Colleges

The College Admissions Scandal Is A Perfect Example Of How Deeply Corrupt America Has Become

Is there anything left in this country that has not been deeply tainted by corruption? By now you have probably heard that dozens of people have been arrested for participating in a multi-million dollar college admissions scam. Enormous amounts of money were paid out in order to ensure that children from very wealthy families were able to get into top schools such as Yale University, Stanford University, the University of Texas and the University of Southern California. We should certainly be disgusted by these revelations, but we shouldn’t be surprised. Such corruption happens every single day on every single level of society in America. At this point our nation is so far gone that it is shocking when you run into someone that actually still has some integrity.

The “mastermind” behind this college admissions scam was a con man named William Rick Singer. He had been successfully getting the kids of wealthy people into top colleges for years using “side doors”, and he probably thought that he would never get caught.

But he did.

There were four basic methods that Singer used to get children from wealthy families into elite schools. The first two methods involved bribes…

Bribing college entrance exam administrators to allow a third party to facilitate cheating on college entrance exams, in some cases by posing as actual students,’ is the first.

Bribing university athletic coaches and administrators to designate applicants as purported athletic recruits – regardless of their athletic abilities, and in some cases, even though they did not play the sport,’ is the second.

Because many of these kids didn’t even play the sports they were being “recruited” for, in some cases Photoshop was used to paste their faces on to the bodies of real athletes…

In order to get non-athletic kids admitted to college as athletes, Singer often had to create fake profiles for them. Sometimes this involved fabricating resumes that listed them having played on elite club teams, but to finish the illusion Singer and his team would also use Photoshop to combine photos of the kids with actual athletes in the sport.

A number of college coaches became exceedingly wealthy from taking bribes to “recruit” kids that would never play once they got to school, but now a lot of those same coaches are probably going to prison.

The third and fourth methods that Singer used involved more direct forms of cheating…

‘Having a third party take classes in place of the actual students, with the understanding that the grades earned in those classes would be submitted as part of the students’ application,’ is the third.

The fourth was ‘submitting falsified applications for admission to universities … that, among other things, included the fraudulently obtained exam scores and class grades, and often listed fake awards and athletic activities.’

Of course the main thing that the media is focusing on is the fact that some celebrities are among those being charged in this case, and that includes Lori Loughlin from “Full House”…

It was important to “Full House” star Lori Loughlin that her kids have “the college experience” that she missed out on, she said back in 2016.

Loughlin, along with “Desperate Housewives” actress Felicity Huffman, is among those charged in a scheme in which parents allegedly bribed college coaches and insiders at testing centers to help get their children into some of the most elite schools in the country, federal prosecutors said Tuesday.

Despite how cynical I have become lately, I never would have guessed that Lori Loughlin was capable of such corruption.

After all, she seems like such a nice lady on television.

But apparently she was extremely determined to make sure that her daughters had “the college experience”, and so Loughlin and her husband shelled out half a million dollars in bribes…

Loughlin and Giannulli ‘agreed to pay bribes totaling $500,000 in exchange for having their two daughters designated as recruits to the USC crew team – despite the fact that they did not participate in crew – thereby facilitating their admission to USC,’ according to the documents.

As bad as this scandal is, can we really say that it is much worse than what is going on around the rest of the country every single day?

Of course not.

We are a very sick nation, and we are getting sicker by the day.

William Rick Singer had a good con going, and he should have stopped while he was ahead…

William “Rick” Singer said he had the inside scoop on getting into college, and anyone could get in on it with his book, “Getting In: Gaining Admission To Your College of Choice.”

“This book is full of secrets,” he said in Chapter 1 before dispensing advice on personal branding, test-taking and college essays.

But Singer had even bigger secrets, and those would cost up to $1.2 million.

But like most con men, Singer just had to keep pushing the envelope, and in the end it is going to cost him everything.

The ironic thing is that our colleges and universities are pulling an even bigger con. They have convinced all of us that a college education is the key to a bright future, but meanwhile the quality of the “education” that they are providing has deteriorated dramatically. I spent eight years in school getting three degrees, and so I know what I am talking about. For much more on all this, please see my recent article entitled “50 Actual College Course Titles That Prove That America’s Universities Are Training Our College Students To Be Socialists”.

I know that it is not fashionable to talk about “morality” and “values” these days, but the truth is that history has shown us that any nation that is deeply corrupt is not likely to survive for very long.

Our founders understood this, and former president John Adams once stated that our Constitution “was made only for a moral and religious people”…

Avarice, ambition, revenge and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Today, we are neither moral or religious.

What we are is deeply corrupt, and America will not survive if we keep going down this path.

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

12 Statistics That Prove That The U.S. Is Facing A Consumer Debt Apocalypse

In the entire history of the United States, consumers have never been in so much debt. And that would not be a crisis as long as the vast majority of us were regularly making our debt payments, but as you will see below delinquency levels are starting to rise to extremely alarming levels. In fact, some of the numbers that are coming in are even worse than we witnessed at any point during the last recession. If things are this bad already, what are they going to look like once the economy really gets bad? Because even though it appears that we are heading into a new recession, according to the Federal Reserve it has not officially begun yet. That means that much worse is yet to come. Just like last time, millions of Americans will likely lose their jobs, and without an income most of those that suddenly find themselves unemployed will not be able to pay their bills. The stage is set for the largest tsunami of consumer debt defaults that this country has ever seen, and that will absolutely devastate major financial institutions all across America.

If you think that I am exaggerating even a little bit, please read over the following list very carefully. The following are 12 statistics that prove that the U.S. is facing a consumer debt apocalypse…

#1 Total consumer debt in the United States just surpassed the 4 trillion dollar mark. That has never happened before in all of U.S. history.

#2 When you throw in mortgages and all other kinds of individual debt, U.S. consumers are now 13.5 trillion dollars in debt.

#3 A whopping 480 million credit cards are in circulation in this country. That number has shot up by nearly 13 percent since 2015.

#4 U.S. consumers are carrying 870 billion dollars worth of balances on their credit cards right now.

#5 56 percent of Americans that currently have credit card balances have been carrying them for more than a year.

#6 The number of “seriously delinquent”credit card accounts in the U.S. has shot up to 37 million.

#7 Americans now owe a total of 1.3 trillion dollars on their auto loans.

#8 At this moment, more than 7 million Americans are delinquent on their auto loan payments. The figure has already surpassed what we witnessed during the peak of the last recession by about a million.

#9 The total amount of student loan debt in the United States has reached the 1.5 trillion dollar mark. Over the last 10 years, that number has more than doubled.

#10 Right now, more than 166 billion dollars in student loan debt is considered to be “seriously delinquent”.

#11 Millennials are now more than a trillion dollars in debt. No generation of Americans has ever been deeper in debt at this stage in life.

