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All 13 presidents of the United States since Dwight D. Eisenhower have been college graduates. The years after high school are critically formative ones when adolescents become adults, so most presidents in the modern era were significantly influenced by their collegiate experiences. The historical image was that Republican presidents usually came from wealthy privileged families and thus attended prestigious private schools — think of Bush 41 and 43, both Yale University graduates, or Donald Trump, who graduated from the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania. Democrats, however, were thought to more often resemble Lyndon B. Johnson (who graduated from the distinctly downscale Southwest Texas State Teachers College) or Joe Biden (whose undergraduate degree came from a mid-quality flagship state school, the University of Delaware). A Dec. 5 study by Declan Bradley for the Chronicle of Higher Education, supplemented by some additional research of my own, shows that image is profoundly misleading today: Democratic members of Congress and governors, members of a political party historically purporting to champion the poor and “working class” and favoring aggressive government policies, disproportionately attend very expensive elite private schools. By contrast, their traditionally wealthier and more business-friendly GOP colleagues, who are far more skeptical of government involvement in our lives, typically attended less expensive and exclusive state (government-owned) schools. Eight American universities have eight or more members of Congress as graduates, and not one is a state university — the only “public” school to make the list is the highly specialized U.S. Military Academy at West Point. With one exception, Brigham Young University, all eight schools are in Atlantic or Pacific coastal states or D.C. Schools. The Midwest, South, and Great Plains states — “flyover country” to coastal elites — are dramatically underrepresented. For example, 12 members of Congress have bachelor’s degrees from Georgetown University in D.C. The same number comes from the top four Midwest universities in the U.S. News college rankings combined (Northwestern University, University of Chicago, University of Notre Dame, and Washington University in St. Louis), even though all four of those Midwestern schools are rated higher than Georgetown in the U.S. News rankings. Some 28 members of Congress, over 5 percent of the total, graduated from colleges located within walking distance of the Washington D.C. Metro, which strikes me as amazing since most presumably attended college well before they were even old enough to be elected to Congressional office. Do parents move to Washington expecting their kids will ultimately go to college there and then become powerbrokers in the D.C. swamp? Looking at governors reinforces the general conclusion that Democratic political leaders are far more likely to attend elite private schools. Some five of 23 Democratic governors (22 percent) attended Ivy League schools (three went to Harvard University), compared with but one of 27 GOP state leaders (Florida’s Ron DeSantis who attended Yale). One GOP governor, Mike Parson of Missouri, did not even go to college at all. Moreover, several other Democratic governors attended non-Ivy League elite private universities like Duke University, Johns Hopkins University, Vanderbilt University, or Swarthmore College, more so than Republicans. Philosophically, Democrats tend to be highly sympathetic to notions going back to Plato’s Republic of “philosopher kings” or, more recently, to Woodrow Wilson’s vision of highly educated technocrats governing our lives through a powerful administrative state. Wilson and later similarly minded folks believed that some persons are smarter and educationally better equipped than others, so they should be running things. The best and brightest of them go to Harvard or similar Ivy League schools. Republicans are more smitten by the wisdom found in Adam Smith, where the “invisible hand” controlling competitive markets does a far better job of allocating and creating resources and promoting public welfare than Wilsonian bureaucrats. Of the CEOs of the dozen largest companies on the Fortune 500 list at this writing, only one did his undergraduate degree at an Ivy League school, others mostly attended public universities such as Auburn University, the University of South Carolina, the University of Nebraska, the University of Arkansas, and the University of California at Santa Cruz. Most of the largest companies making critical market decisions are headed by graduates of decent quality public schools without strong pretensions of claiming that they are intellectually superior and wiser academic communities. So what? A Republican-controlled federal government may be less sympathetic to higher education in general but is especially less awed by elite private schools. Contributing to Republican Ivy League skepticism: a number of studies show that while college faculty in general have a strong left-wing orientation, that is particularly true of elite private schools like Harvard and Yale. The faculty at the Ivies largely hate the socioeconomic background of their customers. One qualification, however. The “private” school designation generally is highly misleading (excepting a few that take no federal funds like Hillsdale or Grove City colleges) since they almost all take copious amounts of money from the federal government. They also generally do not have to provide First Amendment protections afforded to students at state (public) universities because of their truly mislabeled “private” status. All of this becomes important as a new administration contemplates the future of higher education. For example: Vice President-elect Vance, as a senator, championed a big increase in the federal endowment tax imposed on some wealthy schools. The perpetuation of an academically created aristocracy through private school legacy admissions may be challenged — I suspect with bipartisan support. Other new constraints on universities are likely. For example, the tying of federally-funded research grants to strong university support for academic freedom (an idea from National Institutes of Health director nominee Jay Bhattacharya) will get consideration. More federal policing of fraudulent research findings can be expected. President Trump has already served notice that he wants to revamp accreditation, too often used today to harass colleges to adopt policies more concerned with student skin coloration or