Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
I don't think the Zoron Mamdani thing is repeatable broadly.
I don't think it's repeatable at a national level. But
I do think it has some pretty troubling signs for
Republicans if the Trump administration doesn't start fixing some things
(00:20):
and fixing them quick and maybe it's a problem that
both sides are faced with these really huge economic problems.
Congress doesn't have the flexibility and the agility to actually
fix them quickly, no matter who's in power, even if
they did have the right ideas, And it's setting up
(00:43):
maybe a next couple of decades of just ping ponging
from one political party to the next around this central
issue of affordability. So let me explain why I'm I
got a lot of these ideas bouncing around this. Gal
ainez Stepman, whom I follow on Twitter, who works for
(01:05):
a couple of different nonprofits, Think her column writer Gal
She writes about how the student loan problem is just
not going away. We've now got two generations of young people.
We got millennials and now we got gen z who
(01:25):
are all being held hostage to you know, leaving college
with tens of thousands of dollars of student loans, and
it's all because they did something that was told to
them was quote the responsible thing to do. They were
told by either their boomer parents or their boomer guidance counselors,
(01:47):
or their boomer teachers, whatever, do the responsible thing, go
to college and get a degree. They freighted themselves with
tens of thousands of dollars of student loans in order
to do that, and now they are screwed. Real in
come has not increased enough. Costs, particularly for young people
who need to go to the cities to pursue opportunities,
(02:09):
costs are outlandish. Housing costs in particular, are outlandish. You've
got people making six figures in New York City who
feel like they're living paycheck to paycheck because of how
expensive everything is. And there's no real solution. Democrats want
(02:36):
to just blanket forgive student loans, but they don't actually
want to solve the problem of people taking on too
many student loans. They don't want to fix what's at
the root of it. They just want a handout to
make their voting base happy. At the same time, conservatives
don't want to move on the problem at all. Conservative
(03:00):
who does want to fix the underlying root cause, i e.
The excess of funny money loans that are just available
for anyone, no matter what field of study you're pursuing,
no matter your grades, whatever, Just anybody who wants a
student loan can have it for the taking, which is
an incredibly improvident way to give out loans. If the
(03:25):
taxpayer weren't on the hook, there's no bank in America
that would operate in such an irresponsible fashion. Conservatives don't
want to forgive those loans, and they don't want to
solve the root problem. So you've got two generations now
of people. You've got millennials still paying off their loans.
(03:47):
In many cases, you've got gen z now saddled with
their loans. A lot of them go to the cities
for work. I mean, I don't know how many Notre
Dame kids went to Chicago for work. I don't know
how many Notre Dame kids went to Boston or New
York or.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
LA for work.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
But a lot of these college kids are all going
to the cities to try to find work. It's unaffordable,
but it's where the jobs are. They're stuck. You know,
the Ben Shapiros of the world Wilay.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Oh, just move to somewhere more affordable.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
Well not everyone can do that, Okay, what if you've
got ill family members, what if you don't have jobs
available in the small town like not everyone has the
flexibility to do that, And we've now got these stories
coming out. Record fourteen percent of student loans turn ninety
(04:46):
plus days delinquent in the third quarter of twenty twenty five,
the highest since the data began to track in two
thousand and three. So it's not like the student loan
problems gotten better somehow, it's worse. It It is every
bit as bad as it was ten years ago, if
not worse. There's been no forward progress. There's been no
(05:08):
improvement to the situation. We still have the same kind
of broken American public high school system that is funneling
kids through a program of study where the only goal
is college, college for all. If you don't go to college,
then you are a failure in the eyes of the system.
(05:29):
Even though it's completely unrealistic that everyone's going to go
to college or graduate from college, or that everyone should
go to college or should graduate from college.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
It's just not realistic.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
The value of a college degree consequently has dropped and
dropped and dropped is everyone's standards have gone down. The
standards of high schools wanting to graduate kids and not.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Look like the abject failures that they are.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
The standards of high school slip in order for colleges
like you know, the presdent states of the world. I mean,
this isn't necessarily impacting the Harvard's as much, but the
and states of the world need bodies. Their standards slip
and slip and slip. They have more and more remedial math,
remedial English courses, and so the value of a bachelor
(06:15):
And then when you get to the real world where
you actually have to do stuff as opposed to the
lalla land of education where you can just kind of
give someone a grade, and a grade is just.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
Sort of a symbol.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
No, in the real world, you actually have to do
work and get work done. And as a result, the
value of a bachelor's degree has just gone down, down, down, down,
down down down. So we're not fixing this problem. And
as a result, when a demagogue comes along like Zoron
(06:48):
Mamdani to say, hey, you have been sold a bill
of goods, he's right on the diagnosis. His diagnosis is right.
Young people have been screwed. You have been sold a
bill of goods and all kinds of factors. A lot
(07:10):
of the same factors that are happening here in California
are happening in New York City. There's not enough housing
because there's not enough will to build more housing. Limited supply,
high demand, prices are high. There's all kinds of taxes
and regulations and burdens on businesses that force them to
(07:32):
increase their prices everywhere. So as a young person, you're
you're you're pinched. Just everywhere you go, everywhere your turn,
you're pinched. You're pinched, You're pinched. You want a car, well,
you can't afford you certainly can't afford to buy one
out right.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Here's what you put you on a payment plan?
Speaker 1 (07:47):
You know, you know, then another couple hundred dollars a
month out of your paycheck every month. Want to get
a house, Good luck with that. You definitely don't have
enough for a down payment. If you do have enough
for a down payment, certainly not a twenty percent down
payment to avoid mortgage insurance. It's now to the point
where they're offering fifty year mortgages. Save yourself two hundred
(08:09):
bucks a month, but you're gonna wind up paying four
hundred thousand dollars more over the life of the loan.
Mom Donnie's right to diagnose that this is a perverse
and terrible situation, especially for anyone under the age of fifty.
(08:29):
And guess what the message sold. Who did Mom Donnie
do best with millennials and gen z And you're crazy
if you think that that kind of a message won't
work in other parts of the country. If presidential Canada
(08:50):
AOC won't be able to convince a couple of people
that that's meaningful. I mean, in fairness, I don't think
Joe Biden or Kamala Harris was talking to any of
those people. Whatever messaging they had, it was completely missing
this whole theme and that whole crowd. If anything, it
was Trump who was capitalizing on that theme. Everything's too expensive,
(09:12):
Everything's too expensive. Biden increased inflation, I will do something
to stop it. That was the Trump message. Now, I
don't necessarily fault Trump, but I don't necessarily fault Trump's efforts.
