A Lucrative Technical School or a Four-Year College Degree?

“The Ideologies that killed more than 100 million people last century are being praised at our universities today.”  - Turning Point USA

It is becoming increasingly difficult to find a skilled technician to fix anything. Everything is disposable – something breaks down, let’s buy a new one. There are fewer and fewer technical and trade schools and, even if there were more, American students are not interested in learning a trade. They have been conditioned by society and by their parents that, unless they get a four-year college degree, anything else is not worth their effort and time.

Technician and trade jobs are generally filled by foreign workers, legal and illegal because Americans are not qualified, nor interested in pursuing such jobs. When our home was completed and there were some problems, every company I called to fix something sent a foreign national. I counted twenty-seven individuals born outside of the U.S. who did not learn their trade in this country. How is that possible?

Germans have trade schools attached to most large companies and only about a third of high school graduates are interested in going to college even though college is free. They attend a trade school or a technical college. Those jobs pay well and are easy to find.

Why are American students not interested in studying something that would assure them employment when they graduate and the satisfaction of a job well done?

Why are American college advisors promising them a six-figure salary when they are pursuing majors in fields in which they have no chance of ever getting a job or making a decent living?

What good is your passion if there are no jobs to feed this passion? Why can’t their passion be pursued as an extra-curricular activity while doing something else that earns them a decent living?

Why have Americans been conditioned to think that a soldier wearing a helmet who defends his country should make way less money than an athlete with a helmet who defends and chases a football on a grassy field?

Students are advised to pursue majors in multiculturalism, postmodernism, feminist theory, gender studies, indigenous psychology, complexity theory, post-colonialism, ecological studies, Eastern thought, racial studies, and contemplative practices and traditions.

Unless they plan on becoming radical activists or community organizers with ANTIFA, BLM, Pink Hats feminists, and other such violent groups, they will find zero jobs but will have a huge baggage of debt hanging around their necks like an albatross.

According to Forbes, the total student loan debt of $1.2 trillion is negatively affecting the economy and those who owe thousands of dollars in student debt upon graduation with a diploma hardly worth the ink that it is printed on. One in ten graduates owes more than $40,000 in student loans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/specialfeatures/2013/08/07/how-the-college-debt-is-crippling-students-parents-and-the-economy/#376a43a02e17

The national debt clock counts student loan debt at $1.5 trillion, a much higher number than the $1.02 trillion credit card debt. With the median income at $30,592, one wonders how these students will ever pay back these huge school loans. http://www.usdebtclock.org/

Steve Odland acknowledged five years ago that, “Education is the great equalizer in this country. It is the facilitator of the American Dream. People can grow up poor, in an urban or rural setting, but can hope to pull themselves up out of poverty with education. Unlike many other areas of the world, America mostly is a meritocracy facilitated by education.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveodland/2012/03/24/college-costs-are-soaring/#5163c9281f86

Unfortunately that is not the case anymore in many areas of education where jobs no longer exist or are scarce as automation and artificial intelligence replaced the need for humans. Students are forced to live in their parents’ basement looking for that six-figure salary their advisor promised, eventually having to settle for baristas in coffee shops, retail associates, waiters, or protesters for hire.

Yet advisors keep steering students into majors that are totally useless in today’s world. At the same time, college costs escalate way beyond inflation rates to pay for inflated tenured professorial salaries, university trust funds, and athletic programs and expensive stadiums. I don’t see any liberals protesting the escalating tuition costs; they just want more money for education and school loans.

Who makes money from the 44 million Americans in debt because of student loans? The short answer is the federal government, banks, private investors, and Wall Street.

Before President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Higher Education Act of 1965, prospective students had to pay for education themselves from savings, a generous scholarship, or from an inheritance. Poor but smart people could not pursue higher education unless they made a personal loan.

Congress created in 1972 the Student Loan Marketing Association or Sallie Mae. Sallie Mae bought loans from banks after banks had loaned money to students, thus freeing the banks to make more loans. At the time tuition was much lower and much more manageable on an average salary.  

Congress decided in 1996 to turn Sallie Mae into a private agency thus giving it power to make its own loans, both federally guaranteed loans, as well as private loans with higher interest rates but no strings attached.

