Thought For The Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Good one. 😂 The poor dears have a lifetime of learning because the nutty professors are still figuring out the gender categories. Just keep adding onto their student debt whilst they complete their PHD in gender studies. And they won’t be able to afford a plumber at that point.
We don’t have a Media that hold Democratic politicians accountable; so they lie, they cheat, they steal, pay out graft and are not held accountable.
Helping put four children through college has been a bit of a tough financial road. They worked or a third, they borrowed a third, we payed for a third. Sometimes it’s felt like we were helping pay for other peoples social security, as the four will have incomes and will pay into the pyramid scheme when not many are having children these days. The four all have between 18K and 26K in loans. My advice to them was 1. take the money on the table and 2. don’t vote for these clowns. Perhaps that’s the best revenge of all.
(Ok. I’ve said it. I’ll brace for the beatings now.)
The Idiocracy is on a roll.
Freee Money! College will become even more expensive.
The Warden in her fifties went back to full-time ER nursing to help put our three through college.
O Tempora! O Mores!
This is incidence number 6,000,000 wherein progressives and demons reward bad behavior,
What do they get? More bad behavior.
There are 8,000,000 stories in the naked city. The dems intend to buy each vote.
will pay into the pyramid scheme when not many are having children these days.
It isn’t a pyramid scheme, it’s an income transfer program. The structural problems with it could be easily solved by having cohort-specific retirement ages which provide for the ratio of beneficiaries to workers to vary only within a narrow band.
The U.S. isn’t Japan or Germany. The total fertility rate is deficient, but it has not as yet fallen more than 15% below replacement level. There are policy measures which could be employed to reduce people’s inhibitions about having children which are not being employed.
The Idiocracy is on a roll.
Free Money! College will become even more expensive.
The Warden in her fifties went back to full-time ER nursing to help put our three through college.
O Tempora! O Mores!
This is incidence number 6,000,000 wherein progressives and demons reward bad behavior,
What do they get? More bad behavior.
There are 8,000,000 stories in the naked city. The dems intend to buy each vote.
And of course nothing is being done to reduce the high cost of college that helped get people into this mess. Sounds a lot like giving amnesty to illegal immigrants without securing the border.
I’m noticing a trend.
Rpublicans should have gotten ahead of this with their own plan for dealing with the student loan crisis.
Sitting back and letting the Democrats set the message was an unforced error, and trying to get in some quick owns now isn’t going to fix things.
I’ve talked previously about the morality of loans, but let’s look at it from a purely political lens. Okay, let’s throw out the “rich” and “upper middle class” debt from the chart. That still leaves 41.39% of the debt among the middle class or lower. Many of those have debt through interest in excess of the principal, and will have to continue paying for years before they even begin to pay down the principal. Is the right’s only political play to say “that’s your own fault; you’ll get no help from us.” I’m not seeing any prominent voices on the right even saying things like “we should overhaul the loan and educational systems so that this at least doesn’t happen to the next generation.”
david burge: I thanked God.
Ben Shapiro is a Harvard Law graduate.
Some colleges fix the system to force students into five year courses by withholding one or two credits necessary to complete the degree in four years.
The U.S. isn’t Japan or Germany. The total fertility rate is deficient, but it has not as yet fallen more than 15% below replacement level.
Going off of how poisoned the population statistics have been identified to be, we may not even be that low– women who are not born cannot give birth, and the Census admitted to being off by millions in the 2020 census.
“that’s your own fault; you’ll get no help from us.”
It is their own fault and subsidizing profligacy is no help to anyone. My Bride and I had student loans of 20k back in 1982 which is the equivalent of 61K today. We paid every cent off during the next 18 years while starting a family, and a law practice. (My intial income was 16k a year.) Many lean years during that time period, and making sure all the bills got paid required discipline and living frugally. We benefited from the experience. Personally, I think government student loans should be abolished, and I further favor making colleges responsible for half of government grants and private student loans if the student does not graduate and find a job in his or her degree field within two years of graduation. Lots can be done to improve the higher education system that does not involve pouring vast sums of public money into a broken system.
