Is it time to restructure colleges and the media?

Victor Davis Hanson writes at National Review,

n media land, Donald Trump is a reckless tweeter; Barack Obama’s outreach to GloZell and rapper Kendrick Lamar is just kicking back and having fun (Lamar’s latest album portrayed the corpse of a judge to the toasting merriment of rappers on the White House lawn). In media land, Donald Trump risked world peace by accepting a phone call from the democratically elected president of Taiwan; Barack Obama’s talks with dictators and thugs such as Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, and Raul Castro were long overdue. In media land, jawboning Carrier not to relocate a plant to Mexico is an existential threat to the free market; not so when Barack Obama tried to coerce Boeing to move to Washington State to produce union-made planes, or bullied a small non-union guitar company, or reordered the bankruptcy payouts of Chrysler and essentially took over the company.

The university and the media share two traits: Both industries have become arrogant and ignorant. We have created a climate, ethically and professionally, in which extremism has bred extremism, and bias is seen not as proof of journalistic and academic corruption, but of political purity. The recent election, and especially its aftermath, embarrassed journalists and academics alike — and should not be forgotten.

If both the media and the campus are unconcerned by their obvious bias, or, indeed, brandish it proudly (recall that there were no campus lamentation centers after the presidential election in 2008 or 2012), then the public and president-elect Trump should show no reluctance in addressing their incompetence and conceit.

Higher education has a $1 trillion sword of Damocles hanging over its head in the form of aggregate student debt. The staggering sum drags down the economy, delaying marriage and child-bearing, discouraging young buyers’ home and car purchases, prolonging adolescence, and subsidizing mostly vacuous (and costly) “-studies” courses that manage to impart little knowledge but lots of superciliousness.

Any government reform should require federally subsidized colleges to reform their budgeting and keep costs well below the rate of inflation. Given colleges’ culpability for the debt, they should use their endowments and budgetary dollars to pitch in to help pay down the liability. Their prior budgets were not transparent. Annual tuition costs customarily outstripped inflation. Student borrowers were not fully apprised of the conditions and various interest rates of their Byzantine debt packages, and schools gave little if any information to inexperienced borrowers about their own likely ability after graduation to pay back such huge sums. Taxpayers who have chosen to forgo college should not be asked to subsidize the debacle created by their supposedly educated betters.

Colleges should have to follow the same rules as local car dealerships or home-mortgage lenders.

Read more here.

Do you want to keep your daughter safe? Send her to prison, instead of college!

Asche Snow reports at the Washington Examiner,

The Obama administration has produced new statistics on prison rape which, taken in conjunction with its widespread claims about college campuses, imply that women and even men are safer from rape in prison than they are on college campuses.

In a recent report from the White House states that 8.5 percent of female inmates and 3.7 percent of male inmates experience sexual assault while in prison. More than half of these incidents are committed by prison and jail staff, though the report acknowledges that "many abuse incidents in prisons involve other inmates as perpetrators."

If one takes these statistics at face value and compares them to other widely reported statistics used by the White House on campus sexual assault, one could conclude that sexual assault is far more common on college campuses than in America's prisons. After all, the Obama administration loves to tout deeply flawed self-reported surveys showing 20 percent of women and 5 to 8 percent of men are sexually assaulted on college campuses over a four-year college career.

This would mean that men are twice as likely and women nearly three times as likely to be raped on a college campus as they are in prison.

Read more here.

The world would be better if more people were like Americans

Tom Krannawitter has a few things to say to college students who think the United States is a uniquely shameful source of social injustice:

For the coddled snowflakes enrolled in American colleges and universities -- especially the ones tempted to protest the United States as some uniquely shameful source of social injustice -- consider the following:

There are just over one million public charities in the United States today. There are just over one hundred thousand private foundations. And there are about four hundred thousand other types of tax-exempt, social service organizations such as fraternal organizations and civic leagues, for a total of over 1,500,000 individual charitable organizations!

Last year, American charitable organizations gave in donations over $350 BILLION DOLLARS! That's $358,380,000,000 to be more precise. Not far from half a trillion dollars in private giving!

* * * *

The United States tops all other nations in terms of charitable giving. And each and every dollar that is given by an American to someone who needs help represents the hard work of free citizens who make profits by producing goods and services that other people want, need, and value.

In other words, free American citizens make a profit by helping others and making others happy, THEN those same profit-making Americans turn around and help people yet MORE through charitable giving!

Just think: In little more than two short centuries, the United States went from a nation of poor, subsistence dirt farmers to the most prosperous and most charitable nation the world has ever seen! And how did Americans do this? The protection of property rights and individual freedom, and the entrepreneurship fueled by freedom, make all this prosperity, profit, and giving possible.

Isn't capitalism a beautiful thing?

* * * *

To boot, when people from the around the world were surveyed in terms of willingness to help a stranger, individually, Americans ranked number one. Which means: Americans are pretty decent people, at least compared to the rest of the world.

Our colleges and universities might encourage young Americans to be embarrassed and ashamed of their country. But the truth is, the world would be better if more people were more like Americans, and more nations were more like the United States.
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