May 30, 2012
May 30, 2012
Peter Wehner makes a point about the administration's claim Romney has no idea how to be president.
... For Obama and Biden to lecture Romney on the qualifications for being president is like John Edwards and Bill Clinton lecturing us on the importance of fidelity in marriage. Their case is undermined by their record, their actions, and their failures.
I cannot imagine a greater in-kind gift to the Romney campaign than for the president and the vice president to run on their stewardship. But that is what they’ve decided to do, at least this week.
Andrew Malcolm says Wisconsin is very important.
... June 5 is the election in Wisconsin, the unions' attempt to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker using Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, you say. That's a re-run of the 2010 election. And you're right. It is. And the same result is likely, according to late polls.
But this time much more is at stake. This time Wisconsin's election has become a symbol of the national struggle between Republicans and Democrats, between fiscal restraint and spending as usual, between President Obama's vision of uncontrolled spending to transform America into something else and the opposite.
The stakes are huge. Because either way the winning side will interpret Cheeseland's verdict as emblematic of the national mood, with a national election coming just 154 days later.
Obama didn't deliver what he promised the unions during this term. So, his operatives at the Democratic National Committee are quietly sending in money and help to oust Walker, a fiscal hawk whose budget cuts, collective bargaining reforms and radical ideas such as teachers paying some of their pension are already benefiting local governments and school boards.
But Obama doesn't want a high profile there in case the Dems lose there again. The Real Good Talker is already suffering from E.D., Election Dysfunction as a significant number of voters have opted for nobodies or "Uncommitted" against him in Democratic primaries, even though he's essentially unchallenged. ...
The analogies with the Civil War are overdone, but Bill Kristol's piece on significance of Wisconsin and the GOP's deep bench is good to read.
... Campaigns tend to focus on making the case for their uniquely qualified candidate. But the case for Romney as president is immeasurably strengthened if it’s not just about Mitt Romney. His case is reinforced by the successes of governors like Mitch Daniels and Bobby Jindal and Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell and Scott Walker and Susana Martinez. These governors have had real successes dealing with the fiscal and financial challenges their states have faced. And this during the same period in which President Obama (and to some degree President Bush before him) failed to grapple with comparable problems at the national level—and at the same time that Democratic governors and legislators in states like Illinois and California have conspicuously failed.
If Team Romney can become Team Romney-Walker-Daniels-Christie-et al., Romney’s campaign will take on a sharper focus. His chances of prevailing this fall will increase. It’s true that he might win anyway in a long and difficult slog. But a Walker victory in Wisconsin on the first Tuesday in June could provide a defining moment for the Romney campaign—and for the forces of responsible Republican reform against reactionary Democratic opposition.
It’s up to the Romney campaign to seize that moment and spend the months after June 5 explaining that a Republican president is needed to complete at the national level the “work so gloriously prosecuted so far” by Republican governors.
Michael Barone says life in the liberal cocoon dulls the senses.
... cocooning has an asymmetrical effect on liberals and conservatives. Even in a cocoon, conservatives cannot avoid liberal mainstream media, liberal Hollywood entertainment and, these days, the liberal Obama administration.
They're made uncomfortably aware of the arguments of those on the other side. Which gives them an advantage in fashioning their own responses.
Liberals can protect themselves better against assaults from outside their cocoon. They can stay out of megachurches and make sure their remote controls never click on Fox News. They can stay off the AM radio dial so they will never hear Rush Limbaugh.
The problem is that this leaves them unprepared to make the best case for their side in public debate. They are too often not aware of holes in arguments that sound plausible when bandied between confreres entirely disposed to agree.
We have seen how this works on some issues this year.
Take the arguments developed by professor Randy Barnett of Georgetown Law that Obamacare's mandate to buy health insurance is unconstitutional. Some liberal scholars like Jack Balkin of Yale have addressed them with counterarguments of their own.
But liberal politicians and Eric Holder's Justice Department remained clueless about them. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, asked whether Obamacare was unconstitutional, could only gasp, "Are you serious? Are you serious?" ...
A good example of leftist cocooning is the disparate reactions to a couple of hit pieces posing as books. Byron York tells about the fawning treatment made over a hatchet job on Bush and compares that to the left liberal press practically ignoring a new book on Obama. Here's how the NY Times got the word of the Bush book out on the sly.