Personally, I think government student loans should be abolished, and I further favor making colleges responsible for half of government grants and private student loans if the student does not graduate and find a job in his or her degree field within two years of graduation. Lots can be done to improve the higher education system that does not involve pouring vast sums of public money into a broken system.
Why are Republicans making no effort to advance any of this?
There are adjustments which could be made to ameliorate this problem which are never even discussed.
A. Strip ‘disparate impact’ rules out of employment discrimination law and provide explicitly for employers public and private to have a free hand to make use of paper and pencil tests to regulate hiring and promotion.
B. Enact co-ordinate state and federal legislation to replace the current degree architecture used in higher education and to induce a re-organization of extant institutions into a set of successor institutions. About 25% of the time the young spend enrolled in higher education consists of padding whose principal effect is to generate job opportunities for the arts and sciences faculty. A great deal of occupational training is padded when it’s not rubbish. Credentials could consist of certificates awarded upon the completion of a certain number of credit-hours of study of a discrete subject, with internships and apprenticeships accounting for some of the credits. For vocational programs, one can imagine four classes of certificates (< 30 credit-hours, 30 credit-hours, 48 credit-hours, and 60 credit-hours). For academic and arts programs, three might do (30 credit-hours, 60 credit-hours, 90 credit-hours). Longer courses of study would be found in re engineering, medical arts, law, veterinary medicine, clinical psychology, and research degree programs. (Collectively, these might be followed by no more than 5% of each birth cohort).
C. Insist elementary schooling be laser-focused on three objects: imparting literacy, imparting numeracy, and (after the first three years) imparting knowledge about the fundamentals of American history, geogrphy, and civics. Sort students who can handle regular classroom instruction in the English language into for tracks: one expected to finish their elementary program by age 10, one expected to finish at around age 12, one expected to finish at age 14, and one slated for remedial high schools where you work on a basic education certificate and take life-skills classes. The students would be sorted and their achievement would be remarked through the use of state regents’ examinations.
D. Rebalance the share of manpower in secondary schooling devoted to vocational technical instruction as opposed to all other kinds. Currently, about 6% of the manpower is devoted to voTech. Work to raise that share to 35%. Posit that 30% of the manpower be devoted to academics and the arts and 35% be devoted to basic education, remedial education, and life-skills classes.
E. Increase the length of the school year by 1/3, but calibrate time in school and homework with the understanding that youths over the age of 14 are working part time. Follow Edward Banfield’s advice and lower the school leaving age to 14 and allow employers to hire them.
F. End grants and subsidies for private higher education, including loan guarantees.
G. End the autonomy of public higher education to charge tuition and mandatory fees. The use of fee-for-service enterprises on campus would have to be wholly voluntary; parking fines and textbook purchases would mark the outer boundary of the institution’s capacity to compel expenditures. In lieu of tuition and room-and-board set by the institution, students admitted would have a contingent claim on a tuition voucher and a room-and-board voucher issued by the state treasury. They could claim their vouchers by paying a recipient’s fee to the state treasury and then present their vouchers to the institution. The institution would then present them to dedicated state funds for redemption. The funds would be financed out of a dedicated state income tax; the tax base and tax rates would be delineated by an appendix to the state constitution. The legislature would be debarred by the constitution from providing for any discretionary appropriation to public higher education. All public support would come from those dedicated funds, which would be receiving a fixed share of the state’s personal income. The recipients’ fees mentioned would go into the state treasury as general revenue and the institutions would never see them. The fee charged each student would be a function of the number of state income tax returns filed by his family over his natural life (not the amounts of the liability) and the student could elect to decline the room-and-board voucher and live on his own. The recipients’ fees could be financed out of family resources, loans from banks and finance companies (unsubsidized, unguaranteed, not given abnormal protection in bankruptcy court, and constrained by state laws on criminal usury), grants from the scholarship programs of foundations, grants from the school’s dedicated legacy endowments, and grants from the school’s discretionary funds.
