HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: More Than 40% of Student Borrowers Aren’t Making Payments.

More than 40% of Americans who borrowed from the government’s main student-loan program aren’t making payments or are behind on more than $200 billion owed, raising worries that millions of them may never repay.

The new figures represent the fallout of a decadelong borrowing boom as record numbers of students enrolled in trade schools, universities and graduate schools.

While most have since left school and entered the labor force, 43% of the roughly 22 million Americans with federal student loans weren’t making payments as of Jan. 1, according to a quarterly snapshot of the Education Department’s $1.2 trillion student-loan portfolio.

About 1 in 6 borrowers, or 3.6 million, were in default on $56 billion in student debt, meaning they had gone at least a year without making a payment. Three million more owing roughly $66 billion were at least a month behind.

All is proceeding as I foretold.

HILARIOUS: WATCH “JUST LIKE YOU” HILLARY STRUGGLE WITH METROCARD ON THE SUBWAY (VIDEO).

Related: All aboard the lapdog train! Journos help Hillary spin her subway ride.

GAP PULLS ‘RACIST’ AD, instead of questioning the assumptions of the SJWs who read racism into an ad where none exists.

Or as James Taranto is wont to say, if you’re hearing dog whistles, you’re the dog.

“CO-ED BATHROOMS, NOW AND FOREVER! Did you ever imagine that this would be liberalism’s last redoubt? I didn’t.”

IS HILLARY CLINTON turning into Martha Coakley?

BRAVE OLD WORLD: ON RUINING PARIS. At Ricochet, Claire Berlinski asks a few questions:

1. From the Gallo-Roman era to the recent past, almost everything Parisians built was beautiful, in many cases more beautiful than anything else in the world; and at least, not aggressively ugly.

2. After the Second World War, Parisians lost this ability — entirely. What has been built since then is at best tolerable, and at worst, among the ugliest architecture in the world.

3. Why?

Because socialist architect professors self-lobotomized and banished the knowledge, styles and techniques of the past long before the rest of the academie. Modern architecture began before WWI, reached fruition in the 1920s, took a timeout for the Depression and WWII and in the late ‘40s resumed pretty much where it left off before the war. In America, Mies van der Rohe’s influential 1950s buildings such as 860 Lake Shore Drive and the Seagram Building were based on aesthetic concepts he has previously worked out for such commercial structures as Berlin’s Adams Department Store that he never got to build in the 1920s. In France, if anything, aesthetically, Corbusier went backwards; his aptly-named brutalist concrete apartment towers such as the Unité d’habitation in Marseille being nowhere near as sleek and attractive as his 1920s white stucco homes for his first, wealthy avant-garde patrons. And in both nations, budding architects took their cues from these heavily-publicized influences, whether or not they actually learned them firsthand.

France’s buildings look the way they do because after the war, France’s architects couldn’t think — or draw — in any other style.

On the other hand though, something tells me we’ll look back at postwar France as its good old days, both aesthetically and otherwise.

STANFORD STUDENTS: OFFERING WESTERN CIVILIZATION CLASSES DESTROYS DIVERSITY!

Which dovetails rather well with the motto of one highly Progressive nation: war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.

THOUSANDS ARE WAITING FOR PUBIC HOUSING BUT HUD WORKER GETS TWO APARTMENTS IN NO TIME: Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group strikes HUD again! Seems a HUD employee was able to rent two subsidized apartments by somehow leaping ahead of the hundreds of thousands of poor people waiting for public housing units to become available.

The employee lived in the Alexandria, VA., apartment and sublet the apartment in the nation’s capital to her sister who used it, among other things, to park her Lexus SUV. Housing authorities in both cities knew about the arrangement, yet did nothing. When the HUD Inspector General discovered the deal, HUD managers initially promised “severe discipline” for their misbehaving colleague.

Can you guess what comes next?

“But instead of being severely disciplined, Mathis was hastily promoted to a position in charge of giving out millions of tax dollars in federal grants,” Rosiak reports. So a HUD employee steps on poor people who need places to live and gets a promotion to give away millions of tax dollars instead of being fired. What’s wrong with this picture???

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1064.

ED MORRISSEY: Trump’s Wisconsin Debacle a Major Warning to the GOP.

MEGAN MCARDLE: The Panama Papers Actually Reflect Pretty Well on Capitalism. “What we’ve seen from the papers so far is not so much an indictment of global capitalism as an indictment of countries that have weak institutions and a lot of corruption.”

Yes, this is a political corruption scandal. The politically corrupt, and their enablers, want to make it about tax evasion, or capitalism, because they don’t want you talking about how staggeringly crooked, and hypocritical, the global ruling class is.

