Tag Archives: Tuition

News

Unproductive UK rioters demand to be given other people’s money

Leave a comment

Video from Verum Serum.

Story from the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

Police fought mobs of masked thugs who pelted officers with ammonia and fireworks loaded with coins.

The anti-capitalists started fires and smashed their way into banks, hotels and shops, bringing chaos to Britain’s busiest shopping street.

The violence began as Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, addressed a TUC rally of at least 250,000 peaceful protesters in Hyde Park who had marched from Westminster to demonstrate against government spending cuts.

As he spoke, an apparently co-ordinated attack began on shops and police in Oxford Street as a mob tried to storm into shops including Topshop, BHS and John Lewis.

MPs and retailers said the scenes damaged Britain’s reputation around the world.

The move was the first of a string of actions by anarchists in which:

• There was violence last night in Trafalgar Square, with protesters setting banners ablaze and throwing missiles including broken bottles at police officers. As police contained protesters around Nelson’s Column, there were running battles in Strand. Close to Charing Cross railway station, a fire was started near shops;

• Fortnum and Mason, the department store, was occupied by 200 “anti-cuts” protesters who smashed windows and knocked over displays;

• A huge fire was started in the centre of Jermyn Street, the Ritz hotel was attacked with dustbins and a “Trojan horse” set on fire in Oxford Circus;

• Banks were broken into, their windows smashed and daubed with graffiti reading “smash the bank”;

• Windows were smashed in New Bond Street and running scuffles took place on Piccadilly, where a Porsche car showroom was attacked.

Anarchist groups had spent weeks preparing the action on Facebook and Twitter and even posted a map directing people to the time and location of where to attack shops.

[…]After five hours of running battles, there were 202 arrests. At least 30 people, including five police officers, were injured. Police said the anti-capitalists threw lightbulbs filled with ammonia at them.

More videos from Verum Serum.

Commentary

Is a college degree worth the money you pay for it?

5 Comments

Do college degrees really get you a better job?

It depends on what you study. If you study really hard stuff that is in demand, then it will help. But if you study easy stuff and don’t come out in the top 1% of those easy programs, then going to college is a huge waste of money. It’s also a huge “opportunity cost”, because you could have been working instead of going to college – which would get you not only a salary but a lot of experience, too. Instead of having $50,000 in debt, you could have $50,000 in savings, over four years.

Take a look at this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education. (H/T Hans Bader at the Competitive Enterprise Institute)

Excerpt:

“60 percent of the increase in the number of college graduates from 1992 to 2008 worked in jobs that the (Bureau of Labor Statistics) considers relatively low skilled — occupations where many participants have only high school diplomas and often even less.” This means that the great push to increase the number of college grads has apparently come to very little — only a minority of the additional grads are in occupations regarded as requiring a bachelor’s degree.  Of the nearly 50 million U.S. colleges graduates, 17.4 million are holding jobs for which college training is regarded as unnecessary. The number of waiters and waitresses with college degrees more than doubled from in the years 1992-2008, from 119,000 to 338,000, and cashiers with college degrees rose from 132,000 to 365,000.

We should not be taking money from working individuals and businesses to provide grants for immature students to study basket weaving. Providing money for so many people to study things that are not practical and that they are not even that good at is a waste of money. We are not getting a good return for this money if graduates just go on to do jobs that they would have done anyway. The real questions that should be asked by students is “is this worth the money? Will this help me to find a job?” And the real question that taxpayers should be asking is “do we need to stop wasting money on grants for useless degrees and leave the money in the private sector to create more good jobs instead?”.

It’s not good to be sending young people to universities that are run by leftists in any case, because it insulates them from real life and puts them at the mercy of perpetual adolescents (professors). For many students, college is wasted on partying and “studying” impractical and counter-factual areas like feminist studies, peace studies, black studies, Marxist studies, queer studies, etc. We do not need to be sending so much money into the pockets of unqualified leftists like Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, who bash capitalism while living off of the wealth produced by it.

Hans writes:

In “The Great College Degree Scam,” expert Richard Vedder points out that “[s]ome in higher education KNOW about all of this and are keeping quiet about it because of their own self-interest. We are deceiving our young population to mindlessly pursue college degrees” they don’t need.

Hans also talked about the problem of rising college debt here.

News

In the UK, socialists attack police and lay siege to Tory headquarters

13 Comments

Story in the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

Thugs who hijacked the tuition fees protest narrowly avoided seriously injuring or even killing police when they threw a fire extinguisher off the seventh floor roof of the Tory HQ, it emerged today.

The dramatic moment was captured on video footage, showing the extinguisher crashing to the ground just inches from a group of officers desperately battling to regain control in Millbank.

A youth was seen on pictures clutching the missile on top of the building and the film showed it being launched over the edge and falling at speed.

It glanced off the helmet of one territorial support group officer and grazes the knees of another. Had it properly hit any of the thousands of people below, it would almost certainly have left fatal injuries.

[…]Militants from far-Left groups whipped up a mix of middle-class students and younger college and school pupils into a frenzy, setting off the most violent student unrest Britain has seen in decades.

The focus of the violence was Tory HQ in Central London, where hundreds of thousands of pounds of damage was caused.

The glass frontage was smashed and protesters swarmed seven floors up to the roof, from where a fire extinguisher was hurled down at police below.

Effigies of David Cameron and Nick Clegg were burned to cheers from the roaring mob. At least 14 casualties were taken to hospital, seven of them police officers, and 51 demonstrators were arrested.

Notice that the signs in the pictures have logos from socialist organizations on them. These are violent left-wing thugs and they nearly killed police officers. And why? To protest against anyone who would cut the flow of taxpayer money that subsidizes their work-free lifestyle.