Use That Hope And Change To Pay Those Loans

Unemployment among college graduates is higher than the national average:

In the [latest issue of Consumer Reports] I received today, the first thing that I noticed was how student debt can have an impact on the entire economy. That’s pretty much common knowledge but one large factoid that stood out in one of the “Did you know?” boxes was “9.1 %: That’s the unemployment rate for young college graduates in 2010, the highest annual rate on record, says “The Institute for College Access & Success.” 9.1% is a higher unemployment rate than the overall rate.

Naturally, news industry polling shows that college-age kids still support Obama.

Must be all that contraception.

30 thoughts on “Use That Hope And Change To Pay Those Loans

  1. I would love to see a breakdown of that 9.1%. There are an awful lot of dumb college grads out there these days — and that has nothing to do with politics. If you can’t pull a coin out of your pocket and write one paragraph about it, complete with a topic sentence, exposition, and a concluding sentence, you’ve got no business calling yourself a college graduate.

  2. We have a ton of openings over at the Department of Evil and Darkness due to the fact that all those Islamic radicals have left and are now taking over governments in Egypt. They have learned well. All we ask of the kids is that you sign your soul over to us, of course that is SOP when applying for any job in DC that is a branch of the US government.

  3. Good point, Terry.

    On Fox this morning, Doocy was talking to a guy about the liberal indoctirnation taking place on college campuses, specifically to this report was…wait for it…UC Berkeley! He found that English classes do not require literature study or any of the usual curriculum associated with those courses, Poli Sci courses do not require study of principles of governement, etc. A real scary situation.

  4. A soul can be purchased, P of D. The rate is traditionally determined by the cost-per-credit. Humanities degrees are utterly, completely, unabashedly without value these days. They produce journalists.

  5. Have you seen america’s credit today TBS? We are so busy repossessing souls that the paperwork takes up a couple of spare rooms right now.

  6. and yes we have a lot of people here that have humanity degrees. We would hire the gender studies majors but they are so dumb they can’t even be counted on to do the simplest of tasks. And even if we did they would quit after a day, our sexual harassment policy is different here. We encourage and demand it be done.

  7. It will be a generation before the Humanities are fixed. It will require today’s parents of 30-year-olds still living at home to demand from colleges that they start producing pragmatic, marketable fields of study.

    Q: What did the Humanities graduate say to the engineering graduate?
    A: Would you like fries with that, sir?

  8. As someone who has 2 college degrees but was unemployed at one point…..a big thing I found out that a potential employer will not hire you based on your education. You could be ruled out if you don’t have a degree or the right degree, but from the very large pool of applicants who all have look-alike education, they look at accomplishments at your previous jobs.

    They don’t care about your 4 year degree. They want to know how much money you saved your previous employer. What new initiatives did you come up with?

    I know people with no higher education who are doing very well in life. I know people with humanities degrees who work hourly retail jobs.

  9. Terry, isn’t the task you’re talking about traditionally the realm of….junior high school?

    I would be very interested in seeing the breakdown by major, incoming SAT scores, and school. I met a young lady recently who commented that she was one of very few people in her major to be employed–social services, not exactly pre-med or engineering, to put it mildly.

  10. Chuck: I have a BA. Never opened any doors. Work, a track record and experience were my only door-openers. A BA is a bear trap. It’s a painless way to earn a degree and party your way through school, but once the party is over there’s a price to pay – unless, of course, the Obama Administration finds a way to pardon student loans – then, Humanities degrees will cost what they’re worth.

  11. TBS, I guess I’m one of the fortunate ones who managed to squeeze every last nickel out of my four-year, University of Minnesota (horrors!) BA. I’ve used it to qualify for two full career changes in the 25 years since I earned it but you are quite correct to note that a track record and experience help with that.

    I suppose as well that it goes to show not having a Gender Studies degree is helpful in finding a job.

  12. I are has a humanititites degree. I got a job and they wanted me to work something called “exell”. All them coloms and rows cofuseded me.

  13. Terry wrote:”
    Terry on April 5, 2012 at 9:07 am said:

    I would love to see a breakdown of that 9.1%. There are an awful lot of dumb college grads out there these days — and that has nothing to do with politics. If you can’t pull a coin out of your pocket and write one paragraph about it, complete with a topic sentence, exposition, and a concluding sentence, you’ve got no business calling yourself a college graduate.”

    You are absolutely correct Terry. But who is it that is trying to dumb down our population? We have the southerners trying to make textbooks inaccurate in a variety of subjects, from history to economics, and especially science. Texans are the worst, but the conservatives in Tennessee seem to be catching up. Someone needs to explain – cogently – to the right that being filiopietistic is not a good thing.
    (http://www.wcyb.com/news/30309212/detail.html)
    It seems to be the conservatives who have gone off the educational rail, by becoming fact aversive, and by having a very selective relationship to objective reality :
    http://articles.latimes.com/2012/apr/01/opinion/la-ed-science-conservatives-distrust-20120401
    “Common sense, as well as past research, suggests that distrust of science correlates with lack of education; the less education a person has, the more likely he or she will favor traditional beliefs or religious dogma over scientific evidence. There’s even an academic name for this theory: the “deficit model” of scientific literacy. When it comes to modern conservatives, however, the deficit model does not apply.