... The New York Times also found a way to pass on the accusation without passing on the accusation; the paper published several articles about the controversy over the book, even if it did not directly quote the book itself. Times readers certainly got the idea.
The party ended when the Dallas Morning News reported Hatfield was "a felon on parole, convicted in Dallas of hiring a hit man for a failed attempt to kill his employer with a car bomb in 1987." The publisher of "Fortunate Son," St. Martin's Press, quickly withdrew the book.
But nobody could withdraw the story. For a while, the tale that Bush had been arrested for cocaine possession, even though it was told by an unknown author who was also a felon who apparently made the whole thing up -- that tale was the talk of the 2000 presidential race. (Hatfield committed suicide in 2001.)
Fast-forward to today. Klein's book reports that in the spring of 2008, in the middle of the presidential campaign and in the heat of the controversy over Rev. Jeremiah Wright's incendiary sermons, a very close friend of Barack Obama's offered Wright a payoff if Wright would remain silent until after the November election.
The source of the story is Jeremiah Wright himself. Wright told it, in his own words, in a nearly three-hour recorded interview with Klein. (The author gave the audio of the entire interview to me, as well as to other reporters who asked.)
Unlike the media storm over "Fortunate Son," the Wright revelation has attracted very little comment in the press. The Associated Press and most of those outlets that talked about Bush and cocaine? They've had little or nothing to say about Jeremiah Wright and alleged payoffs. ...
Robert Samuelson says it's time to stop pretending that everyone should have a college education.
The college-for-all crusade has outlived its usefulness. Time to ditch it. Like the crusade to make all Americans homeowners, it’s now doing more harm than good. It looms as the largest mistake in educational policy since World War II, even though higher education’s expansion also ranks as one of America’s great postwar triumphs.
Consider. In 1940, fewer than 5 percent of Americans had a college degree. Going to college was “a privilege reserved for the brightest or the most affluent” high-school graduates, wrote Diane Ravitch in her history of U.S. education, “The Troubled Crusade.” No more. At last count, roughly 40 percent of Americans had some sort of college degree: about 30 percent a bachelor’s degree from a four-year institution; the rest associate degrees from community colleges.
Starting with the GI Bill in 1944, governments at all levels promoted college. From 1947 to 1980, enrollments jumped from 2.3 million to 12.1 million. In the 1940s, private colleges and universities accounted for about half. By the 1980s, state schools — offering heavily subsidized tuitions — represented nearly four-fifths. Aside from a democratic impulse, the surge reflected “the shift in the occupational structure to professional, technical, clerical and managerial work,” noted Ravitch. The economy demanded higher skills; college led to better-paying jobs.
College became the ticket to the middle class, the be-all-and-end-all of K-12 education. If you didn’t go to college, you’d failed. Improving “access” — having more students go to college — drove public policy.
We overdid it. The obsessive faith in college has backfired.
For starters, we’ve dumbed down college. ...
Mark Perry has the proof college has been dumbed down.
In 1960, the average undergraduate grade awarded in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota was 2.27 on a four-point scale. In other words, the average letter grade at the University of Minnesota in the early 1960s was about a C+, and that was consistent with average grades at other colleges and universities in that era. In fact, that average grade of C+ (2.30-2.35 on a 4-point scale) had been pretty stable at America's colleges going all the way back to the 1920s (see chart above from , a website maintained by Stuart Rojstaczer, a retired Duke University professor who has tirelessly crusaded for several decades against "grade inflation" at U.S. universities).
By 2006, the average GPA at public universities in the U.S. had risen to 3.01 and at private universities to 3.30. That means that the average GPA at public universities in 2006 was equivalent to a letter grade of B, and at private universities a B+, and it's likely that grades and GPAs have continued to inflate over the last six years. ...
Which brings to mind a two year old post from the blog The View From Alexandria. The post is about Reynold's Law. The bien pensants who run our governments have ruined home ownership and college education.
... The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them. ...
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Contentions
Obama’s Gift to Romney
by Peter Wehner
This past week, the president and the vice president have made some rather curious arguments on their behalf.
“If your main argument for how to grow the economy is ‘I knew how to make a lot of money for investors,’ then you’re missing what this job is about,” Obama said. “It doesn’t mean you weren’t good at private equity, but that’s not what my job is as president. My job is to take into account everybody, not just some. My job is to make sure that the country is growing not just now, but ten years from now and 20 years from now,” he said.
