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Two prominent writers argued for banning college football on Tuesday night at New York University’s Skirball Center as part of the Intelligence Squared U.S. Debates series. Their opponents were two journalists, who also happened to be former players.

Before hearing the arguments, audience members were asked their opinion, and 16 percent were for the resolution to ban college football; 53 percent were against. At the end of the night, 53 percent were for it and 39 percent against. The undecided vote had plunged from 31 percent to 8 percent.

Gladwell was not amenable to modifications, calling the idea that brain injuries could be minimized by better helmets or medical care “a fantasy.”“I’ve seen pictures of the brain scans of people with C.T.E.,” he said, referring to a trauma-induced disease, “and it looks like someone drove a truck across their brain.”

a college degree is no longer the guarantor of a middle-class existence. Until the early 1970s, less than 11 percent of the adult population graduated from college, and most of them could get a decent job. Today nearly a third have college degrees, and a higher percentage of them graduated from nonelite schools. A bachelor’s degree on its own no longer conveys intelligence and capability. To get a good job, you have to have some special skill — charm, by the way, counts — that employers value. But there’s also a pretty good chance that by some point in the next few years, your boss will find that some new technology or some worker overseas can replace you.

Though it’s no guarantee, a B.A. or some kind of technical training is at least a prerequisite for a decent salary. It’s hard to see any great future for high-school dropouts or high-school graduates with no technical skills. They most often get jobs that require little judgment and minimal training, like stocking shelves, cooking burgers and cleaning offices. Employers generally see these unskilled workers as commodities — one is as good as any other — and thus each worker has very little bargaining power, especially now that unions are weaker. There are about 40 million of these low-skilled people in our work force. They’re vying for jobs that are likely to earn near the minimum wage with few or no benefits, and they have a high chance of being laid off many times in a career.

The actual rules have also changed notably since the 1970s. Back then, there were all sorts of stabilizers that pushed working-class wages up and kept rich people’s wages lower. The minimum wage, at its pre-1970s peak, was almost 50 percent higher than it is now (inflation adjusted, naturally). Unions were stronger and had more government support. The United States taxed the rich much higher relative to the working class. (The top bracket was taxed at 70 percent in 1978; now it’s 35 percent.) It’s hard to imagine, but regulations largely limited the profitability of banks and kept bankers’ financial compensation low.

Adderall, an amphetamine prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder that the boy said he and his friends routinely shared to study late into the night, focus during tests and ultimately get the grades worthy of their prestigious high school in an affluent suburb of New York City. The drug did more than just jolt them awake for the 8 a.m. SAT; it gave them a tunnel focus tailor-made for the marathon of tests long known to make or break college applications.

“Everyone in school either has a prescription or has a friend who does,” the boy said.

Pills that have been a staple in some college and graduate school circles are going from rare to routine in many academically competitive high schools, where teenagers say they get them from friends, buy them from student dealers or fake symptoms to their parents and doctors to get prescriptions.

a team of researchers embedded themselves in a freshman dormitory at an unnamed high-profile Midwestern state school and then kept up with a group of female students through college and into graduate or professional life.

the authors discovered were the many ways in which collegiate social life, as embraced by students and blessed by the university, works to disadvantage young women (and no doubt young men, too) who need their education to be something other than a four-year-long spree.

the American way of college rewards those who come not just academically but socially prepared, while treating working-class students more cruelly, and often leaving them adrift.

Every year researchers at U.C.L.A. do a survey of incoming college freshmen. These surveys, conducted over four decades now, show how the life cycle has changed over the past couple generations.

In 1966, only about 19 percent of high school students graduated with an A or A- average. By 2013, 53 percent of students graduated with that average.

the workload is lighter. As late as 1987, nearly half of high school students reported doing at least six hours of homework a week. By 2006, less than a third of all students reported doing that much work.

Admissions officers are chasing not so much a more perfect student as a more perfect class. In a given year, this elusive ideal might require more violinists, goalies, aspiring engineers or students who can pay the full cost of attendance. Colleges everywhere want more minority students, more out-of-state students and more students from overseas.