Sallie Mae became so large and powerful that in 2014 it turned its federally-guaranteed student loans into a new company, Navient, leaving Sallie Mae to handle only private loans. According to James B. Steele and Lance Williams, “CEO Albert Lord received pay and stock totaling hundreds of millions of dollars before he retired in 2013.”

Ninety percent of the $1.5 trillion student loan debt is held by the federal government as either original lender or a guarantor of a loan. The Department of Education has certainly become an enormous bank funded by taxpayers.

“In fiscal year 2014, students borrowed approximately $100 billion through federal loan programs.”  The highest default rate was experienced in consolidated loans both in 2014 (20.9%) and 2015 (21.2%).  In 2013, the default rate of such consolidated loans was 25 percent. http://www.edcentral.org/edcyclopedia/federal-student-loan-default-rates/

“The government earns as much as 20 percent on each of its loans” because it borrows money at a lower rate and lends to students at a higher rate.  According to the Government Accountability Office’s 2014 report, the government made $66 billion in profit from student loans made between 2007 and 2012. https://www.gillibrand.senate.gov/news/press/release/gillibrand-statement-on-new-gao-report-released-showing-federal-government-profit-of-66-billion-on-federal-student-loans-graduates-currently-saddled-with-over-1-trillion-in-student-loan-debt

Congress lowered student loan interest rates in 2013 but those who already had outstanding loans did not benefit from this “bonanza” of generosity. As most students can attest, it is easy to begin with a loan of $50,000 that balloons with compounding interest and penalties to over $125,000 in a few years.

The loan becomes unpayable when the student is unable to find a job or the job barely pays enough for the student to survive on because the worthless diploma they earned in utopian thought or women’s studies has not taught them any useful or marketable skills in the real world.

Filing for bankruptcy is hardly a fix since Congress has made student loans not dischargeable in bankruptcy proceedings except in very rare cases. Even in old age, the government can take as much as 15 percent of a debtor’s Social Security check in order to service an unpaid student loan balance.

Delinquent borrowers who have fallen on hard times are often surprised to learn that the government can make “administrative offsets” from tax refunds and disability checks.

How can the federal government ask U.S. citizens to pay back student loans when illegal aliens are getting their education free? Illegal aliens are “dreamers” but legal citizens are considered “racists” when questioning such liberal insanity.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau estimates that there are eight million loans in default out of 41 million loans and “one out of four borrowers are delinquent or in default on a student loan.” (p. 3) http://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/201509_cfpb_student-loan-servicing-report.pdf

According to Steele and Williams, the DOE hires debt collectors with taxpayer dollars to harass and collect from those who fell behind their student loans or cannot afford to pay them. These collectors make an estimated $2.1 billion in commissions.

It seems that it would be much less costly for taxpayers if these students did not receive so many loans to begin with, especially if their majors show that there are  no jobs available in the economy, their grades are poor, or simply scale back their indebtedness through write offs.

Counseling students the right way, without the profit motive in mind, would benefit students, the economy, and the taxpayers. But colleges plan to keep their student enrollment up, professors need their classrooms full, college financial advisors aspire to distribute as many loans as possible, and banks want profits.

Not every college student I have ever taught was really college material, motivated enough to succeed, or even enjoyed being in college. Some could have benefited from attending a trade school or a technical college.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Role of Education in America-Phobia

“I never let my schooling interfere with my education.”     -  Mark Twain

Poster in D.C. mall advertising citizenship
in the global economy
Photo: Ileana Johnson 2016

Have God and fervent prayers saved America temporarily from the scourge of global communism by electing Donald Trump for president? It was the hand of God that acted through the voting population to elect Donald Trump but it is up to his chosen administration to implement his promises.

If the President Elect is going to deliver a fraction of his campaign assurances, we are going to make tremendous progress in addressing our huge national debt and our national security.

There is a lot more to be redressed that has been deliberately diminished, fundamentally transformed for the worse, and even destroyed in the last ten years, i.e., the military, jobs, the economy, education, health care, family, faith, our personal freedoms, and our foreign policy.

