Community Colleges at War?

From the Arizona Republic:

Hundreds of thousands of [illegal]-immigrant youths could become eligible to join the military to offset shortages of qualified recruits under a bill pending in Congress.

...

The Development Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act would allow [illegal immigrant] high-school graduates to gain citizenship if they either attend college for two years or serve two years in the military.

It is ridiculous to equate wasting two years in community college with no sign of a graduation requirement to actually serving in the military.

...supporters of the DREAM Act are playing up the bill's military provisions over its educational benefits. Unlike legal immigrants with permanent residency green cards, [illegal] immigrants are barred from enlisting in the military.

The military provisions merit consideration, but the unbalanced, undemanding "education" route is merely amnesty and should be debated as such.

Another Failure of "Higher Education"

The Washington Times reports:

Commencement addresses at the nation's top colleges and universities this year mostly were given by [leftist] speakers with few conservatives snagging the honor, according to a report... by the Young America's Foundation.

The conservative group conducts the review each year using the U.S. News & World Report ranking of top schools. This year, it found left-leaning speakers outnumbered conservatives by a ratio of 8-to-1.

"It's not that there's a few cases here and there. It's that there's a consistent pattern where conservatives are shunned," said Jason Mattera, spokesman for YAF. "For 14 years, we've shown that college administrators are using commencement ceremonies to send their students off with one more predictable leftist lecture."

...With some schools yet to announce their speakers at the time of the review and some schools' speakers listed as neutral, YAF found 42 "blue" speakers and eight "red" speakers.

...

Among the eight speakers listed on the conservative side of the political spectrum were Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates at the College of William & Mary, first lady Laura Bush at Pepperdine University and conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks at Wake Forest University.

Edwards Charged $55k to Talk About Poverty

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, who as a Democratic presidential candidate recently proposed an educational policy that urged "every financial barrier" be removed for American kids who want to go to college, has been going to college himself -- as a high paid speaker, his financial records show.

The candidate charged a whopping $55,000 to speak at to a crowd of 1,787 the taxpayer-funded University of California at Davis on Jan. 9, 2006 last year, Joe Martin, the public relations officer for the campus' Mondavi Center confirmed Monday.

That amount -- which comes to about $31 a person in the audience -- included Edwards' travel and airfare, and was the highest speaking fee in the nine appearances he made before colleges and universities last year, according to his financial records.

The earnings -- though made before Edwards was a declared Democratic presidential candidate -- could hand ammunition to his competition for the Democratic presidential nomination. The candidate -- who was then the head of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina -- chose to speak on "Poverty, the great moral issue facing America," as his $55,000 topic at UC Davis.

That could cause both parents and students to note some irony here: UC Davis -- like the rest of the public University of California system -- will get hit this year by a 7 percent tuition increase that likely hits many of the kids his speeches are aimed at helping.

...

In 2006, records show Edwards made more than $285,000 speaking to nine colleges and universities, charging between $16,000 and Davis' $55,000 for his talks...

Not only is this a great demonstration of Edwards' well-known hypocrisy, it also is a reminder of the waste that drives up college costs. UC Davis could never have raised the $55,000 by asking for donations from attendees, so they taxed the rest of the student body to pay for it.