Thayer made the following observations about telemed abortions:

….  Telemed abortion is the practice by which an abortion doctor from a remote location simply presses a button, which opens a drawer containing the dangerous abortion pill, after a brief teleconference call with the woman.

Telemed abortion doesn’t only result in the death of an unborn child; it strips women of their dignity by denying them the courtesy of an in-person visit from a doctor concerned for their health and well-being. It risks their lives by sending them away with no support and a drug that has led to massive bleeding and hemorrhaging, infection and even death.

So what does Planned Parenthood, the “trusted friend of women,” love so much about telemed abortions? Low overhead costs.

My superiors justified telemed abortions, lauding the financial benefits of not having to worry about or pay for specialized equipment, staff and a traveling physician – all required with surgical abortions.

When I expressed my concerns, I was “let go,” supposedly because of “downsizing.”

President Obama apparently indicated to the Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, that the pipeline would be approved after the November election.  Environmentalists are a major constituency of the Democratic Party, and they oppose the pipeline for many reasons but primarily because they believe that killing the project will stop the production of unrefined oil from Canadian tar sands.  This is folly because the Chinese are more than willing to buy the oil, so the oil will be produced, and it will be consumed somewhere.

The United States imports dangerously large volumes of crude oil, but it also has massive resources that could be used to reduce our dependence on unfriendly governments who produce oil.  Yet, our current government has anti-energy policies that will inevitably lead to more importing and higher prices.

Oddly enough President Obama chose to go to Disney World on Thursday (1/19) to press the flesh and promote tourism in Florida.  Florida has an unemployment rate of 10.0%, and it depends greatly on tourism.  It has Disney World and all the nearby entertainment parks.  It has a large cruise ship industry, and it has a wonderful climate and beaches that people visit from all over the world (e.g., South Beach, Miami).

How do people get to Florida to enjoy these various tourist activities?  They consume a pretty substantial amount of fossil fuel like the stuff we won’t be getting from the Keystone XL pipeline.  As energy prices climb due to lack of production, the health of the vacation and entertainment industries will be imperiled.  I hope some Floridians asked the president about that.

Furthermore, the political Left hates energy production and the economic productivity it brings.  It doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that one of the reasons our standard of living is so high is that we use these fuels to run engines that increase our real productivity.  Take a look at the History Channel’s program “Modern Marvels” sometime.  Almost all the episodes rely on the use of fuel or electricity to run machinery that expands human productivity enormously.

The environmental movement has a basic problem with this fact.  Remember that in 1992, Al Gore wrote in his book, Earth in the Balance, that the internal combustion engine posed a greater threat to the United States than actual military enemies.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Engines of various kinds have been one of the factors that have allowed mankind to escape the grinding poverty it had known for millennia.

The United States has 55,000 miles of oil-carrying pipelines, and Keystone XL would have expanded that total only marginally.  That was not the problem for the environmentalists.  They just want to shut down all new energy production except for inefficient renewable energy (wind, solar) that has no hope of powering our economy.  The long-term continuation of policies like this will have profound effects on the ability of the United States to grow economically and increase the standard of living for American families.  More basically, it will help determine whether many families will be able to heat there homes economically.

The American people are going to have to choose the vision of reality they endorse.

Outstanding student loan debt — which exceeds $1 trillion, more than what Americans owe on credit cards — is likely to be a major political issue this election year as students and their parents question the rising cost and value of a college education.

Sullivan presents some alarming statistics about loan defaults:

The rate of defaults rose from 7 percent in 2008 to 8.8 percent in 2009, the latest official figures available. That’s 320,194 of the 3.6 million people who began repayment that year, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

The rate in 2009 is about one in twelve – a high rate.  Concern runs from the political Right to the Left.  As a Univ. of Pittsburgh English professor, William Scott, associated with the Occupy movement observed, “Schools keep raising their tuitions because they know their students have easy access to these student loans.” “It’s almost become a type of predatory lending.”  At the same time, Rep. Ron Paul believes the loan programs should be abolished because they are “an absolute failure.”

Jay Schalin, of the excellent John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy (Raliegh, NC), has written an op-ed in the Washington Times discussing some educational reviews that may be coming in China:

China’s state-run universities have been churning out graduates so quickly that many can’t find good jobs, even in a booming economy.

In response, China will “soon start evaluating college majors by their employment rates, downsizing or cutting degree programs in which the employment rate for graduates falls below 60 percent for two consecutive years,” the Wall Street Journal reported recently.

Much is imperfect with this authoritarian approach, but it seems more sensible than having no feedback in a system – like ours – that continues to sink students in unproductive majors and degree programs with loads of debt.  (See the Wall Street Journal article by Laurie Burkitt who writes from Beijing.)

As Schalin observes – after noting that employment rates are not the only evaluative measure that should be used:

But using data on the employment of graduates is still a valuable evaluation tool, and it serves as a useful guide for reforming higher education.

The Chinese exhibit hard-nosed common sense by looking at the actual results of their higher-education system; forward-looking U.S. public universities should do the same. If they won’t end their excesses voluntarily, perhaps it’s time for state legislatures to consider Chinese-style standards.

Results matter; it’s time to judge universities on how well graduates perform once they’ve left the security of the ivory tower.

It isn’t just that their unemployment rate is higher than that of any other group in the general populace, but the young are being subjected to “record-smashing college debt levels.”  This is taking place while the national debt explodes.  Youth employment stands at 17.4%, and college debt has reached $26,300 for the typical graduate.  The national debt now stands about 100% of GDP – 15 trillion dollars.  More significantly in one sense: the interest payments alone are now equal to $3,000 per taxpayer.

