Prof. Jason Fertig has written an illuminating piece for NAS on the difficulty of dealing with students who would rather try to manipulate a professor into a gift grade than doing the work necessary to earn one.

The student in the piece already has a job he evidently is capable of doing. So why is it necessary for him to take the professor’s course? I think the answer is: credential mania.

The New York Times has a piece today about the swelling ranks of college graduates who remain unemployed — even one or two years after graduation. They have degrees, and plenty of college loans, but no paychecks.

For young adults, the prospects in the workplace, even for the college-educated, have rarely been so bleak. Apart from the 14 percent who are unemployed and seeking work, as Scott Nicholson is, 23 percent are not even seeking a job, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The total, 37 percent, is the highest in more than three decades and a rate reminiscent of the 1930s.

Wait a minute: 23 percent aren’t even looking? Have they given up because they failed to find quick success? Have we become so soft? If it is really true that one out of four young people in this country is unemployed and not even looking for work, one has to wonder: What are all these people doing with their time? It seems we are suffering a great waste of energy, opportunity, and potential.

The article describes the sense of entitlement some of today’s graduates feel. Some are refusing jobs for which they feel overqualified, even after two or more years of futile searching.

In terms of their employment rate, college graduates are still faring better than non-college graduates. But, with more than a third of the young adults in America out of work, some degree-holders are having a difficult time coming to grips with the reality of the job market.

Robert Wenzel, editor of EconomicPolicyJournal.com, gets at the truth, writing, “The wholesale creation of degree factories, as a result of government sponsored programs, has diluted the value of a college education. 1. Because many more have them and 2. The quality of knowledge by those who have graduated has declined dramatically.”

Wenzel is right. Because of government interference in education (from top to bottom), we now have huge numbers of college graduates with less knowledge about the world and less in the way of basic skill than the typical ninth grader used to. They keep hearing that a college degree is the ticket to a good career. For a few, it is, but for many others, college is just an expensive detour before landing the sort of mundane, low-skill job that they could have done while they were in high school.

Is college overrated? USA Today has a piece by a gutsy high-school teacher (Patrick Welsh; is he ever going to get the hate mail!) who thinks it’s fine that such a high percentage of students from his school are going on to college, but says, “It seemed to me that many of our staff beat the bushes to send as many warm bodies as they could on to higher education regardless of whether the students had the skills or motivation to do rudimentary high school work.” That confirms what a lot of college profs will tell you: A high percentage of students aren’t academically ready for college and belong back in about eighth grade.

Who benefits? The author again nails the truth: “The trend is certainly a boon to the education establishment. High schools like mine, always eager for good press, can boast that they have prepared an ever greater percentage of their charges to move on to the halls of academe. And though colleges blame us in the high schools for sending them kids who are woefully unprepared, they blithely pocket the tuition from such students lest they have to downsize and lay off professors and administrators.”

Without heavy subsidization, could this system continue? Welsh seems to doubt it. I say that it definitely couldn’t.

Ben Wildavsky wrote a lot about the Abu Dhabi campus and other international expansions by American universities in his book The Great Brain Race (about which I’ll have a piece soon), but without Allen’s skeptical view. While NYU is good at making this venture sound like an exciting and pathbreaking move into the bright, globalized educational future, Allen evidently regards it as conspicuous consumption that benefits only a few NYU bigwigs.

In cases such as these (and there are quite a few), the question should be: What is the point? Is there really any educational synergy in having a foreign campus? Is the teaching of undergrads improved in any way? Is faculty research somehow enhanced? Or is this just a matter of prestige mania gripping college presidents?

One writer who isn’t the least taken in by the Siena poll of historians that ranks Obama as our 15th best president is Gene Healy of Cato. Writing in the Washington Examiner, Healy points out that the professors who get asked to rank presidents are just about uniformly statist in outlook, getting all excited about presidents who push federal activism at every turn and turning thumbs down on those who prefer to leave the people alone. Healy points out that Warren Harding is ranked as the third-worst president, but his administration was notable for peace, prosperity, tax and spending reductions, and the restoration of civil liberties that had been under assault under Wilson. Fortunately for the American people, Harding listened to the advice of Andrew Mellon, who counseled that federal non-interventionism was the best policy when the economy entered a sharp postwar recession.

Conversely, despite the evident counter-productivity of his obstinately statist economic policies, his assaults on the rule of law, and his eagerness to use politics as a means of rewarding supporters and hurting opponents, Obama gets pretty high marks from the scholars. That just shows how foolish many of our historians are.

