HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: If You Major in STEM, It Doesn’t Matter Where You Go to College.

We’ve written before about how selective colleges function to perpetuate privilege, giving students access to exclusive resources, opportunities and networks that are unavailable to students who are just as bright but couldn’t impress an admissions committee at age 17—or who, for financial or personal reasons, didn’t want to go to a elite school. In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, the economists Erica Eide and Michael Himler, who have tallied earnings data for students across colleges and across different majors, offer an important qualification to his phenomenon: it only seems to apply to students who earn liberal arts degrees. Students with similar characteristics who major in STEM fields earn roughly the same wherever they go to college. . . .

There are many interesting nuances to their findings not captured in the above excerpt, so read the whole thing. In the meantime, two preliminary points seem worth making:
First, the fact that STEM majors who go to inexpensive low-or-mid-tier schools do just as well, income-wise, as their counterparts who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an Ivy League education, suggests that there is plenty of room for cost-saving in these programs. Universities are starting to take advantage of this: Perhaps the most successful MOOC degree program to date is Georgia Tech’s online master’s degree in computer science, which costs 80 percent less than its in-person counterpart. Elite liberal arts colleges tout the value of face-to-face learning in a small classroom setting, and, indeed, this may be valuable to many students. But Eide and Himler’s findings suggest that, for scientists and engineers, such an experience doesn’t actually change students’ job prospects. At a time when college costs keep going up, and middle and working class families keep getting squeezed, these data highlight the need to find more efficient ways to deliver knowledge at lower cost.

Second, the fact that there is such a dramatic difference between the earnings liberal arts majors from top colleges and students with similar abilities from lesser-ranked colleges suggests that the privilege-reinforcing effect of elite education discussed above can be very real. Not only is this unfair, it points to economic inefficiencies: If colleges are relying on the prestige of liberal arts students’ degrees, rather than their actual skills and knowledge, to make hiring decisions, they are probably selling themselves short. That’s one reason we proposed a system of national exams to allow students from, say, West Texas State to compete on equal footing in the job market with students from Princeton. One reason the incomes for STEM majors are comparable across schools is that many technology companies have essentially figured out how to do this for engineers. Companies that hire philosophy majors would do well to also start thinking along those lines.

All is proceeding as I have foretold.

MY GOODNESS, WHATEVER COULD BE THE DIFFERENCE? “In the economic analysis the Brookings Institution released last week — the one where Washington looks remarkably bad — Austin, Raleigh and Nashville are all humming. Their economies are growing. Aggregate wages are rising. The number of jobs in these regions is expanding, too.”

JUST NBC THE LACK OF SELF-AWARENESS! “The first wave of that data is notoriously suspect. So, don’t believe everything you see and hear tonight,”* Brian Williams advised MSNBC viewers Monday night. “With no self-awareness, Williams proclaimed, ‘We hopefully will be the purveyors of truth and justice here.'”

* To be fair, that’s always excellent advice when watching anything on NBC or its sister networks.

IT JUST WASN’T HIS YEAR, BUT I’M GLAD TO HAVE HIM IN THE SENATE: Rand Paul Suspends His 2016 Campaign. If Jeb were smart and cared about the future of America or the Republican Party, he’d do the same.

THE OBVIOUS SOLUTION IS TO RAISE THE MINIMUM WAGE TO $15/HOUR. Unemployment: The All-but-Certain Fate of Too Many Poor Black Boys.

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THE DAY THE MUSIC DIED.

RESET: NATO reports Russian submarine activity “equalling or even surpassing Cold War levels.”

The North Atlantic was again and area “of concern” for the alliance, Vice Admiral Clive Johnstone, Commander of NATO’s Maritime Command, said, with the commanders of his submarine cells currently reporting “more activity from Russian submarines than we’ve seen since the days of the Cold War”.

Not only are Russian submarines returning to Cold War levels of operational activity, but Russian submarines have made a major jump in technological performance, Vice Adm Johnstone said, with NATO seeing “a level of Russian capability that we haven’t seen before”.

Russia, he said, “through an extraordinary investment path not mirrored by the West” has made “technology leaps that [are] remarkable, and credit to them.” Russian submarines now “have longer ranges, they have better systems, they’re freer to operate”, he said. The alliance has also “seen a rise in professionalism and ability to operate their boats that we haven’t seen before”, noted Vice Adm Johnstone, adding, “that is a concern”.

The US however still leads in deployments of sick burns.

TEXAS MONTHLY’S FIELD GUIDE TO TED CRUZ. Note this excerpt:

I’m not ideological about intelligence. In my view, it comes in many forms and none of them have a moral valence. So when I say that Cruz is smarter than us, I don’t mean it to imply a value judgment or even a contrast with other politicians. What I mean is that Cruz has the particular form of intelligence that is universally recognized as such, and he has it in abundance. This is just how it is. I feel no need to deny it, and I see no purpose to doing so.

Instead, I proceed on the assumption that Cruz is smarter than me—not that he’s a superior human who Americans should follow blindly, and not that he’s always right. Just that he’s smarter than me. In practice, that means when Cruz says or does something that doesn’t make sense to me, I ask myself what I’m missing. I take a step back and slowly puzzle through why a very smart person with certain well-documented strategic objectives would do that. Lord knows this is not my usual practice with politicians, but it has turned out to be a surprisingly effective technique for analyzing Cruz. I highly recommend it.

