Average ACT college admission test scores drop to lowest level in more than 30 years, 19.5 out of 36, just 21% of test-takers are college material

 You can throw all the billions you want at educating the masses, but you still can't make a purse out of a sow's ear.

A sane country would train the other 79% for careers which don't require college, but ours is not a sane country, otherwise we wouldn't have 1:1 ratios of administrators to students all over the place. College is producing some mighty fine jobs for the education industry and for the 20% who belong there, but God help you if you borrowed money to learn that one day you will die. 

When I was a kid the unemployed PhD was the joke. Now it's the unemployed BA. You can see where this is going.

But maybe not.  

The Morning Call had the story here.

College dropout F. Chuck Todd calls it quits at Meet The Depressed while he's still ahead

Proving yet once again that you don't need a college degree to rise to the level of your incompetence in this great country of ours.

 

Sounds about right

 STUDY: Americans' IQ Scores Falling First Time In Century...

Freud comeback...New generation embracing father of psychoanalysis...

Very ugly Biden meltdown in Iowa last night, calls an older man "fat" and "too old to vote" for him

Challenges him to an IQ test, and a push-ups test.

Video here.

The insecurity lurks not far from the surface.

Remind you of anyone?

2020: Battle of Tiny Titans

Treasury bonds are the most expensive they have been in over sixty years

All "asset" classes are near-record expensive: bonds, stocks, gold, housing, college education, health insurance policies . . .. 

Cliff Asness, here:

So, the bottom line is, as measured by real bond yield, U.S. Treasury bonds are really frickin’ expensive. Measured by the slope of the yield curve they are really frickin’ expensive. But, measured by the average of these two simple variables, they are 60+ year just about record-low frickin’ expensive. This result is not caused by, but is certainly exacerbated by, the (perhaps) surprisingly uncorrelated nature of slope and real bond yield, thus making both so low and at the same time considerably more surprising.

Not coincidentally Biden is also preferred overwhelmingly by those without a college degree

Much smaller than first thought to be, the gig economy lies prostrate before the great wall of state capitalism

"The Gig Economy Increasingly Defines Late-Stage Capitalism

Annie Lowrey, Atlantic" is how Real Clear Markets links to:

The Truth About the Gig Economy

Uber and similar companies aren’t driving huge changes in the way that Americans make a living.

Real Clear Markets' libertarian headline writer completely missed the point of the article, which is that the gig economy is as much as 80% smaller than we first thought. A capitalism disintegrating into a chaos of millions of small holders in risky circumstances, careening into the ditch, is a complete myth. The leftists who still long for this resemble no one so much as the Christian millenarians.

Clearly Marxism-light thoroughly infects economic thinking at the popular level in more places than just The Atlantic, blinding us to where we really are, which is in the golden age of fascism. Here tax reform for the individual is an afterthought, a necessary piece of propaganda in the big scheme of things having to do with state capitalism and its myriad forms of corporate welfare. What really matters is the relationship between government and business, protecting their mutual interests.

The West's version is little different from China's. China exercises top down control through the corrupt Communist Party, but we increasingly have the same thing from the bottom up through the unjust hand of Political Correctness, populated through the right schools and the revolving door of Washington where the regulators become the richly rewarded regulated.

The extension and consolidation of control by this globalist fascist system since the Reagan Revolution is responsible for all the failure lately attributed to capitalism by the coddled generations of children of the post-war Baby Boom. It couldn't be otherwise in a world where everything has been organized to feed the corporation through the glorification of the job. You must go to school, you must get good grades, you must get a college degree in order to get hired, you'll need loans to make this happen, and for the car to get to work, and good credit, and . . .. And then they've got you. It's called preying on human nature.

The declarations of independence of our former youth often used to take the form of getting out of Dodge as soon as they turned eighteen. Now those declarations are a mere shadow of their former selves, taking the form of tattoos on that creature that still lives in your basement in his twenties . . . or thirties.

The risk-taking of capitalism has been expunged, and the consequences of rebelling against the new rigidity have been amplified. Stenosis has set in, and if the barbarians finally do overtake us they will find that the bones break easily.     

Good Lord, Jeeves, The Atlantic fired Williamson but keeps nitwit writers who can't write

For example, this boob, who are clearly a college graduate, for whom mines excavate and unearth miraculously all by themselves:

But for all those years, the source material for the arguments have [sic] remained largely the same. ...