#12 One recent survey found that 78 percent of Americans “are living paycheck to paycheck”. Suffocating debt levels are a big reason why that figure is so incredibly high.

Since so many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, that means that there is very little room for error. During the last recession, large numbers of Americans immediately began getting behind on their bills once they were laid off, and we saw mortgage defaults rise to unprecedented levels. Sadly, we haven’t learned from our past mistakes, and millions upon millions of Americans will find themselves drowning in an ocean of red ink once again during this next recession.

But even if you are not living paycheck to paycheck, carrying credit card balances is a very unwise thing to do.

Most Americans don’t realize that if you only make the minimum payment on a credit card every month, you can end up paying more in interest than you did for the original purchases. The following comes from USA Today…

If a credit-card borrower only made the minimum payments on $5,000 of debt, for example, they’d be in debt for more than 18 years and would end up paying $6,372 in interest based on national average interest rates, according to Ted Rossman, industry analyst for CreditCards.com.

If you keep playing this game, I promise you that you will never get rich. Instead, the only people that will be getting wealthy will be the people that are receiving your debt payments.

Credit card debt is one of my pet peeves. One of the best financial moves that anyone can make is to get out of credit card debt and never look back.

And that is particularly important at this juncture because the economy is really starting to slow down. Compared to last year, U.S. job cut announcements were up 117 percent in February.

We haven’t seen anything like that since the last financial crisis.

At this point, even mainstream economists are openly admitting what is coming. Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, sounded downright gloomy in his most recent article…

The economy is throttling back. Way back. That’s the message in the near stall out of job growth last month. Job creation probably isn’t as bad as February’s disappointing numbers suggest — unusually poor weather played a role in limiting job growth to just 20,000 — but it is weaker than just a few months ago. Businesses are nervous, and sentiment is at risk of breaking if anything goes wrong.

And plenty could go wrong. A recession could materialize swiftly if businesses lose faith, and there is a good chance they will.

And when the next recession strikes, things are going to get very, very rough for U.S. consumers.

A consumer debt apocalypse is coming, and it is going to be incredibly painful.

Millennials Are More Than A Trillion Dollars In Debt, And Most Of Them Don’t Even Own A Home

When compared to a similar point in time, Millennials are deeper in debt than any other generation that has come before them. And the biggest reason why they are in so much debt may surprise you. We’ll get to that in a minute, but first let’s talk about the giant mountain of debt that Millennials have accumulated. According to the New York Fed, the total amount of debt that Millennials are carrying has risen by a whopping 22 percent in just the last five years…

New findings from the New York Federal Reserve reveal that millennials have now racked up over US$1 trillion of debt.

This troubling amount of debt, an increase of over 22% in just five years, is more than any other generation in history. This situation may leave you wondering how millennials ended up in such a sorry state.

Many young adults are absolutely drowning in debt, but the composition of that debt is quite different when compared to previous generations at a similar point in time.

Mortgage debt and credit card debt levels are far lower for Millennials, but the level of student loan debt is far, far higher…

While the debt levels accumulated by millennials eclipse those of the previous generation, Generation X, at a similar point in time, the complexion of the debt is very different.

According to a 2018 report from the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, mortgage debt is about 15% lower for millennials and credit card debt among millennials was about two-thirds that of Gen X.

However, student loan debt was over 300% greater.

Over the last 10 years, the total amount of student loan debt in the United States has more than doubled.

It is an absolutely enormous financial problem, and there doesn’t seem to be an easy solution. Some politicians on the left are pledging to make college education “free” in the United States, but they never seem to explain who is going to pay for that.

But what everyone can agree on is that student loan debt levels are wildly out of control. The following statistics come from Forbes…

The latest student loan debt statistics for 2019 show how serious the student loan debt crisis has become for borrowers across all demographics and age groups. There are more than 44 million borrowers who collectively owe $1.5 trillion in student loan debt in the U.S. alone. Student loan debt is now the second highest consumer debt category – behind only mortgage debt – and higher than both credit cards and auto loans. Borrowers in the Class of 2017, on average, owe $28,650, according to the Institute for College Access and Success.

What makes all of this even more depressing is the fact that the quality of “higher education” in the U.S. has gone down the toilet in recent years. For much more on this, please see my recent article entitled “50 Actual College Course Titles That Prove That America’s Universities Are Training Our College Students To Be Socialists”.

Our colleges and universities are not adequately preparing our young people for their future careers, but they are burdening them with gigantic financial obligations that will haunt many of them for decades to come.

We have a deeply broken system, and we desperately need a complete and total overhaul of our system of higher education.

Due to the fact that so many of them are swamped by student loan debt, the homeownership rate for Millennials is much, much lower than the homeownership rate for the generations that immediately preceded them. The following comes from CNBC…

The homeownership rate for those under 35 was just 36.5 percent in the last quarter of 2018, compared with 61 percent for those aged 35 to 44, and 70 percent for those aged 45 to 54, according to the U.S. Census. The millennial homeownership rate actually dropped in the fourth quarter compared with the third quarter, but was unchanged year over year.

This is one of the big reasons why “Housing Bubble 2” is beginning to burst. There are not enough Millennials buying homes, and it looks like things could be even worse for Generation Z.

If you are a young adult, I would encourage you to limit your exposure to student loan debt as much as possible, because the debt that you accumulate while in school can have very serious long-term implications that you may not even be considering right now.

50 Actual College Course Titles That Prove That America’s Universities Are Training Our College Students To Be Socialists

What in the world are they teaching to our young people? As you go through the list of college course titles below, I am sure that many of you will be completely shocked. Most parents assume that they are sending their children to college to get prepared for their future careers, but the truth is that a lot of our major colleges and universities have become little more than indoctrination centers for progressive thought. Our college students are literally being systematically trained to be socialists, and it is working. According to a brand new Harris Poll that was just released, 37.2 percent of all Americans “prefer living in a socialist country”. But for Millennials and Generation Z combined, that figure is 49.6 percent. That means that essentially half of our young adults want to be socialists, and that has enormous implications for the future of our society.

So how did this happen?

Well, the truth is that it really isn’t a mystery. Progressives have a stranglehold on higher education in the United States, and they are training future generations of leaders to think just like them.

Young America’s Foundation has just released their yearly report on the craziest college courses in America, and I pulled some examples out of that report that demonstrate how bad things have gotten.