“The total fertility rate is deficient, but it has not as yet fallen more than 15% below replacement level.”
It’s real simple math.
There are an approximately an equal number of women and men in the world, (except in China and some other countries where a majority of abortions were of girls.)
Not every woman gets married, not every woman can conceive, not every woman has children, not every woman can have more than one. The number of children to consider for zero population growth is closer to three, not two.
Count the number of people on your street and count the number of children.
If it weren’t for immigration, illegal or not, the fertility rate in the US would be falling.
It seems people come here to contracept and die. Maybe go to private catholic school first.
Some other things you might do to reduce bloat and corruption:
H. Set up a state admissions bureau for public higher education. Instead of having a student apply to a specific institution, have them apply to the state bureau, rank-ordering their preferences among the state institutions on a pre-printed card. Applications would be spare, including the student’s name, family address, certificates completed in high school, standardized test scores, and some demographic and financial data. The state bureau would assign each applicant a composite score based on a vector equation combining board scores, achievement test scores, and high school GPA. It would assign to each school a quota of freshman admissions derived from the capacity of the school and the historical share of those admitted who actually matriculate. The preference cards would be sorted among the institutions according to first preference, then rank-ordered according to composite score. For each school a cut-off score would be remarked. For the school with the highest cut-off score, those scoring higher for whom the school was their first choice would be admitted. Those below would be distributed to their second choice school and the cards for all the other schools re-ranked. The process would be repeated until a freshman class was determined for all the state’s schools.
I. Require all schools, public and private, to issue an annual report on the stock and flow of specified demographic segments, along with the mean, median, and standard deviation of the board and achievement test scores reported of the set of students in each segment. The data would have to be attested to by outside auditors and both the institution and officials within it would be subject to criminal prosecution for lying. Conjoined to this, private institutions would be granted plenary discretion over their admissions. They would be required to publish a disciplinary manual, which would be subject to contract law.
J. Prosecute officials and institutions in private higher education for participation in price-fixing schemes and restraint of trade. Include officials of public higher education if their campuses have autonomy in the realm of admissions and tuition charges.
K. Enact by law a glossary of the universe of degree and concentration programs which the universe of state institutions might offer.
L. Require state institutions to apply to a commission of the board of regents to apply for permission to offer a given degree program, contingent on the commissions assessment of market demand and briefs filed by institutions which already are offering such a program.
M. Have the state comptroller undertake periodic audits of degree programs at given institution, most particularly ascertaining the mean number of degrees awarded in a given subject each year to students whose composite score was above the 32d percentile of their entering class. Programs would be given a grace period of 12 years from their foundation and the mean would be calculated over the time since the program was founded or over the previous 35 years, whichever was a shorter period. Programs who fall below threshold would be authoritatively shuttered unless the program in question was the sole survivor among all the state’s institutions.
N. Enact in law categories to which teachers in higher education would be sorted. Those who teach full courses would be deemed ‘faculty’ and those who teach workshops and fragments of courses would be deemed ‘quasi-faculty’ (among them lab instructors, athletic coaches, remedial tutors, music tutors, and workshop instructors in the library and IT service). ‘Faculty’ would be subdivided into ‘clinical faculty’ and ‘regular faculty’. Clinical faculty would be working professionals who make their real living in the field or retired professionals who once did. Regular faculty would be those for whom teaching was their primary livelihood. You’d find clinical faculty in occupational schools and in the performing and studio arts. The academic departments would have only regular faculty. Quasi-faculty and clinical faculty could be engaged on any time schedule. Regular faculty would ordinarily been engaged on f/t contracts, with the number of p/t positions in any department rationed to one in unsegmented departments and one-per-segment in a segmented department.