A team of archaeologists, historians, and climate scientists have [sic] constructed a history of Rome’s lead pollution, which allows them [sic] to approximate Mediterranean economic activity from 1,100 b.c. to 800 a.d. They [sic] found it hiding thousands of miles from the Roman Forum: deep in the Greenland Ice Sheet, the enormous, miles-thick plate of ice that entombs the North Atlantic island. In short, they [sic] have reconstructed year-by-year economic data documenting the rise and fall of the Roman Republic and Empire. ...

But these mines didn’t excavate [sic] pure silver: Instead, they unearthed [sic] an ore of silver, lead, and copper that had to be smelted into silver. ...

Once in the air, these lead emissions did not stay in one place. Instead, it [sic] wafted with the winds, eventually blowing into squalls and storms over Greenland. ...

The Crisis of the Roman Republic—the series of civil wars and political strife, spanning 134 b.c. to 27 b.c., that brought the Roman Republic to an end— were [sic] associated with a broad period of economic stagnation and disintegration, the study finds. And the early Roman Empire—especially the Pax Romana, the 206 years of mostly uninterrupted peace throughout the Mediterranean—were [sic] accompanied by an economic boom. ...

These simulations allow scientists to estimate how air from the Iberian peninsula—air that, in Roman times, would have been full of lead pollution—wafted up to the Greenland ice sheet. It [sic] also allowed them to distinguish between air from the Iberian peninsula specifically and ambient air from farther east in Europe.   

Immigration raid sends shockwaves through packing industry happy to hire people from shit-hole countries

Neil Munro reports for Breitbart, here:

The raid is sending shock-waves through the meatpacking industry which is being caught between marketplace pressure to keep costs low and the federal laws barring the employment of cheap foreign migrants.... For many years, the industry has relied on a mix of immigrants, illegal migrants and legal refugees from Syria, Somalia, and other unfortunate countries. The resulting marketplace pressure is pressuring reluctant meatpackers to raise their salaries. ...

Four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs in the free market.

But the federal government inflates the supply of new labor by annually accepting roughly 1.1 million new legal immigrants, by providing work-permits to roughly 3 million resident foreigners, and by doing little to block the employment of roughly 8 million illegal immigrants.

The Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via mass-immigration floods the market with foreign labor, spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.

Kevin Williamson isn't just tone deaf to the political violence going on, he's oblivious to it

Here.

Just as he is oblivious to the rape of the South not just in that damned war but in Reconstruction, and counsels unemployed whites without college degrees today to just die already.

Republican refusals to denounce political violence on all sides proves once and for all that there isn't a dime's worth of difference between the two political parties.

As high school grades inflate, SAT scores deflate

Reported here:

Recent findings show that the proportion of high school seniors graduating with an A average — that includes an A-minus or A-plus — has grown sharply over the past generation, even as average SAT scores have fallen.

In 1998, it was 38.9%. By last year, it had grown to 47%.

That’s right: Nearly half of America’s Class of 2016 are A students. Meanwhile, their average SAT score fell from 1,026 to 1,002 on a 1,600-point scale — suggesting that those A's on report cards might be fool's gold.

There's no business like the loan shark business: Federal student loan rates jump 18.4% effective July 1

The 10-year Treasury pays barely 2.3% but the Feds will now gouge students over 93% more than that.

From the story here:

For new loans disbursed from July 1, 2017, to June 30, 2018, undergraduates will pay 4.45 percent. That's an increase from this year's rate of 3.76 percent. ... [Graduate students] will pay 6 percent for a direct unsubsidized loan — which begins accruing interest as soon as the borrower takes out the loan — an increase from 5.31 percent this year. Finally, rates on direct PLUS loans, which both graduate students and parents of undergrads can use, will rise to 7 percent from the current 6.31 percent. ... Last year, the average college graduate owed $37,172, up 6 percent from 2015, according to data from Student Loan Hero. ... Total student debt in the United States is now over $1.4 trillion — the majority of which is from federal loans.

Once again Rush Limbaugh is full of it about the late, great recession

Here's Rush on November 15th:

In the first place, this so-called recession, the worst since the Great Depression 2008, I don't care, folks, it wasn't! ... Democrats have lived off of this economic collapse narrative for eight years now, and it's horse hockey. The truth of it is that there hasn't been a recovery from it. ... Hell, the recession that Reagan inherited in 1980 dwarfs this one. I mean the thing that Reagan inherited when he became president in 1980, this doesn't even get close to touching it, how bad it was. ... This has really been a sore spot for me for all these eight years, is how supposedly bad that was and how Obama single-handedly rescued us from it, and it was all the Republicans' doing, and it all happened because of the Iraq war. ... We haven't replaced these jobs that were lost. They keep talking about the employment rate being way down, record lows, what a crock.

