New Poll Reveals Strong Majority of Americans Believe Higher Education is a Scam – All Debt and No Job Skills | The Gateway Pundit

New Poll Reveals Strong Majority of Americans Believe Higher Education is a Scam – All Debt and No Job Skills

Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication./ Author: Garden Sprite

A strong majority of Americans now believe that higher education is a scam, according to new polling from NBC News.

More and more, people see colleges as organizations that prey on young people, doing nothing more than saddling them with massive debt while imparting no real job skills. College tuition rates have risen to insane levels in recent decades, surpassing price growth in virtually every other area of life.

In California, it was recently revealed that a shocking number of students entering college cannot even do math at an 8th grade level.

Colleges have also become little more than political indoctrination centers, where young people learn to hate the United States of America and embrace far left systems of government like socialism/communism.

Having fewer young Americans enroll in college today would actually be a good thing for the country.

The Editorial Board of the New York Post wrote about this:

Americans are rightly waking up — much of higher education is now a scam

More Americans are wising up to the fact that higher education has become a raw deal for all too many young people.

A new NBC News poll finds that a full 63% of voters believe a four-year college degree now isn’t worth it, since many students graduate with “a large amount of debt” but no “specific job skills.”

That’s up markedly from 2013, when a majority took the opposite view, as 53% called a degree “worth the cost because people have a better chance to get a good job and earn more money over their lifetime.”

That was the case for generations of Americans, who saw college as a key step to higher-paying jobs and a better life: “Upwardly mobile” was almost entirely synonymous with “college-educated.”

But over the last few decades, the dynamic has shifted: Far too many college degrees guarantee nothing … except onerous debt.

Tuition costs have skyrocketed, doubling over the last 20 years (a redoubling from two decades earlier), as universities jacked up prices to match increased “help” such as federal aid and ever-larger government-facilitated student loans.

If a young person wants to become a lawyer, a doctor, or some other kind of professional, then college is a must. For the vast majority of young people however, they would be much better off attending a trade school and learning how to become a plumber, electrician, welder, or mechanic. These jobs are in high demand and pay extremely well.

Attending college for a degree in something like Gender Studies is a waste of valuable time and money.

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Survey Finds ONE IN THREE College Students Think Some Level of Violence is Acceptable to Stop Campus Speech They Don’t Like | The Gateway Pundit

Survey Finds ONE IN THREE College Students Think Some Level of Violence is Acceptable to Stop Campus Speech They Don’t Like

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

One point that has been made repeatedly over the last 48 hours is that Charlie Kirk was assassinated while exercising one of our most basic rights, the right to free speech.

When Kirk visited college campuses, he was not protesting, he was engaging in peaceful, intellectual discussions, question and answer sessions and/or debate with students who participated freely.

So how would anyone think of killing him for doing this? Well, a survey which was released just a day before Kirk was murdered, shows that an astonishing number of college students believe that violence is an acceptable way to stop campus speech they don’t like.

The College Fix reported:

1 in 3 students say some level of violence acceptable to stop campus speech

One in three students believe some level of violence is acceptable to stop a campus speech, according to the results of a large-scale survey released Tuesday by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

The survey, which questioned more than 68,000 students at 257 colleges and universities nationwide on a variety of free speech topics, asked: “How acceptable would you say it is for students to engage in the following actions to protest a campus speaker? Using violence to stop a campus speech.”

Two percent said “always acceptable,” 13 percent said “sometimes acceptable,” and 19 percent said “rarely acceptable,” or about one-third of those surveyed.

When broken down by political beliefs, 7 percent of students who identified as liberal said it’s “always acceptable” to use violence to shut down speech — while 8 percent of students who identified as conservative did.

“More students than ever think violence and chaos are acceptable alternatives to peaceful protest,” FIRE Chief Research Advisor Sean Stevens said in a news release. “This finding cuts across partisan lines. It is not a liberal or conservative problem — it’s an American problem.”

“Students see speech that they oppose as threatening, and their overblown response contributes to a volatile political climate.”

A majority of students surveyed — 54 percent — also responded it was acceptable to block other students from attending a campus speech: 3 percent said “always acceptable,” 19 percent said “sometimes acceptable,” and 32 percent said “rarely acceptable.”

