Tag: College

Contributor Post Created with Sketch. What Should Twenty-Somethings Be Doing With Themselves?

Rachel Lu
By Rachel Lu
Rachel Lu Contributor
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148 COMMENTS
 

I’m particularly thinking of the younger ones, who are still minimally employable and not terribly mature.

A lot of people are realizing that college isn’t a great deal for many (or most) people. But one of the reasons people send their kids to college is because they want them to have a pleasant post-adolescent/early-adulthood transitional experience. I’m not suggesting that colleges do a great job of providing this. Many people spend their college years wasting enormous amounts of time and money while eroding their moral character. Still, in broad terms, you can see how college seems like the right choice to many people. It offers some independence, but also some supervision; it has a natural starting and ending point; professors and counselors and friends will encourage students to spend their years there planning for some productive future to follow. And of course you get a degree (assuming you finish, that is).

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Promoted from the Ricochet Member Feed by Editors Created with Sketch. College Application Essays Are Bunk

D.C. McAllister
By D.C. McAllister
D.C. McAllister Inactive
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37 COMMENTS
 

With three kids in college and friends who’ve needed help with their paperwork, I’ve spent a lot of time navigating the waters of college applications, and nothing is more irritating to me than the essay. Some schools mercifully don’t require it, but many do—and it makes me cringe.

According to the College Board, essays are important because they give students a chance to “reveal their best qualities and to show an admission committee what makes them stand out.”

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Contributor Post Created with Sketch. The White House Sexual Assault Report: The Words “Due Process” Never Appear

Greg Lukianoff
By Greg Lukianoff
Greg Lukianoff Contributor
Greg Lukianoff is the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and has been with FIRE since 2001, when he was hired to be the organization's first director of legal and public advocacy. Greg is a member of the State Bar of California and the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States. Greg is the author of both Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate and Freedom From Speech. @glukianoff
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6 COMMENTS
 

Three months after its creation, the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault issued its first report (PDF) this past Monday night. Titled “Not Alone,” and accompanied by a new website, NotAlone.gov, the report announces new recommended practices for colleges and universities nationwide. Unfortunately, the Task Force fails to answer—or even address—my organization’s, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)’s, grave and continuing concerns about campus civil liberties and the reliability, impartiality, and fundamental fairness of campus judicial proceedings for students accused of sexual harassment and assault.

Here is an excerpt from my official statement released yesterday:

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Contributor Post Created with Sketch. An Open Letter From Charles Murray to the Students of Azusa Pacific University — Peter Robinson

Peter Robinson
By Peter Robinson
Peter Robinson Founder
Peter Robinson, former Reagan speechwriter, wrote the historic Berlin Wall address in which President Reagan urged Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall!" Peter Robinson is now a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and hosts the interview program "Uncommon Knowledge." Peter is a co-founder of Ricochet.
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18 COMMENTS
 

Because Charles says it all, I post this — this brilliant and biting and sad letter — without comment:

I was scheduled to speak to you tomorrow. I was going to talk about my new book, “The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead,” and was looking forward to it. But it has been “postponed.” Why? An email from your president, Jon Wallace, to my employer, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), said “Given the lateness of the semester and the full record of Dr. Murray’s scholarship, I realized we needed more time to prepare for a visit and postponed Wednesday’s conversation.” This, about an appearance that has been planned for months. I also understand from another faculty member that he and the provost were afraid of “hurting our faculty and students of color.”

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Contributor Post Created with Sketch. There’s a Great Future in Plastics

Son of Spengler
By Son of Spengler
Son of Spengler Contributor
Mild-mannered actuary by day. Intrepid barbershopper by night. Renegade Jew. Twitter: @spengjr
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6 COMMENTS
 

It’s college admissions season, and across the land, there are tears of joy and pain. But mostly pain. This was among the most brutal years ever for acceptances.

The news articles focus on the Ivies, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. Acceptance rates are down pretty much across the board. Private college counselors, who take in upwards of $10,000 to assist with the application process, are now trying to explain to their clients why they (or rather, their children) weren’t accepted anywhere they applied, even their safeties.

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Contributor Post Created with Sketch. Harvard to Embrace an Egalitarian Admissions System

Tim Groseclose
By Tim Groseclose
Tim Groseclose Contributor
Tim Groseclose is an economics professor at George Mason University and the holder of the Adam Smith Chair at the Mercatus Center.  He has held previous faculty appointments at UCLA, Caltech, Stanford University, Ohio State University, Harvard University, and Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author of two recently published books, Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind, and Cheating: An Insider's Report on the Use of Race in Admissions at UCLA.
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12 COMMENTS
 

Cal-State professor Richard Samuelson has written a brilliant piece for the April 1, 2014 edition of Liberty Law blog. It begins:

In a move designed to foster diversity and to create a university that “thinks like America,” Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust, the President of Harvard University announced yesterday that the school will embrace egalitarian admissions. The school will no longer give priority to students with good grades, high SAT scores, and impressive extra-curricular activities. Such policies have, Dr. Faust acknowledged, created an “elitist” and “inegalitarian” atmosphere at the college. “It is unacceptable in 2014 to be favoring the intelligent over the unlearned, and the energetic over the slothful,” she proclaimed.Starting next year Harvard’s incoming class will have SAT scores ranging from six to sixteen hundred to produce, for the first time, a truly diverse freshman class. The class’ scores will resemble the distribution of scores across the United States.

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Contributor Post Created with Sketch. PSA: Don’t Let Your Children Be Art Majors at Murray State — Troy Senik

Troy Senik
By Troy Senik
Troy Senik Contributor
Troy Senik was a White House speechwriter for George W. Bush. He is the host of the Hoover Institution podcasts Law Talk with Epstein & Yoo; The Classicist, with Victor Davis Hanson; and The Libertarian, with Richard Epstein. Senik is the author of the forthcoming book  A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland.
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42 COMMENTS
 

Over the past few years, as anxiety about the value proposition of college has spread, there have been increasing calls for transparency in higher education, such as the 2012 proposal by Senators Marco Rubio and Ron Wyden to make data about employment and earnings for graduates available to the public.

While that proposal is still floating around Congress, the folks at the Atlantic have done some of the spadework, releasing data earlier today on the most and least lucrative colleges and majors. Here’s what they found.

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Contributor Post Created with Sketch. Protip from Dartmouth Student to UCSB and Stanford: Run Over Free Speech with Your Car — Greg Lukianoff

Greg Lukianoff
By Greg Lukianoff
Greg Lukianoff Contributor
Greg Lukianoff is the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and has been with FIRE since 2001, when he was hired to be the organization's first director of legal and public advocacy. Greg is a member of the State Bar of California and the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States. Greg is the author of both Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate and Freedom From Speech. @glukianoff
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39 COMMENTS
 

Being offended is what happens when you have your deepest beliefs challenged. And if you make it through four years of college without having your deepest beliefs challenged, you should demand your money back.

I have been saying that in speeches on campus for more than a decade. Even though the line often gets a laugh, the idea that students have a “right not to be offended” seems more entrenched on campus than ever.

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