Tag Archives: University

Commentary

College of the Ozarks offers students tuition-free degrees – if they work part-time

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This article from the Wall Street Journal has been the #1 editorial for much of the last four days.

Excerpt:

Looking for the biggest bargain in higher education? I think I found it in this rural Missouri town, 40 miles south of Springfield, nestled in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains. The school is College of the Ozarks, and it operates on an education model that could overturn the perverse method of financing college education that is turning this generation of young adults into a permanent debtor class.

At this college the tuition is nowhere near the $150,000 to $200,000 for a four-year degree that the elite top-tier universities are charging. At College of the Ozarks, tuition is free. That’s right. The school’s nearly 1,400 students don’t pay a dime in tuition during their time there.

So what’s the catch? All the college’s students—without exception—pay for their education by working 15 hours a week on campus. The jobs are plentiful because this school—just a few miles from Branson, a popular tourist destination—operates its own mill, a power plant, fire station, four-star restaurant and lodge, museum and dairy farm.

Some students from low-income homes also spend 12 weeks of summer on campus working to cover their room and board. Part of the students’ grade point average is determined by how they do on the job and those who shirk their work duties are tossed out. The jobs range from campus security to cooking and cleaning hotel rooms, tending the hundreds of cattle, building new dorms and buildings, to operating the power plant.

[…]”We don’t do debt here,” [School President Jerry C.] Davis says. “The kids graduate debt free and the school is debt free too.” Operating expenses are paid out of a $400 million endowment. Seeing the success of College of the Ozarks, one wonders why presidents of schools with far bigger endowments don’t use them to make their colleges more affordable. This is one of the great derelictions of duty of college trustees as they allow universities to become massive storehouses of wealth as tuitions rise year after year.

In an era when patriotism on progressive college campuses is uncool or even denigrated as endorsing American imperialism, College of the Ozarks actually offers what it calls a “patriotic education.” “There’s value in teaching kids about the sacrifices previous generations have made,” Mr. Davis says. “Kids should know there are things worth fighting for.”

He says a dozen or so students will be taking a pilgrimage to Normandy in June to commemorate the 70-year anniversary of D-Day and the former College of the Ozarks students buried there. Amazingly, four of the school’s graduates served as generals in the U.S. military during the Vietnam War.

[…]Nearly 90% of graduates land jobs—an impressive figure, given the economy’s slow-motion recovery.

“If I were an employer, I’d take our graduates over those at most any other schools,” says Mr. Davis. “The kids at these East Coast colleges strike me as being a little spoiled. Our graduates don’t expect to come into the company as the CEO.” But they certainly join a company knowing the value of work.

I am always encouraging young people to steer themselves to STEM degrees, and away from debt. If you did a STEM degree at College of the Ozarks, then you would really have a leg up on life. It’s not a good time now to follow your heart and do what you like. Now is the time to dig in and do what you have to do to pay your own way later on. It’s going to get a lot harder to have even the same standard of living as what your parents had.

Podcasts

Jennifer Roback Morse lectures on sex and sexuality at Harvard University

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Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse

Dr. Morse delivers a talk based on her book “Smart Sex” at Harvard University.

The MP3 file is here. (30 Mb)

Topics:

  • the hook-up culture and its effects on men and women
  • cohabitation and its effect on marriage stability
  • balancing marriage, family and career
  • single motherhood by choice and IVF
  • donor-conceived children
  • modern sex: a sterile, recreation activity
  • the real purposes of sex: procreation and spousal unity
  • the hormone oxytocin: when it is secreted and what it does
  • the hormone vassopressin: when it is secreted and what it does
  • the sexual revolution and the commoditization of sex
  • the consumer view of sex vs the organic view of sex
  • fatherlessness and multi-partner fertility
  • how the “sex-without-relationship” view harms children

52 minutes of lecture, 33 minutes of Q&A from the Harvard students. The Q&A is worth listening to – the first question is from a gay student, and Dr. Morse pulls a William Lane Craig to defeat her objection. It was awesome! I never get tired of listening to her talk, and especially on the topics of marriage and family.

News

University of South Carolina Upstate teaching students to be lesbians with taxpayer money

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From Campus Reform, a story that shows what awaits your children when they get to university.

Excerpt:

An upcoming LGBTQ seminar at the University of South Carolina Upstate (USCU) will teach students How to Be a Lesbian in 10 Days or Less and will focus on LGBTQ cultural mores.

According to the school’s website, theater artist Leigh Hendrix will perform her one-woman show, How to Be a Lesbian in 10 Days or Less, to kick off the sixth Bodies of Knowledge Symposium and Conference.

The show is a one-hour performance that follows Butchy McDyke, a motivational speaker and expert lesbian, as she “deftly guides her captive audience in an exploration of self-discovery and first love, coming out, lesbian sex, queer politics, and a really important Reba McEntire song.”

Hendrix encourages her audience to shout “I’m a big ‘ol dyke!” in a show that is “one part instructional seminar, one part personal story, and one party wacky performance art.”

The symposium is funded by outside grants as well as university funds according to Dr. Lisa Johnson, the Director of the Center for Women’s & Gender Studies at USCU.

Dr. Johnson declined to discuss what percentage of the funding was coming from the university.

“Until you call and ask how much money has been spent on heterosexual literature, I’m not going to answer that question,” Johnson told Campus Reform.

Earlier this month, the South Carolina House of Representatives voted to cut almost $70,000 in funding for two public universities, including $17,142 from USCU, over literature containing gay themes.

This is what your tax dollars are funding. Every time you vote for more “compassion”, you are giving money to a government that pays leftists on campus to teach your children to vote against your American values. And your kids are not just hearing the indoctrination from professors, but the whole environment at university is set up to promote the overthrow of traditional moral values. They have organizations, like this Center for Women’s & Gender Studies that promote the anti-marriage, anti-child views of the sexually-permissive left.

If you want a positive outcome for your children at college, then you need to be more careful about what they are learning in college. And you need to be more careful about preparing them for what they encounter. If you can’t explain to them how traditional marriage differs from the gay lifestyle in terms of sex addiction, domestic violence, sexually-transmitted diseases, health care costs, suicide risks, relationship duration, etc. then your kids surely don’t know what the difference is either. They will never hear it from anyone but you. No one else has any incentive to tell them about these things except you.