O. Calculate the compensation of the faculty at your institution according to a common formula for which certain parameters would vary by department or school but would work the same way without regard to seniority or faculty rank. People sitting on endowed chairs or given a special increment in a hire-to-tenure deal would have some extra, but everyone else in a given department or school would received compensation calculated the same way with the same parameters. It would consist of (1) foundational compensation in the form of benefits with some cash, received by everyone and (2) cash for each course one is anticipated to teach, (3) cash for each additional section of that course one is anticipated to teach, (4) cash for the number of students anticipated to enroll in one’s course in the coming semester, and (5, 6, 7) increments and decrements applied given the difference between the anticipated and the actual value the previous semester (or previous quarter, for schools which have three terms a year). The foundational compensation and the rates for one’s teaching would be department or school specific. The institution as a whole would have a baseline rate which everyone receives and then a market increment would be applied in certain departments and schools.
P. Make it the law that faculty be sorted into three ranks according to the duration of their contract: instructors (contracts of < 6 semesters), lecturers (contracts of 6-12 semesters), and professors (continuous tenure). Require by law that the number with continuous tenure be limited to ~38% of one’s FTE faculty and that tenure be granted only to those who are at least 45 years of age and have 12 years of fte service at the institution in question. Require also that faculty who are eligible for full Social Security and have paid into TIAA-CREF for 35 FTE years take emeritus status, and limit the teaching duties of emeriti to filling in for faculty on leave and in the event of vacancies.
Q. Require grants of continuous tenure, endowed chairs, and hire-to-tenure deals be ratified by a majority of sitting trustees, require that faculty dismissals and enforced leaves undertaken ‘ere the expiration of their contract be executed only if ratified by a majority of the trustees, and provide for the board to intervene and scotch contract renewals at their discretion.
R. Make it a practice, and perhaps the law, that the presidential and vice presidential stratum at an institution be drawn from outside the faculty guild, the provosts excepted, and that none among them be the graduates of teacher’s colleges or social work programs. Make it a practice as well that only the faculty and people with rarefied occupational skills receive multi-year contracts.
S. Make it the law that institutions have boards of between 5 and 21 members according to their census of living alumni and that, as a rule, board members are chosen for quadrennial terms, subject to rotation-in-office rules (no one can stand for election if in the course of at term they will have been on the board >14 years in the previous 16), and chosen by a postal ballot of stakeholders supervised by the secretary of state or state board of elections. Stakeholders as a rule would be degree recipients registered to vote in the state in question, with some dispensations for institutions meeting certain criteria.
T. Require by law that students writing dissertations and not enrolled in classes not be charged, but rather granted a stipend. The stipend would be determined by the terms of bequests and or at the discretion of the institution. Its duration would be at the discretion of the institution beyond the first three years. Its monthly value would have to exceed a certain % of employee compensation per worker in the state. Teaching duties would be strictly auxilliary to those of members of the faculty, and could not exceed one lecture or seminar per week.
It’s real simple math.
The salient datum is the one I alluded to.
Why are Republicans making no effort to advance any of this?
I assume because Democrats control the House, the Senate and the White House.
https://jonathanturley.org/2022/08/25/reclaim-america-from-constitutionalism-law-professors-now-call-to-pack-the-states-rather-than-pack-the-court/comment-page-1/#comments
While we’re at it, have a gander at manifestations of the culture of elite law schools.
They haven’t had to make a payment since April 2020 either.
Reportedly 20 million US households are delinquent in their utility bills. The GOP can get ahead of this national tragedy by getting voters to throw out the commies and climate scam artists that fomented this mess.
My plumber ain’t pleased he’s paying for these vote bribes.
Who else thinks them deadbeats will vote GOP for $10,000?
The Horror! The Horror!
Millions of impoverished Harvard, Yale, USC, UCLA Law School and Pre-Columbian, Meso-American Lesbian Poetry grads can’t repay their loans and can’t get them discharged in bankruptcy.