    Analyzing results from the General Social Survey, which has been conducted by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center since 1972, Gauchat found that for conservatives with college degrees, trust in science declined more over time than it did forconservatives with only a high school degree. (This was not true for liberals or moderates, whose views on science have been relatively static for decades.)

    How did this happen? Gauchat theorizes that it came about because the most educated conservatives are also the most politically engaged and the most likely to seek information that conforms to their ideology — and in recent years they’ve been able to find it in spades. Right-wing think tanks, funded by corporate interests to undermine the scientific consensus on such expensive-to-fix phenomena as climate change, have proliferated, as have conservative cable-TV networks, blogs and radio talk shows. In general, these outlets are talking to a well-educated audience. And they’re presenting a very one-sided view of scientific issues.

    The results are dramatic. In 1974, people who identified themselves as conservatives were the most likely group to have a high degree of trust in science; now they’re the least trustful.”

    Not to mention the insistence on ignorance only aka abstinence only sex education.

    It’s not contraception that’s the problem Mitch. Not that I imagine you were particularly celibate during or after college? I presume you were responsible, and therefore employed contraception yourself, or at least assured yourself that your partner was protected?

    It is the right wingers that are mandating factually inaccurate information, like the claim that abortion causes a woman to be more likely to get breast cancer, or that contraception has a higher failure rate than is true.

    I have every hope that will change back at some point to where it used to be, so that conservatives no longer advocate and fund ignorance.

    Given the overall unemployment rates that resulted from Republican policies that caused our economy to tank, I don’t think the 9.1% is all that bad. It could be so much worse.

    You remember, I’m sure what I mean. The insistence that important segments of our economy police themselves instead of regulation; the dismantling of effective measures like Glass Steagall; starting two wars without paying for them, and simultaneously cutting taxes, claiming that deficits don’t matter.

    I find it alarming that the same sabre rattling is taking place on the right, and the same economic policy advisers are guiding candidates like Mitt Romney. It isn’t the grads who seem to have a problem with either learning or the economy, or getting certain jobs; it is the right wing extremists who have hijacked conservativism.

  14. I have also managed to do quite well for myself with only about a year’s worth of junior college. And just like Chuck, I spent about 2 years off and on either un or under employed.

    I had a disasterous run of luck in ’02, 05, 06 and 07 where I went to work for small private companies that went belly up within 6 months of my starting there. My resume looked more like a check list. In mid 08, one company took a chance on based on my experience and accomplishments. After I was hired, my boss, who was about 6 years older than me, told me that he pushed for me to get the job because I didn’t go on unemployment, choosing instead to work up to 3 PT jobs. I’m still trying to catch up on all of the deferred maintenance on my house, but we survived.

  15. No, TBS. I designed the city streets in New Hope. That’s why they are so rigidly based on a square grid. Concrete sequential. Used to be abstract sequential, but I got better.

  16. DG,

    the most likely to seek information that conforms to their ideology

    Heh.

    Heh heh heh.

    Heh heh heh hah hah ha ha ha ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha HA HA HA HA HA HAH!

    Oh, man. That’s…

    No, I’m not done!

    Hah! Hah hah hah hah hah Hah Hah Hah Hah Hah Hah Hah Hah Hah Hah Hah Hah Hah Hah Hah Hah Hah Hah Hah Hah Hah HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH .

    Wow. I haven’t laughed that hard in ages.

    DG, you’re joking right? You, whose picture is listed next to “confirmation bias” in every major dictionary, if your record on this blog and yours are to be believed? The person whose idea of “fact checking” means, in its entirety, “check a statement for congruence with “progressive” chanting points”, as has been shown on this blog too many times to count?

    I repeat. Heh.

  17. You are absolutely correct Terry. But who is it that is trying to dumb down our population? We have the southerners trying to make textbooks inaccurate in a variety of subjects, from history to economics, and especially science.

    Two minute penalty for “Artless thread-jacking”.

    And I’ll see your tangent about southern textbooks, and raise you the complete collapse of the public schools system under relentlessly liberal control, including the vast amount of complete bilge taught under the aegis of “progressivism” in our schools.

    Go ahead. Ask a recent high school graduate, especially from an urban (Democrat!) district, to define the Bill of Rights, much less name them. Or any key players in the Constitutional Convention. To list any of the grounds for the American Revolution. To explain the Federalist Papers. To list the sides or years, much less the motivations, of the Civil War. To identify the president who packed the Supreme Court, much less why it mattered.

    Natter on about evolution appearing in textbooks; the education establishment can’t teach the kids to read the damn things anyway.