Over the last 15 years, he says, growing applicant pools reflected an earnest push for greater diversity among the wealthiest institutions.

To each applicant, Chicago assigns a “fit” rating based on holistic measures — say, intellectual curiosity or evidence that a student applied a favorite subject to life.

Not every American kid is cut out for college.

College — even community College — drives many young people into debt. Many others lack rudimentary study skills or any scholarly inclination. They want to get on with their lives, not be forced to analyze the meter in “King Lear” in night school in order to become a cop or a nurse’s aide.

“No one is thinking about the larger implications, or even the morality,” Professor X says, “of admitting so many students to classes they cannot possibly pass.”

Tweet // Re-execute when the element gets attached. if (window['gapi'] !== undefined) { window.gapi.plusone.go(); }; More Email Print Lara/Flickr In 2004, two women who were long past college age settled into a dorm room at a large public university in the Midwest. Elizabeth Armstrong, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan, and Laura Hamilton, then a graduate assistant and now a sociology professor at the University of California at Merced, were there to examine the daily lives and attitudes of college students

The researchers interviewed the 53 women on their floor every year for five years—from the time they were freshmen through their first year out of college.

the researchers also dug into their beliefs about morality—sometimes through direct questions, but often, simply by being present for a late-night squabble or a bashful confession.

One of America’s leading political scientists, Robert Putnam, has just come out with a book called “Our Kids” about the growing chasm between those who live in college-educated America and those who live in high-school-educated America

Roughly 10 percent of the children born to college grads grow up in single-parent households. Nearly 70 percent of children born to high school grads do. There are a bunch of charts that look like open scissors. In the 1960s or 1970s, college-educated and noncollege-educated families behaved roughly the same. But since then, behavior patterns have ever more sharply diverged. High-school-educated parents dine with their children less than college-educated parents, read to them less, talk to them less, take them to church less, encourage them less and spend less time engaging in developmental activity.

sympathy is not enough. It’s not only money and better policy that are missing in these circles; it’s norms.

The gun lobby is flirting with self-parody as it exploits the issue of sexual assaults on college campuses by proposing a solution of — what else? — having students carry guns. Experts who study the complicated issue of predatory behavior and advise colleges point out that rapes often begin in social situations. “It would be nearly impossible to run for a gun,” said John Foubert, the national president of One in Four, a rape-prevention organization.

Such common sense, however, has never deterred statehouse politicians when it comes to obeying the gun lobby.

Lawmakers in 10 states are busy adapting the issue of campus sexual assaults to the campaign to arm college students.

A faculty working group at the University of Houston recently offered these recommendations to professors preparing for Texas’s new campus-carry law, set to take effect August 1.

The situation to which these recommendations are alluding—gun violence in response to controversial or otherwise difficult classroom discussions—is at this point only a hypothetical worst-case scenario. But critics of the legislation are still appalled: To abide by the law, and keep everyone safe in classrooms with armed students, faculty may ultimately have to resort to self-censorship.

In the eight states that have already enacted such a law, none of the predicted nightmares have taken place—students drawing their weapons on professors who fail them, for example, or students firing on one another in heated classroom arguments.

Between 1998 and 2013, Case and Deaton argue, white Americans across multiple age groups experienced large spikes in suicide and fatalities related to alcohol and drug abuse—spikes that were so large that, for whites aged 45 to 54, they overwhelmed the dependable modern trend of steadily improving life expectancy.

A Pew study released last month found that the size of the middle class—defined by a consistent income range across generations—has shrunk over the last several decades.

The study builds on other recent research that finds that almost all the good jobs created since the recession have gone to college graduates.

For many opponents, the heart of the case against is made by Chief Justice John Roberts’s pithy comment “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” The dictum seems to be trivially true

In context, it’s clear that Chief Justice Roberts means “The way to stop discrimination against any given race is to stop discriminating against all races.”

over the past 50 years, the idea that race should not matter in judgments of merit has become widely accepted among Americans. Affirmative action, however, denies this: When the purpose is sufficiently worthy, it’s right to prefer minority over majority applicants (and even to prefer some minorities over other minorities, such as Asian-Americans).

