Crypto News: US college campuses look a lot like 1970s Detroit

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Higher education is rotting.
Sean Hannity eulogizes the radio.
Apple sets up shop in India.
Money transfers go global.

Picture this: After graduating from FancyTown University in 1990, you applied for some jobs. Moved to a new city. Started a 9-to-5 working as a "consultant." Made new friends. Fell in love with one of them. Got married. Moved to the 'burbs. Had a baby. Did crossword puzzles on your commute. Became the boss. Now, all of a sudden, your child is going to college! Crazy how time flies.

But for your kid, things are different. The tuition at FancyTown is now outrageous. The professors seem to be doing more sabbaticals than seminars. There are protests preventing access to the dining hall. And it honestly seems like your kid is getting a better education watching four-hour meme essays on YouTube. And after they graduate, their job search is a tear-filled nightmare that's documented on TikTok. It's enough to make you, a product of the system, wonder whether this whole higher education shindig is a scam.

The reality is that your kid is far from alone: All around the world, young people are struggling to stay afloat. In India, for instance, life after college consists of more college. Students are pursuing two or three degrees at universities that are "popping up inside small apartment buildings or inside shops in marketplaces. Highways are lined with billboards for institutions promising job placements," Bibhudatta Pradhan and Vrishti Beniwal write for Bloomberg News. And in China, the urban jobless rate for people aged 16-24 hit 19.6% — a near record — last month.

The concept of the modern-day university was born in the US. And it used to be a very reasonable transaction: I pay you money to teach me things that will help me get a job. Now, that transaction is futile. Schools can no longer hold up the end of the bargain that guarantees job stability because "vital elements in a healthy academic system are failing at the same time," Adrian Wooldridge writes. "A year at Cornell now costs nearly $90,000," he notes, which, by my calculations, could snag you a new Cadillac.

Fittingly, Adrian says, higher education "increasingly looks like the country's car industry in the 1970s, just before it was taken apart by the Japanese — hampered by a giant bureaucracy, contemptuous of many of its workers, and congenitally inward-looking." Across the US, there's unchecked administrative bloat (Yale is particularly egregious, with its 1:1 ratio of students to admins), ballooning federal student debt ($1.6 trillion!) and falling enrollment. So no, it's not just you: FancyTown isn't what it used to be. And it probably will never be again. Read the whole thing.

Today, Fox News reached a last-minute settlement with voting machine maker Dominion, which alleged that the TV network aired false claims about it rigging the 2020 presidential election. Although the settlement itself is surprising, coming up with bogus claims is par for the course for Rupert Murdoch's "unfettered disinformation machine," to steal a phrase from Tim O'Brien.

The network's latest conspiracy theory comes from Sean Hannity, who has "noticed something missing from a lot of electric vehicles," Liam Denning writes. The host is mourning the loss of his beloved AM radio, which he says is "a direct hit politically on conservative talk radio in particular." While Hannity is correct that Tesla, Ford and others have, indeed, axed AM radio, it's probably not because they have a hidden agenda to kill conservative talking points. The EV companies say that electric motors don't jive well with AM frequencies. Plus, how many people really want to listen to 12 minutes of staticky ads about identity-theft protection?:

In an era where we're Google Mapsing our way to the grocery store and playing the daily news on Spotify, it makes sense that the radio would eventually be laid to rest. When I paid for my first car with babysitting money in 2012 (for the curious minded, it was a 1995 S10 pickup), it had a cassette player that might as well have been an ancient artifact to someone who received an iPod shuffle for her 8th birthday. Technological shifts like this are nothing new. "As much as Hannity might lament, and weaponize, this erosion of AM radio's foothold, those same EVs often sport giant touchscreens where drivers can not only listen to him but also watch him on video," Liam writes. The only people who should be worried here are those who have "a face for radio." I'll leave it up to you to decide whether Hannity fits in that camp.

Tim Cook was in Mumbai today in honor of the grand opening of Apple's first-ever physical store in India. Excitement is in the air, but Tim Culpan is having some déjà vu: Just 15 years ago, Apple was unveiling its first retail space in China. Initially, sales soared. But today, China doesn't play nearly as big a role as supporters once thought it could. It's a cautionary tale for Cook as he embarks on India's Applefication.

Maybe in the future, we'll just need to tap our microchipped brains two times to send our international friends $20, but until then, we're stuck with what Andy Mukherjee says is "the inefficiency-ridden landscape" of global money transfer ideas. As it stands, sending money from one country to another is a costly and arcane process. Nexus and Icebreaker want to fix that. The competing concepts are neck-and-neck in a race to reach your smartphone. Their arrival would be welcome news for customers who are already used to frictionless account-to-account payments.