Total Cost: $58,065Tuition: $43,840Room & Board: $13,980Fees: $245Claremont McKenna, located near downtown Los Angeles, accepted only 12.4 percent of its applicants for the class of 2016, a rate that admissions counselor Brandon Gonzalez said ensures that students here will be going to school only with other top students.�The class of 2016 will be one of the most talented groups of students we have ever seen,� The school will charge these students a tuition of $21,920 per semester, or $43,840 for the entire academic year, incurring a total cost of
Thirty-five percent of Americans correctly answered only six or fewer questions, which is worse than random guessing, as blogger Steve Sailer points out.
Some of the intersections of ignorance and demographics are quite surprising. Forty-four percent of women, for example, did not know Nancy Pelosi is a Democrat (fewer men, 33 percent, got this wrong). Fifty percent of women didn’t know what John Boehner’s party. (For the benefit of those who got it wrong, including 40 percent of men, the answer is Republican.)
Overall, men scored better than women, Republicans better than Democrats, older people better than young people.
There are some interesting exceptions. For example, the 18-29 cohort scored better than older folks when it came to knowing the Democratic party is more aligned with cuts in defense spending, creating a “path to citizenship” for illegal aliens and expanding the rights of gays of lesbians.
One way of reading these results is as an indicator of what people care about. You probably know a bit more about the issues that concern you. If that’s right, younger people are far more engaged by the issues of defense, immigration and gay rights, and less engaged by partisan identifications. People ages 50 and up are engaged by taxes and partisanship (70 percent correctly identified the party affiliation of Pelosi, 72 percent correctly identified which party is known as the G.O.P.).
As an employee at a cable news stations, I should point out that it’s not clear that my colleagues do much to ameliorate ignorance. Thomas Edsall at The New York Times recently reported on the top 10 television shows that appeal to Democrats versus those that appeal to Republicans.
The Democratic shows were: “Washington Week,” “Tavis Smiley,” “Late Show with David Letterman,” “The View,” “PBS NewsHour,” “NOW” on PBS, “House of Payne,” “ABC World News Now,” “60 Minutes” and “Insider Weekend.” That’s a pretty heavy roster of public policy and news oriented shows.
The top-10 Republican shows were “The Office,” “Rules of Engagement,” “The Mentalist,” “New Yankee Workshop,” “The Big Bang Theory,” “Castle,” “Desperate Housewives,” “Dancing With The Stars,” “The Biggest Loser” and “Grey’s Anatomy.” Not one public policy or news oriented show was on the list.
Republicans, however, outscored Democrats on every question on the Pew Test other than the one about defense spending. Perhaps this makes sense. Democrats may watch a lot of news and public policy programming in an attempt to overcome their ignorance. Republicans already know enough, so they can spend their time watching stars dance.
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