The following are 50 actual college course titles that prove that America’s universities are literally training our college students to be socialists…

#1 Harvard University: FRSEMR 62O—Who is a Fascist? Culture and Politics on the Radical Right

#2 Princeton University: FRS 139—Marx in the 21st Century

#3 Yale University: AMST 469a—Progressivism: Theory and Practice

#4 University of Alabama: SW 351—Oppression & Social Justice

#5 University of Florida: WST 3349—Ecofeminism

#6 University of Florida: POT 4053—Great Political Thinkers: Machiavelli to Marx

#7 University of Kentucky: SOC 235—Inequalities in Society

#8 University of Missouri: PSYCH 4984—Promoting Social Justice, Diversity, and Inclusion Capstone

#9 Middlebury College: AMST 0269—Beyond Intersectionality: Developing Anti-Racist and Anti-Capitalist Feminisms

#10 Middlebury College: ECON 0405—Economics of Discrimination

#11 University of Minnesota: AFRO 1917—Inequality and the American Dream

#12 University of Minnesota: SOC 3507—Immigration to the United States: Beyond Walls

#13 University of Minnesota: CSCL 3405—Marx for Today

#14 University of Minnesota: CI 5137—Multicultural Gender-Fair Curriculum

#15 University of Iowa: GWSS 1005—Introduction to Social Justice

#16 University of Iowa: GWSS 2045—Working for Social Justice

#17 University of Illinois: GWS 337—Interrogating Masculinities

#18 Indiana University: GNDR-G 330—Looking Like a Feminist: Visual Culture and Critical Theory

#19 University of Maryland: WMST 300—Feminist Reconceptualizations of Knowledge

#20 University of Michigan: WOMENSTD 434—Eco/Queer/Feminist Art Practices

#21 Michigan State University: ANP 859—Gender, Justice, and Environmental Change: Methods and Application

#22 Ohio State University: WGSST 3200—Breaking the Law: An Introduction to Gender Justice

#23 Penn State University: AFAM 147—The Life and Thought of Malcolm X

#24 Purdue University: OLS 45400—Gender And Diversity In Management

#25 University of Wisconsin: HISTORY 346—Trans/Gender in Historical Perspective

#26 University of Wisconsin: GEN&WS 536—Queering Sexuality Education

#27 University of Wisconsin: AFRICAN 233—Global HipHop and Social Justice

#28 Williams College: AFR 342—Racial Capitalism

#29 Williams College: AMST 219—Understanding Social Class

#30 Williams College: ENVI 103—Global Warming and Environmental Change

#31 Amherst College: POSC 407—Contemporary Debates: Gender and Right-Wing Populism

#32 Amherst College: SWAG 351—From Birth to Death: LGBTQ Life Trajectories

#33 Swarthmore College: ENVS 043—Race, Gender, Class and Environment

#34 Swarthmore College: RELG 032—Queering God: Feminist and Queer Theology

#35 Swarthmore College: RELG 033—Queering the Bible

#36 Wellesley College: AMST 281—Rainbow Republic: American Queer Culture from Walt Whitman to Lady Gaga

#37 Wellesley College: SOC 205—Modern Families and Social Inequalities

#38 Carleton College: POSC 275—Black Radical Political Thought

#39 Pomona College: AFRI144A—Black Women Feminism(s) and Social Change

#40 Pomona College: GWS142—Queering Childhood

#41 Claremont McKenna College: GOVT113—Inequality, Politics, and Public Policy: Class, Race, and Gender

#42 Davidson College: SOC 356—Feminization of Poverty

#43 Butler University: RI379—The Problem of God

#44 Creighton University: ANT 178—Global Citizenship

#45 DePaul University: LGQ 338—Sexual Justice: Lesbians, Gays and the Law

#46 Georgetown University: WGST 250—The Breast: Image, Myth, Legend

#47 Providence College: SOC 418—Globalization and Social Justice

#48 St. John’s University: SOC 1170—Inequality; Race, Class and Gender

#49 University of Pennsylvania: RELS 110—American Jesus

#50 University of Pennsylvania: URBS 050—Womanism and Identity Politics in the Realm of Hip-Hop

This system of “higher education” has produced Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and millions of young radical leftists just like her.

And even though she has only been in Congress for a little more than two months, AOC is already one of the most popular politicians in America.

Unfortunately, she is tremendously disgusted with capitalism. In fact, according to NBC News she just told a large crowd that capitalism “cannot be redeemed”…

She dismissed concern about the government taking over corporations, which she said she doesn’t favor, by saying “corporations have already taken over our government.”

Instead, she said, her view of democratic socialism emphasizes making everything, politics and the economy, more democratic. And she said capitalism — which she defined as an ideology of “putting profit above of everything else in society” — “cannot be redeemed.”

Is this where our country is headed?

Is there any hope that we can return to the values that this nation was founded upon?

We better hope so, because those values helped us to become the greatest nation on the entire planet. I really like how Trish Regan made this point in her recent piece…

America is losing its way amid this socialism madness. The new alt-left’s mob-like insanity is spinning a lie– a lie that capitalism is bad and that capitalists are bad.

Capitalism has made us what and who we are as an economy and as a nation.

Alexander Hamilton said during the founding years of our great republic:

“True liberty, by protecting the exertions and talents of industry, and securing to them their justly acquired fruits, tends more powerfully than any other cause to augment the mass of national wealth and to produce the mischiefs of opulence.” – Alexander Hamilton, “Defense of the Funding System,” July 1795, in Papers of Alexander Hamilton, Vol. 19, p. 32.

I very much agree with her. As a nation, we are definitely losing our way.

Hopefully we can find our way back, because the path that we are currently on doesn’t lead anywhere good.

Middle Class Erosion: 33 Million Americans Will Not Travel During The Holidays Because They Can’t Afford To Do So

We have repeatedly been told that the U.S. economy is “booming”, but meanwhile the middle class in the United States continues to be hollowed out. The financial bubbles that the Federal Reserve has created have been a great blessing for those at the very top of the economic pyramid, but most of the country is still deeply struggling. According to one survey, 78 percent of all full-time workers in the U.S. live paycheck to paycheck, and that doesn’t even include part-time workers or those that are unemployed. We have also been told that unemployment is “low”, but the real numbers tell us that there are more working age Americans without a job in 2018 than there was at any point during the last recession. Most of the people that my wife and I know are struggling, and I continually get emails from readers all over the country that are struggling. The sad truth is that the middle class is slowly but surely dying, and more people are falling into poverty with each passing day.

And we got more evidence of this fact on Tuesday. According to one new survey, 33 million Americans will not travel during the holiday season because they simply cannot afford to do so…

Wallet Hub’s Winter Travel Survey has revealed a disturbing trend: 33 million Americans won’t travel this winter because they can’t afford it.

I have been warning about the effect that rising interest rates would have on the economy, and rising rates are being blamed for this travel slowdown. The following comes from MSN…

However, Americans are still feeling the pinch of the pocketbook—part of that has to do with rising interest rates.

“U.S. consumers will be shelling out billions of dollars in extra charges they otherwise could be spending on other things such as travel,” said Mark A. Bonn, director of the resort and vacation rental management program at Florida State University. “This makes it difficult to travel now, let alone after the holiday spending has ended.”