gender identity than with academic merit. The Musk-Ramaswamy Department of Government Efficiency will very likely recommend consolidation of civil rights oversight, which now includes the contentious civil rights division in the Department of Education, along with a Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice, the U.S. Civil Rights Commissions, and other agencies. Ridding the Education Department of civil rights involvement could be an important first step in eliminating the entire department, furthered by moving federal student loan activities to the Treasury Department in the short run and perhaps even eliminating them completely in the long term. In such an evenly divided nation as the U.S., political control over the federal government is constantly oscillating, creating perpetual policy uncertainty for institutions of higher education, still another argument for downplaying the federal role, allowing the states, on average more homogenous in political philosophy, to oversee most higher education governmental regulation. Richard Vedder is a distinguished professor of Economics Emeritus at Ohio University, senior fellow at the Independent Institute, and author of the forthcoming Let Colleges Fail: The Power of Creative Destruction in Higher Education. READ MORE from Richard Vedder: Does Academic Research Advance Human Welfare? Not Always. Time to Put Our Fiscal House in Order Are We at the Beginning of the End of Homo Sapiens? The post Progressives’ Aversion to Private Industry Does Not Extend to Private Universities appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

It’s hard to ponder our education system for long and come away thinking it makes sense. This is especially true for our lack of choice in public education. Think about it: We aren’t assigned and restricted to specific grocery stores, hospitals, car dealerships, or churches based on where we happen to live. Even when tax dollars are involved, such as with food stamps or Medicaid, people can choose among a variety of private providers. Parents of children below the age of five choose where — even whether — to send their children to preschool. Likewise, young adults choose whether and where to receive post-secondary education. Even when vouchers or state grants are involved, no one is assigned to a preschool or college based on where they live. But when it comes to educating children in the 5-17 age range (give or take a bit depending on the state), it’s a completely different story. The government assigns kids in this age group to a school based on their home address. Sure, it’s easy to understand why the system was set up that way in the 1800s when transportation and communication were difficult. If it made any sense in 2024, wouldn’t we see people clamoring to assign people to providers in other sectors based on where they live? Happily, there’s growing recognition that children should be educated based on their needs, not their addresses. That’s the premise behind school choice, which is an umbrella term for a variety of programs that allow tax dollars to follow children to a variety of educational options. A voucher program created in 1990 to give lower-income families in Milwaukee access to private schools is considered the first modern school choice program in America. According to the advocacy group EdChoice, there are now 80 school choice programs on the books in 31 states plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, with more than a million students participating. Much of the growth in school choice has happened post-COVID. School closures led to Zoom schooling, which gave parents a front-row seat to see what their children were — or were not — being taught in school. In some cases, this resulted in values clashes, especially around sex education, gender ideology, and how racial issues are discussed. School choice supporters responded to these clashes by pointing out that choice lets people avoid the winner-takes-all political battles that are part and parcel of government-run schooling. Media stories and union-led opposition campaigns often lump all school choice programs into one category called vouchers. However, there are several different types of programs that are quite distinct. Vouchers, such as the previously mentioned Milwaukee program, use state tax dollars and can only be used for private school tuition. Tax credit scholarships are funded with donations from businesses or individuals who receive a credit on their state taxes in return for their donations. Education savings accounts (ESAs) are funded with tax dollars, but they can be used for a wide variety of educational expenses, not just tuition. Tax credit ESAs are funded like tax credit scholarships, but they function like ESAs in terms of what expenses they can fund. Individual tax credits or deductions give parents a credit or deduction on their individual state tax returns based on their education-related spending. Historically, most school choice programs have been limited to specific populations — such as students with special needs, lower-income families, and students assigned to low-performing schools. Starting with West Virginia in 2021, there has been a growing push for programs with universal or nearly universal eligibility, which means all students, regardless of address, abilities, or income, would be eligible. 2023 was dubbed the year of universal choice, given that eight states either expanded programs to universal eligibility or created new ones that are heading toward universality. Unfortunately, funding hasn’t kept up, so some states that have universal eligibility on paper still have waitlists in reality. On the plus side, there was continued progress in 2024. Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Wyoming created new education savings accounts. Alabama’s and Louisiana’s programs will initially be limited to families below specified income levels before eventually being open to all students. The Georgia Promise Scholarship is targeted to students assigned to the bottom 25 percent of public schools in the state. Only students from families whose incomes do not exceed 150 percent of the federal poverty level are eligible for Wyoming’s new ESA. Several other states expanded eligibility and/or funding of existing school choice programs. However, 2024 also saw some setbacks. While political candidates who support school choice fared well in this year’s elections, pro-school choice ballot questions in Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska did not. As my colleague Neal McCluskey and I explained recently, there are a lot of reasons why the anti-school choice side won these contests. Beyond that, we pointed out, “education choices should not be based on majority rule. It is simply wrong to compel families to pay for, and de facto attend, government schools — places intended to do nothing less than shape human minds — that they find subpar, or even morally unacceptable, even if the majority is okay with them.” Despite these losses, the march toward universal school choice continued through 2024. At the same time, there has been increasing attention paid to important issues such as ensuring families know these options exist, encouraging education entrepreneurship so families have a place to use their school choice funding, and working to increase funding so students don’t get trapped on waitlists while their education suffers. The spread of school choice and related policies is transforming the education landscape in America. Parents are increasingly being equipped to choose the best-fit education for their children instead of being compelled to attend a government-run school they happen to live near. And once families experience having a choice in education, they’re unlikely to want a return to the antiquated system of having their address determine their children’s education. Colleen Hroncich is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. READ MORE: Churches Bring School Choice to Every State K-12 Parents Need Same Choices as College Athletes Scholarships Succeed in Pennsylvania Catholic School The post The Status of School Choice: Looking Back at Gains in 2024 appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Gladiator II (2024) is the next installment in failed historical fiction, disappointingly delivered by the director who once brought us Black Hawk Down (2001), American Gangster (2007), and Blade Runner (1982), among many others. It follows his previous lackluster historical fiction, Napoleon (2023). Despite plagiarizing its predecessor to an extent that would make President Biden blush, there’s little family resemblance between the two movies past crude nostalgia baiting. Lucius Verus (Paul Mescal), revealed to be the son of Maximus from Gladiator, was sent away by his mother Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) after the events of that film to protect him from assassins, as he is the grandson of one emperor and nephew of another, making him a potential rival to whoever sits on the Roman throne. Lucius lives with his wife in Numidia when their city is attacked by Roman legionnaires under the command of General Acacius (Pedro Pascal). Lucius’s wife is killed in the attack, he is taken as a slave and trained to be a gladiator, and he swears vengeance against Acacius. Unbeknownst to him, Acacius is tired of war and plots with his wife Lucilla to depose Rome’s corrupt twin emperors, Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger).  Now, not having a reason for existing does not a bad story make. Consider HBO’s The Penguin, for example. But a story that doesn’t need to be told does have a higher bar to meet when it comes to being told well. And here, Gladiator II doesn’t measure up. Despite being an almost shot-for-shot remake of the first film with the same character roles, it feels conventional and modern. There’s a certain kind of sequel that’s become more common over the last decade. It takes a completed story that doesn’t need anything more, fasts forward a few decades, and just repeats it with new characters and some minor tweaks. Ta-da, a reboot! Star Wars: The Force Awakens is the archetype of this kind of movie. Was it a bad film? Not necessarily. But it was a film that was cautious to the point of cowardice, a film that had nothing to say, and a film that seemed to have no reason to exist beyond making money. So too with Gladiator II. The only differences between the two are stylistic in nature — and are for the worse. Maximus’s character traits from the first film are broken up into the Lucius and Acacius roles, both of whom give thoroughly adequate but mediocre performances. The role of Commodus is given to the twin emperors, and to an extent Denzel Washington’s Macrinus, who is also this film’s version of the gladiator trainer Proximo. Macrinus definitely earns the superlative of the best character in the film, but that’s sadly not a high honor. The Roman emperors were finely acted and had the potential to be interesting antagonists, but they never got to really do anything and were just cartoon villains who twirl their mustaches and get manipulated by Macrinus. They capture a certain petulance that we saw from Commodus in the first film but lack his competence, humanity, and menace. For his part, Macrinus isn’t really a clear villain until the film decides he is at the end, and his conclusion is perplexing in light of his intelligence. Especially comical are the animals. Gladiator used horses and tigers tastefully, in a way that never broke your immersion that this was a realistic thing you were watching. In Gladiator II, one scene in particular features gratuitous CGI baboons in an incredibly important moment to establish Lucius’s martial prowess… and it’s impossible to take seriously. Equally absurd are the sharks. While the Romans did fill their arenas with water to reenact sea battles, sea creatures like sharks were beyond their capabilities. The trade of story immersion for a cheap “wow” factor was not well considered. It felt more like Sharknado than Gladiator. To be fair, the original Gladiator did more than its fair share in taking creative license, especially with the life of Emperor Commodus, and Maximus is entirely fictional as well. And while the first film leaves the events after Commodus’s death vague, the movie seems to end on a hopeful note. However, in Scott’s fictional Rome, Commodus’s death ushered in a period of chaos and civil war called The Year of the Five Emperors. More of a Roman nightmare than a Roman dream, really. But what the original Gladiator lacked in historical accuracy it more than made up for in plot, characters, and emotional resonance.  If you’re looking for the kind of vibes Gladiator II is marketing, you would be better served rewatching the first one. The sequel is dull, pointless, and worst of all, soulless. At the risk of taking the obvious layup, no, I was not entertained, and I don’t think you will be either. READ MORE: Is the New York Times Shaking Off Woke? Three Movies to Watch This Holiday Season “The Things We Do For England”: Watching Netflix’s Churchill at War The post Thumbs Down on Gladiator 2 appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.