Uncharitable Content Warning.
Why is the fact that millions of debtors won’t [I bet each one has a $1,000 smart phone and vacays in some hot spay] their college loans the GOP’s problem, Sport?
It’s simply a vote buying scheme.
First call your proctologist!
Have him pull your head out of your . . .
David WS – The number of children for each woman who has children to consider for zero population growth is closer to three, not two.
Yes. Closer to three. More than three and you’ll definitely be an outcast from polite society and private schools.
Count the number of people on your street and count the number of children.
Then remember to divide the number of adults by three, because only about 1/3 of the adult timespan would be with kids even for edge cases like my own… then check if your area is hospitable to children, most places aren’t suited to more than two to four kids… then check if you’d even see the kids, depending on their schedule, and no you can’t just assume off of school buses….
Here in Iowa, there are a lot of babies, and nobody looks twice at three under five, even with older siblings. When I had our 7th this late winter/early spring, they were at capacity (rooms, not lack of manning), and even had to transfer some mothers and children.
Do the “count kids on your street” trick in Seattle? Not so much.
And you’ll get publicly scolded if they realize you have less than four years between them.
It did use to be that having three was a big family, and having four or more was a sign you were Definitely Crazy, when I was a kid. (We were one of the “big families” and I knew only one couple that was crazy.)
That twenty-some month long “two weeks to flatten the curve” resulted in a lot of women having to quit their jobs if they couldn’t work from home, because the daycares (and schools) were shut down.
A lot of them discovered that even if they had to quit to take care of the kids, the family’s take-home pay went up when they didn’t have to pay for childcare, and then end up eating out most nights because everyone was exhausted, plus gas and… well, all the other costs of Having A Real Job.
Most of the moms I talked to when I was in the hospital were having their third, or more– and the illegals still haven’t come back to the area like they use to be, which has screwed with birth rate calculations for years.
The way to rebel these days is to get married and have kids, and at best suffer the idiots commenting on how many you have in silence… and the culture is shifting. At the Cute Baby contest last month– little home town parade event had one– there was a young Boomer age guy who made some Remarks when one of the families answer the “does he have any siblings?” question with “yes, seven older sisters and brothers.” He got glared at by at least half the crowd, and the young couple rolled their eyes. When it was our turn, my husband looked over at the other couple, grinned, threw them a thumbs up and congratulated them on having us beat. Pause. Grin. So far.
To general approval.
Just like the news articles that try to turn low rates of premarital sex in those born after 1980 into a horrible moral failing, the stuff that everyone knows isn’t so accurate, anymore.
Yes. Closer to three.
Only if the proportion of women in a cohort who are childless falls below 84%. It hits 3 only if the prevalence falls below 70%.
I assume because Democrats control the House, the Senate and the White House.
Then these plans should be good campaign ad fodder. The only political appeals I’ve seen from Republicans in elections on this issue that I’ve seen has been to attack the idea of loan forgiveness. I haven’t seen a single one talk about solving the loan problem itself.
Have you seen any ads of that nature?
Beyond that, when your opponent tries to buy votes, the smart political play is to attack your opponent as corrupt. The dumb political play is to attack the people being bought as immoral for taking the bribe.
The vast majority of the rhetoric from the right I’ve seen on this has been attacking the people who would benefit from loan forgiveness as stupid, greedy, lazy, etc. I’ll even give the snake Dan Crenshaw credit for attacking the issue based on matters of authority (i.e. Biden shouldn’t be able to do this unilaterally but instead this should be in Congress’s court, especially the house) but he is an outlier in that.
Have you seen any ads of that nature?
Give them time. Ads before Labor Day are usually a waste of time in any case.
The vast majority of the rhetoric from the right I’ve seen on this has been attacking the people who would benefit from loan forgiveness as stupid, greedy, lazy, etc
I have seen a lot of attacks on the Puppetmasters administration as attempting to bribe voters. I cannot think of any attacks on ordinary student loan debtors.