But of course the truth is that most Americans were deeply struggling long before interest rates started to rise.

Those of us in our prime working years can try to work even harder to make ends meet, but when you are elderly and on a fixed income, there is little that can be done.

According to the Sacramento Bee, 9 million elderly Americans across the country “can’t afford to eat”, and in one of their recent articles they featured the plight of 71-year-old Floridian Janet Burke…

Burke is one of the nearly 9 million elderly people at risk of hunger in the United States. In Florida, with the highest percentage of people 60 and older, more than 750,000 elderly need food assistance, according to experts.

The problems confronting the elderly have become one of the hot topics for candidates this election year. Candidates in South Florida have pointed to the needs of the elderly as one of the key concerns voiced by voters.

More than 100 million Americans receive assistance from the government each month, but many citizens do not believe in receiving any help and so they just quietly suffer as they search for a way to make things better.

Today, I would like to share with you a testimony from someone that has been there. My good friend Daisy Luther knows what it is like to barely survive from month to month, and the way that she described those struggles in one of her most recent articles was extremely poignant…

Let’s talk about poverty.

I don’t mean the kind you’re talking about when your friends invite you to go shopping or for a night out and you say, “No, I can’t. I’m poor right now.”

I don’t mean the situation when you’d like to get a nicer car but decide you should just stick to the one you have because you don’t have a few thousand for a down payment.

I don’t mean the scene at the grocery store when you decide to get ground beef instead of steak.

I’m talking about when you have already done the weird mismatched meals from your pantry that are made up of cooked rice, stale crackers, and a can of peaches, and you’ve moved on to wondering what on earth you’re going to feed your kids.

Or when you get an eviction notice for non-payment of rent, a shut-off notice for your utilities, and a repo notice for your car and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about any of those notices because there IS NO MONEY.

If you’ve never been this level of broke, I’m very glad.

I have been this broke. I know that it is soul-destroying when no matter how hard you work, how many part-time jobs you squeeze in, and how much you cut, you simply don’t make enough money to survive in the world today.

If the U.S. economy really is “booming”, then why are millions upon millions of American families struggling like this?

Sadly, it is because the truth is that the U.S. economy is not “booming”, and we continue to get more indications that another major economic downturn is imminent.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Blueprints have been proposed that would mean much better days ahead for America, but most Americans seem quite content with the status quo.

Most Americans seem to want corrupt politicians in Washington, a Federal Reserve system that is bankrupting future generations, an exploding national debt, a deeply oppressive system of taxation and a bloated national government that is becoming more monstrous with each passing day.

In this day and age, “liberty” and “freedom” are seen as antiquated concepts that are standing in the way of “progress”, and more government always seems to be the “solution” that is proposed whenever any crisis arises.

If we truly want to turn America around, we need to return to the values and the principles that once made this nation so great, and right now that simply is not happening…

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is publisher of The Most Important News and the author of four books including The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters.

The Last Days Warrior Summit is the premier online event of 2018 for Christians, Conservatives and Patriots. It is a premium-members only international event that will empower and equip you with the knowledge and tools that you need as global events begin to escalate dramatically. The speaker list includes Michael Snyder, Mike Adams, Dave Daubenmire, Ray Gano, Dr. Daniel Daves, Gary Kah, Justus Knight, Doug Krieger, Lyn Leahz, Laura Maxwell and many more. Full summit access will begin on October 25th, and if you would like to register for this unprecedented event you can do so right here.

The American Dream Is Getting Smaller, And The Reason Why Is Painfully Obvious…

Over the past decade, an unprecedented stock market boom has created thousands upon thousands of new millionaires, and yet the middle class in America has continued to shrink. How is that even possible? At one time the United States had the largest and most vibrant middle class in the history of the planet, but now the gap between the wealthy and the poor is the largest that it has been since the 1920s. Our economy has been creating lots of new millionaires, but at the exact same time we have seen homelessness spiral out of control in our major cities. Today, being part of the middle class is like playing a really bizarre game of musical chairs. Each month when the music stops playing, those of us still in the middle class desperately hope that we are not among the ones that slip out of the middle class and into poverty. Well over 100 million Americans receive money or benefits from the federal government each month, and that includes approximately 40 percent of all families with children. We are losing our ability to take care of ourselves, and that has frightening implications for the future of our society.

One of the primary reasons why our system doesn’t work for everyone is because virtually everything has been financialized. In other words, from the cradle to the grave the entire system has been designed to get you into debt so that the fruits of your labor can be funneled to the top of the pyramid and make somebody else wealthier. The following comes from an excellent Marketwatch article entitled “The American Dream is getting smaller”…

More worrying, perhaps: 33% of those surveyed said they think that dream is disappearing. Why? They have too much debt. “Americans believe financial security is at the core of the American Dream, but it is alarming that so many think it is beyond their reach,” said Mike Fanning, head of MassMutual U.S.

Almost everyone that will read this article will have debt. In America today, we are trained to go into debt for just about everything.

If you want a college education, you go into debt.

If you want a vehicle, you go into debt.

If you want a home, you go into debt.

If you want that nice new pair of shoes, you don’t have to wait for it. Just go into more debt.

As a result, most Americans are currently up to their necks in red ink…

Some 64% of those surveyed said they have a mortgage, 56% said they had credit-card debt and 26% said they have student-loan debt. Many surveyed said they don’t feel financially secure. More than a quarter said they wish they had better control of their finances.

You would have thought that we would have learned from the very hard lessons that the crisis of 2008 taught us.

But instead, we have been on the greatest debt binge in American history in recent years. Here is more from the Marketwatch article…

It makes sense that debt is on Americans’ minds. Collectively, Americans have more than $1 trillion in credit-card debt, according to the Federal Reserve. They have another $1.5 trillion in student loans, up from $1.1 trillion in 2013. Motor vehicle loans are now topping $1.1 trillion, up from $878.5 billion in 2013. And they have another nearly $15 trillion in mortgage debt outstanding.

That is one huge pile of debt.

We criticize the federal government for running up 21 trillion dollars in debt, and rightly so, but American consumers have been almost as irresponsible on an individual basis.

As long as you are drowning in debt, you will never become wealthy. In order to build wealth, you have got to spend less than you earn, but most Americans never learn basic fundamentals such as this in our rapidly failing system of public education.

Many Americans long to become financially independent, but they don’t understand that our system is rigged against them. The entire game is all about keeping consumers on that debt wheel endlessly chasing that piece of proverbial cheese until it is too late.

Getting out of debt is one of the biggest steps that you can take to give yourself more freedom, and hopefully this article will inspire many to do just that.