Young America’s Foundation recognizes the economic problems facing the young and has developed a “Youth Misery Index.”  The Index reflects a value for youth unemployment plus college debt levels and per capita national debt.  This is a good idea, and I look forward to the Index’s release each year.

(One suggestion might be to adjust the national debt component to also reflect the finding of Reinhart and Rogoff (This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly) that debt levels above 90% of GDP have a detrimental effect on long-term growth and stability.)

There is a great deal of debate even among conservative education scholars whether the NCLB’s standards have become increasingly unrealistic.  There is disagreement over whether NCLB should continue as a national guide.  Whatever one’s feelings about NCLB, it seems clear that many schools and students are not proficient in reading and math.  Proponents note that the law “require[s] states to publish test-score results in math and reading for each school in grades 3 through 8 and again in grade 10.”  Parents can see how their children’s school is doing, but see this article that argues the federal yardstick  is defective.

The debate will continue next year as the NCLB law needs to be reauthorized by the Congress.  That may not be possible in an election year.  As with many other things much depends on the outcome of the presidential election.

One area in which there seems to be positive news is in “virtual” schooling.  “Virtual” education refers to taking classes online using the internet as the teaching device.  It seems completely obvious that online learning – if packaged properly – will revolutionize education.  See the Khan Academy.  A recent article notes the rapid growth in this new avenue for learning.  I think it is a positive development for a market-based approach to make an appearance in schooling.

The New York Times published a lengthy incredibly negative article on virtual learning recently.  Virtual learning probably has its difficulties, but it also strikes at the core of the modern public school power structures by giving parents more choices.  Lindsey Burke at the Heritage Foundation has some good observations on this debate.  One wonders if the Times is more worried about that than learning.

At its core, Reynolds thesis is simple.  He notes that education costs have risen at multiples of the general level of inflation in the economy.  Roughly speaking over the past thirty years, U.S. inflation was about 106%; health care costs increased 251%; and, college tuition costs increased 439%.  Next, he borrows the economist Herbert Stein’s maxim that things that are unsustainable, won’t be sustained.  These levels of excess cost increases for higher education are so great that they cannot and won’t be sustained over time.

This weekend, Professor Reynolds, had another column on this topic in the Washington Examiner.  Reynold made a couple of additional points.  First, he believes that college loan debt should be subject to elimination in bankruptcy.  That is not possible now.  Related to this he makes the following recommendation:

For higher education, the solution is more value for less money. Student loans, if they are to continue, should be made dischargeable in bankruptcy after five years — but with the school that received the money on the hook for all or part of the unpaid balance.

Up until now, the loan guarantees have meant that colleges, like the writers of subprime mortgages a few years ago, got their money up front, with any problems in payment falling on someone else.

Make defaults expensive to colleges, and they’ll become much more careful about how much they lend and what kinds of programs they offer. China, which has already faced its own higher education bubble, is simply shutting down programs that produce too many unemployable graduates.

Second, Reynolds argues that it may be time for skilled trades to make a return along with a return of vocational education.  (As he writes, “We need people who can make things, and it’s harder to outsource a plumbing or welding job to somebody in Bangalore.”)

Ultimately, he argues correctly that the skill that is most needed for young workers now is adaptability.  That seems to be clearly correct.

Check out the articles and the lecture, they are worth your time if you have an interest in this topic.

The first, a news story in the Washington Times, discusses “the latest installment of [President Obama’s] ‘we can’t wait’ campaign against Congress” in which the president issued new executive orders dealing with the Head Start program;

The second article by Michael G. Morris, CEO of American Electric Power, makes note of a looming worker shortage needed to fill millions of skilled jobs being vacated by retiring baby boomers that, in many cases, might not require debt-inflicting college degrees;

Finally, Michael Barone has a thought-provoking column about student debt and an Occupy Wall Street protester who acquired $35,000 in debt to study puppetry.  Yes, puppetry.  Barone defends his choice and considers him to be something of an entrepreneur.  Read it.

• The first, an editorial in the Washington Examiner, focuses on the impact charter schools are having on education in theDistrict of Columbia.

• The second article focuses on the difficulties being experienced in reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind law. (Rightly or wrongly, the author believes that: “Failure to update the 2001 No Child Left Behind law, despite considerable support from both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill, would have the practical effect of giving President Obama a much freer hand in setting federal education policy and pushing his favored reforms.”)

• The third article, by former congresswoman Melissa Hart, describes some unusual circumstances surrounding a federal False Claims Act lawsuit against Education Management Corporation (a for-profit) that was joined by the Dep’t of Justice in May 2011.  (Here is a New York Times piece with some background information and a different point of view.)

All in all, these articles lead one to conclude that the size of the D.C.-based education-industrial-complex is so massive that it needs to be drastically reduced or eliminated.

Coincidentally, in a speech given today at the Family Research Council, Representative Michelle Bachmann, stated that, if elected president, she would repeal all federal education laws (i.e., policy authority).  She added that she would eliminate the Department of Education.  The key step, however, would be eliminating the education laws because erasing the Dep’t of Education alone would do nothing to end the programs, activities, and spending that are required under all these federal statutes.  Only statutory repeal will do that.  It was interesting to hear Rep. Bachmann make this distinction.