Home // 2016 (Page 2)

Expensive College Degrees Become a Bit More Pointless

January 25, 2016 1 comment
It was nice knowing ya

Photo by Gavin Huang

A few months ago, I wrote about the UK offices of giant accounting firms Ernst & Young and PriceWaterhouse Coopers deemphasizing college credentials in their hiring processes. At a time when college costs are soaring and campuses appear to have degenerated into madhouses, E&Y “found no evidence to conclude that previous success in higher education correlated with future success in subsequent professional qualifications undertaken.”

So E&Y essentially announced that their was no hiring advantage to be had in laying out a mint for tuition and suffering four years of hypersensitivity, and it wasn’t alone.

Now enlist Penguin Random House to the that-college-degree-isn’t-worth-a-damn brigade. “Random House human resources director Neil Morrison said that growing evidence shows there is no simple correlation between having a degree and future professional success,” reports The Guardian. As a consequence, the international publishing company “will no longer require candidates for new jobs to have a university degree.”

As far as these companies are concerned, if you want to go to college, that’s your choice, but it won’t necessarily help you when you apply for a job.

So… When will people begin to decide, en masse, that there’s little attraction to be found in paying out tens of thousands of dollars per year to be immersed in a quasi-totalitarian environment that’s increasingly divorced from real life? We can’t be too many hiring policy announcements away from that point.

With Clinton Campaign Collapsing, Brace Yourself for a Brown vs. Red Election

January 20, 2016 Reply

Offered, for your edification, this comment from Hillary Clinton’s campaign spokesman, Brian Fallon:

“It is alarming that the intelligence community IG, working with Republicans in Congress, continues to selectively leak materials in order to resurface the same allegations and try to hurt Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.”

The offended protest came in response to revelations from an inspector general for the intelligence community that some of the emails the presidential candidate stored on her home-cooked email server when she was secretary of state included “special access program” information. That’s the sort of super-secret label slapped on black projects and other we’d-tell-you-but-then-we’d-have-to-kill-you data.

I’m guessing that the latest details are a deliberate intelligence sector leak, but not necessarily as a gimme to Republicans. I have to think that the country’s spooks are pretty damned appalled at the prospect of a chief executive who cavalierly leaves sensitive data lying around her apartment rather than stored at the office as an attempted end-run around freedom of information requests. Slipping that nugget to the press is probably a shot at torpedoing Clinton’s candidacy and/or pressuring the Justice Department to prosecute, without regard for who else may benefit as a result.

I'm trying to pass one of my policies now. Anybody got some prune juice?

Bernie Sanders/Photo by Gage Skidmore

But the obvious beneficiaries include not just Republican presidential hopefuls, but also Bernie Sanders. The socialist from Vermont is the only serious remaining alternative for the Democratic nomination at a point in time when it’s really too late for anybody else to jump into the normal selection process with hope of getting the donkey party’s nod. He’s already leading Clinton in New Hampshire, competitive with her in Iowa, and gaining nationally. I’m not sufficiently versed on party bylaws to know if there’s still a chance of something being engineered at the convention (both major parties have democratized their procedures over the decades so that the process is far more grassroots-driven than in the past), but it would be exceedingly difficult to foist a top-down establishment pick on the party if Sanders shows up with the requisite delegates.

Would you believe it started as a Y-O-O-O-J joke?

Donald Trump/Photo by Gage Skidmore

With Donald Trump chewing up the scenery on the GOP side, there’s a very real chance of seeing two outsiders seize the major party nominations based on populist campaigns exploiting the collapse of establishment efforts. Sanders is a self-described socialist, while Trump is a personality-driven authoritarian centrist who stirs up nationalist sentiments while vilifying out groups–a fascist at least in the broad sense, if not a Mussolini fanboy.

That means America’s major political parties (which have effectively delegitimized competitors through the schools and media) are within a whisker of handing us a brown vs. red presidential race in the fall of 2016.

For what it’s worth, I recommend bourbon. Or Victory Gin, if you wait a year.

First « 12