To end this article today, I would like to share 14 facts about how the middle class in America is shrinking that I shared in a previous article…

#1 78 million Americans are participating in the “gig economy” because full-time jobs just don’t pay enough to make ends meet these days.

#2 In 2011, the average home price was 3.56 times the average yearly salary in the United States. But by the time 2017 was finished, the average home price was 4.73 times the average yearly salary in the United States.

#3 In 1980, the average American worker’s debt was 1.96 times larger than his or her monthly salary. Today, that number has ballooned to 5.00.

#4 In the United States today, 66 percent of all jobs pay less than 20 dollars an hour.

#5 102 million working age Americans do not have a job right now. That number is higher than it was at any point during the last recession.

#6 Earnings for low-skill jobs have stayed very flat for the last 40 years.

#7 Americans have been spending more money than they make for 28 months in a row.

#8 In the United States today, the average young adult with student loan debt has a negative net worth.

#9 At this point, the average American household is nearly $140,000 in debt.

#10 Poverty rates in U.S. suburbs “have increased by 50 percent since 1990”.

#11 Almost 51 million U.S. households “can’t afford basics like rent and food”.

#12 The bottom 40 percent of all U.S. households bring home just 11.4 percent of all income.

#13 According to the Federal Reserve, 4 out of 10 Americans do not have enough money to cover an unexpected $400 expense without borrowing the money or selling something they own.

#14 22 percent of all Americans cannot pay all of their bills in a typical month.

This article originally appeared on The Economic Collapse Blog. About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is publisher of The Most Important News and the author of four books including The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters.

11 Rage-Inducing Facts About America’s Wildly Out Of Control Student Loan Debt Bubble

Higher education has become one of the biggest money-making scams in America. We tell all of our young people that if they want to have a bright future, they must go to college. This message is relentlessly pounded into their heads for their first 18 years, and so by the time high school graduation rolls around for many of them it would be unthinkable to do anything else. And instead of doing a cost/benefit analysis on various schools, we tell our young people to go to the best college that they can possibly get into and to not worry about what it will cost. We assure them that a great job will be there after they graduate and that great job will allow them to easily pay off any student loans that they have accumulated. Of course most college graduates don’t end up getting great jobs, but many of them do end up being financially crippled for decades by student loan debt.

In all of American history, we have never seen anything quite like this student loan debt bubble. Since 2007, the total amount of student loan debt in America has nearly tripled.

Let me repeat that again.

Since 2007, the total amount of student loan debt in America has nearly tripled.

But of course the quality of college education has not tripled over that time. Instead, it has progressively gotten worse. At this point most college courses have been so “dumbed down” that the family pet could pass them. If you would like to look into this more, you can find a list of 37 of the most idiotic college courses in America right here.

These days, most college courses do not require any actual writing. Instead, your performance is judged by a series of “tests” consisting of multiple choice, fill in the blank, and true/false questions. And the questions are usually ridiculously easy, because most of our high school graduates need to take remedial courses in basic skills when they get to college.

I spent eight years at public universities, and the quality of education that I received was a joke, and that was many years ago. Now the quality of education has deteriorated so dramatically that most college degrees are essentially worthless from a practical standpoint, but for many professions you still need that “piece of paper” in order to “qualify” for certain jobs.

So the scam continues, and thousands upon thousands of “administrators”, “diversity specialists”, “career counselors” and “college presidents” are taking home massively bloated salaries at our expense. Beautiful new lecture halls, residential complexes and sports stadiums are going up at colleges and universities all over the country, and textbook publishers are laughing all the way to the bank.

If everything but the basics was stripped away, the cost of actually delivering a college education to students would be quite low. In fact, most learning could be done over the Internet.

But instead, the “college education industry” has convinced all of us that we desperately need their services, and that we shouldn’t care about the price.

Of course many of our young people are filled with regret once they get out into the real world and they realize that student loan debt is going to financially cripple them for the rest of their lives.

At this moment, America is drowning in more student loan debt than ever before. The following are 11 rage-inducing facts about America’s wildly out of control student loan debt bubble…

#1 The student loan debt bubble has now grown to 1.4 trillion dollars.

#2 In 2007, the total amount of student loan debt in the U.S. was just 545 billion dollars.

#3 Over the previous ten years, student loan debt has grown by a staggering 176 percent.

#4 Americans now owe more on their student loans than they do on their credit cards.

#5 In 2003, student loan debt accounted for just 3.3 percent of all household debt. Today, that number has grown to 10.5 percent.

#6 The current student loan 90-day delinquency rate is 11.2 percent.

#7 30 percent of all student loans in the United States are either in “deferment” or “forbearance”. The most common reason a loan is placed into one of those categories is because the borrower cannot pay.

#8 It is being projected that a whopping 40 percent all student loan borrowers will default on their loans by 2023.

#9 From 2007 through 2017, “college tuition costs jumped 63 percent, school housing surged 51 percent and the price of textbooks by 88 percent.”

#10 In 2001, 18.6 percent of all U.S. households led by someone in the 18 to 34 age bracket were carrying household debt. Today, that number has jumped to 44.8 percent.

#11 Each year, more than a million Americans default on their student loans.

Professors at some colleges now allow students to pick their own grades

(The College Fix) A literature class at Davidson College this fall will use “contract grading,” allowing students to pick ahead of time their grade for the class and the workload they need to complete to earn it.

The offer is posed by Professor Melissa Gonzalez for her Introduction to Spanish Literatures and Cultures course, SPA 270, at the private liberal arts college in Davidson, North Carolina.

She is one of several professors across the nation who allow this pick-your-own grade method, billed as a way to eliminate the student-professor power differential and give students control of their education.

Vampires, Zombies And ‘Hooking Up’: 37 Examples Of Real College Courses That Are Almost Too Crazy To Believe

You just can’t make this stuff up. All over America we push our young people to get good grades so that they can get “a college education”, but then once they get through college many of our young people are completely unequipped to deal with the real world. Personally, I spent eight years at public universities, and I can tell you that the quality of education that our college students are receiving is a complete joke. Especially on the undergraduate level, almost all testing consists of either true/false, multiple choice or fill in the blank questions. Students learn very few useful skills at our “institutions of higher learning”, and many of them leave school barely even able to function in society.

I am about to share with you a list of 37 of the most ridiculous courses that are currently being offered at major U.S. colleges and universities today. This information comes from a brand new report that was just put out by Young America’s Foundation, and it is tempting to chuckle as you read through what they have compiled, but the truth is that what is happening to our system of higher learning is not a laughing matter. The following is a short excerpt from the report…

As tuition rates increase and students face increasing levels of college-related debt, the value and quality of education plummets. Rather than churning out the next generation of American leaders, so-called “premiere” institutions graduate class after class of adults who are unable to tolerate opposing viewpoints.

