Free Republic

In many ways, Newt is the perfect man. He knows how to buy good jewelry. He puts his wife ahead of his campaign. He’s so in touch with his feelings that he would rather close the entire federal government than keep his emotions bottled up. He’s confident enough to include a steamy sex scene in a novel. He understands that Paul Revere was warning about the British. Mitt Romney is a phony with gobs of hair gel. Newt Gingrich is a phony with gobs of historical grandiosity. The 68-year-old has compared himself to Charles de Gaulle. He has noted nonchalantly:...

Woe to you, oh modern card-carrying homophobe. For it can't be easy to be you right now, what with all the terrifying changes taking place, all the dramatic sexual upheavals and flagrant displays of "unnatural" love being hurled like exotic sushi in your plain hamburger face these days. Oh, you poor dear. I see you there, glumly sipping your Starbucks gingerbread latte while Googling Swedish fetish porn in between checking the latest news on NASCAR.com in your lightly stained Dockers and beat-up Nikes, Cartoon Network blaring in the background, tattered copy of Shooters Monthly on the bedside. I see you...

Professional schools have had better years. Facing a brutal job market, underemployed graduates have begun to speak up, some even suing their former institutions, claiming they were duped into acquiring massive debt loads based on the promise of a secure, six-figure-salary job. That promise is particularly critical at business schools, where graduates expect a quick financial payoff as well as an education. At these programs, the standards for reporting employment statistics, in true B-school fashion, are rigorous and involve accountants (a system some law schools are considering). But even those career statistics can have their flaws. Prospective students take heed:...

MBA grads are shouldering record levels of debt as tuition rates head skyward, making the degree a risky investment that's not often approached with caution or restraint. In 2008, Brian Jenkins moved to Malibu, Calif., to start his MBA at Pepperdine University's Graziadio School of Business and Management. He had big ambitions for B-school, expecting the degree to help him land a six-figure-salary job in human resources at a top company. Pepperdine seemed poised to deliver. When he was a mere applicant, the admissions director gave him a personal tour of the business school, which commands a stunning perch overlooking...

To some, a MBA is a yardstick of business acumen or a launch pad for great accomplishments. While graduate students are expected to exercise increased independent and critical thought, the amount of leftist indoctrination that goes unchallenged is startling. In nearly every department, the MBA curriculum has got it wrong. Keynesianism: MBA programs teach that government spending and expansive monetary policy stimulates GDP expansion. Keynesian formulas suggest that recessions can be cured by stimulus spending and money supply growth. Stimulus ‘primes the pump’ of the economy. Well, no, stimulus has never worked, but MBA professors fail to mention this, as...

Bob Lutz, the former Vice Chairman of General Motors, is the most famous also-ran in the auto business. In the course of his 47-year rampage through the industry, he's been within swiping range of the brass ring at Ford, BMW, Chrysler and, most recently, GM, but he's never landed the top gig. It's because he "made the cars too well," he says. It might also have something to do with the fact that Maximum Bob, who could double as a character on Mad Men, is less an éminence grise than a pithy self-promoter who has a tendency to go off...

MBA students at top business schools are borrowing more money than ever to pay for their degrees. The average debt carried on the back of graduating MBAs at Wharton increased by nearly $5,000 last year to a record $109,836, the highest debt burden reported by any business school. Wharton MBAs now graduate with debt that is more than a third higher than their counterparts at Harvard Business School and Stanford's Graduate School of Business. The largest year-over-year increase in student debt was at Dartmouth's Tuck School, where the average debt burden of a class of 2010 MBA rose by more...

Building Institutions by Ari Bussel I was at dinner with several major philanthropists. There was enormous power in that room, with two couples sitting next to each other each worth in excess of half a billion dollars, and another at the next table worth both other couples combined. I want to highlight three of those who attended. It was a fundraising event for a local charity, and at the correct time one of those in attendance stood and said: “What I value most is building institutions. This is what remains.” He then added to whatever he already gave “two times...

CoStar Group, a commercial real estate analytics and marketing firm, sold the building that houses its Washington, D.C., headquarters this week for $101 million, which is a 146% gain on the price the firm paid for it. GLL L-Street 1331, an affiliate of Munich-based GLL Real Estate Partners, bought the 2-year-old building with cash in a deal expected to close later this month. CoStar with more than 1,000 employees will still occupy the majority of 1331 L St. after the sale is complete. The firm will put $15 million in escrow to fund additions and improvements to its space and...

The hits just keep coming for the MBA Class of 2010. First, the economy crashed just as students were stepping into their first B-school classes. Then the job market tanked. Jobs were scarce, salaries dipped, and students scrambled simply to find summer internships, let alone full-time positions. Now, a new study done as part of Bloomberg Businessweek's ranking of top full-time MBA programs suggests it's going to take graduates longer to see a return on their MBA investments than their peers did from earlier graduating classes. Two years ago, Bloomberg Businessweek calculated that it would take members of the MBA...

