives,” among other names for them) has on our campuses, but you sure don’t read about it much in the news. I hardly cover specific cases, myself, unless it leads to a riot or something. Thus, I understand if the gentle reader doesn’t believe me when I say how everyday this behavior is, and so allow me to cover yet another “humdrum” cancelling of free speech on campus:

A College Divided Over a Harvard Professor

Concordia U's Liberal Arts College, in Canada, wanted conservative scholar Harvey Mansfield to speak at an alumni gala -- until it didn't. But revoking Mansfield's invite didn't settle an internal debate.

 Harvard isn’t exactly known as a bastion of conservative ideology, so it’s not like this guy walks around wearing swastikas or railing against abortion. Harvard’s pretty high up in the higher ed hierarchy, so you’d think a school would be happy to have him talk. Not if he’ll spout heresy, of course:


Citing alumni backlash over Mansfield’s past controversial statements on gender and gay marriage, the Canadian college then uninvited him and postponed the event.




    Oh no, he’s against gay marriage. Hey, does anybody else remember when Hillary Clinton was against gay marriage? I sure do, and thank goodness it’s on video. It’s weird how I seem to be the only one curious that she gets a free pass for “past statements,” but other people do not. When she speaks on campus (or anywhere else), these issues never arise…why is that? Of course, we’ll never deal with the hypocrisy until we first establish free speech as being important.


     Just how badly does it reflect on Concordia that their alumni are adamantly against free speech? I grant Canada doesn’t quite have the same free speech protections we do in the USA, but the fact remains, Concordia is not doing its students any favors.


      The professor has responded to the insult with class:


Comparing the current climate for conservative professors to McCarthyism, Mansfield wrote in his op-ed, “I little thought that I would now in my old age be qualified for exclusion from Concordia University in our free neighbor to the north, not as the member of a conspiratorial organization serving an enemy power, but simply for holding opinions shared by half the American -- and perhaps the Canadian -- population.”




     The above comment highlights one of the big problems with many of our converged campuses, taken over by Progressives: they don’t come close to representing the values of all the people whose tax dollars support them. People are waking up to this fact, and sending their kids elsewhere—be grateful not every school has this terminal problem!


      His speech, by the way, was on great literary works. Alas, he said some wrong things in the past that means he must be forever silenced on campus. What did he say, and how long ago was it?

…it’s his nonacademic work that has proved polarizing. He wrote a 2006 book, Manliness, and defended Lawrence Summers’s widely criticized 2005 comments about women's aptitude for quantitative fields.

Mansfield also has criticized affirmative action, linking it to grade inflation, and testified against gay marriage. Being gay doesn’t make for a life of “individual happiness,” for example, he said of anti-gay marriage legislation in Colorado in 1993.

     They really go back well over 20 years for this stuff…do the alumni really know this stuff, and hold on to their hate so diligently? I think it’s a fair question, because when Progressives speak, things they’ve said many years ago don’t seem to be a problem. Why does only one side get the free pass, again?


      Despite the university’s tale about  “alumni complaints” and how such complaints reflect so poorly on the school, that’s their story and they’re sticking to it:


Once the Liberal Arts College at Concordia announced its choice of speaker for the reunion, “a large number” of alumni reached out to faculty members to voice their concerns, Russell said. Many alumni stated that they would not attend the gala “because they objected to the views [Mansfield] has expressed publicly on women and homosexuals,” he added.




      Not to denigrate the professor here, but was he really so critically important in 1993 that his words are specifically recalled and reviled to this day? I barely remember anything anyone said then without a bit of jogging of my memory, and I suspect most of my readers are the same. Why should anyone believe this story?


     I’m sorry, just not buying it. Who are really complaining?


Professors within the college discussed the alumni concerns,…



     Yeah, I’m leaning towards the faculty, particularly Leftists who just can’t stand anyone (not on their side) who speaks heresy. Doesn’t it sound more credible that faculty would remember some testimony from over 25 years ago than alumni who probably wouldn’t even be alive at the time? I’m not ruling out admin either, mind you, I can totally see them throwing their alumni and the school under the bus just to protect their ideology.


      One faculty member is against insulting the school, Professor Mansfield, and the alumni just to advance Progressivism, and is willing to speak out:


He said Thursday that he’s received feedback from numerous alumni and students, with “10 to one” against disinvitation.




