A good bit on higher education:  Americans Think We Have the Best Colleges.  We Don’t.  Excerpt:

Americans have a split vision of education. Conventional wisdom has long held that our K-12 schools are mediocre or worse, while our colleges and universities are world class. While policy wonks hotly debate K-12 reform ideas like vouchers and the Common Core state standards, higher education is largely left to its own devices. Many families are worried about how to get into and pay for increasingly expensive colleges. But the stellar quality of those institutions is assumed.

Yet a recent multinational study of adult literacy and numeracy skills suggests that this view is wrong. America’s schools and colleges are actually far more alike than people believe — and not in a good way. The nation’s deep education problems, the data suggest, don’t magically disappear once students disappear behind ivy-covered walls.

For another take on this, read Stuart Schneiderman’s analysis here.

Both articles miss one of our major problems with our institutions of higher education, and that is the continued – nay, the increasing offering of crap degrees.  The recent, unwashed, unfortunate “Occupy” movement was rife with examples of recipients of such degrees:  Dupes who, having been awarded degrees in such areas as Women’s Studies or Underwater Dog Polishing, are now unable to find “suitable work,” and are protesting to have others (taxpayers, the productive, people who made better life decisions than they) pick up their tab.

With a crap degree one may expect to have a crap career.  As stated a thousand or more time in these pages, it is not the legitimate role of government to protect people from the consequences of bad decisions.

With that said, it is bordering on fraud for universities – which are taxpayer-supported – to offer crap degrees.  The several States should take steps to correct this.

A couple of interesting Mittwoch tidbits from the folks at Reason.com this morning.  First up:  U.S. Customs Seize Kentucky-Bound Hemp Seeds.  Not marijuana – hemp.  Excerpt:

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials have seized a batch of hemp seeds heading from Italy to Kentucky’s Agriculture Department. As of earlier this year, cultivating hemp—a type of cannabis plant related to marijuana in form but not function—is no longer illegal in the United States, ending a hysterical, decades-long ban on growing this totally non-psychoactive plant. But apparently no one bothered to tell customs?

Of course nobody bothered to tell Customs – or perhaps Customs knew and just didn’t care.

What the hell was the problem with hemp, anyway?  Marijuana at least is an intoxicant – although it’s unclear, at least to yr. obdt., why alcohol is legal and marijuana isn’t.  But let’s set that aside for now, and focus on hemp.

My grandfather grew hemp during the First and Second World Wars, and somehow nobody was driven into a cannabis-fueled frenzy.  Hemp has a wide variety of industrial uses, from rope to cloth to paper to biofuels.  But because of it’s relation to marijuana – or more accurately marijuana being a type of hemp – the Imperial Federal government has decided to disallow it’s growth in the U.S.?

Someone explain why that makes any sense.

The second tidbit from Reason is more lighthearted:  Are Video Games Art?   Being a casual gamer myself, and having played games like Skyrim and it’s MMO successor The Elder Scrolls Online, I’d say yes, sure – there is an enormous amount of graphic and literary creativity that goes into these works.  It’s one bright spot in American productivity right now – video games are making their creators a lot of money, and they’ve earned all of it.