No matter what problems we attempt to solve, unless we change the “global citizen” course of our educational system dictated from the Department of Education in Washington and the States’ Department of Education, we are doomed to fail, and Common Core will remain the curriculum tool of the global citizenship. America will continue on the globalist path of self-destruction and irrelevancy.

Charter schools will give marginalized students an opportunity for a better school choice, however, there is no guarantee that the indoctrination into Marxism will stop. Those teachers come from the same pool of the College of Education licensed teachers, the corps of “social justice” and “collectivist” thinking.

Socialist teachers will continue to be the vectors of Marxist indoctrination because they are rolled out with little effort on the College of Education assembly line and are encouraged to become proud members of the National Education Association.

Unfortunately for America, these socialist teachers have our children’s eyes, ears, and minds eight hours a day, ample time to shape them into the communist and environmentalist drones required by the 21^st century “social justice” and impossible equality know-nothing workforce.

Sadly, the establishment no longer educates teachers like some of my former colleagues who taught real American history, no matter how uncomfortable the truth may have been to some. They taught Civics and brought speakers to their classes who have experienced or survived communism, the Holocaust, and various wars. They infused pride in our American culture and honored our American exceptionalism. No revisionist history was taught and Howard Zinn’s popular textbook, “A People’s History of the United States,” was not used. David Greenberg wrote in 2013 about “Howard Zinn’s influential mutilations of American history.” https://newrepublic.com/article/112574/howard-zinns-influential-mutilations-american-history

One day a year students were required to eat just soup so that they could feel what it was like to stand in soup lines during the Great Depression. This type of “fasting” was uncomfortable for the coddled generation who felt deprived of their abundant choices in the cafeteria. Many complained bitterly when their tummies were churning empty.

Posters were hung in the hallway for a week, showing in grisly detail the Holocaust atrocities committed by the German National Socialist Party (the NAZIS) against the Jews, the gypsies, the gays, the priests, the handicapped, and anybody else who did not fit the insane profile of the perfect race as designed by Hitler’s Social Democrat party. No safe spaces for these students to flee from reality -- Judy wanted her students to never forget what evil atrocities monsters were capable of towards their fellow man.

A Christmas Cantata was organized every year and a Christmas tree was proudly decorated by students of all religions who enjoyed the tradition. A staff member dressed as Santa Claus; faculty and students took turns having their photographs taken. There was no “war on Christmas” then and people wished each other ‘Merry Christmas’ instead of the leftist politically correct ‘Happy Holidays.’

Ten years ago, an administrator thought it wise to bring an imam to school to indoctrinate a rapt audience of high school students to the wonders of Islam and the “respect” they afford women. The faculty stood silent, disapproving, but fearful of losing their jobs if they spoke out. Some nodded in agreement with the imam; one of his sons will be caught years later trying to join ISIS with his girlfriend.

Diversity did not have to be mandated by government, our society was already plenty diverse and tolerant but not self-destructive. Legal immigrants assimilated into our country, were proud to be here, learned English, but retained their traditions and language at home. Now, the government-imposed progressive and diversity at every level is splitting society into divided groups, at odds with each other, creating micro-societies within our country, each rooting for the hellhole they’ve escaped from, or pushing the agenda they were paid to advocate.

The America-phobia ginned up by the progressive left has reached a new crescendo. They are projecting and displaying all their hatred and intolerance for Americans, while glorifying third world nations and primitive cultures as better than our civilization, vilifying hard-working ordinary Americans who happen to disagree with them. America-phobes want to change everything in the image of their Marxist ideology, utopian nonsense that has failed fully in every country where it had been forced upon the disarmed population.

Progressives no longer hide their intolerance and disdain for Caucasians and conservatives, inventing terms such as “white privilege,” “micro aggression,” “pathological bias,” “ordinary prejudice,” “pathological bigotry,” requiring collegiate “safe spaces” for their frightened progeny, the Snowflake Generation, telling them lies that all conservatives are racist and bigoted, and are going to harm legal and illegal immigrant children.

