Category Archives: Education

Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Academic Bubble

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Is it about to burst? Given the degree to which it’s been driven by government money, and the coming fiscal meltdown, I’d say so.

…consumers seem to be reading the cues in the marketplace.

An increasing number of students are spending their first two years after high school in low-cost community colleges and then transferring to four-year schools.

A recent Wall Street Journal story reported that out-of-staters are flocking to low-tuition North Dakota State in frigid Fargo.

I went to community college my first two years before transferring to Ann Arbor, where I picked up all the basics for engineering — calculus, physics, chemistry, etc. I’m convinced that I got both a cheaper and better education there than those who were freshman and sophomores at Michigan, based on their descriptions of their classes (giant lecture halls taught by grad students for whom English was a second language). But I missed out on a couple years of the “college experience.”

[Update early evening]

The bubble will pop this decade, and here’s one reason why.

[Bumped]

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Hate

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…that dare not speak its name:

Since Hitler’s death, the world has defined anti-Semitism down. Nurturing ancient fantasies of secret Jewish cabals that control the media and play politicians like puppets on a string, and making political judgments based on these fantasies isn’t sort of or almost anti-Semitic. To believe that Jews control public discourse and the media and bend the gentile masses to their sinister agenda is the essence of old fashioned anti-Semite. In some countries these beliefs are so common that they are no longer recognized as an aggressive and communicable mental disease. These ideas have become so widely accepted that they are seldom questioned or examined; when that happens, a whole society is poisoned and distorted.

The irony, of course, is not that it has become so prevalent on the left, but that those same leftists continue to attempt to rewrite history and claim that Hitler was of the “right.”

Business, Education, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

On The Chopping Block

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(My CEI colleague) Iain Murray says that part of a budget deal should be to eliminate the Department of Commerce.

It’s not actually the first one I’d go after (I’d get rid of e.g., Education, Labor and Energy first), but I understand the potential appeal. But it does serve many necessary functions that would have to be redistributed elsewhere. For instance, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) wouldn’t find a comfortable home in the State Department, nor would NOAA or the weather service. Granted, the latter is kind of a mess right now, in terms of not getting needed new satellites up (particularly now that we’re headed into the heart of hurricane season), though it’s not clear whether that’s NOAA’s fault, or NASA’s, which actually manages the development of the satellites. Also, giving over the commercial export list to the State Department could make ITAR even more of a disaster than it already is. It would also raise the issue of finding a new home for the Coast Guard (and the Space Guard, if we ever get one).

There is a reason that Commerce has been around a lot longer than the three agencies I mention above as better targets — if it didn’t exist, we’d probably have to invent it in some form. And unlike education, energy, or labor, we actually do have a Commerce Clause in the Constitution (flawed and overstretched though its interpretation has become).