THIS IS A SURPRISE ONLY TO THOSE WHO WEREN’T PAYING ATTENTION: No, Gender Diversity Doesn’t Boost Corporate Profits.

The fact that women are dramatically underrepresented at the highest tiers of American corporate leadership—and that, for many years, they were greeted with discrimination and dismissal when they tried to break in—has given rise to an understandable effort, especially at elite financial and technology companies, to increase gender diversity on corporate boards. Initially, feminists argued that such efforts were important as a matter of basic fairness—to redress the effects of discrimination, past and present. Recently, however, some of the more ardent champions of corporate diversity have taken to making a different, and more provocative, argument: that increasing the share of women on boards and workgroups dramatically improves companies’ economic performance.

The problem, argues Northwestern University Professor Alice Eagly in a recent paper in the Journal of Social Issues, is that such claims—while usually backed by the best of intentions—simply don’t hold up under scrutiny. They are based on a combination of substandard research, a misreading of that research by impassioned political activists, and the failure of social scientists to act as “honest brokers” when they “produce findings that are not what advocates want to hear.”

Social “science” tends to be more social than science.

SCIENTISTS UNITED AGAINST SCIENCE MUSEUMS: Prominent researchers have joined greens and progressives (including MoveOn.org and the Working Families Party) in a campaign to reduce funding for science museums. They’re demanding that museums reject donations and investment dividends from “the fossil fuel industry and funders of climate science obfuscation,” starting of course with David Koch. The activists are hailing Koch’s recent resignation from the board of trustees at the American Museum of Natural History as a triumph for their cause. (He and the museum say the departure was voluntary.)

The activists claim to be worried about museums’ objectivity, but that’s a ruse, I argue in City Journal. If there’s any bias at science museums, it goes the other way, toward eco-alarmism. Showing the wonders of nature is no longer enough; visitors must be hectored to change their lives and save the planet. Edward Rothstein, who has been writing about museums for a decade at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, has summarized the trend: “Over the last two generations, the science museum has become a place where politics, history and sociology often crowd out physics and the hard sciences. There are museums that believe their mission is to inspire political action.” 

So why worry about conservative donors when they’re having no impact? Because this isn’t really about science or museums. It’s about silencing political opponents. It’s a warning shot to donors and corporations: if you give money to a conservative cause, you will be banished from museums and respectable society.

In this fight, the science museums are just bystanders. If their budgets suffer, if their visitors end up paying higher admission fees or seeing fewer exhibits, that’s just collateral damage. A dedicated leftist can excuse it as a small trade-off to reach our glorious collective future. But the curators and scientists who have signed on to the cause have no excuse for the damage they’re doing. They’re supposed to give science priority over politics—or at least that used to be the professional ethic. 

Several museums, including the Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh and the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, have already caved to the activists. Nearly 150 academics have joined the cause, including George Woodwell,  director emeritus of Woods Hole; James Powell, former president of the science museums of Los Angeles and of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia; and climate researchers like like James Hansen of NASA, Michael Mann of Penn State, and Kevin Trenberth of NCAR.

RED LINE? WHAT RED LINE? Obama destroyed Syrians’ ‘glimmer of hope’ that America would intervene.

ANOTHER DEAD BLASPHEMER — IN SCOTLAND: The stench of Islamic extremism has become all too common among the religious and community leaders of the U.K.

Asad Shah was a much-loved Muslim shopkeeper in Scotland’s first city of Glasgow. Embodying the slogan of his mosque: Love for All and Hatred for None, he would post inclusive social media messages such as “a very Happy Easter, especially to my beloved Christian nation,” and the locals loved him for it.

Yet, on the eve of Good Friday this year, Tanveer Ahmed, a fellow Muslim, appears to have driven 200 miles from Bradford to Glasgow in his licensed Uber car in order to stab Asad 30 times all over his body, stamp on his head and then sit laughing on his chest. Asad, tragically, died from his wounds later that night. With her nation in shock, Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon attended a vigil in Asad’s memory, and he was buried just over a week later.

The truth behind why Asad was killed makes for uncomfortable and ugly reading.

Mohammad Faisal, a friend of the Shah family, described the murderer as “bearded,” wearing a long Muslim “religious robe” and addressing Asad in his native language before killing him.

Police have in fact charged the suspect Tanveer Ahmed with “religiously prejudiced” murder. For Asad was an Ahmedi Muslim, a minority sect persecuted as “heretical” by much of Pakistan’s Sunni Muslim majority. With these facts in mind, Asad Shah has probably become Britain’s first spillover case of Pakistan’s ongoing and vicious blasphemy inquisition being waged by that country’s increasingly belligerent mullah mafia. . . . Mr Shad died hours after he had posted a message wishing friends and neighbours a happy Easter.