At the same time, the progressive and Islamo-phile MSM are busy turning a blind eye to all the violence, mayhem, and crimes that Islamists have committed in this country and around the globe. Nobody in the Christian population at large has attacked, killed, or maimed any Muslims. However, most terror attacks that have occurred in this country in the last fifteen years had been orchestrated and executed by radical Islam.

Symbols of pride and Americanism, our flag, our National Anthem have been burned and disrespected; monuments and veteran cemeteries have been desecrated without much note or mention by the main stream media.

The cable news media ignored the massive fires in Tennessee while spending an inordinate amount of time on the Oakland fire even though both events were tragic. The MSM focused non-stop on paid rioters around the country, on their mercenary and violent demonstrations against the President Elect with whom they vitriolically disagree. Innocent bystanders were subjected to their hateful wrath and suffered physical injuries.

Since the presidential election was not to their liking, the intolerant left is now trying to subvert and destroy the Electoral College process. Baseless recount challenges have been made in three states and millions were raised overnight by the Green Party candidate. Additionally, alleged threats have been made to electors to change their votes before December 19.

Our future depends on who is going to win the war on our “borders, language, and culture,” on our sovereignty, the leftist America-phobes or the America-philes? Unless we change the global communist course and Common Core content of the public education and collegiate education of our children, the future looks uncertain.

 

 

Common Core and CSCOPE Education

In the late seventies, Americans were very proud and fiercely protective of their freedoms granted by the Constitution, of the United States, and of their standing in the world as a capitalist nation. Just the mere notion that someone came from a communist country raised eyebrows and pointed questions about one’s allegiance.

Then on October 17, 1979, President Jimmy Carter signed into law the Department of Education Organization Act, the U.S. Department of Education began operating on May 4, 1980, and things started to change.

People’s patriotic behavior and protectiveness of their culture, of their language, of the capitalist system in general that made them the most prosperous nation on earth, began to erode more and more overtly. Among the culprits were teachers who advanced personal socialist agendas to impressionable youth who believed every word they said.

In 1979 the Office of Education had 3,000 employees and an annual budget of $12 billion. In 2013 the Department of Education (DOE), with a cabinet level position, has 5,000 employees and a budget of $69.8 billion.

The House of Representatives voted in 1979 210-206 in favor of the passage of the Department of Education Organization Act. (http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=lGsjAAAAIBAJ&sjid=HO4DAAAAIBAJ&pg=7077,5962023&dq=department-of-education&hl=en) Republicans opposed the elevation of the DOE to cabinet level status as unconstitutional, an unnecessary intrusion into state and local governments by the feds (they were right, see Common Core Standards and No Child Left Behind) and the creation of another huge bureaucracy (they were also right). The American Federation of Teachers opposed the law.

Liberals and Democrats thought the DOE constitutional under the Commerce Clause and the appropriation of funds legal under the Taxing and Spending Clause. The National Education Association with 1.8 million members supported the law. Amendments were proposed by those supporting the bill to curb school busing, to prohibit use of racial and gender quotas for admission to college, and to encourage school prayer.

Busing, racial and gender quotas are firmly in place today. School prayer or references to God are definitely gone in most schools and crosses are covered – we don’t want to upset the atheists, Buddhists, Hindus, or Islam.  Politically correct liberals who stifle free speech like to explain, it is separation of church and state, yet they promote endless accommodations for other religions and cultures. Asking students to step on the word Jesus or to stomp on the American flag is an “enlightened” classroom activity approved by progressive academia.

As I wrote in my first book, “Echoes of Communism,” (http://www.amazon.com/Echoes-Communism-Lessons-American-Choice/dp/1456535080) I found education, the curriculum, and its certification rules quite strange. I did not understand how a person with a doctorate in Arts in Sciences could not teach at any level in the public school system unless certified by the Department of Education but could teach university students.

I did not understand the stronghold the teacher’s union, NEA, had on employment and how it created standards for the Department of Education, wrote textbooks, and determined the curriculum, a curriculum that zealously promoted socialist/communist ideas and ideals in Social Studies, Economics, Earth Sciences, English, and Foreign Languages.