Rush doesn't remember the 1980s very well, when he was in his 30s. Without a college education and a long enough personal history to compare things to while experiencing the hard knocks of life trying to get his radio career going, those years understandably seemed worse to him than they really were. Honest people everywhere recognize it was that way for them, too. Unfortunately Rush still doesn't seem to be able to measure the 1980s properly let alone put them in their proper perspective economically.

Take first time claims for unemployment. Reagan's weekly average 1981-1988 was 406,000. Obama's  weekly average 2009-2016 (still unfinished) is 373,000, 8% less severe overall. But the averages around each recession peak are much closer in severity. First time claims 1981-1983 averaged 491,000 weekly, while claims 2009-2011 averaged 477,000 weekly, the latter only 2.85% less severe overall. Peak claims in 1982 averaged 30.1 million, in 2009 only 2% lower at 29.46 million.

While the Obama jobs recession was not quite as severe in terms of the persistence of high first time claims for unemployment, full-time jobs took forever to recover under Obama. Under Reagan they had bounced back almost immediately. In 1981 the pre-recession peak in full-time averaged 83.243 million. By 1984 that level had been recovered with 86.544 million full-time jobs on average. Three years, that's it. In 2007, by contrast, the pre-recession peak in full-time averaged 121.091 million, but it took EIGHT YEARS to recover that level. Full-time finally averaged 121.492 million in 2015. That's why it hasn't felt like things are looking up until this year, in 2016.

If you were an adult in the 1980s, you probably remember the Savings and Loan crisis from 1986-1995, but you probably don't think of the Reagan era as a period of widespread bank failures comparable with what we recently experienced in the Great Recession, and you would be right. Losses from such failures as estimated by the FDIC for the period 1981-1988 total $8.9 billion. But for the period 2009-2016 estimated losses from bank failures soared to $57.3 billion, 544% higher. Even adjusted for inflation the recent losses were well in excess of 200% higher than in the 1980s. 

Or take housing. The Case-Shiller Home Price Index fell at most about 14% from the late 1970s to the mid 1980s through the Reagan recessions. I remember my dad was pretty unhappy about it because he retired in 1980 and was sitting in a house he hoped to sell for more money one day, but the value kept declining. But that was nothing compared to what happened between 2006 and 2012 when the index tanked over 36%. The foreclosure rate averaged just 0.5% in 1980-81, but soared to 3.8% in 2008-09, an increase of over 600% in the rate. Many millions of people lost homes in the Great Recession, but they are nameless and faceless to Rush Limbaugh because to him things were much worse in the 1980s. But not in reality. I saw homes in foreclosure in my own middle class neighborhood in 2007 that I never saw back in 1980 in my dad's hometown.

Perhaps the best way to visualize how much worse the most recent recession was compared with the early 1980s is to examine quarterly current dollar GDP. You had one tiny blip in quarterly current dollar GDP between December 1981 and March 1982 when it declined all of $0.01 trillion, 0.3% that's it. The truth is GDP recovered the next quarter ending June 1982 and never looked back.

Fast forward to 2007-09. There were four quarterly declines: A decline of $0.02 trillion between 12/31/07 and 3/31/08; a decline of $0.29 trillion from 9/30/08 to 12/31/08; a decline of $0.17 trillion from 12/31/08 to 3/31/09; and a decline of $0.04 trillion from 3/31/09 to 6/30/09. The previous peak level in quarterly current dollar GDP wasn't recovered until a year later, in June 2010. It took almost two years, not one quarter as in 1982. All told GDP fell from peak to trough by $0.5 trillion or 3.37%. 

The recession of 1982 was child's play compared with 2007-2009. Rush just can't see it because he was already rich during the Great Recession.

Your guiding light in this time of tumult he is not.   

And once again, it's not that Obama wasn't born in the USA, it's that he lied that he was foreign born in order to get preferred treatment in college admissions and financial aide

Which is why his college records remain sealed.

If only 36% finish their college degrees in four years, maybe 64% of those in college don't belong there

The New York Times reported here in 2014:

At most public universities, only 19 percent of full-time students earn a bachelor’s degree in four years, the report found. Even at state flagship universities — selective, research-intensive institutions — only 36 percent of full-time students complete their bachelor’s degree on time.

Meanwhile just 59% finish within six years.

