Television
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Tucker Carlson and I discuss the benefits of Higher Education and Student Loans (Michael Simkovic)
Last night I was invited to appear on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News. For the last two nights, Mr. Carlson has been inveighing against higher education and federal student loans. Mr. Carlson has been promoting a private-student-lender supported plan to tax higher education institutions that accept federal student loans. Similar plans to tax educational…
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Should Online Education Come with an Asterisk on Transcripts? (Michael Simkovic)
The ABA recently voted to permit a dramatic expansion of online legal education. Online education is controversial in higher education. It is even more controversial in legal education, which relies more on classroom interaction and less on lectures than most forms of higher education. Widespread perceptions that online education is lower quality than live instruction…
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Anti-university “free speech” legislation will divert education funds to demagogues and facilitate monitoring, intimidation, and harassment of academic communities (Michael Simkovic)
The Goldwater-Koch legislation is profoundly hostile to the vision of universities as special institutions—places of learning, of the pursuit of knowledge for the betterment of society, of refinement and culture. Anyone with an affinity for this vision of universities should actively and unequivocally oppose the Goldwater legislation and related proposals to strip universities of autonomy…
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Zephyr Teachout (Fordham): Congress let Facebook CEO off the hook too easily (Michael Simkovic)
In the Guardian, Fordham's Zephyr Teachout argues that members of Congress let the CEO of Facebook off easily and essentially treated his hearing as an opportunity to curry favor with him. Teachout writes: "It was designed to fail. It was a show designed to get Zuckerberg off the hook after only a few hours in…
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Statistician Hans Rosling: The Press Does Not Understand the World (Michael Simkovic)
Statistician and data visualization expert Hans Rosling recently took the media to task for misleading readers and viewers using unrepresentative anecdotes and ignoring contradictory data. Rosling says "You can't trust the news outlets if you want to understand the world. You have to be educated and then research basic facts." While journalists often depict the developing world as full of…
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BLS Employment Projections Are Unreliable (Michael Simkovic)
Labor economists have long cautioned against the misuse of Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) employment projections. In 2004, Michael Horrigan at the BLS explained that the BLS projections should not be used to value education or to attempt to predict shortages or surpluses of educated labor. Instead, the value of education should be measured based on…
Giovanni Molteni Tagliabue (Italy) Rationalized and Extended Democracy – The REDemo Project. Foreword by Gilberto Corbellini. Firenze University Press 2023.…