Many of the courses listed in the following pages are comical in their titles and descriptions, but the situation unfolding on America’s campuses is hardly a laughing matter. Beyond the inane topics, these classes advance a liberal agenda, malign conservatives, and shut out ideological diversity.

Since 1995, Young America’s Foundation has released “Comedy and Tragedy” to document the intellectual abuse and flat-out indoctrination happening by way of the appalling curriculum at our country’s most (so-called) prestigious institutions of higher education.

For a long time I have been describing our colleges and universities as “indoctrination centers”, and most parents have absolutely no idea what is really going on at our “institutions of higher education”. The following are 37 examples of real college courses that are almost too crazy to believe…

#1 MCL 135: Vampires: Evolution of a Sexy Monster (University of Kentucky)

#2 HIST 336: Saints, Witches, and Madwomen (University of Nebraska)

#3 WOMGEN 1225: Leaning In, Hooking Up (Harvard University)

#4 SOAN 261: Campus Sex in the Digital Age (Washington & Lee University)

#5 GSWS 434: The Politics of Ugly (University of Pennsylvania)

#6 AMS 398: FAT: The F-Word and the Public Body (Princeton University)

#7 GWS 462: Hip Hop Feminism (University of Illinois)

#8 GWS 255: Queer Lives, Queer Politics (University of Illinois)

#9 SOC 388: Marriage in the Age of Trump (Davidson College)

#10 HISTORY 330-0: Medieval Sexuality (Northwestern University)

#11 AI 318: Zombies: Modern Myths, Race, and Capitalism (DePaul University)

#12 SOCI 332: Alternative Genders (Texas A&M University)

#13 AMCULT 103: Drag in America (University of Michigan)

#14 AMCULT 334: Race, Gender, Sexuality and U.S. Culture in Video Games (University of Michigan)

#15 AMCULT 411: Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music (University of Michigan)

#16 WGS 255: Deconstructing the Diva (DePaul University)

#17 GLBT 3404: Transnational Sexualities (University of Minnesota)

#18 GSFS 0208: Unruly Bodies: Black Womanhood in Popular Culture (Middlebury College)

#19 MC 2002: Media, Sport and Culture: Amplifying the Sporting-Ism (Louisiana State University)

#20 THEO 025: The Bible and Horror (Georgetown University)

#21 SOAS 3500: Queerness in South Asian Literature and Cinema (University of Iowa)

#22 AADS 2204: Black Women and the Politics of Blackness and Beauty (Vanderbilt University)

#23 AFR 334: Radical Theories of Political Struggle: Anti-Black Racism and the Obama Administration (Williams College)

#24 COLT 0510F: Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, The Men and the Myths (Brown University)

#25 HIST 379: Queering Colonialism (Washington & Lee University)

#26 AMST 274: Rainbow Cowboys (and Girls): Gender, Race, Class, and Sexuality in Westerns (Wellesley College)

#27 AFA 4430: Black Lives Matter (University of Florida)

#28 RELI GU 4355: The African American Prophetic Political Tradition from David Walker to Barack Obama (Columbia University)

#29 RELG 032: Queering God: Feminist and Queer Theology (Swarthmore College)

#30 RELG 033: Queering the Bible (Swarthmore College)

#31 ENVS 042: Ecofeminism (Swarthmore College)

#32 FRSEMR 61D: Trying Socrates in the Age of Trump (Harvard University)

#33 GSWS 2219: Deconstructing Masculinities (Bowdoin College)

#34 GSFS 0325: American Misogyny (Middlebury College)

#35 BLSTU 3850: Gender, Hip Hop, and the Politics of Representation (University of Missouri)

#36 AAS 301: Black to the Future: Science, Fiction, and Society (Princeton University)

#37 SOC 105: Race, Religion, & Donald Trump (Davidson College)

As a bonus, let me share with you 20 more crazy college courses that have been previously offered at colleges and universities around the nation.

This list comes from one of my previous articles, and even though most of these courses are no longer being offered, they still serve as examples of how pathetic our system of “higher education” has truly become in recent years…

1. “What If Harry Potter Is Real?” (Appalachian State University) – This course will engage students with questions about the very nature of history. Who decides what history is? Who decides how it is used or mis-used? How does this use or misuse affect us? How can the historical imagination inform literature and fantasy? How can fantasy reshape how we look at history? The Harry Potter novels and films are fertile ground for exploring all of these deeper questions. By looking at the actual geography of the novels, real and imagined historical events portrayed in the novels, the reactions of scholars in all the social sciences to the novels, and the world-wide frenzy inspired by them, students will examine issues of race, class, gender, time, place, the uses of space and movement, the role of multiculturalism in history as well as how to read a novel and how to read scholarly essays to get the most out of them.

2. “God, Sex, Chocolate: Desire and the Spiritual Path” (UC San Diego) – Who shapes our desire? Who suffers for it? Do we control our desire or does desire control us? When we yield to desire, do we become more fully ourselves or must we deny it to find an authentic identity beneath? How have religious & philosophical approaches dealt with the problem of desire?

3. “GaGa for Gaga: Sex, Gender, and Identity” (The University Of Virginia) – In Graduate Arts & Sciences student Christa Romanosky’s ongoing ENWR 1510 class, “GaGa for Gaga: Sex, Gender, and Identity,” students analyze how the musician pushes social boundaries with her work. For this introductory course to argumentative essay writing, Romanosky chose the Lady Gaga theme to establish an engaging framework for critical analysis.

4. “Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame” (The University Of South Carolina) – Lady Gaga may not have much class but now there is a class on her. The University of South Carolina is offering a class called Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame. Mathieu Deflem, the professor teaching the course describes it as aiming to “unravel some of the sociologically relevant dimensions of the fame of Lady Gaga with respect to her music, videos, fashion, and other artistic endeavours.”

5. “Philosophy And Star Trek” (Georgetown) – Star Trek is very philosophical. What better way, then, to learn philosophy, than to watch Star Trek, read philosophy, and hash it all out in class? That’s the plan. This course is basically an introduction to certain topics in metaphysics and epistemology philosophy, centered around major philosophical questions that come up again and again in Star Trek. In conjunction with watching Star Trek, we will read excerpts from the writings of great philosophers, extract key concepts and arguments and then analyze those arguments.

6. “Invented Languages: Klingon and Beyond” (The University Of Texas) – Why would anyone want to learn Klingon?

7. “The Science Of Superheroes” (UC Irvine) – Have you ever wondered if Superman could really bend steel bars? Would a “gamma ray” accident turn you into the Hulk? What is a “spidey-sense”? And just who did think of all these superheroes and their powers? In this seminar, we discuss the science (or lack of science) behind many of the most famous superheroes. Even more amazing, we will discuss what kind of superheroes might be imagined using our current scientific understanding.