Ahh, beyond the cheap Canadian jokes, that explains the template that will be used by the DNC-MSM to attack Cruz, should he win the nomination, since the MSM of course funnels all Republicans into two binary categories, evil and stupid:

• Calvin Coolidge: Stupid.
• Herbert Hoover: Evil.
• Eisenhower: Stupid.*
• Nixon: Eeeeeeeviiiiiilllll.
• Ford: Stupid.
• Reagan: Stupid and evil.
• GHWB: (Tough for the MSM to decide. Two guesses as to which template they used for Quayle.)
• GWB: Stupid. (The MSM had Cheney to project their evil upon.)

On the other hand, if anybody can hold his own against the MSM, it’s Ted Cruz, who wisely front-loaded his critique of the DNC-MSM with his pushback against the buffoonish CNBC debate moderators before his potential campaign begins in earnest.

* No really, despite having then-recently won a minor bit of overseas unpleasantness called World War II due to his organizational genius, Ike was seen as quite dim by many Stevenson-supporting ‘50s lefties.

MOMENTUM: Rubio and Sanders the Big Winners in Iowa?

JOURNALISM: Reporter fired for fabricating quotes, impersonating sources.

Intercept reporter Juan Thompson was fired last month for fabricating quotes in his articles and creating fake email accounts to impersonate sources.

In a note to readers, Intercept Editor-in-Chief Betsy Reed wrote that Thompson attributed quotes to people who say they had never been interviewed, could not remember being interviewed or couldn’t be found. He created fake email accounts purportedly from some of these sources and lied to his editors.

“We apologize to the subjects of the stories; to the people who were falsely quoted; and to you, our readers,” Reed wrote. “We are contacting news outlets that picked up the corrected stories to alert them to the problems.”

The Intercept has retracted one of Thompson’s stories completely (but has left it up on the website with a note) and made corrections to others. The retracted story involved Scott Roof, the alleged cousin of Charleston, South Carolina shooter Dylann Roof. Dylann made headlines in 2015 when he murdered nine black churchgoers in an attack motivated by racism.

Thompson claimed he spoke to Scott about the shooter. Scott allegedly told Thompson that “Dylann was normal until he started listening to that white power music stuff” and “he kind of went over the edge when a girl he liked starting dating a black guy two years back.”

During their investigation, editors for the Intercept spoke to members of the Roof family, who said they had never heard of a cousin named Scott.

In another story, about Black Lives Matter activists being blocked from a Donald Trump rally, Thompson invented quotes and people. He gave the full name of one of his sources, who told the Intercept that she was not at the rally, was not a Trump supporter and never spoke to Thompson. The Intercept also couldn’t verify the existence of a BLM activist who allegedly provided a quote to Thompson.

It’s as if he cared more about advancing a narrative than reporting accurately. Happily, this is a freakish event, unlikely to be repeated.

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:

● “Dear American Muslims, Can We Have An Honest Talk?”

—John Hawkins, Townhall, yesterday.

Now. Simply posting this isn’t controversial, is it? The event happened. Assuming the translation is correct, the question and the response are a matter of record. The reaction of the crowd is illustrative, and perhaps a window into larger concerns of the German people. Or at least the good folk of Bad Schlema, a spa town of 5,000 souls. This would seem to be news.

But it’s questionable because A) the related videos on the page may go to unsavory places, or at least places with video of unsavory sentiments; B) the point of posting the piece is problematic, because it encourages improper conclusions, and C) it emboldens the wrong kind of people who are motivated by xenophobia or nationalism.

In short, it’s not helpful. When you get right down to the truth, no good can come of it, which is probably the intention of anyone who points you to the video. Best to block any site that embeds it. You’ve no idea what else they might do.

—James Lileks, today.

I DUNNO. SO FAR WHENEVER YOU THINK IT’S PEAK TRUMP, THERE’S PEAKIER TRUMP TO COME. Roger Kimball: Have We Reached Peak Trump?

TENURED THUGS AND THIEVES, as spotted by Kevin D. Williamson of NRO, who writes:

Professor Melissa Click of the University of Missouri criminally assaulted an undergraduate student and, though local prosecutors were slow to move on the case — there was video of the incident, and the facts were not in question — she eventually was charged with third-degree assault. She will not be convicted of a crime, and, so far, her tenure-track position is safe.

Ironies abound. Click, a professor of Lady Gaga studies (no, really), enjoyed an appointment in Mizzou’s journalism department, which for mysterious reasons is highly regarded. The undergraduate she assaulted was a student journalist going about his proper business, covering a campus protest of which Professor Click was one instigator.

The subject of that protest was, in part, “white privilege,” which the protesters held up in contrast to the purportedly rough and unfair treatment that African Americans, particularly young men, receive at the hands of the police.

Which brings up the obvious question: What do we imagine would have happened to a young black man who criminally assaulted a white female college professor — and then, as Professor Click did, attempted to instigate mob violence against her? On campus? On video?