Vice President Biden, meanwhile, offered up this argument. “Your job as president is to promote the common good. That doesn’t mean the private-equity guys are bad guys. They’re not,” Biden said at New Hampshire’s Keene State College. “But that no more qualifies you to be president than being a plumber. And, by the way, there’re an awful lot of smart plumbers. All kidding aside, it’s not the same job requirement.”
I suppose one could say that being a plumber makes you more qualified to be president than being a community organizer, but set that aside for the moment.
The case both Obama and Biden are making is that Obama (a) understands what the job of president entails and (b) is promoting the common good. And based on his record, it’s not clear Obama understands or is doing either one.
To sharpen the point a bit: How exactly is the common good being advanced when during the Obama presidency the number of people in the U.S. who are in poverty has seen a record increase, with the ranks of working-age poor approaching 1960s levels that led to the national war on poverty. In addition, the budget deficit and federal debt have reached their highest percentage since World War II. The same is true when it comes to federal spending as a percentage of GDP. During the post-recession period from June 2009 to June 2011, the median annual household income fell by 6.7 percent– a more substantial decline than occurred during the Great Recession. The Christian Science Monitor points out , “The standard of living for Americans has fallen longer and more steeply over the past three years than at any time since the U.S. government began recording it five decades ago. The housing crisis is worse than the Great Depression. Home values worth one-third less than they were five years ago. The home ownership rate is the lowest since 1965. And government dependency, defined as the percentage of persons receiving one or more federal benefit payments, is the highest in American history.”
There’s more, but you get the point.
For Obama and Biden to lecture Romney on the qualifications for being president is like John Edwards and Bill Clinton lecturing us on the importance of fidelity in marriage. Their case is undermined by their record, their actions, and their failures.
I cannot imagine a greater in-kind gift to the Romney campaign than for the president and the vice president to run on their stewardship. But that is what they’ve decided to do, at least this week.
As Wisconsin recall vote looms, much more at stake than Scott Walker's job
by Andrew Malcolm
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You're not from these here parts, are you?
You can have this long weekend off. But get ready right after for a ton of politics news about Wisconsin.
June 5 is the election in Wisconsin, the unions' attempt to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker using Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, you say. That's a re-run of the 2010 election. And you're right. It is. And the same result is likely, according to late polls.
But this time much more is at stake. This time Wisconsin's election has become a symbol of the national struggle between Republicans and Democrats, between fiscal restraint and spending as usual, between President Obama's vision of uncontrolled spending to transform America into something else and the opposite.
The stakes are huge. Because either way the winning side will interpret Cheeseland's verdict as emblematic of the national mood, with a national election coming just 154 days later.
Obama didn't deliver what he promised the unions during this term. So, his operatives at the Democratic National Committee are quietly sending in money and help to oust Walker, a fiscal hawk whose budget cuts, collective bargaining reforms and radical ideas such as teachers paying some of their pension are already benefiting local governments and school boards.
But Obama doesn't want a high profile there in case the Dems lose there again. The Real Good Talker is already suffering from E.D., Election Dysfunction as a significant number of voters have opted for nobodies or "Uncommitted" against him in Democratic primaries, even though he's essentially unchallenged.
As we wrote here the other day, Obama took only 58% of the Democratic primary in Arkansas and 57.9% in Kentucky on Tuesday.
The savvy Sean Trende noted on RealClear Politics Thursday that previously the incumbent lost 41% to a convicted felon in West Virginia, 19% in Alabama, 21% in North Carolina (host to Obama's party re-coronation in September), 24% in Louisiana and 43% in Oklahoma. On Tuesday we'll see how Texas' conservative Democrats feel about the Chicago pol.
Other than those sorts of signals, Obama's party base seems really, really solid.
If he openly supported the Wisconsin rebellion next door to homestate Illinois and lost, that looks kinda bad and could appear to put more of the vital Midwest in play for November.
It's just the opposite on the Republican side. Mitt Romney has endorsed Walker's tough stands. "I support the governor," Romney has said, "in his effort to rein in the excesses that have permeated the public sector union and government negotiations over the years.”
The Republican Governors Assn. has spent more than $6 million to help Walker, launching its seventh TV ad this week. A platoon of governors are also pitching in: New Jersey's Chris Christie has already been there. Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty was there earlier this week followed by Louisiana's Bobby Jindal Thursday.
Next Tuesday Virginia's Bob McDonnell, the RGA chairman, will campaign with Walker. And on Friday in comes South Carolina's Nikki Haley.
