HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): With Jobs Few, Internships Lure More Graduates to Unpaid Work. “Confronting the worst job market in decades, many college graduates who expected to land paid jobs are turning to unpaid internships to try to get a foot in an employer’s door. While unpaid postcollege internships have long existed in the film and nonprofit worlds, they have recently spread to fashion houses, book and magazine publishers, marketing companies, public relations firms, art galleries, talent agencies — even to some law firms.”
Archive for 2012
May 6, 2012
AT AMAZON, IT’S NATIONAL PHOTO MONTH.
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MY SUNDAY WASHINGTON EXAMINER COLUMN: What Comes After The Higher Education Bubble?
MARK STEYN: Fauxcahontas And The Melting Pot. “Martin Luther King dreamed of a day when men would be judged not on the color of their skin but on the content of their great-great-great-grandmother’s wedding license application. And now it’s here! . . . Just in case you’re having difficulty keeping up with all these Composite-Americans, George Zimmerman, the son of a Peruvian mestiza, is the embodiment of endemic white racism and the reincarnation of Bull Connor, but Elizabeth Warren, the great-great-great-granddaughter of someone who might possibly have been listed as Cherokee on an application for a marriage license, is a heartwarming testimony to how minorities are shattering the glass ceiling in Harvard Yard. George Zimmerman, redneck; Elizabeth Warren, redskin. Under the Third Reich’s Nuremberg Laws, Ms. Warren would have been classified as Aryan and Mr. Zimmerman as non-Aryan. Now it’s the other way round. Progress!”
TOBY HARNDEN: Number of Americans working or looking for jobs falls to 30-year-low in a severe blow to Obama’s campaign. “The percentage of Americans working or looking for work has fallen to its lowest level in more than 30 years, according to gloomy economic figures that are a major blow to President Barack Obama’s hopes of re-election. This stark ‘participation’ figure of the proportion of Americans in work will underline the sense of continued crisis at a time when the views of voters on the economy are crystallising.”
CREEPY: Inspired by “Julia,” A New Obama Poster. It’s a brave new world!
THINKING OF COLLEGE LIKE AN INVESTMENT:
PayScale, a Seattle data firm, examines the links between pay and variables like colleges and majors. Its analysis, which also ignores dropouts but accounts for students who take longer to complete their degrees, finds an average yearly return of 4.4% for degrees from 853 schools. That assumes students get financial aid, as most do.
Returns vary sharply; they are negative for more than 100 schools and over 11% a year for ones like Harvey Mudd College in California, the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Virginia. Dartmouth, Harvard, Stanford and Princeton are over 10%, but so is Queens College in New York—where state residents pay just over $5,000 a year in tuition, versus about $41,000 for Stanford.
The worst returns tend to come from schools whose programs focus on nursing, criminal justice, sociology and education, says Katie Bardaro, an analyst at PayScale. The best returns are often from schools with strong engineering, computer science, economics and natural-science programs. There’s a flip side: “It’s a lot harder to successfully graduate from those engineering programs,” says Ms. Bardaro.
Think like an investor, and be aware of opportunity costs.
REX MURPHY: How Obama cheapened a great victory in the war on terror. “Obama went from admirable reticence a year ago, to hitting every note on his own horn a year later. . . . Obama took a national moment and reduced it, very largely, to a personal one, a partisan one. It’s fodder for an attack ad on his Republican opponents, for heavens’ sake.”
RISK-BASED PRICING: Should student loans be priced differently according to major? “Without risk-based pricing of student loans, there may be no reliable price signal about the long-term financial risks inherent in different courses of study. This lack of price signals undermines students’ ability to make informed decisions about the course of study that will best balance their innate abilities and individual preferences with postgraduate economic opportunities. Similarly, the lack of price signals may undermine post-secondary educational institutions’ ability to adjust their programs to improve their students’ postgraduate prospects. Misallocation of educational resources is not only harmful to individual students and their families — it could threaten to undermine the productivity and competitiveness of the U.S. labor force and the U.S.’s ability to continue to invest in education and research.”
If we’d priced student loans this way, we probably wouldn’t have had a higher education bubble.
LIFE INSIDE the Kowloon walled city.
INVESTMENT GENIUS? Buffett Trails S&P 500 for Third Straight Year.
WAR ON PHOTOGRAPHY UPDATE: FAA Rips Delta Passenger for Filming Bird Strike.
MAY I HAVE SOME CREAM?
MATT WELCH: Why Big Government Is Offensive. “The kerfuffles over mandatory ultrasounds and contraceptive mandates made brutally clear an axiom that partisans have a hard time understanding: Any power that government has to do something you like will invariably be used for something you abhor. Today’s decision interpreting the Commerce Clause to justify snatching home-grown medical marijuana from patients in California becomes the justification for tomorrow’s federal mandate to buy health insurance. Reduce the scope of government, and we reduce the culture war, while promoting true tolerance of divergent viewpoints.”
Amen.
STUMBLE: “It’s a campaign faux pas to hold an event in a room that isn’t full; to promise the media a more-than-capacity crowd then fall this far short of that promise is utter incompetence. In 2008, Obama ran a near-flawless campaign, buoyed by enthusiasm and effective organizing. But it’s not 2008 any more, and on day one of the 2012 campaign, Team Obama has already made an embarrassing blunder.”
May 5, 2012
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Blue Smoke and Mirrors: Tobacco Bond Meltdown Heralds Worse. “The tobacco mess is a classic of blue dysfunction at work: with one hand the states are busy throttling the cow which their other hand is trying to milk. Currently, affected states are threatening to sue tobacco companies for $8 billion in withheld payments which the tobacco companies claim they are unable to pay. Cue the desperate fiddling as state governments work frantically to get themselves and their investors out of this mess.”
MICHAEL BARONE: Warren ancestry claim puts light on corrupt system.
WASHINGTON EXAMINER: Jobs report shows Obama’s economy is not like Reagan’s.
AT AMAZON, up to 50% off on Impact Drivers.
SPACE WEATHER EXPERT HAS OMINOUS FORECAST. “Mike Hapgood, who studies solar events, says the world isn’t prepared for a truly damaging storm. And one could happen soon.”
DREAMS OF MY GHOSTWRITER’S EX.
“CIVILIZED PEOPLE DON’T BUY GOLD?” I think he means “people in a civilized polity.” So, are we?
HMM. THE PRE-RECALL SPIN SOUNDS LIKE Scott Walkers opponents are expecting to lose. Let’s hope they do.