Free Republic

Seventy-three percent of college graduates who enter the labor market underemployed stay that way for 10 years... almost half of America’s college graduates are working at high-school-level jobs. The study, published Feb. 22, also found that 52 percent of college graduates are underemployed a year after graduation. ... employers are increasingly turning to factors other than college degrees to determine competency. ... 52 percent of college graduates are underemployed a year after graduation. Even 10 years after graduation, 45 percent of college graduates remain underemployed. Graduates who enter the labor market with a college-level job are said to “rarely slide...

Inputs are out, and outcomes are in. So goes the current thinking about the methodology used to create college rankings. The publications that tell us which colleges are best, next best, and on down the line often revamp their formulas, and the emphasis has moved in recent years to evaluating institutions by the status of their students after graduation rather than their status—and institutional conditions—when they enter. The industry’s behemoth, U.S. News, responded to ongoing criticism by touting, about this year’s best-colleges list, “We want to ensure the educational resources we provide emphasize the outcomes for graduates … This, in...

Interim Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 is expected to announce a working group that will consider a policy of institutional neutrality, a move that comes just months after the University became embroiled in controversy over its response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.A formal stance of neutrality, in which Harvard would refrain from making political statements as an institution, would be a marked shift from the University’s current approach to politics. It would also, in theory, help the University avoid the pressure it’s faced in the past to take political positions on contentious issues — such as the...

Editor’s Commentary: While corporate media and local authorities do their best to downplay the immigration status of suspected murderer Jose Antonio Ibarra, it seems crystal clear that he’s an illegal alien. He’s allegedly from Venezuela and is not a U.S. citizen. Fox News, to their credit, did at least highlight that Ibarra is not a U.S. citizen. Other news networks danced around and often never mentioned that part at all. This story has been in the national news spotlight since it broke Thursday. Let’s see how fast the coverage disappears now that it’s an illegal alien in custody. Here are...

A Texas college has reinstated a professor who was reportedly terminated for teaching about the traditional, biological definition of gender. In a statement published Tuesday, the law firm First Liberty Institute announced that St. Philip's College adjunct professor Johnson Varkey has been reinstated after he was fired in January 2023 for rejecting aspects of LGBT ideology.The law firm filed a charge of discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission after the San Antonio, Texas-based historically black community college fired Varkey because the biology professor told his students that sex is determined by an individual's chromosomes. The professor was accused of...

The rise of political orthodoxy on campus is often cited as one of the key reasons for reforming universities. But if there is a rise of orthodoxy, what does this orthodoxy look like, who is perpetuating it, and on what grounds are they doing so? Professors might immediately want me to point out that universities are known for being open environments of intellectual, academic, and expressive freedom, which support their core mission to create and disseminate knowledge. They might also wish to take issue with the idea that faculty members push an orthodoxy, as it’s common for students (or students’...

Biden Says Bailing Out Student Debt Is "Also Helping You Who Don't Go To College." (36 seconds video in the link below) https://twitter.com/Jules31415/status/1760427842821603631

New analysis finds 1 in 4 students in college programs earn less than high school graduates, ten years after enrollment ... Famed former Wall Street broker Jordan Belfort commented on the diminishing value of a college education, after a new report found some college students learned less than high school graduates a decade after their enrollment. College is a "complete waste of time" for most students, ... "If you want to be a professional, a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant or something that really requires a degree then yes, you should go to college ... "But all of these other...

A bill making its way through the California legislature could, if approved, pave the way for free college tuition for black students and other perceived marginalized communities.ACA-7 passed the state Assembly in September and sits before the Democrat-controlled Senate. If approved there, it would be put before voters this November.The bill would effectively allow the governor to circumvent the state’s longstanding ban on racial preferences first passed by a majority of voters in 1996 with Proposition 209 and reaffirmed in a 2020 referendum.The measure would allow the governor to use the state’s coffers to fund research-based or culturally specific programs...

Many university professors have an intellectually close-minded mentality and produce ill-informed, civically ignorant students.American civilization with its wealth has built an educational system beyond anything imagined in the past. We have staffed our universities with more than 1.4 million full- and part-time teachers. Of those instructors, 60 percent of college instructors identify as “left” or “far-left.” Many of them have an intellectually close-minded mentality based on racial and sexual identity. One result is that we are producing ill-informed, civically ignorant students.A year-long study conducted by researchers at the Center for American Institutions at Arizona State University, where I am a...

