Only in America: A 6-year-old Colorado boy was suspended from school for reciting the rap lyric “I’m sexy and I know it” to a female classmate. The LMFAO track recently topped the national charts, but school officials said first-grader D’Avorite Meadows committed sexual harassment by quoting its chorus. “I’m floored,” said his mom.
While many college graduates aren’t exactly eager to give up a life of beer pong and afternoon classes for the daily drudgery of 9-to-5 office life, this year’s batch of newly minted adults faces an even greater problem: The possibility of no job at all. The unemployment rate remains above 8 percent nationwide, and young graduates are entering a market that’s more competitive than ever. “Truly, this is a terrible time to be young,” says Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman.
Here, some reasons new graduates might wish they could put off graduation:
1. The job market isn’t growing fast enough
The economy added a lackluster 115,000 jobs in April, which isn’t nearly enough to absorb the crush of graduates that will enter the market in the summer and beyond. And the unemployment rate for young people is much higher than the national average. Currently, the jobless rate for workers under age 25 is 16.4 percent.
2. They’re suffering from a “recession hangover”
“The class of 2012 faces tougher competition” than most young graduates, thanks to what’s been called a “recession hangover,” say Lauren Weber and Melissa Korn at The Wall Street Journal. Essentially, 2012 grads will be competing for jobs not only with their classmates, but with the many unemployed or underemployed graduates from 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011 who entered the workforce during the recession and its aftermath.
3. Companies are making do with unpaid interns
Several firms, aware that graduates are increasingly desperate for work experience, have boosted their ranks of unpaid interns to perform duties once done by regular employees, says Steven Greenhouse at The New York Times. The trend has “spread to fashion houses, book and magazine publishers, marketing companies, public relations firms, art galleries, talent agencies — even to some law firms,” reducing many graduates’ chances of seeing a paycheck.
— Yunte Huang: A student debt crisis that cannot be ignored
Most college-bound high school seniors will know by May 1 if they got accepted to the school of their choice, or at least made the waitlist. But here’s a hard reality check: For most students, being waitlisted is “not much better than a rejection,” admissions consultant Elizabeth Heaton tells The Wall Street Journal. Other experts call the waitlist just plain ”mean.”
Just how bad are your chances of advancing past the waitlist? The numbers at elite universities are pretty grim: Yale took in 103 (out of 996), Carnegie Mellon accepted six (out of 5,003), Stanford took 13 (out of 1,078), and Cornell, zero (out of 2,998). Harvard, which won’t specify the size of its waitlist, admitted just 31. And it’s getting worse, says Caralee Adams at Education Week. More colleges are relying on waitlists — 48 percent in 2010, versus 34 percent in 2009 — and admitting a lower percentage of waitlisted students: 28 percent nationally in 2010, down from 34 percent in 2009. At more selective colleges, your odds are at about 11 percent.
In his latest column, Dr. William H. Frist explains how teachers can dramatically change the trajectory of a child’s future. “Our lack of teacher accountability is akin to a drug company producing medicines without measuring if the pills actually cure disease,” Frist says.
So, how can we foster better teaching? Do educators need more pay? Better evaluations? Stronger feedback?
Check out Frist’s column, and share your suggestions. Tweet @TheWeek using the hashtag #GreatTeachers and we’ll share your responses.
The Great Recession hit California community colleges particularly hard, with spending cuts forcing administrators to cancel hundreds of classes, and the remaining classes growing overcrowded. One school’s has come up with a unique solution. Santa Monica College will charge students more to enroll in the most popular courses — five times more.
It is apparently quite common for school districts to request that standardized tests not include certain words that students might find offensive. But New York City’s list of some 50 banned test topics is twice as long as national sensitivity lists, and stands out as “a bizarre case of political correctness run wild,“ says Yoav Gonen in the New York Post.
Here, a look at some of the blacklisted topics, and why they might have been deemed problematic:
1. Birthdays
Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t celebrate birthdays
2. Dinosaurs
Some students don’t believe in evolution
3. Halloween
Suggests paganism
4. Religious holidays and festivals
Could offend students who don’t celebrate one or more of the holidays
5. TV, celebrities, and video games
To “avoid giving offense or disadvantage any test takers by privileging prior knowledge” like pop culture, Robert Pondiscio at the Core Knowledge Foundation tells the New York Post.
6. Computers in the home
Not all students have computers at home
How can we fix this? Today, The Week’s newest columnist, Bill Frist, gives three suggestions. But we want to know what you think. Tweet your thoughts @TheWeek using the hashtag #ChildPoverty, or participate in the conversation on Facebook.
Tomorrow we’ll pull all the best responses together in one post. We can’t wait to read what you have to say.
Came into the office this morning and found this gem waiting for us.
“Mr. Malca’s 8th grade American History Class loves The Week”
We especially love the kid on the left who looks like he might karate chop the magazine. Glad to see The Week is getting some good use in the classroom. Thanks, Mr. Malca’s class!
Er… incorrect.
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