And the problem is that I don't think reducing prices
(09:34):
at a national level is a. I don't know that
it's I don't know that it's achievable at all on
a broad scale, let alone achievable overnight or achievable within
two years before a midterm election. But I don't think
he's had I mean, the poll numbers indicate people are
(09:57):
getting more and more frustrated with Trump's performance economically. I mean,
the big signature splashy thing has been tariff policy, which
has been kind of a mixed bag, seemingly, And now
we've got the Supreme Court deliberating how much authority Trump
has with regards to tariffs at all. And I don't
(10:19):
mind tariffs, particularly as a tool of state craft, of
you know, we need to be cautious and careful about
where we are getting our supplies of critical kinds of materials.
Are we too reliant on China for X, Y and Z?
And I think I'm sympathetic to the Trump position that, look,
(10:41):
tariffs are a fundamental part of foreign policy, foreign policies
exclusively within the domain of the president. The president should
have broad leeway. Now, on the other hand, though to
some extent, is this within Congress's authority to set tariffs?
And it seems like the two ideas are somewhat intention
in the Supreme Court to sort of suss that out. Nonetheless,
(11:07):
the tariff thing has seemingly been Trump's signature economic change,
the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. All it was really
doing was preserving the existing Trump tax cuts. It wasn't
really altering the Trump tax cuts, and it was allowing
upper middle class people to deduct their state and local taxes,
(11:30):
which is really going to be a boon to people
in New York and California who have large homes and
allow them to deduct their sales taxes. So it's not
exactly some great boon for conservatives or for red states.
Rather it actually what it really is is it's allowing
(11:50):
people to deduct their state and local tax It's a
way to bail out blue states, to allow them to
have unreasonably and irresponsibly high tax rates and give them
a break.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
So I'm frustrated.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
I'm frustrated at the Mom Donnie success because I do
think he's got a sellable message, because he's correctly diagnosed
the problem. The solutions though, that he gives are I
think terrible and going to make problem.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
They're going to make matters much much much worse. I
predict if I don't think they're going to get better,
but it does make me think like their needs to
I wish at the very.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Least with the specific issue of student loans, Republicans are
obviously very you know what, I'm going to say this
for the next segment, what is the solution for student loans?
For the student loan crisis when we return. I think
this is the only realistic political solution to fix this
student loan crisis going forward.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
That is next on the John Girardi Show.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
I feel like the only solution to the student loan problem,
which is a continuing, ongoing problem. There's news story out
that in the third quarter of twenty twenty five, the
number of student loans that were ninety plus days late
on payment was at a record high. We've been talking
(13:26):
about the student loan problem for I don't know fifteen
years as a problem, and nothing has been solved, Not
one darn thing has been changed to fix the problem.
And who has benefited universities. Universities have gotten enormously fat
(13:50):
over the last twenty years as they realized the federal
government will just keep on giving out money with absolutely
no end in sight. So why not back up our
tuition to meet with this supply of money. And now
it's at the point where these colleges are charging eighty
thousand dollars one hundred thousand dollars room and board a
(14:12):
year for someone to go to college. It's insane. And
you've got these colleges so obviously living high on the hog.
You've got like I mean, and I think my own
alma mater, Notre Dame, is one of the worst examples.
It's charging people huge amounts of money. They are pretty
generous with need based you know, need based financial aid,
(14:40):
but the costs that they're charging is extraordinary. Why because
they know there's so much student loan money out there
and people have to take out student loans and work
work student jobs and blah blah blah. They're sitting on
an in doubt Notre Dame itself, Notre Dame, which is
not like, look, I love Notre Dame. I recognize it's
not Harvard, it's not Yale. It's not a very big
(15:01):
school at all. I mean, it's only got eight thousand
undergrads at a time. It's like eight thousand undergrads and
ten thousand students total, including grad students. Notre Dame's not
a very big school. President of State is much larger.
Notre Dame's got an endowment of like ten billion dollars plus.
It's absurd how big Notre dames endowment is. Okay, actually, no,
(15:30):
I'm underestimating it. At in twenty twenty four, it was
seventeen point nine billion dollars Notre Dame's endowment. Okay, Notre
Dame is not the best school in the country. It's
probably ranked somewhere around the twentieth best school in the country.
You're in the teens, probably, so the idea that Notre
(15:50):
Dame needs to charge undergrads, it's, oh, this enormous sum
of money, Like, what are you doing? It's so funny,
how universe you know, the home base for you know,
the vast majority of the country's critics of capitalism just
operate in the most ruthlessly money grabbing way possible, just
(16:11):
like like inflexibly, unthinkingly responding to the market forces at play.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
I eat the supply of federal student loan money.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
Oh, if there's federal student loan money out there, then
we must, logically, we must increase our tuition five percent
every single year and extract the absolute max we can
from the students from this government program via the students. Anyway,
the only solution I can see to the student loan
(16:44):
problem is this, and it involves conservatives doing something they
don't like in liberals doing something they don't like.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
One is forgiving student loans. Two is.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
Cutting off the flow of funny money fundamentally reforming the
federal student loan program so that there's a cap on
what the government will loan, and maybe even that the
government actually, if they are giving out loans, maybe they
operate the way a responsible bank would and make the
(17:21):
loans determined by a couple of things.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Your GPA, what major you want to pursue.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
If you pursue an engineering degree, all right, we'll give
you this loan. You're going to be a theater major.
Well that's not a response. You know, the expected return
on investment just isn't there. If the federal government actually
(17:51):
had to operate like a real bank, rather than just
knowing that the safety net is there of other people's money,
they would operate the whole student loan program totally differently.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
Now, when I say forgive the student loan.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Debt assuredly, there's a bunch of conservatives who're like, it's pious.
Speaker 3 (18:12):
I'm not paying for some dumb liberal kid with a
septum piercing through her nose who did underwater basket weaving
women studies master's.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Degree and she's one hundred thousand dollars in debt. I'm
not paying back her student loan. I work too hard.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
Bu blah bu I get it. I don't want to
pay off her loan either. But my brother in Christ,
you are already paying for that loan.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
You know why.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Because it's specifically the worst and stupidest loans, which are
the ones that all these kids are gonna default on.
They're never paying them back anyway. Like, I don't care
if you have a formal program to forgive the student
loan debt or not, you're gonna pay for that because
that kid's never that adult now is never paying that
loan back.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
Forget it.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
You have to just accept that this is a sunk cost.
The taxpayer is going to have to bear this burden. Now,
we take that hit, but we also have to fundamentally
reform the student loan process. See, this was the problem.
(19:24):
The Biden administration just wanted to forgive all the student loans.
They didn't actually want to solve the main problem. Why,
Because the federal student loan program, as much of an
injustice as it perpetuates, is an enormous boon for Biden's allies,
for Biden's allies Democrats, allies in academia. It's a huge
(19:46):
flow of constant income to employ mediocre left wing academics
throughout the CSU system and everywhere else throughout this country.
