In just a few days, a fresh group of teenagers will descend upon America’s college and university campuses, eager to sip from the cup of knowledge and to take their place among the next generation of leaders.

At least that’s the hope.

But a new report from the editors of “Choosing the Right College” and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute finds that students need to be careful about choosing where to study.  A poor decision could leave graduates with more debt than knowledge, and a place in the unemployment line instead of on the fast track to success.

CollegeGuideReport–Final–08.05.2011

The report is titled “Rating America’s Colleges: A Ranking of Academic Excellence and Intellectual Freedom on Campus.” In it, the authors make the case a new approach is needed for assessing the quality of our institutions of higher learning.

They cite a study which finds that corporate leaders are increasingly dissatisfied “with the quality of U.S undergraduate education.” Ninety percent of employers want employees who are skilled in written communication, critical thinking and problem solving, but fewer than 30 percent of applicants meet those expectations.

The authors argue that part of the problem is found in the way the nation’s colleges are evaluated. They take aim at U.S. News and World Report’s popular college rankings, and suggest that schools are evaluated by meaningless criteria such as “peer assessment,” “freshman retention and graduation rates,” and “per-student spending.” Those measurements don’t reveal much about what goes on inside the classroom.

The authors of “Rating America’s Colleges” do something radically different: they assess “how well (or badly) a school does at providing the classic ‘liberal education’ suited to a free citizen and a well-rounded adult.”

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Last week, President Obama brought his unique brand of leadership to the U.S. Military Academy. Speaking to the West Point graduation, the commander-in-chief outlined a foreign policy that sharply differed from the Bush Doctrine that was proclaimed from that same podium eight years ago.

In those tense, post-9/11 days, George W. Bush declared that the U.S. would carry the fight to our jihadist enemies, that we would not wait for those who were preparing weapons of mass destruction to strike us a first, devastating blow, and that we would regard any government that harbored terrorists as a foe. The Bush Doctrine was certainly controversial then. It has been effectively superseded by the Obama Doctrine. President Obama recognized that America’s economy is the basis of America’s military strength. No argument there. He told the Corps of Cadets, that illustrious “Long Gray Line,” including hundreds of graduates who will soon join their brothers in combat:

Simply put, American innovation must be the foundation of American power – because at no time in human history has a nation of diminished economic vitality maintained its military and political primacy. And so that means that the civilians among us, as parents and community leaders, elected officials, business leaders, we have a role to play. We cannot leave it to those in uniform to defend this country – we have to make sure that America is building on its strengths.

During World War II, American productivity saved freedom for the world. But Obama’s economic policies will choke American innovation. Small businesses are already contemplating the grim decision whether to lay off workers or pay the fine and dump their employees from company-provided health plans. Obama’s Cap & Trade legislation, should it be passed, will vastly increase the cost of doing business. At the very time the President seeks to engage “soft power”–economic and non-military resources, his policies are rendering that power ineffective.

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Today, in 1962, General Douglas MacArthur delivered his “Duty, Honor, Country” speech at West Point.

On Saturday morning, I was stopped short by a text message-  a plane crash had killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski and 96 others.  Immediately, I called and asked the location… Russia.

With tragic irony, the Polish Presidential delegation was wiped out while enroute to memorialize the 1940 Katyn Forest Massacre.  During World War II (April 1940), the Russians murdered 22,000 members of the captured Polish Officer Corps. On Stalin’s orders, the Russians killed captured Polish military officers, civil servants, and intellectuals, including lawyers, physicians, teachers, professors, engineers, priests, rabbis and other professionals.  By “liquidating” the Polish Officer Corps and much of the professional class, the Russians eased future “communization” of Poland.

The Russians had never apologized for the Katyn Massacre and for 50 years had denied culpability.  Scheduled for last weekend, the memorial event was meant to extend a hand and unclench a fist.  Instead, the Polish State aircraft crashed nearly at the same site.

Polish President Lech Kaczynski was hated by the Russians;  he was blunt, and a tough negotiator.  As a friend of Lech Walesa, member of Solidarity, and former mayor of Warsaw, President Kaczynski had been jailed while resisting communism.

The historic Polish motto, “Our Freedom is Yours”, is deeply ingrained in the national political culture.

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Today, President Obama travels to West Point, the United States Military Academy, to announce his absolute, final, this is really it, no mistake about it, really serious decision on Afghanistan.