Was anyone else bummed there was no congratulations or certificate at the end of the 2.5 hour online course?

Question on Education: Worst in the Debate?

When watching the second debate last night I was surprised to see the first question was about education.  A 20 year old college student named Jeremy asked the President and Governor what they can say to reassure him and his parents that he will be able to sufficiently support himself after graduation.  Now, this may have been the most poorly answered question in the entire debate (or maybe just for me since I am interested in education).  Governor Romeny was the first to answer and all he did was boast abou the Abigail Adams Scholarship awarded to students in Mass., knock on Obama for crushing the middle class, and say he wanted to extend Pell Grants and some other worthless fillers.  Oh, and of course, he said that when he is president he will bring good jobs back into the economy, but that was it.  Not how, not what kind of jobs or anything, just good jobs back in the economy. 
President Obama's answer may have been even worse.  He said he he is glad that Jeremy is valuing higher education and that he wants to build on the 5 million jobs he has already created in the private sector.  Then he said he wants more manufacturing jobs for college grads (which was the most disheartening for me).  And then he basically used the rest of the time to give a brief overview of his plan to fix the economy and yadda yadda yadda.
SO, not only did neither of them really asnwer the question, President Obama implied he wants college graduates to work manufacturing jobs! So now my college degree will get me a job in a factory and allow me to join a union! Whoo Hoo! At least Romney said he wants to bring back good jobs to the economy.
Anyway, education sucks, debates suck, Jeremy sucks.

Egypt Not Taking Too Kindly to U.S.

Going back to the Gallup website's Opinion Briefing's section, I looked at the article about U.S. aid in Egypt. Recently, the United States has not a very good reputation in the middle east and as we move towards Africa, it looks like they dont want us there. The very first poll was regarding whether or not Egyptians wanted U.S. economic aid. 82% of the Egyptian people appose any economic aid from the U.S. 83% are in agreement in thinking that the U.S. wont let them form their own political system and will instead impose their own. We are really not making a good name for ourselves, especially as expansive as U.S. foreign policy is.

However, it seems we arent the only bad fish in this pond. China and Iran are no better in Egyptian eyes than the U.S. is. Over the past 7 years, the survey has asked the Egyptian people on the leadership of the U.S., China, and Iran. For now, it seems we are the best of the worse, but that may not be the case in the future. China has slowly been increasing in Egyptian approval over the past seven years. Could they be the occupying power the country wants?

From a polling perspective, everything in the survey method seemed pretty standard until I read the line that read, "Results are based on face-to-face interviews with 1,000 adults, aged 15 and older per wave..." I thought that was really interesting. Those considered adults were age 15 and up. Hypothetically, if Gallup were to do a poll of the entire adult world (big dreams, I know, but bear with me) would they have to set a certain age for the entire poll or would each countries definition of "adult" be the standard for the poll? Interesting question that I dont really know the answer to. WAF.

This is a great representation of the two candidates on their view of public spending, although I am worried for our nation if we have finally descended into a social policy of simply taxing the rich to pay for everything the government spends. If you are interested, take a look here The Pew Research Center does a very good job presenting the data.

Undervaluing "quality" jobs or naive parents?

Although I am more concerned with higher education, I found a somewhat interesting but more entertaining article on the Gallup site titled, U.S. Parents Optimistic About Graduation, Unsure About Jobs.  When you read this, or at least when I read this, I figured they would be talking about graduating from college, but they are actaully talking about graduating from HIGH SCHOOL.  In the main poll of this...poll... they ask people to rate on a 1-5 scale whether they know their child will graduate from high school and whether they know they will find a good job.  An overwhelming 91% of parents strongly agreed that they knew their child would graduate from high school (although the national average is only 73%) whereas 38% strongly agreed their child would find a good job after graduation.  Oddly enough, before dipping down into the 1's and 2's of this response (being that they disagree about the respective questions) 89% answered either 5-4-3 (saying they at least agreed) that they knew their child would find a good job after high school.  So does this poll eliminate the children planning on going to college? or are these respondent's children just not going to college?  And if they are not planning on going to college but are going to find a good job out of high school, why are the parents so eager to say that they KNOW they will graduate from high school (which 99% answered a 5-4-3 on).  This is obviously a poll with horrible questioning and problems with "mushiness index" because the question is too close to home (literally) for the respondents.