8. “Learning From YouTube” (Pitzer College) – About 35 students meet in a classroom but work mostly online, where they view YouTube content and post their comments. Class lessons also are posted and students are encouraged to post videos. One class member, for instance, posted a 1:36-minute video of himself juggling.

9. “Arguing with Judge Judy” (UC Berkeley) – TV “Judge” shows have become extremely popular in the last 3-5 years. A fascinating aspect of these shows from a rhetorical point of view is the number of arguments made by the litigants that are utterly illogical, or perversions of standard logic, and yet are used over and over again. For example, when asked “Did you hit the plaintiff?” respondents often say, “If I woulda hit him, he’d be dead!” This reply avoids answering “yes” or “no” by presenting a perverted form of the logical strategy called “a fortiori” argument [“from the stronger”] in Latin. The seminar will be concerned with identifying such apparently popular logical fallacies on “Judge Judy” and “The People’s Court” and discussing why such strategies are so widespread. It is NOT a course about law or “legal reasoning.” Students who are interested in logic, argument, TV, and American popular culture will probably be interested in this course. I emphasize that it is NOT about the application of law or the operations of the court system in general.

10. “Elvis As Anthology” (The University Of Iowa) – The class, “Elvis as Anthology,” focuses on Presley’s relationship to African American history, social change, and aesthetics. It focuses not just on Elvis, but on other artists who inspired him and whom he inspired.

11. “The Feminist Critique Of Christianity” (The University Of Pennsylvania) – An overview of the past decades of feminist scholarship about Christian and post-Christian historians and theologians who offer a feminist perspective on traditional Christian theology and practice. This course is a critical overview of this material, presented with a summary of Christian biblical studies, history and theology, and with a special interest in constructive attempts at creating a spiritual tradition with women’s experience at the center.

12. “Zombies In Popular Media” (Columbia College) – This course explores the history, significance, and representation of the zombie as a figure in horror and fantasy texts. Instruction follows an intense schedule, using critical theory and source media (literature, comics, and films) to spur discussion and exploration of the figure’s many incarnations. Daily assignments focus on reflection and commentary, while final projects foster thoughtful connections between student disciplines and the figure of the zombie.

13. “Far Side Entomology” (Oregon State) – For the last 20 years, a scientist at Oregon State University has used Gary Larson’s cartoons as a teaching tool. The result has been a generation of students learning — and laughing — about insects.

14. “Interrogating Gender: Centuries of Dramatic Cross-Dressing” (Swarthmore) – Do clothes make the man? Or the woman? Do men make better women? Or women better men? Is gender a costume we put on and take off? Are we really all always in drag? Does gender-bending lead to transcendence or chaos? These questions and their ramifications for liminalities of race, nationality and sexuality will be our focus in a course that examines dramatic works from The Bacchae to M. Butterfly.

15. “Oh, Look, a Chicken!” Embracing Distraction as a Way of Knowing (Belmont University) – Students must write papers using their personal research on the five senses. Entsminger reads aloud illustrated books The Simple People and Toby’s Toe to teach lessons about what to value by being alive. Students listen to music while doodling in class. Another project requires students to put themselves in situations where they will be distracted and write a reflection tracking how they got back to their original intent.

16. “The Textual Appeal of Tupac Shakur” (University of Washington) – The UW is not the first college with a class dedicated to Shakur — classes on the rapper have been offered at the University of California Berkeley and Harvard — but it is the first to relate Shakur’s work to literature.

17. “Cyberporn And Society” (State University of New York at Buffalo) – Undergraduates taking Cyberporn and Society at the State University of New York at Buffalo survey Internet porn sites.

18. “Sport For The Spectator” (The Ohio State University) – Develop an appreciation of sport as a spectacle, social event, recreational pursuit, business, and entertainment. Develop the ability to identify issues that affect the sport and spectator behavior.

19. “Getting Dressed” (Princeton) – Jenna Weissman Joselit looks over the roomful of freshmen in front of her and asks them to perform a warm-up exercise: Chart the major moments of your lives through clothes. “If you pop open your closet, can you recall your lives?” she posits on the first day of the freshman seminar “Getting Dressed.”

20. “How To Watch Television” (Montclair) – This course, open to both broadcasting majors and non-majors, is about analyzing television in the ways and to the extent to which it needs to be understood by its audience. The aim is for students to critically evaluate the role and impact of television in their lives as well as in the life of the culture. The means to achieve this aim is an approach that combines media theory and criticism with media education.

I have to admit that “Oh, Look, a Chicken!” is my all-time favorite. I wish that had been offered at my university when I was an undergraduate.

But seriously – what in the world has happened to our system of education?

Our society is rotting and decaying in so many ways, and our colleges and universities are prime examples. If we don’t get our act together, it is hard to see how our country is going to have any sort of a positive future.

Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

‘Sanctuary campus’ protests target Trump immigration policies

At universities across the United States, students say they’re walking out on Wednesday.

Their aim: Pressuring officials to make their school a “sanctuary campus” that limits cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

The protests come a week after the election of Donald Trump, who’s said deporting millions of undocumented immigrants will be a top priority once he takes office.

(Read the rest of the story here…)

‘Tolerant’ educators exile Trump voters from campus

The response to the shock has been to turn campuses into kindergarten. The University of Michigan Law School announced a ”post-election self-care” event with “food” and “play,” including “coloring sheets, play dough (sic), positive card-making, Legos and bubbles with your fellow law students.” (Embarrassed by the attention, UM Law scrubbed the announcement from its website, perhaps concerned that people would wonder whether its graduates would require Legos and bubbles in the event of stressful litigation.)

Stanford emailed its students and faculty that psychological counseling was available for those experiencing “uncertainty, anger, anxiety and/or fear” following the election. So did the University of Michigan’s Flint campus.

Meanwhile, even the Ivy League wasn’t immune, with the University of Pennsylvania (Trump’s alma mater) creating a post-election safe space with puppies and coloring books…

(Read the rest of the story here…)

America’s Colleges Have Become Political Correctness Indoctrination Centers

Most parents assume that when they send their kids to college that they will receive training which will prepare them for a lifetime of employment. Sadly, the truth is that very little time is actually spent imparting practical skills to students at most of America’s colleges. Instead, an extraordinary amount of classroom time is spent telling students what they should think and what they should believe. At this point, most institutions of “higher learning” in this country have been transformed into political correctness indoctrination centers. There is a reason why college towns have a reputation for being extremely liberal. The truth is that they are bastions for “progressive” thought. Each and every day, millions of young adults all across America are literally being systematically brainwashed. In case you are wondering, I know what I am talking about. I spent eight years getting three degrees at public universities. And it doesn’t even really matter what area of the country you attend school. The “education” that students are receiving at schools in very liberal states is virtually the same as the “education” that students are receiving at schools in very conservative states. Our young adults represent the future of this nation, and they are receiving a level of indoctrination that is so comprehensive that it would make Joseph Goebbels proud.