“This is not about Wisconsin," Haley told Fox News. "This is about our country. This is about the fact that a governor went into his state and did exactly what he promised to do. If he loses this, it will take the spine out of every governor across this country. If he wins this, we will see more power and strength across the governors across this country than we’ve ever seen before.”
Weekly Standard
After Wisconsin
by William Kristol
Last week, Morning Joe’s eponymous host, Joe Scarborough, called the effort to recall Wisconsin governor Scott Walker “a political Pickett’s Charge” by the Democrats and the unions: “They ran up the hill when they didn’t have to.” If we were to extend the somewhat fanciful historical comparison, we could, I suppose, liken Walker’s supporters to the 6th Wisconsin Infantry Regiment—part of the famed Iron Brigade—whose successful charge on July 1 near Chambersburg Pike contributed to the Union victory at Gettysburg. (Perhaps Walker, in order to inspire his supporters before the vote, could repeat the famous order of Lieutenant Colonel Rufus Dawes, delivered amidst battlefield confusion and carnage: “Forward! Forward! Charge! Align on the Colors! Align on the Colors!”)
Needless to say, comparing Pickett’s troops to today’s union organizers and left-wing activists is unjust to the memory of the Confederate soldiers, whose courage and resolve compelled admiration, if not awe, from observers both North and South. And Scott Walker would be the first to gainsay any comparison of his efforts to the bravery and fortitude of the Iron Brigade, whose 1,900 soldiers took more than 1,100 casualties that day.
The Wisconsin recall election isn’t a modern-day battle of Gettysburg. But let’s hope the comparison holds at least in this respect—that the recall effort, like Pickett’s Charge, fails, and that the just cause prevails. And then, in the event of a victory for Walker on June 5, the task of today’s Republicans will be similar to the challenge facing the Union forces after Gettysburg: to turn a defensive success—halting the South’s advance into Pennsylvania, preventing Scott Walker from being removed from office halfway through his term—into a strategic victory in the broader conflict.
This the North, much to President Lincoln’s chagrin, failed to do. On July 7, Lincoln commented, “If Gen. Meade can complete his work so gloriously prosecuted thus far, by the literal or substantial destruction of Lee’s army, the rebellion will be over.” But despite Lincoln’s entreaties, Meade allowed Lee’s army to retreat and then cross back over the Potomac to safety in the South. As Lincoln said, “Our army held the war in the hollow of their hand and they would not close it!”
Can the forces of political reform today do a better job of closing their victorious hand? Here is one simple thing the Romney campaign can do: Associate Mitt Romney with Governor Walker’s success—and the successes of other governors—in making the case for a national agenda of conservative reform of a bloated and bankrupt welfare state.
One problem for any challenger is to show that his untested policies will work when he’s in office. Another problem for a Republican running for president in 2012 is to unshackle himself from the perceived failures of the last Republican president. Both problems can be dealt with by having Romney become the tribune and representative of the successful Republican governors.
Campaigns tend to focus on making the case for their uniquely qualified candidate. But the case for Romney as president is immeasurably strengthened if it’s not just about Mitt Romney. His case is reinforced by the successes of governors like Mitch Daniels and Bobby Jindal and Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell and Scott Walker and Susana Martinez. These governors have had real successes dealing with the fiscal and financial challenges their states have faced. And this during the same period in which President Obama (and to some degree President Bush before him) failed to grapple with comparable problems at the national level—and at the same time that Democratic governors and legislators in states like Illinois and California have conspicuously failed.
If Team Romney can become Team Romney-Walker-Daniels-Christie-et al., Romney’s campaign will take on a sharper focus. His chances of prevailing this fall will increase. It’s true that he might win anyway in a long and difficult slog. But a Walker victory in Wisconsin on the first Tuesday in June could provide a defining moment for the Romney campaign—and for the forces of responsible Republican reform against reactionary Democratic opposition.
It’s up to the Romney campaign to seize that moment and spend the months after June 5 explaining that a Republican president is needed to complete at the national level the “work so gloriously prosecuted so far” by Republican governors.
Washington Examiner
Life in a cocoon dulls political responses
by Michael Barone
It's comfortable living in a cocoon -- associating only with those who share your views, reading journalism and watching news that only reinforce them, avoiding those on the other side of the cultural divide.
