According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, “when considering all first-time undergraduates, studies have found anywhere from 28 percent to 40 percent of students enroll in at least one remedial course. When looking at only community college students, several studies have found remediation rates surpassing 50 percent.” Only 25 percent of students who took the ACT in 2012 met the test’s readiness benchmarks in all four subjects (English, reading, math and science).

It’s clear that high schools confer diplomas that attest that a student can read, write and do math at a 12th-grade level when, in fact, most cannot. That means most high diplomas represent fraudulent documents. But when high school graduates enter college, what happens? To get a hint, we can turn to an article by Craig E. Klafter, “Good Grieve! America’s Grade Inflation Culture,” published in the Fall 2019 edition of Academic Questions. In 1940, only 15 percent of all grades awarded were A’s. By 2018, the average grade point average at some of the nation’s leading colleges was A-minus. For example, the average GPA at Brown University (3.75), Stanford (3.68), Harvard College (3.63), Yale University (3.63), Columbia University (3.6), University of California, Berkeley (3.59).

The falling standards witnessed at our primary and secondary levels are becoming increasingly the case at tertiary levels. “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses” is a study conducted by Professors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. They found that 45 percent of 2,300 students at 24 colleges showed no significant improvement in “critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years.”

An article in News Forum for Lawyers titled “Study Finds College Students Remarkably Incompetent” cites a study done by the American Institutes for Research that revealed that over 75 percent of two-year college students and 50 percent of four-year college students were incapable of completing everyday tasks. About 20 percent of four-year college students demonstrated only basic mathematical ability, while a steeper 30 percent of two-year college students could not progress past elementary arithmetic. NBC News reported that Fortune 500 companies spend about $3 billion annually to train employees in “basic English.”

Here is a list of some other actual college courses that have been taught at U.S. colleges in recent years: “What If Harry Potter Is Real?” “Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame,” “Philosophy and Star Trek,” “Learning from YouTube,” “How To Watch Television,” and “Oh, Look, a Chicken!” The questions that immediately come to mind are these: What kind of professor would teach such courses, and what kind of student would spend his time taking such courses? Most importantly, what kind of college president and board of trustees would permit classes in such nonsense?

The fact that unscrupulous parents paid millions for special favors from college administrators to enroll their children pales in comparison to the poor educational outcomes, not to mention the gross indoctrination of young people by leftist professors.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at creators.com.

Overpopulation. From its usage in Thomas Malthus’s notorious 1798 “Essay on the Principle of Population” to its resurgence in Paul Ehrlich’s 1960 “The Population Bomb,” the word invokes images of a bleak, hopeless future. As the story goes, the ever-increasing birth rate triggers rampant food shortages and systemic resource deprivation, culminating with the human race extinguishing itself. Ehrlich went as far to predict an imminent cataclysm: “England will not exist in the year 2000.”

The solution? In an effort to stave off this destruction, population control ensues.

We’ve witnessed it rear its dehumanizing head again and again. The U.S. Supreme Court decision Buck v. Bell (famous for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes chilling phrase “three generations of imbeciles are enough”), which legalized eugenics in the United States. China’s former one-child policy, which resulted in coercive abortions and wreaked havoc on the nation’s food supply and labor force. The United Nations Population Fund, which promoted forced abortion and involuntary sterilization.

Now, population control has returned with a vengeance, reincarnated as the antidote to the Left’s favorite existential threat—climate change. According to the narrative, population growth correlates to detrimental environmental impact. As French President Emmanuel Macron said of Africa’s burgeoning population, “When countries still have seven to eight children per woman, you can decide to spend billions of euros, but you will not stabilize anything.” The Center for Biological Diversity launched a “condom campaign” to alert people to the perceived dangers of having children by distributing birth control in “colorful packages depicting endangered animals,” which sport poorly rhyming mantras like, “Wear a condom now, save the spotted owl.” Progressive author Jill Filipovic’s tweet, however, best encapsulates this ideology: “Having children is one of the worst things you can do for the planet. Have one less and conserve resources.”

First, progressives overstate the gravity of overpopulation. As the National Vital Statistics System noted, fertility rates are sharply declining, causing some perturbed scientists to foreshadow the antithesis of previous concerns–a population “implosion.” By implication, the data the Left uses to fuel overpopulation aversion is inconclusive at best. Furthermore, National Geographic points out that the entire world’s population could fit standing shoulder-to-shoulder in Los Angeles, which demonstrates the sheer amount of space in the world for each individual.

Second, population control—and along with it the mantra that discourages procreation to preserve spotted owls—severely devalues human life. As Alexandra Desanctis observes in the National Review: 

Who among us has the right to decide when a child is “extra,” and how many is too many? Or maybe we should get down to business right away and begin by eliminating all of the “extra” people currently milling about the globe, taxing the earth’s precious resources with their costly carbon dioxide emissions. Any volunteers?

