Monday, October 19, 2009

Links for 10/19/09

William D. Henderson and Andrew P. Morriss on law school.
Below school No. 26 (Emory), a graduate has a less than one in five probability of starting his or her career at a large law firm. If 80 percent of law school applicants are convinced that they will make that 20 percent cutoff, three out of four are destined to be disappointed.
Justin Fox: “American college grads: Homebodies with worthless degrees”
I had a somewhat disturbing conversation yesterday with Steve Fussell, the senior VP of human resources at pharmaceutical maker Abbott… His basic message… was that Abbott is going to be hiring tons of people for high-paying jobs over the next decade, but not many of them will be Americans because we study the wrong things in college and we're not willing to work overseas.

1) "I hate to say we don't have the world's best universities. We may have the best minds, the best liberal arts education. The problem is it doesn't match the work anymore." (That is to say, not enough students are getting science and math degrees.)
Tim Ranzetta
[Ability-To-Benefit] tests have been around for a while with no proof of efficacy…

If the career colleges are concerned enough to "cut way back" on this population, perhaps it might be time for the U.S. taxpayer to make a similar decision…

If the hurdle of requiring a GED for federal aid weeds out the less serious, less committed and less prepared students, what is so bad about that? Is it good public policy to continue to provide post-secondary access to all, load up the most likely not to succeed with large amounts of debt, and then pretend we are surprised when cumulative default rates are projected to exceed 40% for certain types of borrowers?
These are two great examples of how to respond to ill-thought out comments.

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