It's a job program for otherwise completely unemployable liberals.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
Now, perhaps the way we pay for the.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
Repaying of the student loans, if you want to, you know,
ease the burden on the taxpayer who didn't take out
improvident student loans and paid his taxes and or paid
off his or her student loans, as you know, as
my wife did. Maybe the way to do that is
by taxing universities to some way, to some extent, taxing endowments,
(20:31):
taxing this, taxing that. Again, Notre Dame is sitting on
almost eighteen billion dollars in endowment, and Notre Dame's endowment
is not the biggest. I mean, I think Harvard probably
has the largest endowment in the country.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
Okay, yeah. So here's the.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
Here's the chart of the top endowments in the country.
Harvard has a fifty. As a fiscal year twenty twenty four,
Harvard's endowment was almost fifty two billion dollars fifty one
point nine to seven billion. Yale was forty one point
four billion, Stanford was thirty seven point six billion, Princeton
was thirty four billion, MIT was twenty four billion.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
Pen University of Pennsylvania twenty two point so Penn not
Penn State, penn twenty.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
Two point three billion.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
Notre Dame was number seven at seventeen point nine billion,
Columbia fourteen point seven billion.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
You get the picture. These colleges.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Some of these colleges are sitting on just unfathomable amounts
of money.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
So taxim maybe that's what to do.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
I mean, they're the chief beneficiaries of all these kids
ruining their lives financially, and.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
The ill just know they're taking advantage of these kids.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
But because there was so much funny money out there,
it allowed them to just in flate and flate and flight.
And that's why you've seen this huge boom in personnel,
not like non teaching personnel at colleges and universities throughout
the country. This huge boom in building physical building. I mean,
I've seen it in Notre Dame. The difference between what
(22:24):
Notre Dame looked like in two thousand and six when
I started as a freshman to today it's night and day.
We've got a new hockey arena, the football stadium's bigger,
we got two new gyms.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
We got this, we got that.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Like like, the whole thing has been buffed up enormously,
and part of that is because, yes, Notre Dame does
get a lot of big time donors to help fund it,
but they have this constant stream of huge amounts of
tuition money coming from federal student loans. The federal student
loan money is always there and it's always green baby.
(22:58):
So in short, I think there could be some path
forward on this front, but it's not solving the whole thing. Again,
I still think the zoron Mom, Donnie think the problem
with the zoron Mamdanni's of the world. And I'm sure
AOC is going to try to bring this message to
the masses when she runs for president in twenty twenty
eight or whoever. The AOC Zoron anointed candidate. Is they're
(23:26):
diagnosing the problem. They're diagnosing the problems correctly. It is unaffordable.
It is unfairly unaffordable to live in New York City.
It is unfairly unaffordable to live in Chicago, It is
unfairly unaffordable to live in la And a lot of
young people, especially a lot of college students, are sort
(23:47):
of funneled into living in those places because those are
the places that have jobs and opportunities more so than
the outlying sticks. But they're also the most unaffordable places
to live. It's too edge sword, What are you going
to do? The Zoron solution it seems it at least
seems like a solution. The problem is it's probably gonna
fail in horrific spectacular fashion, and in many cases it's
(24:09):
going to exacerbate problems. Now, all the housing costs in
New Yorkers around New York are skyrocketing because everyone's fleeing
New York City itself. When we return the total collapse
of math education in California during COVID next on the
John Girardi Show, all Right, fascinating little threat of tweets.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
I retweeted it at my Twitter.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
Account, Twitter dot com slash fresnoe Johnny at Fresnojohnny or
x dot com slash fresnoe Johnny. I'm never gonna get
over the Twitter to X name change. I just think
I continue to think it was dumb. Twitter was this
readily identifiable brand anyway?
Speaker 2 (24:45):
All Right?
Speaker 1 (24:47):
Steve McGuire, who is a think tanker kind of guy,
and he writes stuff that appears in the Wall Street Journal,
New York Post, Newsweek, Fox News. He works for an
entity called the American Count of Trustees and Alumni. He
has this little report express or he's he's writing about
(25:07):
tweeting about this report released by U SEE San Diego
about a steep decline in the academic preparedness of its freshmen.
He writes, the number of entering students at you See
San Diego. So this is this, let's think about the
student population of you See San Diego. We're probably talking
(25:29):
about I don't know what percentage of kids are at
UC San Diego or California kids, but I'd estimate it's
the overwhelming majority. Right, Different things I'm seeing online indicate
it's somewhere between like seventy three percent and eighty percent.
All right, So vast majority of these kids are from
California at UC San Diego, and that makes sense. You see,
(25:49):
San Diego is a pretty good school. You see, system
as a whole is pretty good. If you get into
a UC, you know, it's a certain certain kind of accomplishment. Okay,
it's it's a different thing from the CSU system. Again,
I'm not saying everyone at a CSU is a dummy
and everyone at a UC is a genius. Uh, but
the academic standards are a little higher. You see, San
(26:14):
Diego should be a pretty good school. The number of
entering students at U SEE San Diego needing remedial math
exploded between twenty twenty and twenty twenty four from one
out of every one hundred students to one out of
every eight students. So one percent to one eighth is
(26:42):
what twelve point five percent. They've had to create a
second remedial class covering elementary and middle school math skills
in addition to the ones covering to the one covering
gaps from high school. So these kids have it, are
going to use San Diego and apparently haven't even mastered
like fifth and sixth grade math.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
Sorry, I guess seventh and eighth grade math.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
The report also shows that nearly one out of five
students fail to meet entry level writing requirements. It's about
eighteen percent of kids now. That seems to have been
fairly stable, although it jumped from about twelve percent of
kids couldn't meet entry level riting requirements in twenty twenty
(27:33):
today or to twenty twenty four. It's at eighteen percent,
so not as drastic a jump as the math gap,
but still significant. The executive summary from UC San Diego
says this deterioration in the quality of students coincided with
a COVID nineteen pandemic and its effects on education. But
(27:57):
they also blame a couple of other things, a couple
of other things that we've been ranting and raving about.
One of those things was the elimination of standardized testing.
Why were the ucs and csus wanting to get rid
of standardized testing? Why were they wanting to not take
(28:20):
SAT scores? Well, it's very straightforward. Why colleges and university
saw that the Supreme Court was ultimately going to outlaw.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
Racial discrimination.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
In college admissions, which is indeed what the Supreme Court did,
and I shouldn't say that the Supreme Court would that
the Supreme Court would outlaw it. I think that the
Supreme Court would correctly interpret the existing law to define
that racial race based considerations in college admissions violate the
(29:00):
Constitution and federal law, et cetera. All right, let me
just clarify that also, California still has laws on the
books saying you're not allowed to consider race in college
admissions period.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
End of story.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
Now, the administrators at the u SES and the CSUS
find such an idea to be out of the question.