She continues:

Of course, there’s a big difference between offing a child standing next to you and saying that people ought to choose not to have that child in the first place. But both presume that human life is valuable only if — and should be brought into the world only if — a certain subset of powerful and wise elites give the okay.

To classify children as a blight because of a tenuous connection with their carbon footprint, to caution parents to avoid children on the basis of preserving endangered species, to contend that procreation is one of the worst things for humanity are affronts to human life and have devastating repercussions for a shared public understanding of the value of human life.

Third, population control exacerbates the fundamental problem: government intervention. By essentially granting to the government the authority to determine who ought or ought not to live, population control legislation vests more power in humanity’s biggest killer.

Walter E. Williams, professor of economics at George Mason University, provides evidence that government interference harms humanity far more than does population growth: 

The greatest threat to mankind’s prosperity is government, not population growth. For example, Zimbabwe was agriculturally rich but, with government interference, was reduced to the brink of mass starvation. Any country faced with massive government interference can be brought to starvation. Blaming poverty on overpopulation not only lets governments off the hook but also encourages the enactment of harmful, inhumane policies.

In other words, population control enthusiasts miss the point. While they’re alleging that increasing population entails mass starvation, they miss the empirical reality that it is government interference, not population growth, that is the real problem for humanity.

Ultimately, only “greater personal liberty, private property rights, the rule of law and an economic system closer to capitalism than to communism” comprise a system that solves the harms falsely imputed to overpopulation and ensures the protection of human value.

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It does make a difference.

Written by Walter E. Williams

One of the unavoidable consequences of youth is the tendency to think behavior we see today has always been. I’d like to dispute that vision, at least as it pertains to black people.

I graduated from Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin High School in 1954. Franklin’s predominantly black students were from the poorest North Philadelphia neighborhoods.

During those days, there were no policemen patrolling the hallways. Today, close to 400 police patrol Philadelphia schools. There were occasional after-school fights—rumbles, as we called them—but within the school, there was order. In contrast with today, students didn’t use foul language to teachers, much less assault them.

Places such as the Richard Allen housing project, where I lived, became some of the most dangerous and dysfunctional places in Philadelphia. Mayhem—in the form of murders, shootings, and assaults—became routine.

By the 1980s, residents found that they had to have window bars and multiple locks. The 1940s and ’50s Richard Allen project, as well as other projects, bore no relation to what they became. Many people never locked their doors; windows weren’t barred. We did not go to bed with the sound of gunshots. Most of the residents were two-parent families with one or both parents working.

How might one explain the greater civility of Philadelphia and other big-city, predominantly black neighborhoods and schools during earlier periods compared with today? Would anyone argue that during the ’40s and ’50s, there was less racial discrimination and poverty? Was academic performance higher because there were greater opportunities? Was civility in school greater in earlier periods because black students had more black role models in the form of black principals, teachers, and guidance counselors? That’s nonsense, at least in northern schools. In my case, I had no more than three black teachers throughout primary and secondary school.

Starting in the 1960s, the values that made for civility came under attack. Corporal punishment was banned. This was the time when the education establishment and liberals launched their agenda that undermined lessons children learned from their parents and the church.

Sex education classes undermined family/church strictures against premarital sex. Lessons of abstinence were ridiculed, considered passé, and replaced with lessons about condoms, birth control pills, and abortion. Further undermining of parental authority came with legal and extralegal measures to assist teenage abortions, often with neither parental knowledge nor parental consent.

Customs, traditions, moral values, and rules of etiquette are behavioral norms, transmitted mostly by example, word of mouth, and religious teachings. As such, they represent a body of wisdom distilled through the ages by experience and trial and error.

The nation’s liberals—along with the education establishment, pseudo-intellectuals, and the courts—have waged war on traditions, customs and moral values. Many people have been counseled to believe that there are no moral absolutes. Instead, what’s moral or immoral is a matter of personal convenience, personal opinion, what feels good, or what is or is not criminal.

We no longer condemn or shame self-destructive and rude behavior, such as out-of-wedlock pregnancies, dependency, cheating, and lying. We have replaced what worked with what sounds good.

The abandonment of traditional values has negatively affected the nation as a whole, but blacks have borne the greater burden. This is seen by the decline in the percentage of black two-parent families. Today, a little over 30 percent of black children live in an intact family, where as early as the late 1800s, over 70 percent did. Black illegitimacy in 1938 was 11 percent, and that for whites was 3 percent. Today, it’s respectively 73 percent and 30 percent.

It is the height of dishonesty, as far as blacks are concerned, to blame our problems on slavery, how white people behave, and racial discrimination. If those lies are not exposed, we will continue to look for external solutions when true solutions are internal. Those of us who are old enough to know better need to expose these lies.

This article was originally posted at the DailySginal.com