Liberals have been doing this for a long time. In 1972 the movie critic Pauline Kael said it was odd that Richard Nixon was winning the election, because everyone she knew was for George McGovern.
Kael wasn't clueless about the rest of America. She was just observing that her own social circle was politically parochial.
The rest of us have increasingly sought out comfortable cocoons too. Journalist Bill Bishop, who lives in an Austin, Texas, neighborhood whose politics resemble Kael's, started looking at national data.
It inspired him to write his 2008 book, "The Big Sort," which describes how Americans since the 1970s have increasingly sorted themselves out, moving to places where almost everybody shares their cultural orientation and political preference -- and the others keep quiet about theirs.
Thus professionals with a choice of where to make their livings head for the San Francisco Bay Area if they're liberal and for the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex (they really do call it that) if they're conservative. Over the years, the Bay Area becomes more liberal and the Metroplex more conservative.
But cocooning has an asymmetrical effect on liberals and conservatives. Even in a cocoon, conservatives cannot avoid liberal mainstream media, liberal Hollywood entertainment and, these days, the liberal Obama administration.
They're made uncomfortably aware of the arguments of those on the other side. Which gives them an advantage in fashioning their own responses.
Liberals can protect themselves better against assaults from outside their cocoon. They can stay out of megachurches and make sure their remote controls never click on Fox News. They can stay off the AM radio dial so they will never hear Rush Limbaugh.
The problem is that this leaves them unprepared to make the best case for their side in public debate. They are too often not aware of holes in arguments that sound plausible when bandied between confreres entirely disposed to agree.
We have seen how this works on some issues this year.
Take the arguments developed by professor Randy Barnett of Georgetown Law that Obamacare's mandate to buy health insurance is unconstitutional. Some liberal scholars like Jack Balkin of Yale have addressed them with counterarguments of their own.
But liberal politicians and Eric Holder's Justice Department remained clueless about them. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, asked whether Obamacare was unconstitutional, could only gasp, "Are you serious? Are you serious?"
In March, after the Supreme Court heard extended oral argument on the case, CNN's Jeffrey Toobin was clearly flabbergasted that a majority of justices seemed to take the case against Obamacare's constitutionality very seriously indeed.
Liberals better informed about the other side's case might have drafted the legislation in a way to avoid this controversy. But nothing they heard in their cocoon alerted them to the danger.
Another case in point is Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's law restricting the bargaining powers of public employee unions. The unions and the crowds in Madison, which is both the state capital and a university town and which with surrounding Dane County voted 73 to 26 percent for Barack Obama, egged each other on with cries that this would destroy the working class. No one they knew found this implausible.
The unions had an economic motive to oppose the laws and seek to recall first Republican legislators and then Walker himself. The law ended the automatic checkoff of union dues, which operated as an involuntary transfer of money from taxpayers to union leaders.
But voters declined to recall enough Republicans to give Democrats a majority in the Senate, and Walker currently leads Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett in polls on the June 5 recall election.
The Madison mob seemed unaware that there were attractive arguments on Walker's side.
Why should public employee union members pay less for health insurance and get fatter pensions than the taxpayers who pay their salaries? Why is it a bad thing for property taxes to be held down and for school districts to cut perks for union members enough to hire more teachers?
Beyond the Madison cocoon, in Wisconsin's other 71 counties, which voted 55 to 44 percent for Walker in 2010, such arguments are evidently proving persuasive. Maybe liberals should listen to Rush every so often.
Washington Examiner
Two books, two standards, for Obama, Bush
by Byron York
Not all campaign books are treated equally. Just look at Edward Klein and J.H. Hatfield.
Klein, of course, is the author of the new book "The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House." Hatfield, now dead and forgotten, wrote a book about George W. Bush, "Fortunate Son," during the 2000 presidential contest.
Klein's book, which debuted in early May, has been mostly ignored by large media organizations (although not by the book-buying public, which has put it at the top of next week's best-seller list). Hatfield's book, on the other hand, rocked a presidential campaign -- before crashing and burning on its own dishonesty and its author's criminal record.
"Fortunate Son" attracted attention because it reported that Bush, then the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination, had been arrested for possessing cocaine when he was 26 years old. Hatfield wrote that Bush's father, the future President George H.W. Bush, used his influence to cover up the incident.
"George W. was arrested for possession of cocaine in 1972 but due to his father's connections, the entire record was expunged by a state judge whom the elder Bush helped get elected," Hatfield quoted a "confidential source" as saying.