There have been a lot of attacks on college loan debtors having studied gender studies and basket weaving. That’s not going to play well.
Anyone offended by a comment about useless majors and large debt simply hasn’t been paying attention for the last few decades:
There have been a lot of attacks on college loan debtors having studied gender studies and basket weaving. That’s not going to play well.
It will bother people who majored in gender studies or in basket weaving. Both are tiny constituencies who don’t vote Republican anyway.
It will bother people who majored in gender studies or in basket weaving. Both are tiny constituencies who don’t vote Republican anyway.
Donald Trump Jr. had an interview on Hannity’s show yesterday where he said that anyone who was in debt shouldn’t have gotten degrees in “gender studies or underwater basket weaving” (he used that exact phrase verbatim.) It was a blanket statement: if you have debt, you have an idiotic degree, and we don’t want anything to do with you.
If you look at the way that tuition has exploded vs. income it’s already clear that even graduates with “useful” degrees are going to have debt for a while. And that’s not even considering the huge rise of student fees, book prices, required meal plans, “administrative fees,” etc. (Even doctors, who make more than pretty much anyone, are expected to hold significant debt for at least five years after graduation.)
What this means is that even STEM majors are going to have debt and it will take them some time to pay it off. Now we can have a conversation about whether they should have taken the loan in the first place, whether it should be paid off, etc. But putting all that aside, we definitely should not throw them all away in the enemy camp.
If you look at the way that tuition has exploded vs. income it’s already clear that even graduates with “useful” degrees are going to have debt for a while.
Most undergrads have around 20k in debt which is highly manageable.
It’s insane that we would even advise the younger generation to take a “manageable” 20k in debt. Especially in a world where a college degree by itself provides little benefit, where even “useful” degrees will be required to take woke indoctrination GenEd classes, and a lot of the debt comes from money completely wasted in administrative grift.
“The borrower is the slave of the lender.” — Proverbs 22:7
But even if we were to agree that it was sane to take out 20,000 dollars in debt in such circumstances, things are on a projection to not be “manageable” in the future. Costs for a degree will only rise, the value of classes will fall, the number of degrees will continue to be inflated (and hence more worthless for securing a job to pay back the debt), etc.
The right needs to attack the system of debt at its core and provide those currently enslaved to it a way out. What the Biden administration is obviously a vote grab that won’t help anything long term, but until the right enacts some concrete answers its still better than anything we’ve done.
It’s insane that we would even advise the younger generation to take a “manageable” 20k in debt.
Why? A new car will cost them more and if they get a useful degree at a reasonable price they will have made a good deal in a financial sense. The idea that any society can be run without debt is insane. College may be a bad deal for many kids, but the amount of debt they incur at most schools for an undergrad degree is not a very convincing argument. I think colleges need a lot of reform, and brick and mortar schools in the future may be increasingly rare, but debt will always be a factor in the training of young people for careers.
I’ve heard an idea where the student might:
– obtain a guarantee of $x salary after spending $x and 4years for the degree. Either with a direct guarantee from the school, or school/student through insurance, performance (grades) based of course.
There is no real reason why college couldn’t be at least 50% remote today and why students could not be employed part time.
The dumb Party should be promoting this, instead of disparaging all college kids with $10K in debt as basket weaving gender studies majors.
It’s easy for Donald Trump Jnr to disparage university degrees when he was in a privileged situation of not having to acquire student debt regardless of what he studied.
Btw, If somebody chooses a degree, even a ridiculous one, whereby they are able to make a living out of it after they graduate then good for them. Even if it is underwater basket weaving.
Perhaps the type of degrees on offer should be assessed to guarantee a career in that chosen field post graduation. Universities should be made to prove the degrees usefulness and worth before being allowed to offer it. Otherwise universities should be forced to scrap the degree. That is one way to sort out the BS ones from the legitimate ones.