I am fucking gobsmacked

Are you fucking kidding me?

"...you could make a case for college..."

YOU COULD MAKE A CASE FOR COLLEGE?!?!?!

I can't even begin to address all the epic fail featured in this video. But here goes nothin'...

No, Fox News, this study (just like everything you hold dear) is flawed. Disgustingly flawed.

To be fair, I have to read the study before I can pass informed judgement on it. However, going just by what Fox News has told me (which is never a good idea, but still), here are my conclusions. First of all, this test lacks any and all internal validity - it does not test what it was intended to test. If you want to test how students' political views have changed, you test them when they first start college, and then you test them again periodically until they graduate. Even then, if their views have changed, you can only conclude that there was a correlation between political stance and college education. I have taken enough psych classes to know that correlation does not equal causation (also to know how to conduct a scientifically responsible study). It may not have been the courses that "turned students liberal," it may have been exposure to peers that were more liberal, or getting away from fundie, fox-news-watchin' parents, or, heavens, perhaps they just thought about the issues and came to more liberal conclusions on their own. Or, since there are so many flaws in that argument and it didn't bother to test students' political views before college, they may have all been liberal in the first place. This study is so riddled with holes, I can only conclude that it was a victim of the Valentine's Day Massacre.

While I am ashamed, but not surprised, that that so many students can't answer basic, common knowledge questions, I have to say that that is not college's fault. Unless every one of the 14,000 students tested took some kind of US government class in college, there's no reason to have talked about that in any class. Nor does failure to learn those facts completely invalidate opinions. PS, do you suppose the study took into account that an equal number of high schoolers can't pass a basic citizenship test (even though US government classes are pretty standard for public high school curricula)? Or that (and I'm only guessing here) even fewer non-college graduates could pass said test?


I do have to say that I love the bottom line of this video: More educated people tend to be liberal.