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Jeremy Carl is the nominee for Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs (including UN) in Feb. 2026. He is a research fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His BA is from Yale where he was president of the student union, and his Masters is from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.  From 2004-2005 he was a visiting fellow at the Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi, India.This article says he has been critical of Jewish attitudes yet he comes from a Jewish family and is now a member of the Presbyterian church. He was Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior in the first term of DJT. His recent book is on the theme of how the culture and attitude of America was culture an attitude of vast majority of the population from 1600 till 1965 for about 400 years. The Immigration laws of 1965 under JFK/Johnson, he says were not intended to change this, yet a change and relaxation of tight immigration policy has led to the situation similar to what Eisenhower faced in 1954 that led to Operation Wetback- as Mexican immigration surged in the war years by the early 1950's. For 150 years before 1965 the US only opened up for Europeans immigrating to the US. The changes since 1965 coincided with deindustrializationn of the US and the failure of the governing class to do anything about the steady shipping out the nation's manufacturing sector to China. Which is why there is so much anxiety about America's position in the world and a sense of a culture that is being lost- of Robert Frost's poetry set in New Hampshire, of Shakespeare's plays and morals for Western civilization, of the values of Emerson and Thoreau that guided Gandhiji and other Asian leaders. ...

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U.S. Vice President Biden and Vice President Xi Jinping visited a high school in Dujianyan, in Sichuan province, China. Xi Jinping is expected to be the new President of China in 2013. This is the first time he has spent extensive time with a U.S. leader. Xi Jinping shared his experiences of meeting with ordinary citizens with Joe Biden. Xi's daughter is a student at Harvard University. He showed considerable interest in the political situation and debt ceiling negotiations in the U.S. Li Keqiang, who is close to Premier Wen Biao, is expected to become prime minister of China in 2013. Li gave a speech to students at the University of Hong Kong during the Biden visit with Jinping, and at one point talked to students in English.

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University fees in Britain are set at 9250 pounds a year and millions of people have tens of thousands of student debt. The student loan book in Britain is already at 120 billion pounds and it weighs in heavily on young people starting life after college affecting the quality of life. 

The Green party says it will cost 40 billion pounds for waiver of recoverable student debt over 5 years. The Labour Party in Britain is looking at following the Green Party's support of writing off the student debt. Labour has said it will abolish student fees. Labour party's McDowell says the system was designed so that much of the student debt would remain unpaid and it is time to clear this and take this burden off the shoulders of young people. 

This would also give the economy a boost as young people are better able to afford basics such as housing, food and services after this is lifted.

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How the promise of free or low cost transportation for the 584,000 students who have a free or a half-fare card has helped bring a diverse group of students to New York city schools as students can commte distances to reach their desired school without having to worry about the cost. This can be $700 for a school year for a typical student. Now with budget cuts at New York city's MTA starting in Sept 2011 these students will lose this benefit. Its asymptom of cuts going on across the nation, from fee raises in the University of California system to student fares on the New York City MTA.

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The University of Waterloo located near Kitchener, Ontario, has one of the top ranking engineering schools in N. America. Blackberry was started by a student here. Google makes this one of the top 4 recruiting places worldwide.

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Much of this report concentrates on big name schools ignoring the facts about student debt and value delivered, and the shifts in perceptions in companies that see big name schools as not necessarily an asset as inthe past. In this new situation looking objectively at value delivered the US state university system is its strongest asset and the state universities offer higher value for local students without the unneeded debt loads of big ticket institutions with a lot of debt overhang, and little additional value. In the end education is about persistence, hard work, grit and determination. A  Kamala Harris at Hastings in San Francisco can do as well or better than someone from the big name schools. After the Supreme Court decision opposing quotas for affirmative action the first results of enrollment by ethnic group and race are mixed and sometimes confusing. Some colleges and universities are seeing the same enrollment and some are moving in opposite directions for ethnic groups and race. This NYT report says if universities can get to a fair enrollment for different groups without racial quotas then these quotas may not be essential to achieve their purpose. Schools are looking at students from rural areas in ways they did not in the past, and trying innovative approaches to building a better America after the pandemic because they think it is the right way. ...

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Australia seeks to reduce migration to pre-pandemic levels by putting a cap on foreign students. The cap is set at 270,000 for 2025. Each college or university will be given a restriction.