There is completely out of the question. They are not
going to follow. They are not going to adopt a
genuinely color blind merit based admissions process. Nope, absolutely not.
(29:42):
They're just not going to do it. They refuse to
do it. It violates every fiber of their being everything
they believe to actually have a color blind admissions process. Nope,
and the way that you have a color blind admissions
process genuinely, it's hard to do with just grades and
(30:04):
GPA because the academic standards can vary so widely from
one high school to another. Even I mean, you know,
what does it mean if you've got a four point
zero at you know, this high school at this rural
district out in the middle of nowhere that doesn't have
as many AP and honors opportunities in this part of
(30:25):
the state, Versus if you're at some posh you know,
a public school district in Beverly Hills or something, and
you have all the best APE whatever. Yeah, your GPAs
might be similar, but you might have differences in academic achievement.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
And it could go either way. Maybe a kid who seems.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Really smart in the rural school is not actually as
smart as a more mediocre kid up there, or vice versa.
Maybe a kid who seems like he's smart in Beverly
Hills is really just kind of coasting and there's actually
a kid from a smaller rural community who's really super smart.
The SAT and the ACT was the great leveler. Everybody
(31:05):
took it. It was the same for everybody you can compare,
and it was on a scale that people understood. People
understand what getting a fifteen hundred on your SAT means.
People understand what getting a thirteen hundred on your SAT means.
People understand what getting eleven hundred on your SAT means.
People understand what getting nine hundred on your essay team
(31:25):
means people have a sense of what those things mean.
Colleges are able to set up their admissions departments in
such a way that, Okay, we're a college that accepts
kids sort.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
Of within this range.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
If a kid gets over that, maybe we offer them
additional academic scholarships.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
Blah blah blah. Like it's not rocket science.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
The SAT was very helpful for helping categorize where you
should go to college.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
Not to say that the SAT is perfect. It's not.
Not to say it's infallible. It's not.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
There are some kids who punch above their weight and
do better in college than their SAT scores would indicate.
There are some kids who do worse who get a
high SAT score, but maybe they're lazy and they don't
do as well in college. But the fact is it's
a pretty good predictor of your first year of college,
and it's a decent way of sorting people into the
right kinds of schools. There's no shame or dishonor in
(32:18):
going to I don't know, going to UC Irvine rather
than going to Harvard. There are two different kinds of schools.
It doesn't mean you're a failure in life and if
you go to UC Irvine, plenty of really smart, really successful,
(32:38):
really fulfilled, happy people go to UC Irvine, and plenty
of total losers went to Harvard. It's not an end all,
be all, but if you want to be appropriately educated,
you should probably be in an environment where you're with
people who are sort of a similar level of academic
achievement to you. All right, But if your focus is
(33:00):
on creating a rainbow collage of diversity among your student body,
and if you fundamentally believe that African American or Latinos
having lower test scores on a standardized test has to
be the result of racism, if your worldview only accepts
that possible solution, well then the SAT is a system
of evil.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
I mean, because that is the root of the whole
equity argument.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
The E in DI people are like, people try to
do this as if it's a real gotcha. Well you
don't like DEI Well, what part of it don't you like?
So you don't like diversity, You don't think we should
have an equitable society, you don't think we should have inclusion.
I'll tell you what I disagree with E the equity.
I don't like the equity the Dictionary definition of equity
(33:51):
is fine. It means something along the lines of equality
treating people fairly. But the way in which equity is
defined and utilized in modern day political parlance means something
quite different. It means mandating an equality of outcomes as
opposed to offering an equality of opportunities. Equity looks at
(34:15):
your student body. It looks at the class that you
accept as opposed to the class of people who applied.
And if there is any kind of racial difference between
whom you accept versus who applies, or the general population
that you're drawing from in some way that well, you know,
(34:35):
African Americans don't quite have as many examples of high
test scores and therefore are not admitted at in as
many numbers, or Latinos are not admitted in as high
numbers as their percentage of the population would indicate. Then
you have done a racism. That's the way they think.
The only way that the outcomes aren't equal to a
(35:02):
given racial group or a sexual minority grouped percentage of
the population share of the population. The only way that
the outcomes can differ from their demographic breakdown is if
there is a bigotry in the system if there is
racism in the system, and California educators bought this idea
(35:23):
that standardized testing was evil, So no wonder you're going
to have examples like this that you see San Diego.
One of the things where all of a sudden, they're
admitting these kids and they're admitting them blind. They don't
know if they're smart or not. They don't know they
don't have SAT scores to go off of. Combine that
(35:45):
with four years of horrible COVID learning loss where these
kids have fallen behind in math, and I feel like
math is such a cumulative thing. It builds on each other.
If you miss out on learning anything for you, you
can't just go to the next year.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
You're gonna be totally struggling.
Speaker 1 (36:03):
You haven't learned the principles that underlie all the new
things that you're being taught, all the concepts you didn't understand,
didn't fully learn in twenty twenty and twenty twenty one
as a freshman in sophomore, well guess what as a junior,
you're gonna be completely struggling in twenty twenty two. So yeah,
(36:24):
of course this is the outcome for UC San Diego
They also seem to have really ramped up admission of
kids from certain kinds of like lower income programs, kids
who are struggling, which I feel like was probably for
them a way to get more minority kids, like foster kids,
kids receiving school lunches, like certain kinds of lower income
(36:45):
This program of accepting kids from these lower income groups,
which I'm guessing was for the UCS a proxy way
of accepting more minority kids. So in short, I mean
this should surprise absolutely no one.
Speaker 2 (37:03):
But it's destroying.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
I mean, yet again, our whole high school system is
built around accepting too many people to college, and it's
leading to this diminution of the value of a college degree.
When we return a little sports gambling crisis in MLB
and the easy solution. Next on the John Girardi Show,
(37:29):
two baseball players for the Cleveland Guardians.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
These the Cleveland Indians, the Guardians.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
Two pitchers were charged with a series of crimes for
rigging bets. Basically, what's happening is you can do these
prop bets now where you can bet on what an
individual pitch is going to be an individual pitch from
the hand of a pitcher. Oh, I'm betting it's going
to be a slider. I'll put down five thousand dollars.
They identified discrepancies there and that these pitchers.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
Were in on it.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
Major League Baseball asked for a two hundred dollars cap
on such wagers. Hey, major League Baseball, tell your gambling partners,
no more prop bets on pictures.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
Are you crazy?
Speaker 1 (38:12):
Sports gambling is getting completely out of control NBA, major
League Baseball.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
There are players getting dinged for this. It is bad.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
It needs to stop. It is a siphon on the
economy that'll do it. John j already shows you next
time on Power Talk
I don't think the Zoron Mamdani thing is repeatable broadly.