     What, you mean we're being lied to? I'm shocked, shocked. I sure hope he has a long career at Concordia…but the gentle reader can forgive me for having some doubts. He’s trying to preserve the integrity of the school, at least. I wish him luck.


Mansfield on Thursday “passed” on describing his current views on gender and gay marriage other than to say he’s “guilty” of holding conservative positions.




      Note that this consistent silencing of conservative speakers is having an effect. Mansfields knows things he said in the previous millennium (sigh…I remember when that wasn’t so long ago…) will be held against him, and isn’t about to add to his list of “crimes.” Do you think the Progressives will scruple to not attack Mansfield’s children when they get the chance? And so a scholar silences himself for love of his family.


      I reiterate this is an everyday event on campus now, and so, much like the silence of our scholars, is all but impossible for the uninitiated to notice. It happens all the same.



www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Student Loan Forgiveness Doesn't Punish Those Who Paid Their Debt Or Even Taxpayers

by Professor Doom


     "Student Loan Forgiveness" is, among many other "free" things, being offered by Democratic Presidential candidate hopefuls. Normally, I'm against free stuff from government, but this particular piece of loot I support, as I've mentioned before.

     Thing is, conservatives are ranting against it. A very popular conservative commentator has a long video on it; his main point is "Bernie Sanders is a fraud...". It's true enough, and those videos are usually worth listening to, but in this case the commentator is wrong about not doing something drastic about student loan debts.

     The primary conservative argument against loan forgiveness is "you took out the loan, you pay it back." It's usually followed up with "I paid off my loans, why should the deadbeats get a free pass?" Conservatives tend to be older, which is part of why they're wrong here, and are unaware of the key issue, being unaware how much higher education has changed in the years since they graduated from college:

      The bulk of student loans (90%, perhaps more) were fraudulently given. This completely changes the debt obligation.

      If you went to a car dealership, ordered a car, filled out the forms for the loan, but never got the car...would you honestly feel obligated to make payments? How about if the dealership reassures you the car is worth what you're paying even though you have nothing, so you should keep making payments? Probably not, but...maybe you'd be suckered some more, hoping that car would arrive soon.

     Our kids are indoctrinated from a very young age that they must go to college. They're told as much by their parents, their teachers...every authority figure tells them this repeatedly. When they show up on campus, admin cheerfully helps them check a box asserting they are seeking a degree, and that's the entirety of the process for getting a student loan. It's so ridiculously simple to get these loans that over a quarter of students with loans don't even know it--how obligated should you be to make payments on a loan you didn't even know you made?

      Our students are told that a college degree, any degree, is worth it, no matter the cost. So, they take out these huge loans, and in many cases get degrees which are utterly worthless, in many cases get no measurable education while pursuing these degrees over the course of years (around half, according to Academically Adrift). Nevertheless, they get out of school, find their degree is worthless and they make loan payments all the same.

       I again maintain these loans were fraudulently given, because the "leaders" running our schools have known for a long time they were engaging in fraud:

College leaders have long excused decades of relentlessly rising prices, exploding student-loan debt, and alarmingly high dropout rates with the assumption that students are learning. The prices are reasonable and the loans repayable, they say, because of the skills and knowledge that students acquire in exchange...

Academically Adrift exposed the bankruptcy of those assertions. But it didn't reveal anything that college leaders didn't know, in quiet rooms behind closed doors, all along...

      If the hypothetical dealership knew they were never going to provide the car, would you still feel morally obligated to keep making payments? Would the reassurances from the dealership make  you keep paying, much as the assertions from the "leaders" in higher ed have been doing to our kids?

      So, the simple fact that these loans were, more often than not, fraudulently given fundamentally resolves the issue of whether they should be paid back.

      There's more.

      Part of the reason these loans were so easily granted is because you can't escape student loans via bankruptcy. Curiously, the immunity to bankruptcy is actually causing more bankruptcies, even amongst students who are able to get jobs with their degrees.

      The jobs don't pay enough to cover the loans, so they use their other resources (credit cards, for example) to make the student loan payments. Eventually, those other resources run out...bankruptcy. That clears the credit cards and such, but the student loans remain. So they get another good job, which still doesn't pay the student loan; the cycle repeats every 5-10 years.

     Simply removing the bankruptcy protection would help a bit here, but we'd still be wiping out around 50,000,000 citizens on the basis of fraudulent debt.