A few weeks ago I wrote at some length about NYU’s new Abu Dhabi campus, noting the irony of one of America’s most politically correct campuses trumpeting a new campus in the heart of a repressive, anti-Semitic Arab nation. Today, at Minding the Campus, Charlotte Allen writes an excellent, detailed analysis of NYU’s “perilous adventure.” First, it appears that the UAE’s petrodollars are more important to NYU than to other elite American universities:

 In fact, because NYU enrolls more than 50,000 at its various schools, its endowment works out to about a mere $50,000 per student, according to figures calculated in a recent Business Week article. (Harvard’s $26 billion endowment, by contrast, amounts to $1.3 million per student, while Yale has $1.4 million per student and Princeton $1.7 million). The Abu Dhabi campus is a feat of Sextonian sleight-of-hand in which other people’s petrodollars pay for what NYU hopes will be a boost in academic prestige without spending a cent of its own scarce money. NYU was happy to publicize Abu Dhabi’s initial contribution of $50 million to the joint venture—a down payment on which NYU insisted as a condition of lending its name to the new university—but now neither the university nor the Gulf city-state will reveal how many more millions Abu Dhabi has sunk into the venture, but it must be plenty. Abu Dhabi has not only committed itself to a glitzy brand-new campus for NYU on Saadiyat Island about 500 yards offshore, but is bankrolling some of NYU’s expansion in New York.

And NYU is putting this money to good use — wooing American college students with essentially an exotic vacation package:

 Sexton [NYU's president] has taken to calling the Abu Dhabi campus “the world’s honors college,” which probably doesn’t do much for the egos of Washington Square students. To lure those high achievers to the Gulf, Sexton hosted (with Zayed’s money) all-expenses-paid trips to Abu Dhabi for 275 top NYU applicants. The excursions seemed lifted from the luxe-packed screenplay for Sex in the City 2, which is set in Abu Dhabi (although so far not screened there thanks to state censorship and the film’s louche content): a five-star beachfront hotel, camel rides, sword dancers, and a desert picnic. All that seemed lacking was Carrie Bradshaw and her shoe collection.

While Abu Dhabi is unquestionably repressive, to be fair to NYU they have extracted some concessions from the government to protect the liberty of their students:

Sexton has extracted promises from the Abu Dhabi government that NYU’s campus will be free of Internet and other censorship, as well as the control of that country’s education ministry, and that gays and Israelis will be welcome there both as students and as faculty. NYU has also pledged improved working conditions for the foreign laborers at its Saadiyat Island construction site. The campus will be coeducational (this fall’s entering class will comprise 87 men and 63 women hailing from 39 different countries), an unusual feature in the socially conservative Gulf that is bound to lead to greater opportunities for women in general in the Emirates.  

Yet students should understand that when private entities “extract promises” from sovereign nations, those promises are inherently tenuous and contingent on that nation’s domestic political circumstances. Will the UAE keep its promises if NYU students engage in conduct (such as — gasp — embracing Israeli scholars) that shocks the conscience of Abu Dhabi’s citizens? Will there be subtle pressure to conform to UAE’s standards to avoid creating a cultural lightning rod? After all, UAE officials are on the record saying that “Nobody is going to have any special protection.” Assertions like this could create a profound chilling effect on campus, especially after the exciting first months of the branch campus’s operation, when operations become more routine and public attention has shifted to other educational initiatives elsewhere.

Ironically enough, on the very day that I received Charlotte’s piece, Inside Higher Ed leads with a cautionary tale from nearby Dubai:

 When Michigan State University announced plans to expand into Dubai in 2007, President Lou Anna K. Simon described the move as “transformational for a university with an expanding ‘world-grant’ mission” (get it? — “world-grant,” not “land-grant”). She added that “other U.S. institutions are likely to follow MSU’s path.”

Any followers would do well to learn from Michigan State’s combination of ambition, mistakes and misfortune. After just two years of operation, MSU Dubai has moved to immediately discontinue its undergraduate programs due to under-enrollment. That just 85 students are affected is testament to the extent of the institution’s struggle.

Check out the pie charts on this page of the University of Michigan’s School of Education website:

There are “women,” and there are “minorities,” and then there is that other group that we dare not even name.

Carol, I think that Andrew Ferguson, writing about for-profit colleges in the Weekly Standard, has it about right. He says, “The government is inducing more adults than ever before to go to college, and to the horror of the Mr. Fixits [Congress and the Department of Education], the students are grabbing their loans and enrolling in the wrong kind of schools.” The problem is not the colleges but the government’s financial-aid and loan subsidies. Both kinds of schools take advantage of the funding; profit-making colleges are simply more adept at doing so.

