Don’t have time to watch or read the news? No problem! The Butler Collegian’s editor-in-chief has compiled a list of the top five things he thinks readers should know this week.
Let’s keep this short, sweet and to the point. The truth will traumatize.
Fact 1: It matters where you go to college: “Graduates of the most-select colleges often earn more than graduates of less-selective public universities,” according to the Atlantic. Students that attend elite universities are employed at higher rates than those who attend community colleges or online universities. An elite school is classified as a school that admits fewer than half of their applicants. With more than four million 18-year-olds in the United States, about three-and-a-half million of them will go to college, and just 100,000 to 150,000 of those—somewhere around 3 percent of the entire age group, will attend an elite school. As of now, “44.8 percent of billionaires, 55.9 percent of [Forbes’s most] powerful women and 85.2 percent of [Forbes’s most] powerful men” attended elite schools, according to Quartz.
Fact 2: Changing the game: Fans of offensive baseball may be disappointed this season. In Major League Baseball, runs per game fell to a 20-year low last year, batting averages are at their lowest since 1971 and strikeouts are more probable than hitting a single, according to Grantland. Teams scored roughly 5,000 fewer runs and hit roughly 1,500 fewer homers than they did in 2000, which was the height of the steroid era, according to The New York Times. Rob Manfred, MLB’s new commissioner, said he has no interest in devising ways to increase the offensive output of teams, but his goal is to speed up the game and decrease average game times to less than three hours long. But if game times decrease, television advertisements during breaks may fall as well.
Fact 3: The problem with low oil prices: Last Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the economy created just 126,000 jobs. That’s barely half of the 248,000 predicted by economists and it is the first time in a year there has not been at least 200,000 new jobs for a month, according to the Wall Street Journal. One possible culprit is oil prices. Consumers might love seeing gas prices sink, but there’s a tradeoff, and that is weakness in the job market. Mining, which includes the oil industry in the BLS’s count, lost 11,000 jobs in March, and is down 30,000 for the year. Supporting services for extraction have also been hit hard.
Fact 4: Columbia releases damaging report on Rolling Stone: In November, Rolling Stones published “A Rape on Campus,” an article that detailed an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia. “Jackie,” an otherwise unidentified student, said she was sexually assaulted at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house in fall 2012, according to USA Today. Her story included vivid details from the night of the incident and it led to the suspension of Greek life activities on the campus. Since then, “Jackie’s” story has been proven to be a complete fabrication that was perpetuated by Rolling Stone’s poor reporting, as outlined by Columbia’s critique of the original article. “The failure encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking,” the authors of the critique wrote. “The magazine set aside or rationalized as unnecessary essential practices of reporting that, if pursued, would likely have led the magazine’s editors to reconsider publishing Jackie’s narrative so prominently, if at all. The published story glossed over the gaps in the magazine’s reporting by using pseudonyms and by failing to state where important information had come from.” The magazine’s editor Will Dana issued a formal apology to readers, administrators at the University of Virginia, Phi Kappa Psi fraternity and students. “The report was painful reading, to me personally and to all of us at Rolling Stone,” Dana said in a statement released Sunday by Rolling Stone.
Fact 5: North versus South: The scars of the Civil War that ended in 1865 can still be seen in the United States. Only five states have no minimum-wage laws; all were Confederate states 150 years ago, according to the Economist. Of the 10 states that imprison the highest proportion of their citizens, seven were Confederate states. In only 12 states, most residents think abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. Five were in the Confederacy. The death toll from the Civil War surpassed 600,000. An equivalent margin adjusted for the present population would amount to six million people. Race relations may have been the sole cause of the differences between the North and South, but in the present, the most segregated schools are located in the Northeast. Also, mixed-race marriages are growing faster in some southern states than anywhere else in America. However, Mark Noll, a University of Notre Dame professor, said religious affiliation is a better predictor of ideological opposition. He said that as politics continues to blend with religious beliefs, the divide amongst different regions grows.
There you have it. Check the news section next week for another set of facts you can use to impress (and annoy) your friends with. Who doesn’t love a smart aleck, right?
P.S. I don’t care what anyone says. Gas under $3 is always a good thing.
Written and compiled by Julian Wyllie