Teacher Unionization

With the recent strike of the Chicago teachers, an interesting question is posed: Are teacher's unions helpful?  America says "no".  As you can see from the attached image above, since 1976, the general opinion of the unions have received a negative connotation.  The image is from the article, Polling Shows Most Americans Think Teachers Unions Have Hurt Education Quality. Why does the public seem to think the unions lower education quality?  After some research, in most districts teacher compensation, or salaries, makes up 80% of the budget.  That means that only 20% of the budget is left over for school advances, sports, extracurriculars and so on.  Teachers are strongly protected by their union when it comes to pay cuts and other aspects of financial "equality", which they basically control.  Being unionized, they can essentially refuse pay cuts so schools are forced to dip into that remaining 20%, which makes school less enjoyable, which makes children hate their lives more, which makes for lower willingness to learn, which makes for lower marks, which makes for lower quality of education.  A lot of teachers get tenured in as little as working at a school for three years, which pretty much ensures they cannot get fire no matter how much they suck at teaching.  Basically, with teacher unions, there is no way to improve the quality of school and education when they are taking 80% of the money allocated to school districts.  In a lot of cases even, teachers receive a 4% annual salary upgrade.  Teachers really do not have it all that bad like people tend to think, they get free health care (in most cases for life) for themselves and their families, extraordinary job security and much better benefits than those in the private sector.


Source:
http://www.michiganreview.com/archives/2857
http://reason.com/blog/2012/09/10/polling-shows-most-americans-think-teach

Libya Response Poll!

Pollster Blog #2 Ladies and Gentlemen!

My first post was incredibly lack luster, simply because I didnt have much knowledge on the subject of polling at all! Now I am armed with some more information on what goes into a poll including the meaning behind the margin of sampling error and the confidence level. Typically, both of those can be found at the bottom of the polls. It belongs with the usual technical stuff.

Back to Libya though. After all the uproar that is happening in Libya right now, with Ambassador Chris Stevens being killed, the American reaction to Libyan Government and its citizens is, not surprisingly, low. I look to Ramussen Reports this week for a poll on Libya, as suggested by my wonderful professor Dr. Gelbman. The article titled "Just 29% Are Even Somewhat Confident Libya Will Punish Ambassador’s Killers" is pretty short. Did not expect that. However, it does provide one thing that my previous poll did not: the questions they asked. The Ramussen Reports provided a link to the questions so people could see what was asked. Recently, in class, our discussion has been based around nonattitudes and insincerity. A lot of the causes behind both of these stems from the questions, both how they are asked and who is asking.

Another nice point that of interest regarding the Ramussen Reports is by stating how they gathered the information. In this case, it was by an automated survey. They go into more detail about who they poll, how they decide who that is and many other factors. They are much more open and direct about their polling techniques than previous articles. Especially for someone who is trying to learn all they can about the various aspects of polling, this information is incredibly helpful!

See you all next time!

Mass Transit--What to do?

Being from Wisconsin, I understand the politics behind transportation issues in this country. A bi-partisan effort has insisted that the government sponsor creating a network of transportation rail lines similar to Europe and part of the stimulas program was allocated to Wisconsin for this project. Governor Scott Walker effectively rejected this proposal and returned the stimulas funds. Hawaii is also considering building a rail line. Four years ago California issued 10 billion dollars in bonds to build over 800 miles of high speed rail. According to an article found here the LA Times, "...the cost of which is now pegged at $68 billion..." Despite all of this negative publicity, the public still wants a more reliable national transportation system according to a new poll by the National Research Defense Council, showing that a majority of Americans want individual states to increase spending on this system. "Americans over-estimate what their state spends on public transportation, estimating that it is an average of 16 percent of their state’s transportation budget – and still they would like that amount nearly doubled, calling for their state to spend an average of 28 percent on public transportation (note: The average percentage of transportation money – state plus federal – spent on transit over the past three years was 6.55 percent per state)."

Raising the amount a state spends on transportation to 28% would drastically change the budgets for each state, pulling much needed funds from every sector in order to compensate the transportation. Indiana, named "Crossroads of America," has a total budget for 2012 of 54.5 billion dollars, 3.5 billion was spent on transportation according to governmentspending.com-on par with the national average. Raising the spending to 28% would place transportation to the second highest priority, just shy of education. Citizens should think critically about government spending and priorities when answering poll questions, and realizing the implications of raising areas of spending.

2012 Election Polling

This morning, C-SPAN aired this discussion of polling in the 2012 election season. While it's mostly focused on the presidential and vice presidential candidates and the campaign season "horserace," there's some consideration of public opinion on major issues as well.

No Child Left Behind

Gallup polled American's on their feeling about the "No Child Left Behind" act introduced by the Bush Administation in 2001. From what I understand, a very basic explanation of the NCLB is that every federally funded school (K-12) have to administer standardized tests and schools that repeatedly do poorly or do worse than before get some sort of reprimandation by the state or federal government. Surprisingly, this act is viewed rather poorly by the public which comes as a bit of a surprise to me.  It is surprising to me because I can't see how an act that measures schools' performance on an annual basis can be anything but good.  Is it because of the social lashing the school's reputation receives whence done poorly with their education efforts? And it was also surprising that here was virtually no difference in opinion about NCLB between adults with students in a K-12 setting, and one's without. Not only do American's generally think NCLB is not beneficial, almost 1/3 of them thin it has made education worse! Someone please explain to me how this can be. The public's general perception of them hating Bush? Who knows? In my opinion, I think school's should be called out more for student's performing poorly.
Source: No Child Left Behind Act Rated More Negatively Than Positively

Is Raising Taxes Good?