Related: “If I had not done this, others would.”

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GOSH, WHO KNEW? “Obama is tougher on America than he is on its enemies.”

—Richard Cohen, the Washington Post, April 4th, 2016.

Some of us figured this out quite a long time ago; i.e. at the start of the Obama administration. QED:

“President Obama has demonstrated that he’s always eager to view American politics as the continuation of warfare by other means, to flip von Clausewitz’s axiom on its head.”

— Ed Driscoll, Ed Driscoll.com, June 20, 2009.

I HAVE A PIECE ON JURY NULLIFICATION AND PROSECUTORIAL DISCIPLINE IN THE WASHINGTON POST TODAY: Prosecutors have too much power. Juries should rein them in. (Bumped).

JOHN SCHINDLER: How the Kremlin Manipulates Europe’s Refugee Crisis: Russian intelligence is detectable in the huge migration wave hitting Europe. What does this mean for Western security?

“GREAT FEARS” AND FUNDAMENTAL TRANSFORMATION, THEN AND NOW.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: In a segment titled “Shrinking Military,” Bret Baier talks with Mr. Obama’s three former defense secretaries, who all agree: inexperienced paranoid Obama staffers tried to micromanage the war on terror from the White House, believing that the military had it in for Obama, and shade their views to please the president. Taken together, it’s quite a damning portrait of a president deeply in over his head, and a world out of control as a result:

And while it’s fun to joke about “President Ash Carter,” his current secretary of defense, Carter seems far more interested, as he rides out the last months of the Obama era, to inflict PC social change on the military than to see it actually achieve anything, let alone win wars.

OBAMA POLITICAL APPOINTEES AT HUD MUST RETURN THEIR SALARIES AFTER OBSTRUCTING CONGRESS: Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group is probably not the most popular reporter covering the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He keeps turning up stories like today’s on the two Obama political appointees who GAO says must pay the penalty for obstructing Congress, literally.

The dynamic duo “refused to let an employee speak with the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform about a major scandal. The congressional watchdog agency cited a federal law barring the use of taxpayer dollars to pay executive branch officials to obstruct Congress,” Rosiak reports. The scandal involved a fraud in HUD that cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. The two barred a career subordinate from telling Congress about the fraud.

“The GAO said that unless HUD’s associate general counsel and a deputy assistant secretary personally return their salaries, the department would be knowingly retaining ‘improper payments’ on its books in violation of the law,” Rosiak said. The two political appointees make six-figure salaries and GAO estimates their obstruction lasted six months, so this is going to hurt. Unless HUD’s corrupt leadership contrives to save them, that is.

Rosiak reports that “a HUD spokesman told The Daily Caller News Foundation that officials there have no plans to require the salary repayments despite the GAO opinion.” Stay tuned because GAO has just handed Congress an open invitation to regrow a couple of big brass ones and enforce its power of the purse over the executive branch, as the founders intended.

YOU’VE HAD A GOOD RUN WESTERN CIVILIZATION, BUT NOW IT’S TIME TO SAY GOODNIGHT: Uproar in Switzerland after school excuses Muslim students from having to shake hands with women teachers.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Our dangerous obsession with Harvard, Stanford and other elite universities.

It’s that time of year again, when high-school seniors receive their college acceptances and sift through financial-aid offers to pick the place where they are going to spend the next four years in college. It’s also the time when seemingly everyone involved in the college search process — from the media to school counselors — are obsessed with the admissions decisions Harvard and dozens of other selective colleges and universities have made.

Last week, Ben Casselman writing at fivethirtyeight.com and Frank Bruni in the New York Times, exposed the absurdity of our obsession with Harvard, Stanford, and the other colleges that reject most of their applicants. As Casselman rightly pointed out, just 4 percent of undergraduates in the U.S. attend institutions that accept 25 percent or less of their applicants, “and hardly any — well under 1 percent — attend schools like Harvard and Yale that accept less than 10 percent.”

[Applied to Stanford or Harvard? You probably didn’t get in. Admit rates drop, again.]

Sure, the Ivy League, along with Stanford, the University of Chicago, Duke, and a few elite public universities such as the University of Michigan, UC-Berkeley, and UNC-Chapel Hill are the pride of the American higher-education system around the world. But focusing on them in media coverage of higher education, in the halls of Congress or statehouses, and especially in guidance offices in high schools, is dangerous for our future.

Actually, what’s most dangerous to our future is the way these schools’ graduates dominate government, business, and the judiciary like never before. I say, abolish the Ivy League!