I don't think it's repeatable at a national level. But
I do think it has some pretty troubling signs for
Republicans if the Trump administration doesn't start fixing some things
(00:20):
and fixing them quick and maybe it's a problem that
both sides are faced with these really huge economic problems.
Congress doesn't have the flexibility and the agility to actually
fix them quickly, no matter who's in power, even if
they did have the right ideas, And it's setting up
(00:43):
maybe a next couple of decades of just ping ponging
from one political party to the next around this central
issue of affordability. So let me explain why I'm I
got a lot of these ideas bouncing around this. Gal
ainez Stepman, whom I follow on Twitter, who works for
(01:05):
a couple of different nonprofits, Think her column writer Gal
She writes about how the student loan problem is just
not going away. We've now got two generations of young people.
We got millennials and now we got gen z who
(01:25):
are all being held hostage to you know, leaving college
with tens of thousands of dollars of student loans, and
it's all because they did something that was told to
them was quote the responsible thing to do. They were
told by either their boomer parents or their boomer guidance counselors,
(01:47):
or their boomer teachers, whatever, do the responsible thing, go
to college and get a degree. They freighted themselves with
tens of thousands of dollars of student loans in order
to do that, and now they are screwed. Real in
come has not increased enough. Costs, particularly for young people
who need to go to the cities to pursue opportunities,
(02:09):
costs are outlandish. Housing costs in particular, are outlandish. You've
got people making six figures in New York City who
feel like they're living paycheck to paycheck because of how
expensive everything is. And there's no real solution. Democrats want
(02:36):
to just blanket forgive student loans, but they don't actually
want to solve the problem of people taking on too
many student loans. They don't want to fix what's at
the root of it. They just want a handout to
make their voting base happy. At the same time, conservatives
don't want to move on the problem at all. Conservative
(03:00):
who does want to fix the underlying root cause, i e.
The excess of funny money loans that are just available
for anyone, no matter what field of study you're pursuing,
no matter your grades, whatever, Just anybody who wants a
student loan can have it for the taking, which is
an incredibly improvident way to give out loans. If the
(03:25):
taxpayer weren't on the hook, there's no bank in America
that would operate in such an irresponsible fashion. Conservatives don't
want to forgive those loans, and they don't want to
solve the root problem. So you've got two generations now
of people. You've got millennials still paying off their loans.
(03:47):
In many cases, you've got gen z now saddled with
their loans. A lot of them go to the cities
for work. I mean, I don't know how many Notre
Dame kids went to Chicago for work. I don't know
how many Notre Dame kids went to Boston or New
York or.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
LA for work.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
But a lot of these college kids are all going
to the cities to try to find work. It's unaffordable,
but it's where the jobs are. They're stuck. You know,
the Ben Shapiros of the world Wilay.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Oh, just move to somewhere more affordable.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
Well not everyone can do that, Okay, what if you've
got ill family members, what if you don't have jobs
available in the small town like not everyone has the
flexibility to do that, And we've now got these stories
coming out. Record fourteen percent of student loans turn ninety
(04:46):
plus days delinquent in the third quarter of twenty twenty five,
the highest since the data began to track in two
thousand and three. So it's not like the student loan
problems gotten better somehow, it's worse. It It is every
bit as bad as it was ten years ago, if
not worse. There's been no forward progress. There's been no
(05:08):
improvement to the situation. We still have the same kind
of broken American public high school system that is funneling
kids through a program of study where the only goal
is college, college for all. If you don't go to college,
then you are a failure in the eyes of the system.
(05:29):
Even though it's completely unrealistic that everyone's going to go
to college or graduate from college, or that everyone should
go to college or should graduate from college.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
It's just not realistic.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
The value of a college degree consequently has dropped and
dropped and dropped is everyone's standards have gone down. The
standards of high schools wanting to graduate kids and not.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Look like the abject failures that they are.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
The standards of high school slip in order for colleges
like you know, the presdent states of the world. I mean,
this isn't necessarily impacting the Harvard's as much, but the
and states of the world need bodies. Their standards slip
and slip and slip. They have more and more remedial math,
remedial English courses, and so the value of a bachelor
(06:15):
And then when you get to the real world where
you actually have to do stuff as opposed to the
lalla land of education where you can just kind of
give someone a grade, and a grade is just.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
Sort of a symbol.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
No, in the real world, you actually have to do
work and get work done. And as a result, the
value of a bachelor's degree has just gone down, down, down, down,
down down down. So we're not fixing this problem. And
as a result, when a demagogue comes along like Zoron
(06:48):
Mamdani to say, hey, you have been sold a bill
of goods, he's right on the diagnosis. His diagnosis is right.
Young people have been screwed. You have been sold a
bill of goods and all kinds of factors. A lot
(07:10):
of the same factors that are happening here in California
are happening in New York City. There's not enough housing
because there's not enough will to build more housing. Limited supply,
high demand, prices are high. There's all kinds of taxes
and regulations and burdens on businesses that force them to
(07:32):
increase their prices everywhere. So as a young person, you're
you're you're pinched. Just everywhere you go, everywhere your turn,
you're pinched. You're pinched, You're pinched. You want a car, well,
you can't afford you certainly can't afford to buy one
out right.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Here's what you put you on a payment plan?
Speaker 1 (07:47):
You know, you know, then another couple hundred dollars a
month out of your paycheck every month. Want to get
a house, Good luck with that. You definitely don't have
enough for a down payment. If you do have enough
for a down payment, certainly not a twenty percent down
payment to avoid mortgage insurance. It's now to the point
where they're offering fifty year mortgages. Save yourself two hundred
(08:09):
bucks a month, but you're gonna wind up paying four
hundred thousand dollars more over the life of the loan.
Mom Donnie's right to diagnose that this is a perverse
and terrible situation, especially for anyone under the age of fifty.
(08:29):
And guess what the message sold. Who did Mom Donnie
do best with millennials and gen z And you're crazy
if you think that that kind of a message won't
work in other parts of the country. If presidential Canada
(08:50):
AOC won't be able to convince a couple of people
that that's meaningful. I mean, in fairness, I don't think
Joe Biden or Kamala Harris was talking to any of
those people. Whatever messaging they had, it was completely missing
this whole theme and that whole crowd. If anything, it
was Trump who was capitalizing on that theme. Everything's too expensive,
(09:12):
Everything's too expensive. Biden increased inflation, I will do something
to stop it. That was the Trump message. Now, I
don't necessarily fault Trump, but I don't necessarily fault Trump's efforts.
