Free Republic

The past decade has ushered in dramatic growth in the number of postsecondary degree options available to US students. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in the US increased by 22 percent from 2010 (1.6 million) to 2019 (2.0 million). Likewise, master’s degrees increased by 20 percent, while doctoral degrees increased by 18 percent. Moreover, many of these degrees are in new areas of study: there’s been a 21 percent increase in the number of different degree or certificate programs available since 2012. Concurrently, non-traditional degree or certificate options have also become...

In 2014, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) filed suit against the University of North Carolina. Its complaint argued that the university had engaged in intentional discrimination on the basis of race and ethnicity to the detriment of SFFA members. The suit followed in a line of cases challenging the admissions policies of universities, where students from certain groups were given preferences over students who were not in those groups. In a pair of 2003 cases involving the University of Michigan, the Supreme Court ruled that universities were in violation of the law if they used a rigid quota system (Gratz...

The lawlessness of the Obama administration has been astounding. Entire books have been written about President Obama’s notion that he should be and is free to do whatever he wants (such as Lawless by Professor David Bernstein, which I wrote about here). No doubt more will be. One remarkably brazen instance I recently learned about is his administration’s funneling of money from lawsuit settlements into the pockets of left-wing activist groups. It makes you wonder if there is anything this administration won’t try to get away with. Following the collapse of the housing bubble, the federal government initiated several grandstanding,...

The 2016 campaign has begun and higher education will probably play a bigger role than in any previous presidential campaign – and not because GOP contender Scott Walker is the first candidate in many years who didn’t earn a college degree. Since LBJ’s Great Society, the federal government has been promoting higher education through grants and easy loans. Politicians in both parties hyped the personal and national benefits of college. Boosting it seemed like a good idea at the time, but then so did pushing home ownership to achieve “the American dream.” Like most federal policies, the college-for-everyone push led...

For quite a few years, the number of states with Right-to-Work statutes was stuck at 22. Oklahoma adopted RTW in 2001, but then no more did so (despite serious legislative battles) until Indiana in 2012 and Michigan in 2013. Wisconsin has now become the 25th RTW state. What is going on? I think the momentum toward RTW – or more accurately, the declining appeal of compulsory unionism – is explained by two things. First, it is becoming clear that RTW status helps attract business, while compulsory unionism repels it. Second, more and more workers who once regarded labor unions as...

... Last March I discussed the trip to the woodshed the agency endured in the Kaplan case when the Sixth Circuit slammed its “expert,” whose purported proof of statistical discrimination was seen to be laughable. The agency has just received similar treatment from the Fourth Circuit in EEOC v. Freeman – exactly the same sort of disparate impact case where a company used background checks to help screen out workers who might not be trustworthy, particularly in jobs involving the handling of money. The EEOC’s view is that employers are not allowed to have a preference for workers who haven’t...

Should workers have the freedom to make their own contracts? Long ago, they did. Back in 1905, the Supreme Court held in Lochner v. New York (which I discussed recently on Forbes) that the state could not dictate to bakery employees how many hours they were allowed to work in a week. Unfortunately, freedom of contract is one of those rights that “progressives” and collectivists regard as unimportant – one that legislators and bureaucrats can whittle away as long as they claim that doing so somehow advances “the public good.” One of the many federal statutes that interfere with freedom...

When Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972, it was exercising its power to regulate interstate commerce by prohibiting discharges into the nation’s “navigable waters.” If a body of water could be used to transport goods from one state to another, it was covered by the Act. Like so many other statutes enacted over the last 80 years – that is, since the advent of the administrative state under FDR – the Clean Water Act (CWA) depends on bureaucratic interpretation and enforcement. The two entities involved with the CWA are the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of...

The latest figures on union membership from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the long decline has continued to the point where the percentage of Americans in unions is lower now than at any point in the last century. That decline has not been arrested even by the extraordinarily pro-union actions of the National Labor Relations Board (such as this Arkansas case where two-third of the workers have petitioned for an election to decertify an unwanted union, but the NLRB has gone to court to block that) and union efforts at greasing the rails for election victories, as occurred...

President Obama’s penultimate SOTU was notable for its audacity in demanding an even more expansive role for the federal government. Although trust in government has plummeted during his relentlessly statist administration, the president wants Americans to rally behind his belief that more federal mandates and spending will “turn the page” and make the country great. I would like to single out one especially wrong-headed idea – that Congress should amend the Fair Labor Standards Act, requiring employers to pay many workers more. Obama supports increasing the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour. In his speech, he argued for it...