At the New York Observer, Cathy Young explores “The Totalitarian Doctrine of ‘Social Justice Warriors,’” which she abbreviates as “SocJus” throughout her article. (“The callback to ‘IngSoc’ from George Orwell’s 1984 is not quite coincidental,” she adds):

There is a word for ideologies, religious or secular, that seek to politicize and control every aspect of human life: totalitarian. Unlike most such ideologies, SocJus has no fixed doctrine or clear utopian vision. But in a way, its amorphousness makes it more tyrannical. While all revolutions are prone to devouring their children, the SocJus movement may be especially vulnerable to self-immolation: its creed of “intersectionality”—multiple overlapping oppressions—means that the oppressed are always one misstep away from becoming the oppressor. Your cool feminist T-shirt can become a racist atrocity in a mouse-click. And, since new “marginalized” identities can always emerge, no one can tell what currently acceptable words or ideas may be excommunicated tomorrow.

Or as Jonah Goldberg warned in Liberal Fascism:

This is not to say that there are no racist conservatives. But at the philosophical level, liberalism is battling a straw man. This is why liberals must constantly assert that conservatives use code words—because there’s nothing obviously racist about conservatism per se. Indeed, the constant manipulation of the language to keep conservatives—and other non-liberals—on the defensive is a necessary tactic for liberal politics. The Washington, D.C., bureaucrat who was fired [in 1999] for using the word “niggardly” correctly in a sentence is a case in point. The ground must be constantly shifted to maintain a climate of grievance. Fascists famously ruled by terror. Political correctness isn’t literally terroristic, but it does govern through fear. No serious person can deny that the grievance politics of the American left keeps decent people in a constant state of fright—they are afraid to say the wrong word, utter the wrong thought, offend the wrong constituency.

Jonah’s book was published eight years ago last month — and in the years since, the number of items that campus crybullies find offensive has accelerated exponentially. Which brings us to another evergreen reminder of today’s age:

The gender healing of the Hillary era will be equally heartwarming to observe.

CHANGE: “A Golden Age for Pentagon Waste — Ridiculous Pentagon spending may be reaching historic levels.”

IS IT TOO LATE FOR MARTIN O’MALLEY TO JUMP IN? Elijah Cummings Won’t Run for Senate in Maryland.

Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, the Maryland Democrat who had been considering a campaign for his state’s open seat in the Senate, said Tuesday he has decided to run instead for a 12th term in Congress.

His public statement came after months of speculation that the Baltimore resident would join Reps. Donna Edwards and Chris Van Hollen in the race for retiring Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski’s seat, a race in which polling suggested he would enter as the front-runner.

I mean, Martin needs something to do, and I think he has until tonight to file.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: VA reverses demotion of second disgraced official.

DISPATCHES FROM THE HIGHER EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: The College Where Martin Luther King Is Problematic.

These days, there’s likely far more than just one.

Speaking of which, “The University of Connecticut is building a new residence hall that will segregate black people away from the general student population.”

Don’t worry — I’m sure the quality throughout the facility will be equal, even if races are kept separate within it. But then, separate but equal education has been a growing trend in leftwing-dominated academia for well over a decade now.

PRIVACY UPDATE: Germany considers ban on all cash transactions greater than $5,450.

Deputy finance minister Michael Meister said Wednesday that Germany would like to see a European solution, but could introduce a national limit if none is achieved, news agency dpa reported. He said “we can imagine a level of 5,000 euros.”

Meister said there’s “the risk of terror financing and we also have the problem of how to clear up money-laundering offenses properly” when large transactions are conducted anonymously.

Germans tend to use cash more than many other Europeans.

People already engaging in under-the-counter cash transaction don’t seem likely to go along with this.

CHANGE: Army, Marine Chiefs: Women Should Register For The Draft.

Women should be required to register for the draft if all combat jobs are going to be open to them, the top generals of the Marines and Army said Tuesday.

“Every American who’s physically qualified should register for the draft,” Gen. Robert Neller, commandant of the Marine Corps, told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley agreed with Neller.

“I think that all eligible and qualified men and women should register for the draft,” he said.

The two made the remarks while testifying before the panel with Navy Secretary Ray Mabus and Under Secretary of the Army Patrick Murphy on how to implement the landmark decision to open all combat jobs to women.

I agree. Actually, as women are highly underrepresented among combat deaths, we should probably draft them preferentially until those numbers even up, right? Because equality.

THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT THE WAY I HAD HOPED: DC bill would pay people stipends not to commit crimes.

On the flip-side, to paraphrase Warren Zevon, enjoy every ham sandwich.

DON SURBER: Is Anybody Going To Apologize To The Tea Party?

SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: Litigating (former) Senator Hillary Clinton’s Legal Woes: A Response to Professor Rick Hasen (Election Law Blog) and Michael Stern (Point of Order blog).

MICHAEL BARONE: Republican Debate Shows Where Comprehensive Immigration Is Headed: Nowhere.

THIS IS SARAH, SIGNING OFF FROM SNOWY COLORADO:  I did not do this (and my husband wouldn’t do it) but I saw this on Facebook and it made me smile.