And the problem is that I don't think reducing prices
(09:34):
at a national level is a. I don't know that
it's I don't know that it's achievable at all on
a broad scale, let alone achievable overnight or achievable within
two years before a midterm election. But I don't think
he's had I mean, the poll numbers indicate people are
(09:57):
getting more and more frustrated with Trump's performance economically. I mean,
the big signature splashy thing has been tariff policy, which
has been kind of a mixed bag, seemingly, And now
we've got the Supreme Court deliberating how much authority Trump
has with regards to tariffs at all. And I don't
(10:19):
mind tariffs, particularly as a tool of state craft, of
you know, we need to be cautious and careful about
where we are getting our supplies of critical kinds of materials.
Are we too reliant on China for X, Y and Z?
And I think I'm sympathetic to the Trump position that, look,
(10:41):
tariffs are a fundamental part of foreign policy, foreign policies
exclusively within the domain of the president. The president should
have broad leeway. Now, on the other hand, though to
some extent, is this within Congress's authority to set tariffs?
And it seems like the two ideas are somewhat intention
in the Supreme Court to sort of suss that out. Nonetheless,
(11:07):
the tariff thing has seemingly been Trump's signature economic change,
the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. All it was really
doing was preserving the existing Trump tax cuts. It wasn't
really altering the Trump tax cuts, and it was allowing
upper middle class people to deduct their state and local taxes,
(11:30):
which is really going to be a boon to people
in New York and California who have large homes and
allow them to deduct their sales taxes. So it's not
exactly some great boon for conservatives or for red states.
Rather it actually what it really is is it's allowing
(11:50):
people to deduct their state and local tax It's a
way to bail out blue states, to allow them to
have unreasonably and irresponsibly high tax rates and give them
a break.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
So I'm frustrated.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
I'm frustrated at the Mom Donnie success because I do
think he's got a sellable message, because he's correctly diagnosed
the problem. The solutions though, that he gives are I
think terrible and going to make problem.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
They're going to make matters much much much worse. I
predict if I don't think they're going to get better,
but it does make me think like their needs to
I wish at the very.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Least with the specific issue of student loans, Republicans are
obviously very you know what, I'm going to say this
for the next segment, what is the solution for student loans?
For the student loan crisis when we return. I think
this is the only realistic political solution to fix this
student loan crisis going forward.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
That is next on the John Girardi Show.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
I feel like the only solution to the student loan problem,
which is a continuing, ongoing problem. There's news story out
that in the third quarter of twenty twenty five, the
number of student loans that were ninety plus days late
on payment was at a record high. We've been talking
(13:26):
about the student loan problem for I don't know fifteen
years as a problem, and nothing has been solved, Not
one darn thing has been changed to fix the problem.
And who has benefited universities. Universities have gotten enormously fat
(13:50):
over the last twenty years as they realized the federal
government will just keep on giving out money with absolutely
no end in sight. So why not back up our
tuition to meet with this supply of money. And now
it's at the point where these colleges are charging eighty
thousand dollars one hundred thousand dollars room and board a
(14:12):
year for someone to go to college. It's insane. And
you've got these colleges so obviously living high on the hog.
You've got like I mean, and I think my own
alma mater, Notre Dame, is one of the worst examples.
It's charging people huge amounts of money. They are pretty
generous with need based you know, need based financial aid,
(14:40):
but the costs that they're charging is extraordinary. Why because
they know there's so much student loan money out there
and people have to take out student loans and work
work student jobs and blah blah blah. They're sitting on
an in doubt Notre Dame itself, Notre Dame, which is
not like, look, I love Notre Dame. I recognize it's
not Harvard, it's not Yale. It's not a very big
(15:01):
school at all. I mean, it's only got eight thousand
undergrads at a time. It's like eight thousand undergrads and
ten thousand students total, including grad students. Notre Dame's not
a very big school. President of State is much larger.
Notre Dame's got an endowment of like ten billion dollars plus.
It's absurd how big Notre dames endowment is. Okay, actually, no,
(15:30):
I'm underestimating it. At in twenty twenty four, it was
seventeen point nine billion dollars Notre Dame's endowment. Okay, Notre
Dame is not the best school in the country. It's
probably ranked somewhere around the twentieth best school in the country.
You're in the teens, probably, so the idea that Notre
(15:50):
Dame needs to charge undergrads, it's, oh, this enormous sum
of money, Like, what are you doing? It's so funny,
how universe you know, the home base for you know,
the vast majority of the country's critics of capitalism just
operate in the most ruthlessly money grabbing way possible, just
(16:11):
like like inflexibly, unthinkingly responding to the market forces at play.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
I eat the supply of federal student loan money.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
Oh, if there's federal student loan money out there, then
we must, logically, we must increase our tuition five percent
every single year and extract the absolute max we can
from the students from this government program via the students. Anyway,
the only solution I can see to the student loan
(16:44):
problem is this, and it involves conservatives doing something they
don't like in liberals doing something they don't like.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
One is forgiving student loans. Two is.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
Cutting off the flow of funny money fundamentally reforming the
federal student loan program so that there's a cap on
what the government will loan, and maybe even that the
government actually, if they are giving out loans, maybe they
operate the way a responsible bank would and make the
(17:21):
loans determined by a couple of things.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Your GPA, what major you want to pursue.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
If you pursue an engineering degree, all right, we'll give
you this loan. You're going to be a theater major.
Well that's not a response. You know, the expected return
on investment just isn't there. If the federal government actually
(17:51):
had to operate like a real bank, rather than just
knowing that the safety net is there of other people's money,
they would operate the whole student loan program totally differently.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
Now, when I say forgive the student loan.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Debt assuredly, there's a bunch of conservatives who're like, it's pious.
Speaker 3 (18:12):
I'm not paying for some dumb liberal kid with a
septum piercing through her nose who did underwater basket weaving
women studies master's.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Degree and she's one hundred thousand dollars in debt. I'm
not paying back her student loan. I work too hard.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
Bu blah bu I get it. I don't want to
pay off her loan either. But my brother in Christ,
you are already paying for that loan.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
You know why.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Because it's specifically the worst and stupidest loans, which are
the ones that all these kids are gonna default on.
They're never paying them back anyway. Like, I don't care
if you have a formal program to forgive the student
loan debt or not, you're gonna pay for that because
that kid's never that adult now is never paying that
loan back.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
Forget it.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
You have to just accept that this is a sunk cost.
The taxpayer is going to have to bear this burden. Now,
we take that hit, but we also have to fundamentally
reform the student loan process. See, this was the problem.
(19:24):
The Biden administration just wanted to forgive all the student loans.
They didn't actually want to solve the main problem. Why,
Because the federal student loan program, as much of an
injustice as it perpetuates, is an enormous boon for Biden's allies,
for Biden's allies Democrats, allies in academia. It's a huge
(19:46):
flow of constant income to employ mediocre left wing academics
throughout the CSU system and everywhere else throughout this country.