      The conservatives are also against student loan forgiveness because of an obvious question: how will we pay for it?

Who Pays for Student-Debt Forgiveness?

Taxpayers who didn’t go to college, didn’t take on debt, or paid it off already.

      The above is from the Wall Street Journal but...they're not trying very hard. Let's see if I can scrape up some money. Current student loan debt is around $1.6 trillion.

       Total college endowments are about half a trillion dollars. Now, technically, that endowment money didn't come from the student loan scam, but seeing as colleges engaged in fraud to a large extent, causing the $1.6 trillion debt, it's not entirely unfair to just seize the endowments.

      A pro football team is generally worth around $2.5 billion, and the average NBA team is worth $2 billion.  Granted college football/basketball teams aren't worth as much, but in Division 1 alone there are 120 football teams, and 351 basketball (men's) teams. Force the schools to sell off all their sportsball teams, and even at 20% valuation we're looking at 300 billion, easy, quite possibly much more if you throw in stadiums and athletic facilities. Our schools should get out of the sportsball business anyway, seeing as they're supposed to be about education and research.

      Hey look, WSJ, I just found half the money in under 30 seconds.

      I've written a few times of the real estate shenanigans of our institutions. Rice University, for example, has about $700 million in real estate holdings. Rice is a small school by university standards, only around 7,000 students, to put this in perspective. There are over 5,000 accredited schools in this country; if they on average have only a fraction compared to what Rice has, say $200 million (and, honest, many have much, much, much, more), that's another trillion, and again probably much more.

     And...we're done with plenty to spare.

     Maybe I've overestimated the above, and I know "fire sale" prices will be lower than expected. Let's plan for that by raising a few extra billion.

     The gentle reader should note carefully: I'm not getting this money from the taxpayer like the WSJ says, I'm getting it from the higher education system which to a large part fraudulently took the money.

     The rest of the money we'll get not by selling assets, but by eliminating expenses and forwarding that money to the Federal government. We'll do this by targeting some of the people involved in this scam. It'll take a little longer.

    I need 20 years to raise $12 billion this way. 

     We can shut down the Diversity fiefdoms on campus, higher ed went for over a thousand years without these boondoggles. The University of Michigan's Diversity fiefdom, for example, has an $11 million dollar payroll...shut down 30 fiefdoms like that (and nearly every state university has such a fiefdom) and forward the money to Uncle Sam for an easy $6 billion over 20 years--I know that's a long time frame, but I want to do what I can to be sure these abominations never sprout up again--these ideological lunatics have done much harm.

    I'll need another 20 years, for the same reason, to pay off the remaining $6 billion--not too bad compared to the lifetimes of debt we'll be sparing with debt forgiveness.

     Let's target some of the people involved here. In 2017, there were 58 college presidents making over a million dollars a year (note: some of these guys are from "nonprofit" schools...). Simply firing these guys, and taking their salaries for 20 years, would yield over $1 billion. The coach is almost always paid more than the president, and you'll be firing the coach anyway, so there's another billion, almost certainly more. Both coaches and Presidents each have at least 4 guys under them making at least half as much...fire them, too, for at least another 4 billion in savings, forwarded to Uncle Sam.

      Isn't it nuts that you can fire 580 people in Higher Education, save $6 billion dollars over the course of 20 years, and not affect the education of a single student on campus nor affect the research of a single scholar on campus? We have many college classes with more than 580 students in them, to keep this in perspective.

     I barely thought about it, and have found more than enough assets in our higher education system and shifted a few liabilities to cover more than enough of the student loan debt.

      Please understand, many of our schools and universities have been plundering the student loan system for decades...they've squandered much of the money, but there's still plenty there, so there's no need to make the taxpayer foot the bill at all, despite what the Wall Street Journal says.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

   

2/3rds of American Employees Regret Their Degrees...And That's The Spin!

by Professor Doom

      I'm not a big fan of broadcast news...it's all a chorus at this point, so I can get the "mainstream" point of view when I'm forced to watch CNN every time I go to an airport, doctor's office (lots of that for me anymore), or most any place citizens gather and are trapped.

      Nevertheless, a CBS report caught my eye. It tries its best to distort the truth in a recent report:

Two-thirds of American Employees regret their college degrees.


