College

It is a widely held belief in our society and a major article of faith among our politicians that going to college is a very good thing and that more young people should be doing it. Most people seem to think that going to college pays off handsomely financially, and a good number believe that attending college is the best or even the only way to acquire what people used to call a liberal education.   This is completely understandable. The last time I looked, the mean income for college graduates was  higher than the mean income for high school graduates, with the mean income for people who attended college but did not graduate falling in between. It is also true that most students do wind up taking some courses in science, mathematics, and arts and  humanities and that most colleges try to give the impression of taking those things seriously.

However, there are reasons to question both assumptions. It is difficult to decide how much of the difference in average incomes is due to college and how much is due to the fact that the population attending college contains a higher percentage  of people who are more prone to success due to intelligence, attitude, determination, ability to make and follow long term plans to meet long range goals,  patience, ability to and learn the house rules and know the score, expectations, or other factors.  The problem is complicated further by the fact that some high paying professions such as law, engineering, and medicine require certifications based at least in part on having a college degree. Excluding that, it is possible that college  is responsible for far less of the differences in average incomes than is usually supposed.

Then there is the obvious fact that college is very expensive, far more expensive than it used to be. One can ask: would  a young person be better off to reach the age of twenty two with a fresh bachelors degree and the contacts and career-focused skills he acquired  on campus, having spent and/or borrowed sixty to two hundred thousand dollars to get them, or would the same person be better off with four years of experience on a job, the contacts he made there, and that same sixty to two hundred thousand dollars in his pocket and/or off the debt portion of his personal balance sheet?  It is clear that  the answer will vary with circumstances, but it is by no means clear that the first  option will be the right answer for most people.

There are also reasons to question the assumptions about a liberal education. Beyond the obvious fact that there are many educated, cultured, well read people who never attended college, there is the less obvious fact that what passes for a liberal education in colleges has changed. Many programs in many colleges require no more than a few perfunctory “general education” courses taught at not much if anything above what used to be a high school level and often blown off by students interested only in their career-focused major programs.  Also, political correctness had done its work on the curricula  at many colleges.  It is an exaggeration to say that race and gender studies, post-modernism, and tendentious and mediocre diversity-based subject matter have crowded out  Shakespeare,  Sophocles, and Mozart, but there is a trend. There are also lots of places, online and otherwise, for an interested young person to pursue (and find help and stimulation in pursuing) a liberal education these days.

I worked in colleges  for many years. I think they are good places for young people to learn, explore life, and have fun and are the best places for a lot of things.  But the vast majority of students do not become doctors, lawyers, scientists, professional scholars, or engineers.  Nor do they attend Ivy League or equivalent institutions and make contacts and get degrees that function as gilt edged union cards. For many of those students these days, the value proposition is very shaky.

Colleges and universities have been on the gravy train since the end of World War II. Their product has been in high demand. They have been able to raise prices pretty much at will, and governments have subsidized them lavishly.  People running and working at colleges have had few worries. Yet college is a product people choose to purchase.  If it becomes too expensive or the public’s perception of its value declines too much or if attractive competitors enter the market too successfully, the easy good times could end.

More on Contraceptives

There is an ongoing controversy over the mandate in Obamacare for organizations that offer health insurance plans to their employees to include reimbursements for contraceptives. Many Catholic and some other religious organizations oppose the requirement because it violates their religious principles.  I think a solution would be to remove the requirement for health insurance plans and have the government provide free contraceptives to anyone who wants them through local public health offices, public schools, and organizations such as Planned Parenthood. As I have argued elsewhere ,doing this would harm no one,  help people, help the needy disproportionately, save money, lessen suffering, and make the government smaller and less expensive, all by reducing the number of unplanned pregnancies and thus the number of children born to people  unable or unwilling to support and care for them properly. (I would go further and pay teenager girls a bounty to use the free contraceptives.) Of course there would be a problem of women who could afford to buy their own contraceptives taking unfair advantage of the program to get them free.  However, I think the cost of free riders  would be small relative to the overall  benefits. Besides, people who usually object to welfare for the well off might be nonetheless quite willing  to see their tax dollars used to help keep  the Sandra Flukes of the world from reproducing themselves.

It could be argued that religious people would still be forced to support - indirectly through their taxes  - activities they oppose. However  this happens to taxpayers all the time. Pacifists pay taxes, and the government uses tax money to fund the armed forces and foreign wars. Libertarians pay taxes, and the government uses tax money to pay for bureaucrats and regulators, and so on.  The difference is that people with religious objections to contraceptives would not be required to participate actively in something that violates their principles but only to pay taxes,  just as the government taxes pacifists and libertarians but does not require pacifists to work in defense plants or libertarians to become police informers.   

Lessons to Learn

There is a controversy at present over whether an obscure video/amateurish movie that presented Mohammed in a bad light was the cause of the recent murderous attacks on American embassies in Libya, Egypt, and other Muslim countries.  Conservatives point to evidence that the attack in Libya in particular was apparently  carefully planned and executed to commemorate the anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001 and are skeptical of claims the other attacks were spontaneous.  Leftists say that, whatever the case in Libya, the other attacks were spontaneous and driven by religious sentiments inflamed by a couple of video clips on YouTube. The interesting thing is that in most respects it doesn’t matter which side is right. If the attacks were planned, terrorists’ assaults timed for the anniversary of the attacks of 2001, they were  the work of vicious savages who cannot be trusted to behave in a civilized manner. If the attacks were spontaneous outbursts of violent religious fanaticism, they were   the work of vicious savages who cannot be trusted to behave in a civilized manner.

This does not mean that all Muslims are savages or untrustworthy. It does provide additional evidence that that from Pakistan  to North Africa the savages and fanatics are on the march in one way or another, and it illustrates how violent that savagery and fanaticism can be.

I think it is fairly clear that the United States should never have fought the war with Iraq and should have left Afghanistan after completing its punitive expedition in early 2002. This country never needed  to be involved in nation building, colonization, or futile attempts to civilize the un-civilizable in the Middle East. The United States has a vested interest in preventing dangerous fanatics from getting nuclear weapons and a commitment to help Israel avoid  destruction. Beyond that, activities for the present should be limited to keeping the sea lanes open and the oil flowing. American policy for the future should be to develop energy resources and production of all sorts in North America with a goal of fully self-sufficient energy production on the continent as soon as possible. Once this goal is reached, America should leave the Middle East to the Middle Easterners (and such  European and Asian nations as may still need the oil). These places are far from home and should not be our problem to solve or burden to bear.

Praising Ted

It was interesting to hear about the tributes the Democrats paid Ted Kennedy at their recent convention. This was a man who was guilty of at least negligent  homicide (and possibly much worse) when he ran his car into the water at Chappaquiddick, left his female passenger to die, and did not report the event for several hours.  One might think that a bunch of people accusing their opponents of waging a war against women would have been at least a little concerned about that. This is also a man whose offers to the  Soviets in the 1980’s  to help them undermine this country’s strategies in the last years  of the Cold War were either treason or the next thing to it. Since many Democrats now like to claim that those in their party  were right there doing their part in winning the Cold War, one might think this might have been seen as at least awkward. Then there is the fact that he spent most of his life as a drunken, womanizing, rich kid living high on family money he did not earn.  One might think a few people in the party would have noticed that the man was a walking example of the stereotype of the vulgar, useless, wealthy parasite.

That none of this seems to have mattered at all, either to the Democrats or the people in the traditional media covering the convention, suggests once again that for them a person’s character and even his crimes are  irrelevant so long as he follows the correct political line.