It's a job program for otherwise completely unemployable liberals.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
Now, perhaps the way we pay for the.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
Repaying of the student loans, if you want to, you know,
ease the burden on the taxpayer who didn't take out
improvident student loans and paid his taxes and or paid
off his or her student loans, as you know, as
my wife did. Maybe the way to do that is
by taxing universities to some way, to some extent, taxing endowments,
(20:31):
taxing this, taxing that. Again, Notre Dame is sitting on
almost eighteen billion dollars in endowment, and Notre Dame's endowment
is not the biggest. I mean, I think Harvard probably
has the largest endowment in the country.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
Okay, yeah. So here's the.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
Here's the chart of the top endowments in the country.
Harvard has a fifty. As a fiscal year twenty twenty four,
Harvard's endowment was almost fifty two billion dollars fifty one
point nine to seven billion. Yale was forty one point
four billion, Stanford was thirty seven point six billion, Princeton
was thirty four billion, MIT was twenty four billion.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
Pen University of Pennsylvania twenty two point so Penn not
Penn State, penn twenty.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
Two point three billion.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
Notre Dame was number seven at seventeen point nine billion,
Columbia fourteen point seven billion.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
You get the picture. These colleges.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Some of these colleges are sitting on just unfathomable amounts
of money.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
So taxim maybe that's what to do.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
I mean, they're the chief beneficiaries of all these kids
ruining their lives financially, and.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
The ill just know they're taking advantage of these kids.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
But because there was so much funny money out there,
it allowed them to just in flate and flate and flight.
And that's why you've seen this huge boom in personnel,
not like non teaching personnel at colleges and universities throughout
the country. This huge boom in building physical building. I mean,
I've seen it in Notre Dame. The difference between what
(22:24):
Notre Dame looked like in two thousand and six when
I started as a freshman to today it's night and day.
We've got a new hockey arena, the football stadium's bigger,
we got two new gyms.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
We got this, we got that.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Like like, the whole thing has been buffed up enormously,
and part of that is because, yes, Notre Dame does
get a lot of big time donors to help fund it,
but they have this constant stream of huge amounts of
tuition money coming from federal student loans. The federal student
loan money is always there and it's always green baby.
(22:58):
So in short, I think there could be some path
forward on this front, but it's not solving the whole thing. Again,
I still think the zoron Mom, Donnie think the problem
with the zoron Mamdanni's of the world. And I'm sure
AOC is going to try to bring this message to
the masses when she runs for president in twenty twenty
eight or whoever. The AOC Zoron anointed candidate. Is they're
(23:26):
diagnosing the problem. They're diagnosing the problems correctly. It is unaffordable.
It is unfairly unaffordable to live in New York City.
It is unfairly unaffordable to live in Chicago, It is
unfairly unaffordable to live in la And a lot of
young people, especially a lot of college students, are sort
(23:47):
of funneled into living in those places because those are
the places that have jobs and opportunities more so than
the outlying sticks. But they're also the most unaffordable places
to live. It's too edge sword, What are you going
to do? The Zoron solution it seems it at least
seems like a solution. The problem is it's probably gonna
fail in horrific spectacular fashion, and in many cases it's
(24:09):
going to exacerbate problems. Now, all the housing costs in
New Yorkers around New York are skyrocketing because everyone's fleeing
New York City itself. When we return the total collapse
of math education in California during COVID next on the
John Girardi Show, all Right, fascinating little threat of tweets.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
I retweeted it at my Twitter.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
Account, Twitter dot com slash fresnoe Johnny at Fresnojohnny or
x dot com slash fresnoe Johnny. I'm never gonna get
over the Twitter to X name change. I just think
I continue to think it was dumb. Twitter was this
readily identifiable brand anyway?
Speaker 2 (24:45):
All Right?
Speaker 1 (24:47):
Steve McGuire, who is a think tanker kind of guy,
and he writes stuff that appears in the Wall Street Journal,
New York Post, Newsweek, Fox News. He works for an
entity called the American Count of Trustees and Alumni. He
has this little report express or he's he's writing about
(25:07):
tweeting about this report released by U SEE San Diego
about a steep decline in the academic preparedness of its freshmen.
He writes, the number of entering students at you See
San Diego. So this is this, let's think about the
student population of you See San Diego. We're probably talking
(25:29):
about I don't know what percentage of kids are at
UC San Diego or California kids, but I'd estimate it's
the overwhelming majority. Right, Different things I'm seeing online indicate
it's somewhere between like seventy three percent and eighty percent.
All right, So vast majority of these kids are from
California at UC San Diego, and that makes sense. You see,
(25:49):
San Diego is a pretty good school. You see, system
as a whole is pretty good. If you get into
a UC, you know, it's a certain certain kind of accomplishment. Okay,
it's it's a different thing from the CSU system. Again,
I'm not saying everyone at a CSU is a dummy
and everyone at a UC is a genius. Uh, but
the academic standards are a little higher. You see, San
(26:14):
Diego should be a pretty good school. The number of
entering students at U SEE San Diego needing remedial math
exploded between twenty twenty and twenty twenty four from one
out of every one hundred students to one out of
every eight students. So one percent to one eighth is
(26:42):
what twelve point five percent. They've had to create a
second remedial class covering elementary and middle school math skills
in addition to the ones covering to the one covering
gaps from high school. So these kids have it, are
going to use San Diego and apparently haven't even mastered
like fifth and sixth grade math.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
Sorry, I guess seventh and eighth grade math.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
The report also shows that nearly one out of five
students fail to meet entry level writing requirements. It's about
eighteen percent of kids now. That seems to have been
fairly stable, although it jumped from about twelve percent of
kids couldn't meet entry level riting requirements in twenty twenty
(27:33):
today or to twenty twenty four. It's at eighteen percent,
so not as drastic a jump as the math gap,
but still significant. The executive summary from UC San Diego
says this deterioration in the quality of students coincided with
a COVID nineteen pandemic and its effects on education. But
(27:57):
they also blame a couple of other things, a couple
of other things that we've been ranting and raving about.
One of those things was the elimination of standardized testing.
Why were the ucs and csus wanting to get rid
of standardized testing? Why were they wanting to not take
(28:20):
SAT scores? Well, it's very straightforward. Why colleges and university
saw that the Supreme Court was ultimately going to outlaw.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
Racial discrimination.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
In college admissions, which is indeed what the Supreme Court did,
and I shouldn't say that the Supreme Court would that
the Supreme Court would outlaw it. I think that the
Supreme Court would correctly interpret the existing law to define
that racial race based considerations in college admissions violate the
(29:00):
Constitution and federal law, et cetera. All right, let me
just clarify that also, California still has laws on the
books saying you're not allowed to consider race in college
admissions period.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
End of story.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
Now, the administrators at the u SES and the CSUS
find such an idea to be out of the question.