Although the Ivies and other elite colleges and universities in the U.S. are financial titans, they are registered with the Internal Revenue Service as 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit organizations. As a result, their vast property holdings are exempt from taxation in all 50 states. The rationale for this status is that higher education is an inherent public good. At least that has been the assumption under which this country has long operated. But this argument has increasingly been called into question by events over the last few years, culminating in the headline-making responses by university presidents to a recent congressional panel....

University of Iowa women’s basketball sensation, Caitlin Clark, will break the women’s all-time scoring record sometime in the coming week and maybe on Sunday? But not everyone is excited for her. Caitlin Clark went to Dowling High School in West Des Moines and then was recruited by the University of Iowa. In less than four years she has broken several all-time records in women’s basketball. As ESPN reported Clark is averaging 32.2 points per game this season and is 39 points shy of breaking the record. For her career, Clark has: 51 30-point games (including 14 this season), the most...

Taylor Swift has drawn criticism over a cease-and-desist letter her lawyers sent a college student who uses publicly available flight data to track her private jet usage. As Breitbart News reported, the target of the threatened law suit runs social media accounts that follow her and other celebrities’ private jets to measure their carbon pollution levels — with Swift calling the issue a matter of “life or death.” Jack Sweeney, 21, received the missive in December which declared the 14-time Grammy award winner would “have no choice but to all legal remedies” if the accused did not stop his “stalking...

Fueled by political ambition and a distaste for the new left-wing ideological agendas that have taken root on many college campuses, activists and politicians have sought to alter the landscape of higher education in Florida. In many respects, they have succeeded. These reformers have focused much attention on New College of Florida, a public liberal-arts college in Sarasota that had a well-deserved reputation as a breeding ground of progressivism. The school’s extremism sparked the ire of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who often says that “Florida is where woke goes to die.” According to DeSantis’s chief of staff, James Uthmeier, “It...

For all his talk about wanting to get the border crisis under control, Joe Biden is still holding out fresh goody bags for the illegals. Sure, California is offering them free health care and New York is offering them free $1,000 debit cards handed out on the honor system that they'll only be used for food and baby supplies. But what better than for Joe Biden to top them by offering free college to illegals, too? That's what this looks like, with this measure preparing the groundwork for it: According to the New York Sun:The Department of Education could soon...

Among the many destructive ideas that “progressive” thinking has unleashed on education in America is that it’s unfair to hold students from “underrepresented groups” to the same standards as others. Schools and colleges should “help” minority students succeed by lowering expectations for them—somehow atoning for wrongs done to their ancestors in the distant past. That is how Claudine Gay wound up as president of Harvard. The notion that academic standards should be lower for minority students has swept through our educational institutions, but there are some dissenters who argue that this doesn’t help but hurts. One of them is Professor...

Shellyne Rodriguez, the machete-wielding former Hunter College professor, has now been fired by the Cooper Union college. The school previously stood with Rodriguez after she trashed a student display and held a machete to the neck of a journalist. It appears that Rodriguez’s anti-Israel comments were finally too much for Cooper Union. What is interesting is what it takes at both Hunter College and The Cooper Union to be fired. We previously discussed a videotape of Rodríguez trashing a pro-life student display in New York. Before attacking the table, she told the students, “You’re not educating s–t […] This is...

The continued embrace of diversity, equity and inclusion in STEM combined with a broad decline in academic standards is producing a generation of scientists who are less capable than their predecessors, warned some scientists in recent interviews with The College Fix. From easier math classes in high school to the elimination of standardized tests to extreme grade-inflation to DEI tropes that elevate lived experiences and ways of knowing over facts and data, the trend represents a pressing problem for science professors working to protect STEM and preserve its standards and meritocracy. Alex Small, chair of the physics and astronomy department...

We don’t send our young into the wilderness for a vision quest as a rite of passage. There are few things in modern society that signify a transition into adulthood. Going to college is one of them. And in debt addicted America, it is no surprise that for many, college debt is the first debt they will take on. Getting a college education is supposed to give someone a well rounded view of the world and a potential skill set. Some argue that college is not about vocational training. That to some degree is true but when students are going...

Governor Maura Healey signed the order, titled 'Instituting Skill-Based Hiring Practices,' to 'reduce structural barriers that result in inequities in pay and access to employment.' Some Massachusetts leaders praised the move as important for establishing an 'inclusive' workforce. ... Massachusetts will no longer require a college degree for a large majority of government jobs due to a new state executive order intended to make the commonwealth more “inclusive.” Governor Maura Healey signed the order, titled “Instituting Skill-Based Hiring Practices,” on Jan 25. The document asserts that “skills-based hiring practices will strengthen the Commonwealth’s workforce, increase access to quality jobs for...