This is an indictment of our entire system of education. Schools are failing to educate our students about our most basic God-given rights and the respect that they deserve, especially in an education setting.

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Elite Universities Form ‘Private Collective’ to Resist Trump’s Crackdown on Higher Education | The Gateway Pundit

Elite Universities Form ‘Private Collective’ to Resist Trump’s Crackdown on Higher Education

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Elite universities have formed a “private collective” to resist President Trump’s crackdown on higher education.

Over recent weeks, the Trump administration has gone to war with several elite universities over their lack of educational and viewpoint diversity, discrimination via DEI and refusal to combat antisemitism.

While Columbia folded to his demands, Harvard has pushed back against the administration and attempted to frame Trump’s threats to remove federal funding as an assault on the university’s independence.

To try and protect themselves, elite universities are now teaming up to try and create a united front against the White House.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The informal group currently includes about 10 schools, including Ivies and leading private research universities, mostly in blue states. Strategy discussions gained momentum after the administration’s recent list of demands for sweeping cultural change at Harvard, viewed by many universities as an assault on independence.

The collective, as some are calling it, represents a separate, quiet and potentially more potent effort than recent public resolutions from university-aligned groups.

The group comprises figures at the highest levels, including individual trustees and presidents.

Maintaining close contact, they have discussed red lines they won’t cross in negotiations and have gamed out how to respond to different demands presented by the Trump administration, which has frozen or canceled billions in research funding at schools it says haven’t effectively combated antisemitism on their campuses.

The group’s aim is to avoid the fate of some top law firms, where one deal led to others following suit. The universities want to make sure other schools don’t go so far as to strike deals that create a worrisome precedent that others would be under pressure to follow, say the people familiar with the effort.

One major fear among the collective are reports that Trump could escalate his crackdown on Harvard by targeting the flow of international students and faculty, which many elite schools have come to rely on for tuition revenue and prestige.

This prospect is said to have sent shockwaves through university leadership, who now see their business models under threat.

There are also plans to rescind Harvard’s tax-exempt status, which currently saves the instutition billions of dollars a year.

Trump Orders IRS to Draw Up Plans to Rescind Harvard’s Tax-Exempt Status

Should Harvard’s lawsuit fail, the collective fears that more schools will be forced to comply and that the left-wing strangehold over higher education will finally be broken.

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Victor Davis Hanson Says a ‘Reckoning’ Has Finally Come for Radical Left Wing Higher Education | The Gateway Pundit

Victor Davis Hanson Says a ‘Reckoning’ Has Finally Come for Radical Left Wing Higher Education

Conservative historian and scholar, Victor Davis Hanson, believes the time has finally come for a reckoning in higher education.

Colleges and universities have always leaned left, but in recent years Americans have watched in horror as academia turned into a straight-up progressive indoctrination machine. People go into debt to send their kids to these schools which then transform their once happy children into raging Marxists.

If colleges want to be that way, it’s their business but it doesn’t have to be done with taxpayer dollars.

Hanson writes at Townhall:

Is the Jig Up for Elite Higher Education?

Over the last three decades, elite American universities have engaged in economic, political, social, and cultural practices that were often unethical, illegal — and suicidal.

They did so with impunity.

Apparently, confident administrators assumed that the brand of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and other elite universities was so precious to the nation’s elite movers and shakers that they could always do almost anything they wished.

By the 1970s, non-profit universities had dropped pretenses that they were apolitical and non-partisan.

Instead, they customarily violated the corpus of iconic civil rights legislation by weighing race, gender, and sexual orientation in biased admissions, hiring, and promotions.

Hanson suggests that college endowments are now fair game:

Congress will soon pass legislation that will tax the annual multimillion-dollar income from multibillion-dollar endowments at somewhere between 15 and 20%.

There will be no more “overhead” or “surcharges” on government campus grants allowed larger than 15%.

Those two reforms alone could cost some of the richest campuses nearly a half billion dollars a year in lost income.

Everyone should pay close attention to what’s happening with the Trump administration and Columbia University. It’s basically a preview of what is going to happen at a number of other schools. Trump is making it clear that if these schools refuse to change, they will have to learn to live without federal funding. This is long overdue.

