NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: “David Cameron and Barack Obama moved the west closer to military intervention in Syria on Saturday.”

Meanwhile, Charles Glasser comments on Facebook: “BusHitler bombs are mean. Obama bombs are packed with caring.”

PETER WEHNER: Obama’s Long List of Broken Promises. “Has any previous president devalued his words quite so much, in quite so many ways?”

WHAT’S A COLLEGE DEGREE WORTH?

In the end, there’s no such thing as a sure bet. When you graduate from college, you won’t find employers handing you jobs. You’ll still need to work. And you’ll still need some luck. A college education for most of us is simply pretty sound investment despite rising costs.

So the question really shouldn’t be whether or not we should go to college. We all should. The question now should be: How do we make college affordable and available to everyone? That is a question that’s not so easy to answer.

Really? We all should? Coming from an educator, some might consider this a trifle self-serving.

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MEGAN MCARDLE: Why Is The Golden Age of Television So Dark? “We are in a golden age of television, I am told, where television shows are taking the risks, doing the interesting things that are no longer possible in movies that need so many tens of millions of dollars to cover the cost of production and marketing. I largely agree with this assessment. So what does it say about modern society that it considers shows about meth cookers, crack dealers and gangsters to be the finest mass market entertainment we can produce?”

Related: Has America Seen Its Best Days?

WELL, ONE OF THEIR PRODUCTS DID SAVE HIS LIFE: George Zimmerman visits Kel-Tec factory.

TRYING ON a DIY Spacesuit.

VIDEO: If gun control worked, Chicago would be Mayberry.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 107.

A BIT OF HYPERBOLE HERE: SWAT Cop Says American Neighborhoods Are ‘Battlefields,’ Claims Cops Face Same Dangers As Soldiers In Afghanistan.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 7 things to know before your first college class.

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NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Official Self-Published Book Marketing Plan.

SEE, NOT WITHSTANDING TIM FERRISS’S ADVICE, I THINK THIS WOULD BE MY EXPERIENCE, TOO: I Outsourced All My Most Mundane Personal Tasks to India. It was a disaster.

NOW OUT FROM PROF. NICHOLAS JOHNSON: Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms.

Probably the most important work on this theme since Robert Williams’ 1962 book Negroes With Guns.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: What Would Happen If I Ate A Teaspoonful Of White Dwarf Star?

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Nanoscale box aids single-molecule optical detection.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Real Reason College Costs So Much.

Today, only about 7% of recent college grads come from the bottom-income quartile compared with 12% in 1970 when federal aid was scarce. All the government subsidies intended to make college more accessible haven’t done much for this population, says Mr. Vedder. They also haven’t much improved student outcomes or graduation rates, which are around 55% at most universities (over six years).

Mr. Vedder is skeptical about the president’s proposal to tie federal aid to graduation rates, among other performance metrics. “I can tell you right now, having taught at universities forever, that universities will do everything they can to get students to graduate,” he chuckles. “If you think we have grade inflation now, you ought to think what will happen. If you breathe into a mirror and it fogs up, you’ll get an A.”

A better idea, Mr. Vedder suggests, would be to implement a national exam like the GRE (Graduate Record Examination) to measure how much students learn in college. This is not on Mr. Obama’s list.

Nope. It’s about subsidies, redistribution, and control. Not outcomes.

TYLER COWEN ON OBAMA’S NEW HIGHER EDUCATION PLAN: “Should we be giving colleges an incentive to identify and deny admission to potential lower earners? Do we really want the federal government helping to crush humanities majors?”

Plus more “regulatory waivers.” No cronyism issues there.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Student Loans Will Haunt You To The Grave.

We’ve devoted considerable space on this blog documenting the ways in which student debt prevents young people from beginning their lives as adults. A study from Demos, for example, finds that among college graduates, those without student debt are more likely to own a home and enjoy lower interest rates on their mortgages. But the effects of debt can also linger into older adulthood, even when the loans are paid off: the study found that debt-free grads build up a hefty $208 thousand more in wealth over the course of their lifetime. . . .

This is more evidence, as if any was needed, that American higher ed is doing young people a great disservice. Colleges should be preparing students for life as an adult by giving them the skills they need to thrive in the workforce. While some programs succeed in this task, many do not, and they still saddle students with debt that will dog them for much of their lives.

Do tell.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: On dropping one’s youngest at college:

But what does a four-year sum in excess of $200,000 at the priciest schools, and still half that at state schools, get you? I don’t have a clue, and that’s why I’ve thought for several years now that the next bubble that pops will be higher education. I’m not sold that online courses will count for much, aside from personal gratification and, Heaven help us, real learning, but something’s got to give. And when the day of reckoning comes at these oases of never-never land, when schools make drastic staff cuts as they lower tuition fees, it’ll be ugly. Too bad my own pocket won’t reap the benefit.

Yeah, I know what you mean. . . .

FOLLOWING UP ON THE OBERLIN DEBACLE: A recent history of hate-crime hoaxes.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Did ARMs Keep The Housing Crisis From Being Worse? “Whatever role they played in goosing housing on the way up, they may also have eased defaults on the way down. A new paper from Andreas Fuster and Paul S. Willen notes that during the housing crisis, people with ARMs saw their payments fall by about half, on average, because interest rates fell so far.”

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