    Sorry, DG. Tangent seen, mocked, and rejected with prejudice.

  18. Texans are the worst, but the conservatives in Tennessee seem to be catching up. Someone needs to explain – cogently – to the right that being filiopietistic is not a good thing.

    Two more minutes in the penalty box for indulging in social bigotry. Someone needs to explain to you that provincialism is a bad thing, that much of the southern antipathy to “progressive” ideals in education is just plain pushback against the extreme authoritarian leftism in the educational academy.

  19. And here’s where that “blinkered reliance on chanting points” comes in.

    Analyzing results from the General Social Survey, which has been conducted by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center since 1972, Gauchat found that for conservatives with college degrees, trust in science declined more over time than it did forconservatives with only a high school degree. (This was not true for liberals or moderates, whose views on science have been relatively static for decades.)

    You didn’t “analyze” the results. You regurgitated the leftyblog groupthink interpretation of them.

    I design quantitative and qualitative research for a living, DG. The first thing I do when I see a story like this, is look to the quesitons actually asked. You might do well to do the same. The Gauchat study doesn’t mean what you think have been told, and are dutifully repeating, it means.

    Because you, like all the leftymedia and all leftyblogs, misrepresent the results of the study. The actual question whose answer you’re misrepresenting referred to educated conservatives’ trust in scientists, not science. Educated conservatives have come to see many scientists as having political motivations.

    In other words, the leftymedia and leftyblogs, yourself included, took an out of context interpretation of Gauchat’s data and inflated it into a group slander.

    I was going to say “yourself included – but it pains me to say that you are worse than most. It’s not that you are more blithely disingenuous than most leftybloggers at participating in these sorts of group libels; it’s that you so posit yourself with such great self-satisfaction as a “FACT CHECKER”, who then proceeds to “check” none of your own “facts”. (See also: “Conservatives are racists!”, “Tea Partiers are committing a wave of violence”, etc, etc). And if you look back through the various threads where you’ve tried to descend from on high like Alex Trebek bearing “the rest of the story”, you’ll notice that your “facts” have been shown not to be by quite a lopsided margin.

    Your approach work just fine with a leftyblog audience, which tend to be simultaneously very impressed with their own perceived intellects and, perversely, not very smart (see the invincible groupthink in re the Trayvon Martin case – and yep, you partipated without any particular reservation in that particular race to conclusions, too!); they tend to come to grief on the conservative blogs, where people, spending as they do less time primping their supposed intellectual prowess, actually practice it by shredding more or less every factual assertion you’ve ever made on this blog, ever.

    I say that with all due respect.

  20. Ever noticed when DG gets smacked down here she goes away for a few weeks, spouts off her crazy over at penisblog then comes back. We have an opening for fact checkers DG here at the Department of Darkness and Evil (DDE) but we wouldn’t actually use any of your facts, we just need a good laugh sometimes. Anything I’ve ever whispered into Soros’ senile brain is taken by you as fact. Please keep it up, we really appreciate the unintentional humor.

  21. DG- “Trust in science declined…” Well, with the charade that is “global warming” nowdays, that would be a healthy development, right?

  22. I won’t bother to respond to DG’s screed other than to say this:
    I have no problem with people teaching their kids whatever they want to teach them within very, very broad guidelines. The parents pay for the schools with property taxes, right? And we do have a public education system, right? It is not the duty of parents to train their children for the benefit of the business system, the political state or the nation. This is America, fer God’s sake.
    My problem is with handing out degrees to people who cannot read, cannot write, and are ignorant of history. If you cannot name the major dates of World War Two and its combatants (for example), you have no right to call yourself educated and no ability to argue intelligently for or against the “international economic system”.

  23. “Trust in science declined…”
    To the same degree it has become politicized.
    I am a member in good standing of the AAAS. My expertise in this matter can not be questioned.

  24. And since no one else has mentioned it……Penigma’s Chihuahua! Where’s your homework assignment? Last report was the puppy ate it, but time has passed so that you could do it over.

  25. Hopelessly late, but I can’t help myself.
    Ask a recent high school graduate, especially from an urban (Democrat!) district, to…

    … spell, use reasonably correct grammar, or make change without a calculator. Or even better, understand that going in hock for over $100k to get a Womyn’s Studies degree is probably not a good idea.

  26. jdm, what they get along with a omens study degree is membership to an a certain political and social class. Too many conservatives don’t know that the humanities explicitly teach elitism; their job is to criticize the rest of humanity. Your job is to humbly accept their criticism and thoughts and practices accordingly. Their thoughts and practices are never to be criticized. If they decide that gay marriage is good for the country, how dare you oppose it? The mere fact that you oppose marks as :the other” who is to be told how to behave, never, ever to determine how others should behave.

  27. Terry,

    Oddly enough, I was converted to conservatism by my advisor in my English degree program.

    That may be one of the most exclusive clubs in western civilization.

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