There is completely out of the question. They are not
going to follow. They are not going to adopt a
genuinely color blind merit based admissions process. Nope, absolutely not.
(29:42):
They're just not going to do it. They refuse to
do it. It violates every fiber of their being everything
they believe to actually have a color blind admissions process. Nope,
and the way that you have a color blind admissions
process genuinely, it's hard to do with just grades and
(30:04):
GPA because the academic standards can vary so widely from
one high school to another. Even I mean, you know,
what does it mean if you've got a four point
zero at you know, this high school at this rural
district out in the middle of nowhere that doesn't have
as many AP and honors opportunities in this part of
(30:25):
the state, Versus if you're at some posh you know,
a public school district in Beverly Hills or something, and
you have all the best APE whatever. Yeah, your GPAs
might be similar, but you might have differences in academic achievement.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
And it could go either way. Maybe a kid who seems.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Really smart in the rural school is not actually as
smart as a more mediocre kid up there, or vice versa.
Maybe a kid who seems like he's smart in Beverly
Hills is really just kind of coasting and there's actually
a kid from a smaller rural community who's really super smart.
The SAT and the ACT was the great leveler. Everybody
(31:05):
took it. It was the same for everybody you can compare,
and it was on a scale that people understood. People
understand what getting a fifteen hundred on your SAT means.
People understand what getting a thirteen hundred on your SAT means.
People understand what getting eleven hundred on your SAT means.
People understand what getting nine hundred on your essay team
(31:25):
means people have a sense of what those things mean.
Colleges are able to set up their admissions departments in
such a way that, Okay, we're a college that accepts
kids sort.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
Of within this range.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
If a kid gets over that, maybe we offer them
additional academic scholarships.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
Blah blah blah. Like it's not rocket science.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
The SAT was very helpful for helping categorize where you
should go to college.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
Not to say that the SAT is perfect. It's not.
Not to say it's infallible. It's not.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
There are some kids who punch above their weight and
do better in college than their SAT scores would indicate.
There are some kids who do worse who get a
high SAT score, but maybe they're lazy and they don't
do as well in college. But the fact is it's
a pretty good predictor of your first year of college,
and it's a decent way of sorting people into the
right kinds of schools. There's no shame or dishonor in
(32:18):
going to I don't know, going to UC Irvine rather
than going to Harvard. There are two different kinds of schools.
It doesn't mean you're a failure in life and if
you go to UC Irvine, plenty of really smart, really successful,
(32:38):
really fulfilled, happy people go to UC Irvine, and plenty
of total losers went to Harvard. It's not an end all,
be all, but if you want to be appropriately educated,
you should probably be in an environment where you're with
people who are sort of a similar level of academic
achievement to you. All right, But if your focus is
(33:00):
on creating a rainbow collage of diversity among your student body,
and if you fundamentally believe that African American or Latinos
having lower test scores on a standardized test has to
be the result of racism, if your worldview only accepts
that possible solution, well then the SAT is a system
of evil.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
I mean, because that is the root of the whole
equity argument.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
The E in DI people are like, people try to
do this as if it's a real gotcha. Well you
don't like DEI Well, what part of it don't you like?
So you don't like diversity, You don't think we should
have an equitable society, you don't think we should have inclusion.
I'll tell you what I disagree with E the equity.
I don't like the equity the Dictionary definition of equity
(33:51):
is fine. It means something along the lines of equality
treating people fairly. But the way in which equity is
defined and utilized in modern day political parlance means something
quite different. It means mandating an equality of outcomes as
opposed to offering an equality of opportunities. Equity looks at
(34:15):
your student body. It looks at the class that you
accept as opposed to the class of people who applied.
And if there is any kind of racial difference between
whom you accept versus who applies, or the general population
that you're drawing from in some way that well, you know,
(34:35):
African Americans don't quite have as many examples of high
test scores and therefore are not admitted at in as
many numbers, or Latinos are not admitted in as high
numbers as their percentage of the population would indicate. Then
you have done a racism. That's the way they think.
The only way that the outcomes aren't equal to a
(35:02):
given racial group or a sexual minority grouped percentage of
the population share of the population. The only way that
the outcomes can differ from their demographic breakdown is if
there is a bigotry in the system if there is
racism in the system, and California educators bought this idea
(35:23):
that standardized testing was evil, So no wonder you're going
to have examples like this that you see San Diego.
One of the things where all of a sudden, they're
admitting these kids and they're admitting them blind. They don't
know if they're smart or not. They don't know they
don't have SAT scores to go off of. Combine that
(35:45):
with four years of horrible COVID learning loss where these
kids have fallen behind in math, and I feel like
math is such a cumulative thing. It builds on each other.
If you miss out on learning anything for you, you
can't just go to the next year.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
You're gonna be totally struggling.
Speaker 1 (36:03):
You haven't learned the principles that underlie all the new
things that you're being taught, all the concepts you didn't understand,
didn't fully learn in twenty twenty and twenty twenty one
as a freshman in sophomore, well guess what as a junior,
you're gonna be completely struggling in twenty twenty two. So yeah,
(36:24):
of course this is the outcome for UC San Diego
They also seem to have really ramped up admission of
kids from certain kinds of like lower income programs, kids
who are struggling, which I feel like was probably for
them a way to get more minority kids, like foster kids,
kids receiving school lunches, like certain kinds of lower income
(36:45):
This program of accepting kids from these lower income groups,
which I'm guessing was for the UCS a proxy way
of accepting more minority kids. So in short, I mean
this should surprise absolutely no one.
Speaker 2 (37:03):
But it's destroying.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
I mean, yet again, our whole high school system is
built around accepting too many people to college, and it's
leading to this diminution of the value of a college degree.
When we return a little sports gambling crisis in MLB
and the easy solution. Next on the John Girardi Show,
(37:29):
two baseball players for the Cleveland Guardians.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
These the Cleveland Indians, the Guardians.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
Two pitchers were charged with a series of crimes for
rigging bets. Basically, what's happening is you can do these
prop bets now where you can bet on what an
individual pitch is going to be an individual pitch from
the hand of a pitcher. Oh, I'm betting it's going
to be a slider. I'll put down five thousand dollars.
They identified discrepancies there and that these pitchers.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
Were in on it.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
Major League Baseball asked for a two hundred dollars cap
on such wagers. Hey, major League Baseball, tell your gambling partners,
no more prop bets on pictures.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
Are you crazy?
Speaker 1 (38:12):
Sports gambling is getting completely out of control NBA, major
League Baseball.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
There are players getting dinged for this. It is bad.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
It needs to stop. It is a siphon on the
economy that'll do it. John j already shows you next
time on Power Talk
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