George W. Bush denied the story, as did George H.W. Bush.
Still, even though nobody had ever heard of Hatfield, for some reporters the revelation seemed final proof of a rumor that media types had been kicking around -- and sometimes publishing -- since the beginning of Bush's campaign. The New York Times, which had looked for evidence of cocaine before, looked again.
"Reporters for The New York Times, which received an advance copy of Mr. Hatfield's book last week, spent several days looking for evidence that might corroborate his account," wrote Times reporter Frank Bruni, now a liberal columnist for the paper, on October 22, 1999. "But they did not find any, and the newspaper did not publish anything about the claim."
Lots of other news organizations did. When both Bushes denied the story, the Associated Press, Washington Post, New York Post, Los Angeles Times, and many others reported Hatfield's revelation.
The New York Times also found a way to pass on the accusation without passing on the accusation; the paper published several articles about the controversy over the book, even if it did not directly quote the book itself. Times readers certainly got the idea.
The party ended when the Dallas Morning News reported Hatfield was "a felon on parole, convicted in Dallas of hiring a hit man for a failed attempt to kill his employer with a car bomb in 1987." The publisher of "Fortunate Son," St. Martin's Press, quickly withdrew the book.
But nobody could withdraw the story. For a while, the tale that Bush had been arrested for cocaine possession, even though it was told by an unknown author who was also a felon who apparently made the whole thing up -- that tale was the talk of the 2000 presidential race. (Hatfield committed suicide in 2001.)
Fast-forward to today. Klein's book reports that in the spring of 2008, in the middle of the presidential campaign and in the heat of the controversy over Rev. Jeremiah Wright's incendiary sermons, a very close friend of Barack Obama's offered Wright a payoff if Wright would remain silent until after the November election.
The source of the story is Jeremiah Wright himself. Wright told it, in his own words, in a nearly three-hour recorded interview with Klein. (The author gave the audio of the entire interview to me, as well as to other reporters who asked.)
Unlike the media storm over "Fortunate Son," the Wright revelation has attracted very little comment in the press. The Associated Press and most of those outlets that talked about Bush and cocaine? They've had little or nothing to say about Jeremiah Wright and alleged payoffs.
The New York Times has published just one piece about Klein's book, a scathing review that asserts that Klein -- a former editor of the New York Times Magazine -- is the real "amateur" in the story. Of the Wright revelation, the Times said: "Any biographical subject has bitter ex-friends and associates. And if they feel snubbed enough, they will talk."
The Obama campaign says Klein's book has no credibility. And other critics say Klein's previous books have contained anonymous, sensational and unverified revelations that should make readers skeptical about the Wright story, too. But assume for a moment that Klein has never written a trustworthy word in his life. What to make of what Rev. Wright said, on the record?
And speaking of anonymous, sensational and unverified revelations, there was a time, not too long ago, when many journalists found them quite newsworthy.
Washington Post
It’s time to drop the college-for-all crusade
by Robert J. Samuelson
The college-for-all crusade has outlived its usefulness. Time to ditch it. Like the crusade to make all Americans homeowners, it’s now doing more harm than good. It looms as the largest mistake in educational policy since World War II, even though higher education’s expansion also ranks as one of America’s great postwar triumphs.
Consider. In 1940, fewer than 5 percent of Americans had a college degree. Going to college was “a privilege reserved for the brightest or the most affluent” high-school graduates, wrote Diane Ravitch in her history of U.S. education, “The Troubled Crusade.” No more. At last count, roughly 40 percent of Americans had some sort of college degree: about 30 percent a bachelor’s degree from a four-year institution; the rest associate degrees from community colleges.
Starting with the GI Bill in 1944, governments at all levels promoted college. From 1947 to 1980, enrollments jumped from 2.3 million to 12.1 million. In the 1940s, private colleges and universities accounted for about half. By the 1980s, state schools — offering heavily subsidized tuitions — represented nearly four-fifths. Aside from a democratic impulse, the surge reflected “the shift in the occupational structure to professional, technical, clerical and managerial work,” noted Ravitch. The economy demanded higher skills; college led to better-paying jobs.
College became the ticket to the middle class, the be-all-and-end-all of K-12 education. If you didn’t go to college, you’d failed. Improving “access” — having more students go to college — drove public policy.
We overdid it. The obsessive faith in college has backfired.
