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Campus watch: ‘Early Decision’ Exploits Kids
“Early decision” for college admissions used to be “a niche option” that only “a limited number of selective colleges” offered, not now, “many top schools reserve half to three-quarters of their entering class” for students willing to “submit” to “restrictive terms” without awareness about final costs, gripes Daniel Currell at The New York Times.
It serves the schools well, but “forces 17- and 18-year-olds to make life-altering decisions without comparing options” and “pits the interests of teenage novices” against mighty institutions that will even “blacklist” high schools whose applicants “renege on their commitments.”
Ban this practice as an “important step toward revitalizing a culture of learning on our campuses.”
From the left: Dems’ Education Pessimism
Skeptics who say trying “to shrink the gap between rich and poor students is a fool’s errand” tend “to reside on the political left,” fumes the Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait.
The left’s “rapturous” embrace of junk studies that poo-poo clear gains shows “just how eager progressives are to debunk any apparent success in education reform.”
Why deny the “many examples of cities, states, and school systems that have developed effective and scalable ways to shrink education gaps”?
Because “these reforms are challenging to enact,” plus “teachers’ unions loathe accountability” (including “anything that makes it easy to fire a low-performing teacher”) while “affluent parents dislike the stress that comes with standardized testing.”
Democrats prefer “avoiding reforms that unsettle their coalition.”
Eye on Europe: Trump Spots True Trend
The Trump team has a point about how “trends” of “mass immigration” and the “Islamification” of Europe “predict the continent’s ‘civilizational erasure,’ ” observes The Spectator’s Gavin Mortimer: Berlin’s “Jews and gays” are urged to “hide their identity” in Arab precincts; 10% of French Jews have “left the country” since 2000.
This “erasure” is mostly “self-inflicted” as local officials celebrate the hijab and tell natives to “go and live somewhere else” if Islamic norms discomfort them. Amid “mass immigration,” the Muslim Brotherhood seeks to “adapt Europe to Islam.”
Britain’s “Labour government is expected to soon introduce new ‘Islamophobia’ laws that will criminalize criticism of Islam.”
Adapting to Islam means “Europe must first erase” itself — “which it is doing.”
Conservative: Orban’s Failed Bid To Boost Births
Oops: It seemed Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s “pro-family policies, including lots of cash, accommodations, and tax breaks for parents,” had goosed Hungary’s birth rates, recalls the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney — but the rate’s been falling for two years now.
“Hungary’s total fertility rate is down to 1.30 babies per woman, way down from 1.51 in 2023, which itself is far lower than the United States.”
Perhaps the rise in births from 2011 to 2021 was “just a question of babies being born earlier,” as the incentives moved people “to have children sooner than they otherwise would have,” but not to have more kids total.
Plus, “Hungary’s most aggressive recent move in family policy was a tax break for working mothers,” which is “really a work subsidy — stay-at-home mothers don’t benefit from it at all.”
Apparently, “Orbán has not found the key to a 21st-century baby boom.”
Energy desk: Climate Cult Collapsing
“The collapse of the Paris Agreement and the unmasking of the net zero illusion” proves that the climate-apocalypse “spell is breaking,” cheers Vijay Jayaraj at The Hill.
The evidence is everywhere: “Bill Gates stepped away from the front lines of climate alarmism in a recent essay,” admitting “the world will not collapse because of climate change.”
“In the U.K.’s North Sea and off the U.S. East Coast, massive wind projects are being canceled,” while oil companies “are quietly backtracking on ambitious climate goals.”
All because “the gap between alarmist predictions and observed reality is no longer possible to hide.”
“The climate cult declared war on the very engines that lifted humanity from hunger and hardship,” but we’re seeing “a long-awaited return of reason to a world held hostage by fear.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board