New York recently administered a test to 11,371 people who want to become public school teachers, a new requirement mandated by the State Board of Regents. Keep in mind that these are college graduates who have been through education schools. Surely they all possess enough knowledge of English to pass the basic Academic Literacy Skills test – right? Not even close. Only 68 percent achieved the passing score of 520 points out of 600. Graduates of colleges in New York City did even worse. At many schools, the pass rate was under 50 percent and at one, not a single...

... Instead of talking about new laws to enact and regulations to impose, it’s time to start talking about old ones that should be repealed. Your predecessors in office – and quite possibly you – have done grave damage to America with swarms of laws and regulations that take liberty and property away from the people, waste resources, enrich and empower special interest groups, and undermine the rule of law. The very best, most public-spirited thing you could do would be to repeal them. Here is a starter list. The Davis-Bacon Act. This law is a relic of the Depression,...

After the tumultuous Attorney Generalship of Eric Holder, what the country badly needs is a replacement who will uphold the law fairly and guard against injustices perpetrated by the government. President Obama’s nominee to replace him, federal prosecutor Loretta Lynch is questionable in that regard because of her enthusiastic embrace of civil asset forfeiture, which often deprives perfectly innocent people of their property. In an editorial published November 22, “Loretta Lynch’s Money Pot,” the Wall Street Journal revealed that during her tenure as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Ms. Lynch has used civil asset forfeiture in...

Perhaps you have noticed that many jobs that require only basic skills and a cooperative attitude are now walled off to Americans who don’t possess a college degree. A recent study entitled Moving the Goalposts: How Demand for a Bachelor’s Degree is Reshaping the Workforce contains a lot of evidence on that. For example, for sales representatives and retail supervisors, 56 percent of recent job postings specify that having a college degree is a requirement. This doesn’t mean that those jobs have such high intellectual demands that no one without a college degree could possibly do them. What it means...

Competition – everyone loves it, except when it’s competition in your particular business or profession. Then it’s dangerous and must be controlled if not eliminated. Back in August, I wrote about the North Carolina Board of Dental Examiners case, which involves the legality of efforts by that body to stop anyone who is not a licensed dentist from offering teeth whitening services. Upon digging further into the case, I learned that it has spawned a raging battle among legal groups, with four state bar associations weighing in on an amicus brief. They evidently fear that if the decision goes against...

... The TSA has an annual budget of $7.9 billion and employs 62,000 people. Its principal function is to operate the passenger screening function at more than 450 commercial airports. Keeping dangerous people off airplanes is unquestionably important, but is it wise to entrust this to a federal bureaucracy? There is solid evidence that the TSA is not very good at this job, but spends a lot of money uselessly. Exhibit A is the Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT, naturally) program. The idea behind SPOT is that government observers in airports can detect individuals who are intent on...

College syllabi are handed out en masse at the beginning of a course for students. Sometimes they’re kept and carefully followed; sometimes they’re tossed away when the student decides not to take it after all. Professors often post their syllabi online. They are not treated like creative works. Therefore, the idea that syllabi are the copyrighted property of the professor seems far-fetched. The idea that the university that employs the professor must refuse requests for copies of them under a state’s “Sunshine Law” seems even more so. But that is exactly the situation in a dispute involving the University of...

One of the greatest political philosophers, Frederic Bastiat, wrote that the law should exist to protect life, liberty, and property, but unfortunately is often perverted into a means of “legal plunder.” In other words, the law is used to legitimize the use of force to deprive people of their wealth. A recent Washington Post article Stop and Seize shines a light on actions by police that perfectly exemplify the sort of abuse Monsieur Bastiat warned about. In it, readers learn how police forces across the country exploit civil asset forfeiture laws to deprive hapless, innocent people of cash and other...

Having information is good, right? Information helps people make good decisions, so it’s obvious that laws mandating disclosure of information must be a benefit to the public. That’s the logic behind many laws and regulations anyway. And like the logic behind many laws, it’s mistaken. So say professors Omri Ben-Shahar (University of Chicago) and Carl Schneider (University of Michigan) in their recent book More Than You Wanted to Know: The Failure of Mandated Disclosure, published in April by Princeton. Think about those tedious documents you so often have to sign before you can get something you want – they are...

[T]he NLRA sometimes comes in for criticism from leftists, who argue that it doesn’t do enough to tilt the playing field in favor of unions and collective bargaining. The common complaint is that although the NLRA does make it illegal for employers to discriminate against workers because of union advocacy, the legal processes under that statute are too slow and weak to deter employers from telling workers, “I don’t want to deal with a union and if I find you agitating for one, you’ll be fired.” To remedy that purported defect in the law, Representatives Keith Ellison (D-MN) and John...