Free Talk Live

The value of a college degree is a middle-class article of faith. But exclusive new research suggests it may be far less than previously thought.

Recently there was a television panel in which it was asked if there aren’t enough jobs that require a college degree for the coming glut of college grads. The question was a funny one, one that conferred on college grads skills much greater than those possessed by the average individual. Maybe, but not asked enough is what job requires a college degree? The truth is no job does, though politicians and policy analysts would have us believe otherwise.

You are told that to make it in life, you must go to college. You work hard to get there. You or your parents drain savings or take out huge loans to pay for it all.

And you end up learning ... not much.

A study of more than 2,300 undergraduates found 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years....

Half of College Grads Under 25 are Unemployed or Underemployed

Recent projections have job prospects improving for 2012's college graduates. But there's a lot more room for improvement than we're likely to see:

About 1.5 million, or 53.6 percent, of bachelor's degree-holders under the age of 25 last year were jobless or underemployed, the highest share in at least 11 years. In 2000, the share was at a low of 41 percent, before the dot-com bust erased job gains for college graduates in the telecommunications and IT fields.

Can you imagine a baseball game starting without the playing of the national anthem?

Yeah, me neither.

But for 53 seasons, that's exactly what happened — or didn't happen, rather — before games played at Goshen College. Then came Tuesday afternoon when the song was played at the small Mennonite school in Indiana for the first time.

UPTON, NY — Recent analyses from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a 2.4-mile-circumference “atom smasher” at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, establish that collisions of gold ions traveling at nearly the speed of light have created matter at a temperature of about 4 trillion degrees Celsius — the hottest temperature ever reached in a laboratory, about 250,000* times hotter than the center of the Sun.

Nine graduating staff members at the (public) University of Utah's newspaper are being threatened with not receiving their degrees after a traditional farewell gag ran in the student newspaper. The staff members received an e-mail informing them an administrative hold was being placed on their records. The university's e-mail claimed the editors were in violation of the university's Code of Student Rights and Responsibilities.

President Obama wants us to imagine an America that is within reach. I would rather have you imagine a world a little further down the road.
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The only way forward, is to remove the obstacles – placed by government at all levels – from the road.

Lawmakers in the nation's capital have floated a plan to require high school students to apply to college or trade school -- even if the students have no interest in attending.

The proposal is a bid to ensure students in the troubled Washington, D.C., school system at least have the know-how to navigate the admissions process.