      I want to talk about the truth here, but also the spin and attempts to obfuscate. We as a people have had our ability to comprehend fractions basically destroyed, in our public education system (here's the easy way to add fractions, and here's what is attempted to be taught in schools--turning adding fractions into a nightmare is a big pat of why people fear them).


     CBS could have just said 67% instead of scaring people. Perhaps I'm reading into this. The article begins by throwing some propaganda in:

• Science, technology, engineering or math majors, who are more likely to enjoy higher salaries, were least likely to report regrets, while those in the humanities were most likely.

       The gentle reader should read the above, because there's a big spin in there. We're told over and over again how STEM is the holy grail of higher education...but let's see if we can get to some truth here.

a PayScale survey of 248,000 respondents this past spring

     
     That's a nice big sample. I know, statistics are prone to manipulation and lies, but with numbers this big, the results are fairly reliable in terms of being representative.

      The article also mentions total student loan debt is close to $1.6 trillion; it basically goes up around a $100 billion a year now, with very little value for the money. Average student loan debt is around $33,000...up around 10% from last year. I doubt many of my readers experienced a 10% increase in pay, or wealth, from last year...but debts are surely rising.

Most satisfied: Those with science, technology, engineering and math majors, who are typically more likely to enjoy higher salaries, reported more satisfaction with their college degrees. About 42% of engineering grads and 35% of computer science grads said they had no regrets. 


     Wait...what? The top of the article leads one to believe STEM is great but that's spin. The article spins the first line by distracting the reader, waving dollar bills. But read those numbers carefully. MORE THAN HALF of engineering grads clearly had regrets. 65% of computer science grads have regrets.

       How can you say engineering and computer science are good degrees when the majority of people getting them regret it even when employed? In case you're wondering how this can be, my friends with such degrees explain it well enough: you have to compete with workers with similar skills on the other side of the planet, willing to work for half (or less) pay. Even if you get a good job...you're still in that competition, and inevitably lose your job a year or two later as the company realizes saving money on salaries helps their bottom line in the short term (although such companies generally have serious problems later--Hi Boeing!).

      The humanities majors fare the worst, about 75% of them regret their degrees. Honest, I have many good reasons to sneer at Gender Studies degrees, and as long as schools continue to hurt our kids by shoveling out such degrees, I'll continue to chastise them for it.

68% of math graduates who said they regretted their education. 


      Wait...what? Again. Didn't the top of the article say something different? Spin, spin, spin. What's happening here? Well, most math degrees are basically only good for teaching...but we're crowded out by "math education" degrees which substitute indoctrination for mathematics; they get better retention, of course, and help students to get their Gender Studies degree.

At least one sector of employment bucked the trend: Teachers and other professionals in education, which isn't typically a high-paying profession, were the second-least likely, after engineering grads, to have any regrets tied to their major, with 37% saying they had no regrets.


      Spin and spin and spin....read the above carefully, clearly 63% do have regrets. Is that really so much different than the titular "2/3rds" as to call it a bucking of the trend?

...older Americans were more likely to report that they have no regrets about their education. Among baby boomers, or 51% said they have no college regrets, making them the only demographic with a majority reporting no regrets. In contrast, just 37% of Gen Xers and nearly 29% of millennials reported no regrets.


      It really is amazing how the obvious stands out in the above: higher education, once great in the past, is failing now. The system of three or more generations ago may have been worthy of the kind of money we're pouring into it, but today's system is simply too corrupt for further investment.

      Now comes the real spin hidden in the above. This poll only was for the employed. One can easily suspect that those with degrees, and unemployed, almost certainly regret getting an obviously worthless degree. Unfortunately, the way how our government abuses the word "unemployed" makes it impossible to gauge how much higher than 67% the true number of people who regretted getting a degree is.

      There is even more spin.

      The poll also only focuses on those with degrees. Only about half of people who go to college, graduate.

      Again, it's a safe bet the people who spent years of their life on campus and walked off with nothing but (probable) debt have regrets about doing it.

       Bottom line, over 83% of people who go to college now regret it. 33% as per the study (from degree holders, half of those who go to college), another 50% (the non-degree holders), plus an unknown percentage because there's no good way to measure the unemployed degree holders.

      83% of people who set foot on campus regret getting involved with a system paid for by the student loan scam. Please...end it. Why is no presidential candidate brave enough to state the obvious here?


www.professorconfess.blogspot.com