You sense, in some of the stories to emerge from these fraud charges, an odd form of intergenerational class conflict, in which wealthy people who did not grow up pampered (Loughlin is the child of a telephone-company foreman) are now trying to impose middle-class values (a good education is important) on superrich kids who see little use for them.

Many kids compete for elite college slots in an attempt to gain access to a higher social class, but some of these parents are surely seeking the opposite effect — a degree that suggests their kids are not simply coasting on their inheritance while cultivating vanity careers. They are heaping money on their progeny in an attempt to correct for how rich they are.

An underperforming, school-averse teenager is often content to attend a low-pressure state school with good parties; it’s his parents who are desperate to prevent this.

the slaveholders did not need to invent the Electoral College to fend off direct popular election of the president. Direct election did have some influential supporters, including Gouverneur Morris of New York, author of the Constitution’s preamble. But the convention, deeply suspicious of what one Virginian in another context called “the fury of democracy,” crushed the proposal on two separate occasions.

how much did the slaveholding states rush to support the concept of presidential electors? Not at all. In the initial vote over having electors select the president, the only states voting “nay” were North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia — the three most ardently proslavery states in the convention.

outherners didn’t embrace the idea of electors because it might enlarge slavery’s power; they feared, as the North Carolinian Hugh Williamson, who was not a slaveholder, remarked, that the men chosen as electors would be corruptible “persons not occupied in the high offices of government.” Pro-elite concerns were on their minds

These survey results suggest that Americans are deeply ambivalent about the role of diversity in their families, friendships, and civic communities. Some people, it seems, prefer to stay in their bubble.

just under a quarter of Americans say they seldom or never interact with people who don’t share their partisan affiliation. Black and Hispanic people were more likely than whites to describe their lives this way, although education made a big difference among whites: 27 percent of non-college-educated whites said they seldom or never encounter people from a different political party, compared with just 6 percent of college-educated whites.

Less than half of respondents said they encounter political differences among their friends. Only 39 percent said they see political diversity within their families, and vanishingly few people said they encounter ideological diversity at religious services or community meetings.

there are two deeply connected structural problems. The first is that the price of admission has gone up. The second is that the moral center of the meritocracy has collapsed.

Back in 1988, buying a spot at Harvard cost $2.5 million—or at least that’s what the case of Jared Kushner suggests, according to reporting from ProPublica’s Daniel Golden. But in this affidavit, William Singer—identified as “Cooperating Witness 1”—informs one of his parental conspirators that it takes “in the many millions” now to accomplish the same trick

Much more sensible to fork over something between $400,000 and $1.2 million, as Singer’s clients allegedly did.

In a recent poll, 80 percent of Americans say “that political correctness is a problem in this country.” Hostility to new speech codes from elites was one factor that drove support for Trump in 2016. Americans do not want to abolish all differences between men and women, do not support reparations, and view college campuses as strange, alien pockets of madness. Any Democrat in 2020 has to reach that “exhausted majority” who are sick of all that. Biden has already done it.

The reason Trump is so rattled is that Biden is seven points ahead of him in head-to-head polls right now, and, after four years of Trump’s assault on this country’s constitutional order, Democrats are likely to turn out in high numbers, and back whoever gets nominated

There is something deeply clarifying about recent events at Williams College, because they reveal the logical endpoint, to my mind, of critical race, gender, and queer theory. The push for social justice there has now led to demands for racially segregated housing

New data from American, Canadian and British college students indicates that perfectionism, especially when influenced by social media, has increased by 33 percent since 1989.

Perfectionism is a personality trait or characteristic that is innate in many people. It is nurtured in some environments, notably in families where personal accomplishment, academic or otherwise, is rewarded:

“Meritocracy places a strong need for young people to strive, perform and achieve,” he said. They have “increasingly unrealistic educational and professional expectations for themselves.”

Our nation’s students are at the forefront of a technological revolution that is expanding our ability to assert our First Amendment rights.

bias against conservative views exists in higher education. College students from across the nation have testified on this matter before Congress, detailing the difficulties they have encountered in hosting conservative speakers on campus.

to silence speech for fear of reprisal is a cowardly, a surrender of our most basic constitutional rights.