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The California State University system ranks high in creating social mobility in the US. Of the top 10 universities in the social mobility rankings 7 are in the Cal State System. About one third of the 460,000 students in the Cal State system are first in their family to attend college and half represent underrepresented communities. Half of all students receive Pell Grants. Cal State Los Angeles ranks first and Cal State Northridge is fifth.

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About 43% of newly admitted students in 2014 at nine undergraduate campuses of the University of California (UC) system are the first to attend college in their families. The UC system has striven lately to attract more students from underperforming high schools with many Latinos or Hispanics. About 28.8% of students admitted in the UC system are Hispanics in 2014, 27.6% White, 36% Asian American and 4% Black. 13% of students admitted are out of state paying tution of $35,000 per year compared to $13,000 in state tution, out of state students tution subsidizing the in state students. It was 5% in 2010.

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A 2011 survey by Universum shows technology firms such as Google, Apple and Facebook as the most preferred choice of university graduates during campus recruiting. Financial firms lag far behind, with J.P. Morgan Chase ranking 41st in that list. At Harvard Business School only 17% of the class went into investment banking and finance. Students from the University of Texas at Austin to Yale, say they want to build something tangible or follow their dream project.

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Hundreds of thousands of American children are missing after the pandemic. Many are not accounted even when increase in home schooling and private schooling is considered. The Associated Press, Stanford University Big Local News Project and Prof. Dee of Stanford show in their study that 240,000 students in 21 states absence from school could not be explained. In 2023 missing students have become more of a budgeting problem to secure federal and state funds. The actual number of missing students is much higher as this study found that public school enrollment inthe US has fallen in the 2 school years 2019-2020, 2021-2022 by 710,000. Much remains to be done to locate these students so that they are not forgotten. Voice of America ran this story on its Learning English site. The WSJ has an editorial on these missing children today.

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Mitch Daniels, former 2 term governor of Indiana, and president of Purdue University, describes the damage done to hope for the future by putting so many people in so much debt- with estimates by WSJ-Experian showing 70% of recent graduates as borrowers and the average borrower graduating with $33,000 in debt. 40 million young people are affected, as they postpone marraige, postpone childbearing, postpone buying a new home, stay away from starting a new business. Daniels put his own social and moral obligation to the test as he brought the cost of an education at Purdue for 2 successive years- with a 3 year freeze on tution and cuts in room and board, textbook costs. Purdue student borrowings have dropped by 18% since 2012, adding a new metric in evaluating the delivery of quality education for the country, and a moral and social obligation for all the leaders in our society.

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The Times looks at how UK universities are dealing with the social and upward mobility gap- what numbers are present of white working class young men and women, and of first generation students for university education.

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Marie Colvin, was killed in Syria in Feb 2012, while reporting for the Sunday Times of London. She was a student at Oyster Bay High School and Yale University, and was remembered by fellow students as passionate and determined and always involved in the issues of the time. Her makeshift media center was destroyed during an assault on the city of Homs by Syrian government forces.

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A 105 year old woman farmer in Tamilnadu state (formerly Madras) works on her 2.5 acre farm growing bananas. These days she has taken to organic farming with zeal. She was awarded Padma Shri India's national award for her work increasing popularity of organic farming. She comes from a village near the city of Coimbatore. She has worked closely with Tamilnadu Agricultural University and travels to many farmer meetings. Students from the University visit her farm as part of the Village Stay Program.

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There is a surge in online classes and web based learning by 2017. About 36 million people in the U.S. who have some college but no degree benefit from these classes. The low overhead and value of these classes is making colleges move ahead with investment in this field. Arizona State, University of Massachusetts, are some of the universities pushing ahead. Purdue University as part of its "You Can, Go Back" initiative under president Mitch Daniels,is planning to acquire Kaplan University to supplement its efforts. 2U which runs online school programs has revenue growth of 30% a year. It runs marketing and the web platform, nuts and bolts, while schools provide faculty, in a unique collaborative effort. Colorado State University Global Campus went from 200 students to 18,000 half from Colorado, with only a $12 million loan from the University in 2007, which it paid back by 2012, showing the financial viability of these classes. 

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Rosie Millard takes up French at age 60 at London University. She lives just up the road from Birkbeck College. She comes back to the classroom in evening classes attended by people who work during the day. Here she describes her day at school learning French in a new environment of computers, the cloud, and a classroom of avid learners. Only 135,000 students in Britain took modern languages at GCSE A level with French doing the worst. Millard is bucking the trend. For seniors this is about resilience in aging as this as important as smoking cessation or cutting obesity habits say researchers to maintain a healthy vibrant brain well into the eighties and nineties.