For starters, we’ve dumbed down college. The easiest way to enroll and retain more students is to lower requirements. Even so, dropout rates are high; at four-year schools, fewer than 60 percent of freshmen graduate within six years. Many others aren’t learning much.
In a recent book, “Academically Adrift,” sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that 45 percent of college students hadn’t significantly improved their critical thinking and writing skills after two years; after four years, the proportion was still 36 percent. Their study was based on a test taken by 2,400 students at 24 schools requiring them to synthesize and evaluate a block of facts. The authors blame the poor results on lax academic standards. Surveyed, one-third of the same students said that they studied alone five or fewer hours a week; half said they had no course the prior semester requiring 20 pages of writing.
Still, most of these students finished college, though many are debt-ridden. Persistence counts. The larger — and overlooked — consequence of the college obsession is to undermine high schools. The primacy of the college-prep track marginalizes millions of students for whom it’s disconnected from “real life” and unrelated to their needs. School bores and bothers them. Teaching them is hard, because they’re not motivated. But they also make teaching the rest harder. Their disaffection and periodic disruptions drain teachers’ time and energy. The climate for learning is poisoned.
That’s why college-for-all has been a major blunder. One size doesn’t fit all, as sociologist James Rosenbaum of Northwestern University has argued. The need is to motivate the unmotivated. One way is to forge closer ties between high school and jobs. Yet, vocational education is de-emphasized and disparaged. Apprenticeship programs combining classroom and on-the-job training — programs successful in Europe — are sparse. In 2008, about 480,000 workers were apprentices, or 0.3 percent of the U.S. labor force, reports economist Robert Lerman of American University. Though not for everyone, more apprenticeships could help some students.
The rap against employment-oriented schooling is that it traps the poor and minorities in low-paying, dead-end jobs. Actually, an unrealistic expectation of college often traps them into low-paying, dead-end jobs — or no job. Learning styles differ. “Apprenticeship in other countries does a better job of engaging students,” says Lerman. “We want to diversify the routes to rewarding careers.” Downplaying these programs denies some students the pride and self-confidence of mastering difficult technical skills, while also fostering labor shortages.
There’s much worrying these days that some countries (examples: South Korea, Norway, Japan) have higher collegeattendance rates, including post-secondary school technical training, than we do. This anxiety is misplaced. Most jobs — 69 percent in 2010, estimates the Labor Department — don’t require a post-high-school degree. They’re truck drivers, store clerks, some technicians. On paper, we’re turning out enough college graduates to meet our needs.
The real concern is the quality of graduates at all levels. The fixation on college-going, justified in the early postwar decades, stigmatizes those who don’t go to college and minimizes their needs for more vocational skills. It cheapens the value of a college degree and spawns the delusion that only the degree — not the skills and knowledge behind it — matters. We need to rethink.
Carpe Diem
Today's Grade-Inflated, Lake Wobegon World; Letter Grade of A Now Most Common College Grade
by Mark Perry
In 1960, the average undergraduate grade awarded in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota was 2.27 on a four-point scale. In other words, the average letter grade at the University of Minnesota in the early 1960s was about a C+, and that was consistent with average grades at other colleges and universities in that era. In fact, that average grade of C+ (2.30-2.35 on a 4-point scale) had been pretty stable at America's colleges going all the way back to the 1920s (see chart above from , a website maintained by Stuart Rojstaczer, a retired Duke University professor who has tirelessly crusaded for several decades against "grade inflation" at U.S. universities).
By 2006, the average GPA at public universities in the U.S. had risen to 3.01 and at private universities to 3.30. That means that the average GPA at public universities in 2006 was equivalent to a letter grade of B, and at private universities a B+, and it's likely that grades and GPAs have continued to inflate over the last six years.
Grade inflation is back in the news, with a Twin Cities Star Tribune article today "At U, concern grows that 'A' stands for average."
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"A University of Minnesota chemistry professor has thrust the U into a national debate about grade inflation and the rigor of college, pushing his colleagues to stop pretending that average students are excellent and start making clear to employers which students are earning their A's.
"I would like to state my own alarm and dismay at the degree to which grade compression ... has infected some of our colleges," said Christopher Cramer, chairman of the Faculty Consultative Committee. "I think we are at serious risk, through the abandonment of our own commitment of rigorous academic standards, of having outside standards imposed upon us."