Foreign Policy pinhead Fredrik deBoer erupts with reverse racism against whites, feigns concern over increase in white suicides to slam gun ownership

Evidently the same self-loathing white guy featured here for whom more neoliberalism isn't an option and FDR was just another affluent bastard who short-circuited socialism. It's always about the guns, isn't it, because the guns in the hands of the people stop commies like this from taking power. And hey, thanks to Foreign Policy and Business Insider for giving this creep a forum. deBoer must laugh to himself at how easy it is to subvert the country.

Here:

[W]hite Americans overall continue to enjoy significant advantages over black and Hispanic Americans in metrics like unemployment, college completion rate, and incarceration rate, which is not surprising in a country that still suffers from immense and structural white supremacy.

But this does not change the fact that white workers without college degrees have seen their overall quality of life eroded in a variety of ways that almost certainly contribute to the suicide rate. For example, as a New York Times story on the report points out, unmarried men have dramatically higher suicide rates, and divorce rates are strongly tied to income and education, with those in lower income brackets and educational levels suffering from far higher rates.

Why white Americans are so much more likely to commit suicide than black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans, whose rates are less than half that of white Americans, is something of a mystery.

This might paradoxically be part of the legacy of white privilege: Because white Americans have traditionally enjoyed greater affluence and cultural prestige than people of color, they might take unemployment, poverty, and their attendant indignities as harder to stomach. ... Owning a gun is one of the most powerful predictors of suicide risk overall. 

Libertarian John Tamny displays the anti-intellectualism characteristic of the breed

Here in "The Beatles And Wealth Inequality: A Reminder That Education Is Irrelevant To Success".

It's a veritable cornucopia of wrong, sentimental tosh in pursuit of a thesis.

It ignores the fact that George Harrison went to a pretty good school in Liverpool. It doesn't understand that Ringo was prevented from making academic progress as a child by recurring severe illnesses. It is unaware that Ringo actually was punching a time clock at a day job when he became interested in the drums, and that though it was his life's work he didn't play when the band wasn't recording.

Tamny also makes a mountain out of the molehill of Ringo Starr's two-week hiatus from the Beatles in 1968, which supposedly showed the rest of the Beatles how much they needed him. They didn't. Ringo spent much of his time in studio playing cards while the others whacked out their tracks as the group headed for a breakup.

Tamny would have made a better case using Rush Limbaugh as his example. The man's made piles and piles of dough but routinely slaughters math, attacks college education and has a lazy mind.

Howard Dean thinks a president must have a college degree, unless the president is a Democrat

Yeaaaaaaahhhhhh!

Seen here:

SCARBOROUGH: Are you serious? You're saying [Scott Walker] might not be qualified because he didn't finish college?

DEAN: I think there are going to be a lot of people who worry about that. 

SCARBOROUGH: Do you worry about people that don't finish college? 

DEAN: I worry about people being President of the United States not knowing much about the world and not knowing much about science. I worry about that. 

SCARBOROUGH: Oh my God. Let's name the people that didn't finish college that have changed this world. 

DEAN: Harry Truman, who was a great president, there's no question about it.

Is The Cost Of College Really Up 538% Since 1985? Or 53%?

Gold averaged $317/ounce in 1985. Today it's knocking on the door of $1,430, up 351%. But the cost of a college education is up 538% since then, according to this story from Bloomberg:

"[T]uition expenses have increased 538 percent in the 28-year period, compared with a 286 percent jump in medical costs and a 121 percent gain in the consumer price index. The ballooning charges have generated swelling demand for educational loans while threatening to make college unaffordable for domestic and international students."

------------------------------------------------

I won't quibble about the inflation measure. I show the "all items" CPI July 1985/July 2013 up about 115%, but that just raises the question about what is the correct way to measure inflation.

Arguably the price of gold is the correct measure of inflation in the economy, not the CPI. And by that standard the cost of a college education has risen just 53% more than gold measured inflation has risen in 28 years, not 345% more, while medical costs have actually failed to keep up with inflation as measured by gold over the same period. Some maintain that most of the actual increased cost of college has to do with the increased costs of room and board, not with tuition. That seems entirely plausible. Tuition and fees where I went to school in 1985 are up 300% vs. 350% for gold.

People are finding college to be unaffordable in the same way that they are finding gold to be unaffordable. It's not that the prices are up. It's that the dollar has shrunk, the cruellest tax of all because it takes you 30 years to realize you've been robbed somewhere along the line, but just where you cannot tell.

Heresy.

Truth.

We report, you decide.

Why You're A Janitor Or A Taxi Driver With A BA Degree

"[T]he stock of college graduates in the workforce (41.7 million) in 2010 was larger than the number of jobs requiring a college degree (28.6 million)."

Read more about it, here.