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CLT Classical Learning Test has a bright future. Its message is summed up in CLT Test 8 on the website- where Gustav Mahler is cited with the text- "Tradition is not about the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire." 183,000 high school seniors have taken the CLT Classic Learning Test in the US in 2025 compared to 2 million for SAT and 1.4 million for ACT, yet the new test is considered to be more rigorous and includes the western intellectual tradition in ways that the ACT and SAT do not. A CLT Test 3 we looked at on the CLT site included for reading a poem by Amy Lovell 1916, Mark Twain writings, passages on Greek Zeno and Renaissance painter Raphael, EB White and others. CLT Test 4 has poetry of Robert Louis Stevenson 1885, and remarkably it has a passage on the Pack Horse Book Project of FDR's New Deal Initiative in 1935 on women librarians on horseback or with mules going into remote mountainous areas of the US including Kentucky, to teach rural people to read and write. This alone suggests it should appeal to Republican and Democratic states alike. It could include Charles Dickens and Shakespeare or Robert Frost's poetry. In that sense it is far more rigorous than short bland passages in SAT or ACT of little significance or educational value. It is designed to give students an exposure in classrooms to the western intellectual tradition that the elites in America have themselves grown up learning but who now have a haughty attitude to their own intellectual traditions. In CLT Test 6 we found a poem on Nature by Gerard Manley Hopkins 1877 and Dickens famous iconic passage that begins the Tale of Two Cities written about the French Revolutionary period which is clearly not what we find in SAT or ACT, and far better in conveying a feel of what America is about and where it came from. The founder of CLT Mr. Tate believes it will be the test most taken by high school seniors by 2040. Classic Learning Test now competes with SAT and ACT in North Carolina, Indiana and other American states. Arkansas passed legislation favoring CLT, and Ohio is doing it this year. Louisiana, Oklahoma and Wyoming are accepting CLT. This Test is gaining popularity among conservatives in red and purple states  and is getting the support of the US government in 2026. The Maryland Company behind this test is Maryland Learning Initiatives. Indiana passed legislation in March requiring its state universities to accept CLT scores. And North Carolina university system now accepts the CLT. Both CLT and SAT, ACT have Math and Reading Verbal tests, the CLT adds foundational texts from Western science, government, history and literature in ways not found in SAT, ACT. Students can take the CLT at home or at a testing site. More than 350 universities and colleges accept CLT says this report in Washington Post. The SAT and ACT use shorter passages and the reading material is bland and does not have the value that it could have from the western intellectual tradition. The passages in the CLT are more rigorous and include western religious tradition and thinkers but also poets, writers, scientists from the whole gamut of the experience of Europe and the United States of America. And also explore other countries and continents including China and India, from Aristotle to Gandhiji. ...

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Northwestern University has its federal funding  frozen. $790 million federal funds are frozen by the US government for toleration of anti-semitism on campus in 2024 and 2025. Northwestern cut a deal with protesters putting out anti-semitic slogans following an encampment, that was followed by other universities, says this WSJ report. This is not in the tradition of US universities and the Nation founded with the Christian faith that includes the Catholic, Protestant and Jewish faiths as one indivisible faith. Northwestern and others fail when new drug research leads to discoveries funded by federal dollars. Yet the universities get their portion of the return from the pharmaceutical companies, which then charge the average public exorbitant prices, making the universities complicit in the huge burdens placed on the American people. Similar to a Catholic Church  working with the nobles in feudal times- placing ever higher burdens on ordinary working people. Another issue is that universities are investing in new buildings, raising their prices, and operating as if they are unaccountable to the people, as young American men are being pushed away by high prices and foreign students are taking their places.   ...

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Tution fees in the UK are 9450 pounds. The cost of housing about 7500 pounds in 2024, up 15% over the last 2 years. In addition to the over charges on student loans for Plan 2 Loans in Britain that take it from 4.3% with a surcharge of 3%, there is the 15% inflation in housing costs in Britain that households and student have to contend with. This situation is true today for Britain, the US and Germany, and other countries in the EU leaving less for food and transportation costs. This is why there is an added level of worry and anxiety for young people in Britain the EU and in the US, and for their parents.