Colleges and universities all across this nation spend an extraordinary amount of time and effort to alter the belief systems of their students. This even extends to teaching them what words are “appropriate” to use and which words are not. For example, just check out what is happening at the University of Michigan…

Dozens of posters plastered across the University of Michigan caution students not to say things that might hurt others’ feelings, part of a new “Inclusive Language Campaign” at the state’s flagship public university that cost $16,000 to implement.

Words declared unacceptable through the campaign include “crazy,” “insane,” “retarded,” “gay,” “tranny,” “gypped,” “illegal alien,” “fag,” “ghetto” and “raghead.” Phrases such as “I want to die” and “that test raped me” are also verboten.

But this isn’t just an advertising campaign. In fact, University of Michigan students are actually being asked to sign a pledge that they will use “inclusive language” from now on…

Students have been asked to sign a pledge to “use inclusive language” and to help their peers “understand the importance of using inclusive language,” according to campaign materials.

If you think that this is just an isolated incident, you would be wrong.

One survey of 409 colleges conducted in 2013 discovered that 62 percent of them have “speech codes” that “severely departed from First Amendment standards”.

Meanwhile, these “institutions of higher learning” are failing miserably at what is supposedly their primary task.

Today, the average college freshman reads at a 7th grade level. In a desperate attempt to get as many students through the system as possible, most college courses have been so “dumbed down” that the family dog could pass them.

If only parents knew. The amount of useful knowledge that their kids are actually receiving is very small. But most parents are utterly clueless and they just keep writing huge tuition checks semester after semester.

It would be hard to describe how utterly useless some of these college courses are. For instance, there is one college in upstate New York that is offering a course entitled “The Sociology of Miley Cyrus: Race, Class, Gender and Media“.

Do you think that is going to prepare your child for the real world?

And here is a list of some other actual college courses that have been taught at U.S. colleges in recent years…

-“What If Harry Potter Is Real?”

-“Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame”

-“Philosophy And Star Trek”

-“Learning From YouTube”

-“How To Watch Television”

-“Oh, Look, a Chicken!”

Are you starting to get the picture?

No wonder so many students “graduate from college” but are still dumb as a rock.

The following are some numbers about the quality of college education in the United States that come from an article that appeared in USA Today…

-“After two years in college, 45% of students showed no significant gains in learning; after four years, 36% showed little change.”

-“Students also spent 50% less time studying compared with students a few decades ago”

-“35% of students report spending five or fewer hours per week studying alone.”

-“50% said they never took a class in a typical semester where they wrote more than 20 pages”

-“32% never took a course in a typical semester where they read more than 40 pages per week.”

But even with so little being demanded of them, most college students in the United States still cannot manage to graduate from school on time.

Federal statistics show that only 36 percent of all full-time students receive a bachelor’s degree within four years, and only 77 percent of all full-time students have earned a degree by the end of six years.

Instead of studying hard, most college students treat college like one giant party.

No wonder so many of them want to extend it for another year or two or three.

And when these kids get away from their parents, their morality tends to go into the toilet.

For example, just check out what one survey discovered about male college students…

A third of male students questioned in a survey admitted they would rape a woman if they could get away with it.

The study found that 31.7 per cent of the mostly white American participants questioned admitted they would force a woman to have sex in a ‘consequence-free situation’.

Academics quizzed volunteers on how they would act in a situation where they could have sex with a woman against her will ‘if nobody would ever know there wouldn’t be any consequences’.

These are the leaders of tomorrow?

Are you kidding me?

Our system of college education is deeply, deeply broken. Like I stated above, I speak from experience. I earned three degrees from “good schools”, and I saw firsthand how pathetic the system is.

So what do you think?

Is there any way to fix our institutions of higher learning?

Please feel free to share what you think by posting a comment below…

(Originally published on End of the American Dream)

Revealed: The top U.S. universities where broke students are hooking up with rich sugar daddies to pay their tuition

60 percent of America’s 21 million university students will graduate with an average debt of $27,300 – but not those who choose to romance their way out of a financial burden.

An increasing number of students are turning to rich benefactors, or sugar daddies, to fund their education – with the University of Texas topping the list of signups last year.

Sugar daddy dating site Seekingarrangement.com reports that it had 425 new sign-ups from the University of Texas in 2014.

(Read the rest of the story here…)

The average college freshman in America reads at a 7th grade level

The average U.S. college freshman reads at a seventh grade level, according to an educational assessment report.

“We are spending billions of dollars trying to send students to college and maintain them there when, on average, they read at about the grade 6 or 7 level, according to Renaissance Learning’s latest report on what American students in grades 9-12 read, whether assigned or chosen,” said education expert Dr. Sandra Stotsky.

Stotsky, a Professor Emerita at the University of Arkansas, served on the Common Core Validation Committee in 2009-10, during which she called the standards “inferior.” She claimed the Common Core left out the very standards needed to prepare students for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) careers.

(Read the rest of the story here…)

This College Actually Lets Students Minor in Craft Beer

Some college graduates might joke they minored in beer studies. But that’s actually the case for a new group of students at Paul Smith’s College in upstate New York.

This month, the college announced it would start offering a craft-brewing minor to all of its students. But unlike traditional brewing programs, most of these courses get into the business of craft beer—how to market, distribute, and promote the increasingly popular adult beverage.

Joe Conto, the director of the Hospitality, Resort and Tourism Management Program at Paul Smith’s, is the man behind the new academic option. A homebrewer himself (he’s dabbled with pale ales and a Saison), Conto found himself drawn to the minor through the growing popularity of craft beer nationwide and through the food courses he was already teaching.

“Beer just began to take up more and more of the semester. It became more and more interesting to the students, certainly, but to me as well,” Conto says. “And then I realized, holy cow I could teach a course just on beer. And then I said, ‘Well, really, I could teach a whole major on beer.’ And then I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just settle for a minor.’ ”

(Read the rest of the story here…)

U.S. Colleges See Gay Students As Growth Market

Growing up as a fundamentalist Christian in Austin, Texas, Josh Bergeleen says he “didn’t know that gay was a thing.”

That changed when he went off to college at Emory University in Atlanta, and he came out at 18, shortly after beginning his freshman year. Four years later, Bergeleen credits Emory’s welcoming environment for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students as a key factor not only in his discovering his own identity, but in helping him stay on track to graduate from the business school this year.

“I wouldn’t have been able to continue if not for their support,” Bergeleen says. At one particularly rough point after coming out, Bergeleen stopped talking to his own family and says Emory’s LGBT student support office “made me feel comfortable with myself.”

(Read the rest of the story here…)