At first I attributed my basic clash with other teachers’ educational views to my assimilation problems. Teachers would tell me, this is how we do things in this country and, if you don’t like it, you can go back where you came from. That I did not want to do because that is exactly why I left – education, how people thought, lived, behaved, and what they learned was dictated and entirely regulated by the Communist Party in the classroom.

I began to realize quickly that most of these teachers were hard-core liberals who were acting and behaving just like our former communist apparatchiks. When I became a teacher, as a conservative, I was one of the “rara avis” (rare bird) in education, having completed most of my schooling in an Arts and Science environment, save for a few College of Education classes which did not help me at all to become a better teacher.

I did not fully comprehend how brainwashed my college students were by previous teachers until I tried to tell them what life and education were like under communism and none of them believed me, they were laughing! I stopped telling any stories about communism, it was an exercise in futility. The damage to these young people’s minds was so profound, not even direct contact with someone who actually lived under communism persuaded them. Why not?

Children were very impressionable and looked up to their elementary, middle, and high school teachers so much that once they got to college, they were already exposed to a heavy dose of “socialism, social justice, equity are grand” indoctrination. Most parents had no idea what their teachers inculcated into their children’s sponge-like brains. They were too busy making a living to care, some of them were ignorant themselves, even those with college degrees, or the teachers cleverly disguised what they were doing in the classroom.

The most glaring example is the CSCOPE curriculum in Texas, designed by a private corporation as “instructional material,” and not curriculum, thus escaping any scrutiny. Lessons are written by CSCOPE staff and former teachers and are not disseminated or accessed to parents. CSCOPE Review, an independent vigilant group, discovered a lesson plan which compared the Boston Tea Party to “an act of terrorism.” In another example, students were asked “to design the flag for a new socialist nation.” Glenn Beck interviewed teachers, David Barton, Pat Gray, Mary Bowen, Stan Hartzler, and Texas Senator Dan Patrick about CSCOPE. http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/03/07/cscope-exposing-the-nations-most-controversial-public-school-curriculum-system/

On February 27, 2012 I wrote an article, “Common Core and Universal Design for Learning,” http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/44875 that received little attention. As usual, Americans were preoccupied with the latest manufactured crisis, and the American media purposefully ignored the implications of such federal cookie cutter education. I did not think it was a good idea. Emphasizing “collective” work, Arne Duncan described Common Core Standards as a one-size fits all curriculum in which all children can learn to “high achievement standards,” ignoring the facts that we are born with different IQs, different talents, and different interests that cannot be molded by government fiat.

Apparently, standardized tests “fail to produce a valid and reliable measurement of what significant minorities of students actually know, especially students with disabilities, English language learners or those from varied cultural backgrounds. Without accurate measurement, accountability systems are not only ineffective, they are unethical.”(Core Standards)

Education must be “collective” (code word for communism). If students are not equal, self-esteem is hurt. Grades and diplomas should be equal for unequal work in order to achieve social justice in education. Individualism is discouraged yet it is rugged individualism that has made this country great.

Common Core is much worse than I had envisioned. The American Principles Project (conservative think-tank) found that Common Core is one variable in the larger plan to track children from birth to work. (http://truthinamericaneducation.com/tag/american-principles-project/)

Michelle Malkin discovered that the 2009 stimulus package contained a “State Fiscal Stabilization Fund” offered to states for a “longitudinal data system (LDS) to collect data on public-school students” such as health, family income, religion, and homework. (http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/343040/common-core-trojan-horse-michelle-malkin)

Glenn Beck’s The Blaze described a 44-page DOE report which indicated the possibility of implementing through Common Core monitoring techniques such as “functional MRIs” (scanning and mapping a child’s brain function), “using cameras to judge facial expressions, electronic seats that determine posture, pressure-sensitive computer mouse, and a biometric wrist wrap.”

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/03/27/indoctrination-and-data-mining-in-common-core-heres-why-americas-schools-may-be-in-more-trouble-than-you-think/

It will be a fascistic world if every person will be forced into a government-dictated and enforced, dumbed-down mold, where everybody is equally intelligent, equally capable, equally trained, equally able, and equally educated with a diploma on the wall that is not worth the paper with the fancy intaglio printing on it.