Free Republic

For a long time now, the debate has raged as to whether it’s worth going to college anymore. The libertarian view on this question has typically been along the lines of… if people are foolish enough to waste money on worthless degrees, the world will soon enough teach them another lesson. While valid, that view ran aground on the Democrat vote-buying scheme to insulate those with useless degrees from the consequences of their poor choices and indebtedness, with our tax money. The cynical motives behind this ploy aside, I very much doubt many students enroll in college with the intention...

Employers across a range of industries are dropping a job requirement once considered a ticket to a higher paying job and financial security: a college degree. Today's tight labor market has led more companies instead to take a more skills-based approach to hiring, as evidenced on job search sites like Indeed and ZipRecruiter. "Part of it is employers realizing they may be able to do a better job finding the right talent by looking for the skills or competencies someone needs to do the job and not letting a degree get in the way of that," Parisa Fatehi-Weeks, senior director...

In an era of soaring tuition fees and mounting student debt, choosing which undergraduate degree to pursue has become a crucial decision for any aspiring college student. And it always helps to see which way the winds are blowing.As Visual Capitalist's Pallavi Rao shares below, this visualization by Kashish Rastogi, based on data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), examines the changing landscape of undergraduate degrees awarded between the 2010–2011 and 2020–2021 academic years.Undergraduate Degrees Growing in PopularityThe NCES classifies all four-year bachelor degrees into 38 fields of study. Of these fields, 21 saw an increase in graduates...

The Department of Education has released statistics on females versus males earning college degrees. By 2027, it is projected that 60 percent of college degrees will go to females and less than 40 percent will go to males. This represents a total reversal from 1968, when males earned roughly 60 percent of college degrees and females earned roughly 40 percent.Despite the fact that women are soon expected to earn 60% of all college degrees, American universities and colleges continue to offer about 10 times more female-only scholarships than male-only scholarships. (See next tweet.) pic.twitter.com/AxYNlWQyZp— i/o (@monitoringbias) August 2, 2023Why is...

It’s finally happening…America’s most broken industry is being disrupted.I’ve been writing about the disruption of college since 2019.Back then, it was one of my most controversial ideas. Today? It’s becoming more and more of a reality…Many kids are finally realizing college is a waste of money.College is hot off the heels of a 60-year bull market.The number of kids signing up for U.S. universities jumped 4X since 1960.But did you know enrollments have now fallen 12 years in a row?And the future looks bleak.A decade ago, if you told fellow parents you weren’t pushing your kids to attend college, you’d...

Long the hottest place on Earth, Death Valley put a sizzling exclamation point Sunday on a record warm summer that is baking nearly the entire globe by flirting with some of the hottest temperatures ever recorded, meteorologists said. Temperatures in Death Valley, which runs along part of central California’s border with Nevada, reached 128 degrees Fahrenheit (53.33 degrees Celsius) on Sunday at the aptly named Furnace Creek, the National Weather Service said. The hottest temperature ever record was 134 F (56.67 C) in July 1913 at Furnace Creek, said Randy Ceverny of the World Meteorological Organization, the body recognized as...

Cheyenne, Wyoming, broke a record on Wednesday, seeing the most drastic temperature drop in less than an hour as the country braces for a massive winter storm, days before Christmas. The National Weather Service (NWS) is warning of the “widespread and dangerous arctic blast,” which has already begun to sweep the U.S., making its way to the East Coast as the holidays approach. The NWS warns that the “record-breaking cold and life-threatening wind chills over the Great Plains” will spread to the eastern portion of the country by Friday. Some cities have already experienced historic drops in temperature. Cheyenne, Wyoming,...

Three weeks ago, we learned that Judge Ketanji Brown-Jackson was confirmed to the US Supreme Court. Just like that, the SCOTUS has been further reduced in stature to an affirmative action hire giveaway program, rather like a DMV office that has the power to override laws. Anyone who’s been paying attention to trends in late-stage Weimerica shouldn’t be surprised by this, however. It has become a truism in modern America that our institutions - across the board - no longer function as they should, and that many of them barely function at all. While this can be partially attributed to...

Generally, when a buyer is defrauded of services, the demand for the goods diminishes. As more emerges of what colleges and universities across this country are not doing, the demand will dry up unless there are drastic changes. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) has published a report titled "What Will They Learn?" It is a survey of core requirements at our nation's colleges and universities and one does not need a Ph.D. to comprehend the paucity of education now apparent in far too many places. In fact, "for over a decade, ACTA has expressed concern that rising...