If Josh Kaufman had gone to business school, he probably would have graduated this year with an MBA from Harvard or Stanford. But Kaufman, a 28-year-old entrepreneur who had worked as an assistant brand manager for Procter & Gamble, thinks business school is pretty much a waste of time and money. MBA programs, he says firmly, have become so expensive that students “must effectively mortgage their lives” and take on “a crippling burden of debt” to get what is “mostly a worthless piece of paper.” Kaufman believes that MBA programs “teach many worthless, outdated, even outright damaging concepts and practices.”...

Be very careful before diving into an MBA program right now. Even students from the top MBA schools are frequently without job offers, and those in mid-tier schools are jobless in droves as shown below in the chart from Econompic. You can see the rate of graduates' joblessness in red. Now we're pretty sure that MBA's from top schools will always benefit their recipients, if only for the network of contacts they build for the long-term. However, those considering lower- or mid-tier schools should do some serious homework into the financial cost because as shown above you could very well...

If Josh Kaufman had gone to business school, he probably would have graduated this year with an MBA from Harvard or Stanford. But Kaufman, a 28-year-old entrepreneur and former assistant brand manager for Procter & Gamble, thinks business school is pretty much a waste of time and money. MBA programs, he says firmly, have become so expensive that students "must effectively mortgage their lives" and take on "a crippling burden of debt" to get what is "mostly a worthless piece of paper." Kaufman believes that MBA programs "teach many worthless, outdated, even outright damaging concepts and practices." And if that's...

Dear Carrie: I'm 31 and have a good job with a good company, but I want to get an MBA. What's the better choice: Keep my job and go to school at night or take out loans and go to school full time? -- A Reader Dear Reader: I've always thought that education is a great investment, whether you're seeking to improve your earning potential or simply to enrich your mind. So, I applaud your desire to get an MBA. I don't think there's an obvious answer to this question, but to my mind, the decision boils down to two...

...it's becoming ever more apparent that real power within the GOP rests with the ranting talk-show hosts. ...Suddenly, the takeover of the Republican Party by right-wing extremists has become a story (although many reporters seem determined to pretend that something equivalent is happening to the Democrats. It isn't.)... The right's answer, of course, is that it's about outrage over President Barack Obama's “socialist” policies — like his health care plan, which is, um, more or less identical to the plan Mitt Romney enacted... Many on the left argue... that it's about race, the shock of having a black man in...

A long time ago, I had to make a really tough choice: invest in an MBA from New York University, or make do with my bachelors. I was newly married, had a child on the way, and didn’t have much in savings. The degree would set me back tens of thousands of dollars and take years to complete—especially if I did it part time. And I couldn’t imagine doing anything but programming computers for a living. So why learn finance, marketing, and operations management, I wondered? Well, I decided to enroll because my understanding of the business world lacked depth,...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Federal Reserve's unprecedented dose of stimulus to the economy during the recent financial crisis complicates the task of pulling back when the time is right, top central bank officials said on Friday. Fed Board Governor Kevin Warsh argued that tame inflation readings today should not make policymakers complacent about the risk of future price increases. "Inflation expectations will be anchored until they are not," Warsh said in a speech in New York. "Central bankers would be prudent to keep a very open mind about shocks that could happen domestically and overseas." Ben Bernanke, Fed chairman, told...

James Tsai is the sort of MBA corporate recruiters covet. He went to a good prep school, earned a degree with honors from Middlebury College, and made vice-president in Bank of America's (BAC) international wealth management group at the age of 26. Today, Tsai is about to graduate, straight A's in hand, from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, a top-rated program in America. And he's hustling to land his first post-MBA job—in China. Executive Class strivers like Tsai used to have just one post-grad career destination, the U.S. Not anymore. "I am doing everything I think I can to get...

I believe FR is comprised of a large body of intelligent and successful people from various walks of life and educational backrounds. That said, I propose the following question for your guidance and would appreciate your feedback. I'm 33, have Associates and Bachelor's degrees in Computer Science, 15 years of experience in my field, several premium industry certifications and 10 years of military service. I am currently an IT manager for a large pharmaceutical corporation and have a nice commensurate salary. All of my academic endeavors have been successful and I enjoy learning new things though I'm not a 4.0...

EXCERPTS ONLY ... CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR COMPLETE ARTICLE ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ If you always do as you always did, you will always get what you always got." So goes an old saying. And so goes the American economy. The problem has become the solution. Americans are now getting from their government what they got from their corporations. The automobile companies are collapsing because of their short-term perspectives and so the government has provided one bailout projected to last a few weeks, and here comes another. We call this a financial crisis or an economic one, but, at the core, it is...