Archive
The Dream Act joins a Shameful Tradition
By Edward Schumacher-Matos
In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act. It forced most Native Americans in the Deep South to move to Oklahoma in what became known as the “trail of tears and death.” Then in 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law. It required federal law enforcement officials to arrest any black person in the North that a Southern slaveholder declared as his. Blacks were forcibly shipped south under the law.
In 1882, Congress turned international and passed two laws that called for the deportation of immigrants who were convicts, “lunatics” or “idiots”; one of the laws also targeted many Chinese. The Chinese helped build the railroads and open the West, but nativists had demanded their expulsion.
In the first decades of the 20th century, Congress passed another series of deportation laws, this time aimed at eastern and southern European immigrants who were suspected also of being socialists or anarchists. In 1919 and 1920, thousands were dragged from their homes in the two massive “Palmer Raids” and, often within hours, put on ships. In 1952, Congress severely limited judicial review of deportation cases; after President Harry Truman objected that the law was too severe, Congress overrode his veto. Two years later, in what officials called “Operation Wetback,” nearly 1 million Mexicans suspected of not having visas were summarily rounded up in the Southwest and sent across the border.
Most of us cringe at these past examples of Congress covering itself in shame by stripping almost all rights from ethnic groups not considered fully American and expelling or forcibly shipping them elsewhere. Boston College law professor Daniel Kanstroom, and Donald Kerwin of the Migration Policy Institute have assembled a dispassionate multimedia timeline of some of this past at http://www.deportationnation.org.
And now it has happened again.
Continued at: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2010/12/in_1830_congress_passed_the.html
Is America Saturated with College Grads?
By Christopher Matgouranis & Jonathan Robe
Walk into any introductory economics class across the country and it won’t take you long to hear about the law of diminishing marginal returns. According to this law, the production of any good or service reaches a point where each additional (or marginal) unit of the product confers an increasingly smaller benefit. At CCAP, we have released a study presenting empirical evidence pointing to the conclusion that diminishing returns have set in for the increased production of college graduates. We have used data provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, its publication The Occupational Outlook Quarterly, and the Current Population Survey, to show that, over time and with increasing frequency, a substantial number college graduates are underemployed (that is, they are employed in occupations which the BLS classifies as below-college level jobs). This sizable and growing underemployment problem indicates that, at the margin, students who obtain college degrees wind up in jobs which they could have held coming straight out of high school.
Continued at: http://blogs.forbes.com/ccap/2010/12/20/is-america-saturated-with-college-grads/
Read the study: http://www.centerforcollegeaffordability.org/uploads/From_Wall_Street_to_Wal-Mart.pdf
‘The Global Auction’
By Scott Jaschick
College and university presidents in the United States and elsewhere regularly link the need for a higher education to individual and national needs for economic advancement. What if their underlying assumptions aren’t true? Three social scientists from British universities challenge many of those assumptions in The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs and Incomes, just published by Oxford University Press. The authors aren’t by any means anti-education, but they focus on how some countries — by investing in education, raising educational attainment and still keeping wages low — have added complications to the idea of an easy relationship between more education and more money.
The authors are Phillip Brown, distinguished research professor in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University; Hugh Lauder, professor of education and political economy at the University of Bath; and David Ashton, honorary professor at the Cardiff University School of Social Sciences and emeritus professor at the University of Leicester. They responded to e-mail questions about their new book.
Continued at: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/12/21/book_challenges_view_that_more_college_produces_better_economic_outcomes
Goodbye DADT, Hello ROTC
By Dan Berrett
Presidents of some of the nation’s highest profile colleges and universities, where the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program has been barred for decades, said that the U.S. Senate’s vote Saturday to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell” will usher the return of the program to their campuses — though the exact procedure remained unclear.
“This is an historic development for a nation dedicated to fulfilling its core principle of equal rights,” Lee C. Bollinger, president of Columbia University, said in a statement following the vote this weekend to end the 17-year-old policy forcing gay and lesbian members of the military to hide their sexual orientation in order to continue serving. It is likely to be signed into law by President Obama on Wednesday.
Continued at: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/12/21/end_of_don_t_ask_don_t_tell_to_mean_rebirth_of_rotc
Related Articles
- Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Repeal: Will The Ivy League Make Peace With ROTC? (huffingtonpost.com)
Should Governments Support Higher Education
By Richard Vedder
As a professor who has spent over 90 percent of my half-century career in higher education at public universities, it was for decades a matter of faith with me that governments need to subsidize higher education. The two major reasons: higher education allegedly has positive “externalities” or “spillover effects” so that even non-college graduates benefit from college educations. Second, like most Americans I support the American Dream, the idea that anyone living in the U.S. can move from the humblest of circumstances to wealth and fame –in part by using education as a means to that end.
Yet there is no doubt in my mind today that governmental subsidies to higher education are excessive –our nation would be better off if we spent less. Indeed, I suspect no governmental spending commitment at all would be preferable to the situation today (although the optimum may be greater than zero). What led to the change in my position on this issue?
Continued at: http://blogs.forbes.com/ccap/2010/12/21/should-governments-support-higher-education/
Focus on Adult Learning . . . Innovation through Inquiry 