Two-thirds of employees report regrets about their advanced degrees, as Americans question the high cost of higher education. Student loan debt has ballooned to nearly $1.6 trillion nationwide in 2019, topping the list of regrets for employees. 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. A college education is still considered a pathway to higher lifetime earnings and gainful employment for Americans. Nevertheless, two-thirds of employees report having regrets when it comes to their advanced degrees, according to a PayScale...

We have been inundated for years with stories--indeed, books and conferences and seminars--in which we are told that it is impossible to find good jobs without a college degree. If fact, Georgetown has a center dedicated to sounding that very alarm in every way possible. Nevertheless, when you look at their data, you find that, as usual, the current wisdom on that is not necessarily the case. Amber Northern from the Thomas Fordham Institute did just that. "In looking at the national breakdown of good jobs, 55 percent of those workers hold at least a bachelor's degree," she writes. "And...

It’s commencement season, and a new crop of college graduates is entering the job market. How long will it take them to achieve the American dream of homeownership? Realtor.com looked at 336 college degrees to determine which would most quickly put their bearers in a financial position to buy a home. The site based its conclusions on typical early career salaries and a savings rate of 20 percent, with the goal of amassing $50,000, or a 20 percent down payment on a $250,000 home. Engineering degrees dominated the list, occupying 33 of the highest 50 rankings, with petroleum engineering at...

The way to help women continue to move forward isn’t to propagate the myth that women in the United States are victims, oppressed by the system and unable to help themselves secure a better future.Yet that’s exactly the message of the “A Day Without a Woman” strike happening Wednesday.Various organizers, including the Women’s March crowd and other feminists, are pushing women to “take the day off, from paid and unpaid labor,” as well as by not shopping (except at “small, women- and minority-owned businesses”) and by wearing red.An op-ed advocating the strike published in The Guardian last month by eight...

For many young people, the decision of whether to extend their education careers and attend university is a tough one to make. With soaring costs, Statista's Martin Armstrong notes, not all that choose to do a bachelor's degree graduate with the feeling that it was all worthwhile.Emolument surveyed 1,800 graduates to reveal that the most regretted major is psychology. Only 33 percent of bachelors of this particular science said their degree was worth it. On the other end of the scale, 87 percent of chemistry and natural sciences alumni said they felt their studies were worth it.You will find...

An influential seminary affiliated with The Episcopal Church has announced that it will no longer issue degrees starting next year, and is reporting a net loss of $7.9 million in assets since last year. The Episcopal Divinity School of Cambridge, Massachusetts, announced in July that they will stop granting degrees at the end of the 2016-2017 academic year. Last week, the divinity school sent out an update to supporters and members of its campus community wherein they noted that the net assets of the seminary had declined rapidly over the past couple of years. "At our meeting, we also accepted...

Ivanpah, the world's largest solar power plant located in California's Mojave Desert, caught fire last Thursday, causing damage to one of the plant's three towers. This latest engineering setback is the least of the plant's woes. Prohibitive economic realities are the true problem. Earlier this year, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) decided to postpone its continued support of the struggling facility, which was touted as the future of solar power when it opened in 2014. But after receiving $1.6 billion in loan guarantees from the Department of Energy (DOE) and $535 million from the U.S. Treasury Department, the facility's...

As the president reveals his plan to reduce greenhouse gases to save us from an apocalyptic atmosphere, I wish to remind people of three things: 1.) The true hockey stick of the fossil fuel era: Global progress in total population, personal wealth and life expectancy. This is truly amazing. To show how fossil fuels played a roll in expanding the global pie, there are many more people alive today living longer and enjoying a higher GDP. One has to wonder if someone against fossil fuels is simply anti-progress. Ironic since many in the camp of anthropogenic global warming like to...

With the rise of flexible working schedules, the freelance economy, and video conferencing, more Americans are getting their jobs done without ever heading into an office, according to new data from the American Time Use Survey released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among all workers, 23% report spending all or part of their day working from home. That’s up from less than 19% in 2003, the first year for which there’s comparable data.

In many fields, graduate degrees offer distinct benefits for your extra years in school. Employees armed with a graduate education are often a more attractive hire and can make a higher salary than colleagues who have only a bachelor's degree. However, for some industries the benefits of going to graduate school are comparatively low and don't justify the extra investment. Using the recent "Hard Times" report from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, we examined salary and unemployment data of experienced college graduates and experienced holders of graduate degrees. These are workers whose ages range from 35 to...

President likes to refer to us as grown children and is quick to boast that because of his ObamaCare plan we can stay on our parents’ health insurance plans until we’re 26. But this is a generation that remembers typing papers on word processors and tearing the edges off dot matrix paper. We weren’t the first on the information super highway but once we got a license, we took over the road. Facebook has tracked every day of our lives since college and Twitter turned us into citizen reporters. We also have degrees – some of us multiple degrees- but...