National studies and surveys suggest that college students now get more A's than any other grade even though they spend less time studying. Cramer's solution -- to tack onto every transcript the percentage of students that also got that grade -- has split the faculty and highlighted how tricky it can be to define, much less combat, grade inflation."
MP: As one University of Minnesota undergraduate student explained the rising GPA trend when evaluating a professor known as a rigorous grader, "We live in a grade-inflated world." That University of Minnesota anthropology professor Karen-Sue Taussig suspects that today's "grade-inflated world" can be traced to the growing cost of a college degree, i.e. today's "tuition-inflated world." As Taussig told the Star Tribune, "They're paying for it, and they worked really hard, and they put in time, and therefore they think they should get a good grade."
Last year, Professor Rojstaczer and co-author Christopher Healy published a research article in the Teachers College Record titled "Where A Is Ordinary: The Evolution of American College and University Grading, 1940–2009." The main conclusion of the paper appears below (emphasis added), and is illustrated by the chart below showing the rising share of A letter grades over time at American colleges, from 15% in 1940 to 43% by 2008. Starting in about 1998, the letter grade A became the most common college grade.
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"Conclusion: Across a wide range of schools, As represent 43% of all letter grades, an increase of 28 percentage points since 1960 and 12 percentage points since 1988. Ds and Fs total typically less than 10% of all letter grades. Private colleges and universities give, on average, significantly more As and Bs combined than public institutions with equal student selectivity. Southern schools grade more harshly than those in other regions, and science and engineering-focused schools grade more stringently than those emphasizing the liberal arts. It is likely that at many selective and highly selective schools, undergraduate GPAs are now so saturated at the high end that they have little use as a motivator of students and as an evaluation tool for graduate and professional schools and employers."
MP: The connections among "grade inflation, "tuition inflation," "college textbook inflation," and exponentially rising student loan debt are important. Perhaps students find it easier to accept rising tuition, higher textbook prices (many selling for $200-300 now), and $25,000 in average student loan debt if they at least graduate with mostly As and a GPA above 3.0? Even if they can't find a job, they can take pride in having "earned" an inflated GPA?
The View From Alexandria
Reynolds’ Law
by philo
I haven’t been blogging much lately, because I haven’t had many thoughts that haven’t been better expressed elsewhere. But I have to draw attention to a remark of Glenn Reynolds, which seems to me to express an important and little-noticed point:
The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.
I dub this Reynolds’ Law: “Subsidizing the markers of status doesn’t produce the character traits that result in that status; it undermines them.” It’s easy to see why. If people don’t need to defer gratification, work hard, etc., in order to achieve the status they desire, they’ll be less inclined to do those things. The greater the government subsidy, the greater the effect, and the more net harm produced.
This law is thus a relative to Murray’s third law in Losing Ground, the Law of Net Harm: “The less likely it is that the unwanted behavior will change voluntarily, the more likely it is that a program to induce change will cause net harm.” But Reynolds’ Law rests on a different and more secure foundation. It focuses on character as fundamental.
Since the time of Woodrow Wilson, Democrats—but not only Democrats—have fretted that the middle class is shrinking due to the power of large corporations, and that only government action to “level the playing field” can save the middle class. The “middle class is being more and more squeezed out by the processes which we have been taught to call processes of prosperity.” Obama? Hillary? No, that’s Woodrow Wilson in 1913 (The New Freedom). It’s striking to realize that progressives have been playing the same tune for a century, no matter what’s actually taking place in the economy—indeed, in the midst of the greatest expansion of affluence in the history of the world—with the same set of proffered solutions: greater government power, regulations, higher taxes, and subsidies for the markers of affluence.
Reynolds’ Law thus strikes at the heart of progressivism as a political ideology. Progressivism can’t deliver on its central promise. In fact, it’s guaranteed to make things worse in exactly that respect. It’s not that it sacrifices some degree of one good (liberty or prosperity, say) to achieve a greater degree of another (equality). That suggests that the choice between conservatism and progressivism is a matter of tradeoffs, balances, and maybe even taste. Reynolds’ Law implies that progressivism sacrifices some (actually considerable) degrees of liberty and prosperity to move us away from equality by undermining the characters and thus behavior patterns of those they promise to help.
Not coincidentally, progressives accumulate power for themselves, not only by seizing it as a necessary means to their goals but by aggravating the very social problems they promise to address, thus creating an ever more powerful argument that something has to be done.
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