2/3 of Americans With Bachelor’s Degrees Have ‘Major Regret’ About It
Patrick Howley
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Two-thirds of Americans with Bachelor’s degrees are now racked with a “major regret” about their college experience. The survey is punctuated with concern about student loan debt.
Marketwatch reports: “A new survey of nearly 250,000 Americans with at least a bachelor’s degree by career and salary website PayScale found that two-thirds said that they had a major regret about their educational experience. The No. 1 regret: student loans, which about one in four grads say they regretted, according to PayScale. (A separate survey this year of more than 2,700 adults up to age 34 by Merrill Lynch and Age Wave came to a similar conclusion: more than one in three said the student loans they took on weren’t worth it.)”
The most regretted college major was Humanities, with more than 21 percent of Humanities degree holders regretting having majored in that.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott has made sexy talk on college campuses a crime punishable as rape, according to local media outlets.
Per the provisions of the new law: if they hear something and don’t say something, campus staff at any university in the Lone Star State potentially face the same penalties as a serial rapist under Texas Penal Code.
After signing SB 212 last week, the governor made it legal for law enforcement to jail any campus employee who hears — or even “overhears” — a sexual “joke” on campus and doesn’t report it. To not do so makes them guilty of a Title IX violation.
“Abbott signed both SB 212 and a related bill, HB 1735, that uses the same definition of sexual harassment and deprives accused students of basic due process. Texas law will conflict with U.S. Department of Education rules if proposed Title IX revisions remain substantially similar in the final published regulation,” one reporter writes.
The law gives “teeth” to the “Obama administration’s subjective definition of campus sexual harassment,” writes Katherine Timpf at National Review, which the previous White House defined as follows:
Unwelcome, sex based verbal or physical conduct that: in the education context, is sufficiently severe, persistent, or pervasive that the conduct interferes with a student ’s ability to participate in or benefit from educational programs or activities at a postsecondary educational institution.
Elsewhere, it’s believed that this vague standard could effectively include sexual jokes that were merely overheard. The law allows state authorities to punish any college campus worker with up to six months in jail if he or she “witnesses or receives information,” the College Fix reports, also noting that hearsay is permitted and acceptable.
To put it simply: college staff must now engage in sanctioned eavesdropping, since anything overheard can be classified as sexual harassment under the Obama administration’s broad definition.
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE, says that the current definition of sexual harassment “is missing any kind of objective, reasonable-person standard, instead conditioning the permissibility of speech (and the requirement to report) entirely on subjective listener reaction,” adding that “any definition of sexual harassment that lacks an objective component is unconstitutional.”
“Without an objective requirement, students and faculty are held hostage to the personal feelings and opinions of their accusers, no matter how unusual or even unreasonable,” the organization argues. “Given the offense taken by people on both sides of arguments about sexuality and gender generally, the list of victims of ‘sexual harassment’ under this broad definition is functionally endless.”
What does this “sexy-talk-is-rape” law supposedly accomplish? The answer: it “fixes” the sensationalized, totally-discredited & nonexistent campus “rape culture.”
Evidently fearful of losing Texas to the Democrats, Gov. Abbott has joined the throngs of left-leaning humans who apparently do not realize that there are many steps between casual college sex-themed conversations and gang-rape orgies and hookers in dumpsters.
Discussions of sex on any Texas college campus could possibly be punished as if it were violent rape, that is, if they are campus staff or university employees.
Meanwhile, a law protecting the Alamo and requiring transparency over how money is spent on the Alamo by state employees was too controversial to for the House Rules Committee even consider. The spiking of the monument protection bill this session was largely blamed on Gov. Abbott and his henchmen in the legislature.
Critics of the law may have reason to be encouraged, however. SB 212 is unlikely to stand up in court. When district attorneys attempt to prosecute horny college students, judges will likely be obligated to throw the case out on grounds of insufficient evidence.
That’s because, SB 212’s twin features are things that every attorney understand will automatically kill the prosecution’s case. Every lawyer will know SB 212 violates “Law 101,” especially someone like Abbott. Before becoming governor Abbott, was Texas attorney general & brains behind the legal argument that saved the capitol’s 10 commandments statue.
Those “twin features” are specifically: 1) hearsay and 2) fruit of the poisonous tree.
The entire law rests on hearsay: that is, unproven & unsubstantiated claims. Supreme Court precedent says hearsay is inadmissible. The state must prove a defendant’s guilt. Consequently, that makes any argument given by the prosecution “fruit from the poisonous tree.”
FIRE, cited earlier predicts that the new laws will be struck down in court, since similar speech restrictions “have fallen time, and time, and time again in Texas.”
The “poisonous tree” is the ultimate dead end for any attorney, and requires a full stop — no exceptions. No attorney worth their juris doctorate keeps litigating a case on the basis of “he-said-she-said” evidence.
Finally, and some might argue, most importantly, the law applies sentences for a real crime that is already clearly defined under Texas law to a new crime sharing none of the same characteristics. That violates several centuries of case law, but also a basic constitutional bedrock requirement that punishment must reflect crime.
The Bill of Rights includes an amendment that prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. Some may, therefore, like conclude that SB 212 is unconstitutional for sentence-swapping.
Moreover, situational environment may offer advocates legal trouble in court as well. The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that when someone has no reasonable expectation of privacy, for example, then things they do that are illegal in full view of the public can be held against them and used in court even if there was not a warrant –– simply because they were standing in a public place with no expectation of privacy.
Similarly, rape charges for discussing or verbalizing sexual thoughts and themes in an environment that is traditionally considered a culturally-acceptable venue for unsolicited exchanges about that topic doesn’t square with traditional legal doctrine about the expectations of the space.
California law now requires college students to exchange consent papers to hold hands. When surveyed, most Texans say their state is still a long way away from such extremes.
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