Apple and Foxconn have a well-documented history of labor abuses ranging from underpaying employees to compulsory over time that have been blamed for a slew of deaths and suicides among Foxconn's workforce. These abuses were widely covered in the media around 2012 but largely disappeared from the headlines after Apple CEO Tim Cook said he would pressure Foxconn into adopting more humane labor conditions.
Since the early 2000's the amount of student debt outstanding has grown exponentially, along with annual tuitions, and now stands at nearly $1.5 trillion. Moreover, and not terribly surprisingly, defaults on that growing mountain of student debt have also surged as graduating students quickly discover that they just dropped $200,000 on a near-zero ROIC investment.
Project Baltimore, an investigative reporting series conducted by a local Fox affiliate in Baltimore City, has sifted through over a decade of high school records and discovered that attendance at city high schools in 2017 suddenly dropped to a 13-year low of just 76%. Just to state the obvious, the average high school in Maryland has around 1,200 students so that means that, on an average day, nearly 300 of them don't bother to show up.
For the past several weeks, one Fox affiliate in Baltimore has been publishing some staggering stories about the Baltimore public school system under an investigative series called "Project Baltimore." Just a few weeks ago we noted one of those stories in which an undercover teacher admitted that public schools routinely pass kids that never even bother to show up for class a single day during the school year.
Roughly 70% of America's bright-eyed and bushy-tailed high school seniors will go on to binge drink study at a 4-year college, but, to our complete shock, less than two-thirds of them will manage to graduate with a degree. Even worse, 30% of the students will drop-out after just one year on campus.