That’s what most people say, but the truth of the matter is that quite a few highly successful individuals never earned college degrees. Some have created great companies that ironically now demand college degrees for jobs far less demanding than that of their non-college CEO.

In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call, Jenna Ashley Robinson writes about people who are very successful but who don’t have any college credentials.

Maybe a future piece should be about people who have college degrees but can hardly even keep a low-skill job.

Jim Lindgren — who played a big role in exposing the fraud that was Arming America — raises some questions about a new Chronicle of Higher Education piece by Bellesiles.

In today’s Pope Center piece, our intern, Adrienne Dunn, writes about the important lessons she’s learned out of the classroom regarding money and time management.

I suspect that this explains a big part of the reason why so many employers demand college degrees for people applying for jobs that have nothing to do with any particular college curriculum — they just want the extra maturity that usually comes with having gotten through college. Requiring applicants to have a college degree acts as a proxy for experience and maturity without risking litigation by setting an arbitrary age limit.

Like a number of other institutions around the country, the University of Central Florida is waging a high-tech war against cheaters. UCF’s secret-agent-style strategies to monitor student during exams were detailed today in the New York Times. It sounds like something out of a Jason Bourne novel:

The 228 computers that students use are recessed into desk tops so that anyone trying to photograph the screen — using, say, a pen with a hidden camera, in order to help a friend who will take the test later — is easy to spot.

Scratch paper is allowed — but it is stamped with the date and must be turned in later.

When a proctor sees something suspicious, he records the student’s real-time work at the computer and directs an overhead camera to zoom in, and both sets of images are burned onto a CD for evidence.

If indeed Jason Bourne is the inspiration here, I shudder to think what UCF does to these kids after catching them.

Are universities “special”? The University of Colorado is trying to keep concealed guns off campus, in spite of a Colorado appeals-court ruling in April that overturned the university’s 30-year ban on guns. The court cited the state law that allows citizens over 21 to carry concealed guns. While the law includes a few exceptions, including K-12 schools, the court concluded that if the legislature had intended to exempt universities, it would have done so explicitly. But the university is taking the ruling to the Colorado Supreme Court, anyway.

The article “The End of Men: how women are taking control — of everything,” in the Atlantic Monthly, is little more than a piece of breathless propaganda. The author, Hanna Rosin, simply cheerleads for the rise of women in many areas, as if this happened by virtue of their naturally superior talents rather than largely due to enormous political pressure to make the sexes equal in outcomes. She writes as if affirmative action for women had nothing to do with it, and as if political correctness and other kinds of coercive measures weren’t  being used to keep back any honest criticism or evaluation. She mentions how women outnumber men in colleges without adding what the feminization of the academy has done to real education. (See for example, Karen Agness, “For Members Only: Feminism on Campus Today,” at the NAS website.) And she completely fails to note the obvious and concerted effort to diminish and ridicule men and boys in media, education, and popular culture, in order to make girls and women look superior.

While at the university, Elena Kagan, President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, wrote a thesis on the history of socialist politics in New York City, citing prominently the views of an important German Marxist, Werner Sombart, who embraced Nazism after Hitler came to power.

According to Human Events, “during World War I, Sombart endorsed Germany’s ‘heroic’ war against the ‘capitalist spirit’ represented by England,” and, in the early 1930s, he “advocated the ‘total ordering of life’ as an expression of the German Volksgeist, or ‘national spirit.’”

In her thesis, Kagan revamps Sombart’s question: Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten keinen Sozialismus? – “Why is there no socialism in the United States?” She inquires: “’Why, in particular, did the socialist movement never become an alternative to the nation’s established parties?’”

Kagan clearly gave weight to Sombart’s ideas, but it remains to be seen, in light of a full review of her thesis, to what extent, if any, she sympathized with, in her words, his “’idealized notion of a class-conscious party.’”

Andrew Ferguson has written an article defending for-profit colleges. He is informative and makes some good points, but some of his arguments do not convince. For example, almost everything he suggests that the for-profits especially provide — flexible hours, online learning, weekend classes, whatever — is already available through the not-for-profits. 