For my first real post, I found an interesting article written for the Pew Research Center claiming, as the title so eloquently puts it, that "Raising taxes on Rich Seen as good for Economy, and Fairness." This was done through a poll, and the astounding results indicate that a two to one majority of those polled stated it would help the economy if those that made over $250,000 would pay more in taxes. (I am assuming that the sample group most likely did not contain a majority of the 1%-ers) Here is the link for the website. Read and ponder...

Are We Prepared For The Real World?

For my first blog I took the initiative to remind us (seniors) how college has not prepared us to enter the workforce, sarcastically speaking of course.  The article I chose was written by the Gallup poll on the percent of American's who believe emerging adults are ready for the workforce, the article is titled appropriately, Many in U.S. Doubt That Students Are Prepared for Work.  In this article, you will find that only about half of adults think that college graduates are actually ready for the real world.  And I have to admit, I am rather sensitive to this claim.  If I graduated today, I would have no real idea on how to do anything in the real world, and I do not think the classes I am taking this semester and next will prepare me much further.  The question is for me, Who is to blame?  Is it the schools, professors, parents, students, society?  A combination of all?  I must admit, I have not really thought about how "prepared" I am for work until this school year so I guess the fault is partially mine (or students like me).  But if the student graduates from college, he or she obviously has fulfilled the institution's set requirements, and thus should be prepared for "work" or the "real world".  And I imagine the people who were polled have some experience with new college graduates entering their work place and would not blatantly lie on a poll that they believe they were unqualified.  So, what can the schools do to change this?  At Wabash, I believe we solve this issue by pressing the idea of some sort of other schooling after undergrad, be it law school, med-school, business school or what have you.  Is a Bachelor's degree not enough anymore?

Blake's Intro

Greetings.  My name is Blake Mattingly and I am from New Palestine, IN which is about 20 miles east of Indianapolis. I  am majoring in Philosophy and minoring in Political Science and am a senior.  I plan on attending law school after I graduate and pursuing a career in sports law.  I have never blogged before but can appreciate the informality of reading people's opinions on respected issues. My topic for blogging will be education since it is a rather behind-the-scenes topic I would like to look in to further. 

First Post: U.S. and the Latin Neighbors

Here we go on my first blog post. I will either succeed with flying colors or crash and burn in a blaze of glory. Either way, I am doing it!

I went to the Gallup website in search of an article to talk about today. Since my focus this semester is foreign policy, I was a little worried that the Gallup Polls would not have much to offer me. From what I know about them, it is fairly domestic based polling. However, there is an entire section based on foreign policy called Foreign Policy Opinion Briefing. It was the perfect place to begin the search for my first blog article. 

The Article I choose was Opinion Briefing: U.S.-Latin America Relations. With the Presidential Election getting closer and closer, we debate amongst ourselves on who should be the next President of our country. Occasionally, it is always refreshing to get a new and more unbiased perspective on the Presidential Election. This article takes a look at the approval rating of Latin American countries in 2009 and compares them to approval ratings for today. It is quit interesting what comes up.

Obama has always portrayed himself as the defender of the minorities, especially of Latino decent. Now, it seems the countries from which this group hails from are starting to lose interest in Obama and what he is doing.Nearly every country on the list has dropped in their approval rating except for Paraguay. 

When it comes to the affect domestically, we have to take these approval ratings with a grain of salt. After all, their disapproval of Obama may stem from other things (particularly foreign policy) that the typical American does not bother himself with. In an election where foreign policy will be nearly non-existent, the opinions of neighboring countries is a fresh, but not very helpful, opinion.

Greetings!

Greetings! My name is Jim Martin, a Political Science major focusing on American Politics. My blog is going to focus on public opinion concerning taxation and spending issues in the United States. I am a periodic blogger on the Wabash College website for my travels with the school as well as the student life. I am in my last semester for college and I am attempting to enter into politics upon my graduation in December. Thanks for reading, and we will be updating this political blog in the near future. Jim

Let Me Introduce Myself...

My name is Sam Spoerle and I am a Political Science major here at Wabash College. My area of focus is on foreign policy and so, my issue of choice will be foreign policy. Pretty obvious. I am also pursuing a minor in computer science. Two areas of academia on opposite ends of the spectrum. I look forward to keeping you posted in the near future! Till then. Have fun!

Welcome to PSC 371's Public Opinion Blog!

The four of us will be blogging here regularly about public opinion-related current events.

As captain of the ship, my posts will be the most haphazard (and probably the least regular) - they'll include links to poll reports on a wide variety of issues, in-class readings, and other updates, articles, and blog posts of interest.

The other contributors will each be focusing on public opinion developments surrounding a single issue of their choice. They'll introduce themselves and their issue selections in the coming week.