These 11 universities are awful and should be demolished down right now

The Great Recession has put a lot of people out of work and has taken a huge bite out of the value of pretty much everybody’s real property values. It bankrupted some historic companies, too, including Lehman Brothers and General Motors.

Education is a sector of the economy — a pretty large sector — that has managed to survive the malaise mostly unscathed. American colleges have been able to hang on, virtually en masse, with the tenacity of cockroaches — thanks in no small part to federal largesse in the form of Pell Grants and subsidized student loans.

That’s sad, really, because many public and private colleges and universities are delivering a sloppy, unfinished product. The 2011 “Pathway to Prosperity” study conducted by Harvard University found that only 56 percent of students complete four-year programs in fewer than six years.

Graduation rates don’t always accurately reflect the dropout rate. Some students don’t graduate because they leave at the first opportunity for better schools, for example. Also, students who obtain two-year degrees get missed in any four-year graduation count.

Still, way too many public and private nonprofit schools produce deplorable results — leaving dropouts on the hook for student loans and with little else, and leaving the government out billions in wasted grant money.

The slideshow below presents some of the worst offenders. Hopefully, your alma mater isn’t on the list. It’s probably not, though, because graduation rates are so low.

Via: The Daily Caller

Continue Reading....

Report: Median Income Worse Now Than It Was During Great Recession

WASHINGTON (CBSDC) — A new report put out by the Pew Research Center finds that the median income is worse now than it was during the Great Recession.

According to Pew, the Census Bureau showed that the median income for American households in 2009 – the official end of the Great Recession – was $52,195 (in 2011 dollars), while the median income dipped to $50,054 last year, falling 4.1 percent over two years.

“The decrease in household income from 2009 to 2011 almost exactly equaled the decrease in income in the two years of the recession,” the Pew report stated. “During the Great Recession, the median U.S. household income (in 2011 dollars) dropped from $54,489 in 2007 to $52,195 in 2009, a loss of 4.2 percent. By this yardstick, the recovery from the Great Recession is bypassing the nation’s households.”

The Pew report added that the recovery is the “most negative for household income during any post-recession period in the past four decades,” which means that the median household income has not risen above a previous peak over the past 12 years.

The poverty rate rose from 12.5 percent in 2007 to 15 percent last year as the median household wealth fell by 39 percent over a three-year span, from $131,016 in 2007 to $79,431 in 2010.

“[T]he economic health of American families deteriorated further in the first two years of the recovery from the Great Recession,” the Pew report explains. “Much like an unwelcome dinner guest who does not know when it is time to leave, the Great Recession seems blissfully unaware that it was declared over in June 2009.”

Via:CBS DC

Continue Reading...