Moreover, Ferguson suggests that since both not-for-profit and for-profit colleges are frauds, what’s the difference? This is a cynical argument. True, not-for-profit colleges are already enrolling unprepared students and giving them degrees that often turn out to be less than valuable if not worthless; but for-profits go even lower in the potential student pool, and this is reflected in the higher default rate on their students’ federally funded loans. It’s very much like the subprime mortgage loans that led to financial chaos, and it is a difference that should matter to the taxpayer. It is projected that the for-profits will use $500,000,000 in the next ten years. Also default is very bad for students’ future prospects. If there are still some barriers at the not-for-profits keeping some doubly unprepared students out of college, that is actually beneficial in the long run. Finding ways to lower even those already incredibly low barriers is not helpful in the long run. 

Again comparing the two, Ferguson says that they both use easy government money to insulate themselves from market pressure, and he concludes that the only real difference is that the for-profits make a profit. They do not actually make a profit in the sense of making money. They transfer money from the taxpayer through the student to the investor.

The former dean of Harvard Law School and probable next justice of the United States Supreme Court does “not have a view of what natural rights are independent of the Constitution.” Does this mean that she does not believe that the unalienable rights of men derive from a source beyond government? That it is government, not Nature or Nature’s God, that anchors these rights? That government and man-made laws are her highest point of reference? If so, she repudiates a key classic principle of the American Founding. Happy Fourth?

Attacked by Congress and disparaged by the educational establishment, for-profit schools just keep on going. The Detroit News reports that the state’s “No Worker Left Behind” program — which provides up to $5,000 per person for retraining — was supposed to send displaced workers to community colleges. After nearly three years, fewer than one-third of the recipients attended community colleges. The rest, it seems, went to proprietary schools.

“That statistic amplifies criticism by some who believe that for-profit proprietary schools — often less proven and more expensive trade schools — are reaping the biggest benefits of the program while state funding for community colleges stagnates,” wrote the Detroit News reporter.

This follows a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education that recipients of the latest GI Bill are going to for-profits and community colleges, rather than four-year schools — with the for-profits dominating. 

Our less than disinterested professoriate rates President Obama 15th among best presidents.

The North Carolina legislature has just patched together its 2010-2011 budget, still counting on stimulus money to keep the state going. It can’t do that forever, and on the Pope Center website today, Jay Schalin revives an idea that was floated, but then allowed to sink — a cap on enrollment in the university system. Other states might find it useful.

The noisy ex-pastor of the Obamas taught a five day seminar at Chicago Theological Seminary recently that offered college credit. He told his evidently all-African-American class that they could never see whites as their brothers, that whites stole this country, and that the educational system has been designed with “malignant intent” to harm blacks.  He called Italians “Mamma Luigi” and “pizzeria,” although how he managed the grammar of that is anyone’s guess.  And of course he didn’t leave out the Jews. 

While I fervently wish CLS v. Martinez had gone the right way, the decision has at least spawned a tremendous burst of impassioned commentary from those who value the freedom of association and understand the importance of the university as a marketplace of ideas. As always, FIRE is one-stop-shopping for those interested in penetrating and persuasive analysis. Minding the Campus has run important pieces by K. C. Johnson and John Leo. Over at the Alliance Defense Fund Academic Freedom File, Travis Barham has put together a comprehensive media roundup.  

The defense of liberty should never be left to the courts alone, and the groundswell of opposition to the Martinez ruling tells me that we’ll have powerful allies as the battle moves from the courthouse to the campus.

Nathan notes that one accused Russian spy is a Harvard graduate.

Laurie Morrow remarks that another of the eleven alleged Russian spies busted by the FBI this week taught a course at Baruch/City University of New York.

A symbiotic arrangement, suggests Morrow — justifiably, I think:

“Juan Lazaro,” the “husband” of the pair of Russian agents who lived in Yonkers, was a capitalism-hating, Chavez-loving adjunct professor of political science at Baruch/CUNY.  Aside from not being especially effective in the classroom, he apparently blended in nicely with the rest of the faculty.

As he would on most college campuses.

At first glance, the Title IX controversy at Quinnipiac University seems old hat: school cuts multiple sports teams, athletes sue school to save said sports teams, judge prevents school from cutting the women’s team in question because of Title IX but the men’s programs still get the boot. Well, this story keeps developing, and now it’s anything but a normal Title IX case.

See, when Quinnipiac adjusted its athletic programs, it added a new sport for women: competitive cheerleading. Cheerleading isn’t recognized by the NCAA as a sport, but it seemingly meets the criteria set forth under Title IX. Now a federal judge will have to decide if cheerleading can count as a sport for gender-equity purposes. It’s the first time, to my knowledge, that such a question has been addressed in court, and it could have serious ramifications for future Title IX enforcement.

Cathy Young has a good overview of the issue over at Minding the Campus.