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Shocking Study Shows Troubling Trends, Fears Among Professors on American College Campuses | Faithwire

Shocking Study Shows Troubling Trends, Fears Among Professors on American College Campuses

A new survey of thousands of American college faculty yielded some shocking results on free speech and academic freedom, with nearly three-in-10 professors stating they feel unable to speak openly over fears about how students, fellow faculty, and administrators might respond.

This is just one of the eyebrow-raising findings in “Silence in the Classroom: The 2024 FIRE Faculty Survey Report” released by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).

Listen to the latest episode of “Quick Start” 

https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?p=CCBNC3640195386

“While many faculty remain confident in higher education, and few report explicit threats or experiences of discipline for speech, the broader climate reflects that of rampant self-censorship, worry, and fear, particularly among faculty in the political minority,” the study’s executive summary reads.

Some of the key findings underscore this warning. Thirty-five percent of faculty reported recently toning down writings for fear of sparking controversy.

And when you consider 14% stated they “suffered discipline or threats of discipline for either their teaching, research, academic talks, or other off-campus speech,” these worries and moves become easier to understand.

In the midst of a cancel culture — one that can threaten livelihoods and careers — the notion people sometimes self-sensor is on full display.

This is likely why 40% of faculty expressed worries about damage to their reputations if a person misunderstands their words or deeds, with 23% of faculty fearful about losing their jobs over such a scenario.

Perhaps one of the most troubling statistics is the 23% who believe their own academic departments are “somewhat” or “very” hostile toward people who have the respondents’ political views.

Moderates and conservatives are likelier than liberals to express concerns in these areas. Regarding reputational fears, the political disparity is also overtly clear.

Overall, 35% of liberals, 43% of moderates, and 52% of conservatives expressed worries about reputational fallout if something they’ve said or done is misunderstood. Likewise, 18% of liberals, 27% of moderates, and 32% of conservatives said they feared losing their jobs if misunderstood.

Furthermore, conservative faculty members were much more likely (55%) — three times as much, in fact — than liberals (17%) to report hiding “political beliefs from other faculty in an attempt to keep their jobs,” according to the report.

And in an era when social and political issues often percolate on campuses, most faculty (66%) believe their institutions “should not take positions on political and social issues.”

The FIRE survey was conducted among 6,269 faculty across 55 American four-year colleges and universities. Read the full report here.

US Department of Education Gives Christian Universities 70% of Penalties, Despite Them Only Educating 10% of Students | Protestia

US Department of Education Gives Christian Universities 70% of Penalties, Despite Them Only Educating 10% of Students

The United States Department of Education is unfairly targeting Christian Universities and Colleges by giving them 70% of the fines and penalties despite making up a disproportionately small percentage of schools, according to a new report by the American Principles Project. (APP)

Billed as the ‘premier national organization engaging directly in campaigns and advocacy on behalf of the family,’ the APP found that “Since assuming office, the [Biden] administration has waged an unprecedented assault against Christian colleges, universities, and students, while systematically protecting ‘elite’ public and private institutions, foisting woke ideology on reluctant students, and enabling antisemitic, violent protests on campuses across the nation.”

This war is being carried out by the Department of Education’s Office of Enforcement, “an obscure agency created under President Obama and resurrected by President Biden,” whose goal is to “shut down colleges and universities that don’t align with the Administration’s woke agenda.” Their tactics include:

• Impose massive penalties against leading institutions
• Harass schools operating in good faith with scrutinize-and-fine investigations.
• Cut off or threaten colleges’ and universities’ access to Title ICX funding.

The report further found:

Within the last year, the Biden-Harris Department of Education imposed record fines against two of the nation’s most prominent Christian universities—Grand Canyon University ($37.7 million) and Liberty University ($14 million). These fines total more than all other penalties the Department of Education assessed over the past seven years.

Over the last 10 years, the Department of Education has issued nearly 75 fines for Clery Act violations, totaling $27.5 million in penalties. Twenty fines – more than a quarter – were against Christian colleges and universities. The average fine against a Christian school was $815,000, compared to $228,571 against public and private institutions.

Nearly 70 percent of penalties imposed by the Office of Enforcement have been against Christian institutions and career colleges, even though these schools represent less than 10 percent of college students.

To read the whole report, click here:

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