Others one with a business economics degree and a solicitor apprentice in a law firm face the same situation. He works in finance and just sees it as he says a tax on having gone to university.  Similar stories across the US. It doesn't have to be this way for advanced nations education is FIRST PRIORITY.

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In 2025 about $75,000 is considered income yearly for 2 adults and 2 children as the bottom rung of the middle class in America. About half the 70 million children in America, 35 million children are in conditions that involve need for food assistance and other aid, where the sense of income security, healthy food security, that was seen in the 1950's to 1990's the post war industrialization period is now missing in the closing days of the deindustrialization period of America in 2020-2025. WSJ's Dan Frosch provides this report from Binghamton, Broom county in upstate New York. At one time this area was part of the industrialization age in post war America. IBM offices were located here in Endicott. These office buildings of IBM are now being demolished. Instead of industry the economy depends on the University of Binghamton and the university attracts out of state students who bring in new investments in housing. Lower income yet middle class families face higher divorce rates with more single mothers struggling on incomes where they are on the border line for food assistance, and as wages creep up lose food and other aid. At income levels of $39,000 these families struggle to feed children. The poverty rate which declined during covid assistance period was already up in 2023 as government aid phased out under Biden and is now up further. A quarter of children in a once proud industrial region of America in upstate New York near Syracuse, now face poverty conditions. Life is a constant struggle to pay the rent, falling behind on utility or other bills and not having enough for food and other basic needs even at $39,000 year because of the inflation and cost of living having jumped in the last 5 years.   ...

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After campus protests on Gaza the US government to prevent antisemitism on campus took action to see that campus police can prevent student unrest. Columbia University president resigned and Katrina Armstrong was made interim president. Columbia lost $400 million in federal funding of the $1 billion it gets each year. Armstrong made an agreement with the US government last week to get strong campus police enforcement and after explaining this to faculty resigned. An Turkish activist on the Tufts University campus on student visa had her visa revoked and was flown to Louisiana to be expelled this week.

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Carolyn Chen, a professor at Northwestern University, who heads the Asian-American Studies program, says efforts to cap enrollment at Ivy League schools such as Harvard and Yale are similiar to efforts to cap Jewish enrollment in an earlier period. Asian Americans make up 5.6% of the population in the U.S. but are now 12-18% of the students at Ivy League schools. Asian-Americans make up 40-70% of students at top public high schools such as Stuyvesant and Bronx Science in New York City, Lowell in San Francisco and Thomas Jefferson in Alexandria, Va. which are merit focussed. These Asian students try to get into Ivy League schools. Yale has a student population that is 58% white and 18% Asian American. The question she poses is whether white and Asian American applications should be viewed through lens such as "individuality," and "uniqueness," on grounds that a wide range of talents should be encouraged, and if this puts Asian Americans at a disadvantage with white applicants.

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In the event that the US Supreme Court halts president Biden's student loan payments assistance plan about 45 million borrowers will be affected in the US. Young people who believed in getting a higher education or going to university will be penalized for that decision. It will affect the retail sector and standards of living, during a cost of living crisis.One of the achievements of the 20th century similar to achievements in medicine and other fields was the open access to education to all. Without it no part of the world can call itself part of enlightened civilization coming out of the creation of the modern world which started in Europe and spread to the US, then to Asia.

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Class of 1977 was first after the Cultural revolution. In 1977 China held its first competitive national university entrance examination since 1965. A period of 12 years of the cultural revolution till 1977 were a lost decade in terms of education and getting the best minds and training them for careers in various fields for development and modernization. The year 1977 with the reinstatement of university entrance exams was remarkable in the outpouring of energy as young people prepared for entrance exams in a period of a few weeks. Textbooks were hard to find, for over ten years most had no schooling and worked in rural areas doing farming work. Students scrambled to find teachers to guide them. 273,000 were admitted to universities that year- only 4.7% of the the students taking the test. In comparison 58% of nine million students in 2007 were admitted to universities three decades later in 2007. Li Keqiang is one of these students who worked really hard to get into Peking University. He is the new prime minister, part of the new generation of leaders in China. Others include Zhou Qiang, governor of Hunan province, Wang Yi, party secretary of Foreign Affairs Ministry, and Jin Liqun, vice president of the Asian Development Bank, filmmakers Yimou and Kaige. and the writer Chen Cun. ...