The health and fashion magazines keep telling their readers that 60 is the new 50, and 50 is the new 40, and so on. We now have further proof that college is the new high school. It seems that the SAT, an exam that is supposed to establish which 18-year-olds are college material and which ones should consider getting into politics as soon as possible, is not only making the essay portion optional, but removing difficult words from the vocabulary part of the exam.

Apparently, anyone who can spell c-a-t and is willing to hock his or her future for a college loan is now deemed to be college material.

Speaking of places that have the effrontery to claim they’re institutions of higher learning, Rutgers’ Faculty Council passed a resolution calling for the university to rescind its invitation to Condoleezza Rice to be this year’s commencement speaker. The tenured pinheads based their objection on her having played a role in the Iraq War and in “Bush’s policy of enhanced interrogation techniques.” You know, those watery techniques used on a trio of Muslim terrorists that led to our finding and killing Osama bin Laden.

I have to ask: Is there any group of individuals that is simultaneously as stupid, arrogant and self-righteous, as those to be found on our nation’s college campuses? Of course I mean, aside from the members of the current administration.

Rutgers, I should add, is the same place that paid Snooki (real name: Nicole Polizzi) of the so-called reality show “Jersey Shore” $32,000 to share her wisdom at a couple of hour-long Q&A sessions. And you no doubt had been wondering what colleges did with all that tuition money they scarf up like industrial-sized vacuum cleaners.

While we’re on the subject of education, Barack Obama took a break from a visit to a pre-school – which is a heck of a thing for a place that claims to be a school to call itself – to give a press conference. He took the occasion to say, “Putin may have a different set of lawyers making a different set of interpretations, but I don’t think that’s fooling anyone.”

Wow! Kennedy said, “Ich bin eine Berliner;” Reagan said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall;” and Obama stands around comparing lawyers. Rumor has it that on his way out the door, a four-year-old bullied Obama out of his lunch money.

In other news of the day, I have to admit that when I heard that some young New Jersey woman, possibly a friend of Snooki, was suing for child support, I naturally assumed she was suing a husband or a boyfriend who had dumped her and their kid. But it seems that the child was herself and that Rachel Canning, 18, was suing her parents because they insisted that so long as she lived in their home, she’d abide by their rules. So she moved out and tried to get the court to force them to support her.

In a voice mail to her mother, Rachel had said: “I really just wanna s— all over your face right now because it looks like that anyway. Anyway, I f—— hate you and I’ve written you off. I’m blocking you from just about everything.” Isn’t that just like kids? They’ll say the nastiest things imaginable, but they’ll leave the door open a wee crack so you can still pay their bills.

In his decision, Judge Peter Bogaard ruled in favor of the parents, saying that to do otherwise “could open the gates to a 12-year-old suing for an X-Box or a 13-year-old suing for an iPhone.”

If I were the president, I’d have Judge Bogaard, clearly one of the very few sensible jurists in America, on my short list for the next opening on the Supreme Court in spite of that annoying extra “a” in his name.

At the very least, Ms. Canning should not have been allowed to sue for child support, but, rather, for brat support.

Moving on, I’d like to see the day when any American citizen who has the time and money to bring a lawsuit against the federal government is considered to have standing before the Supreme Court. For instance, the Affordable Care Act, which was strong-armed into existence four years ago by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, doesn’t directly affect me. But as an American, why should I have to stand idly by while the bill wrecks the economy, destroys healthcare for millions of my fellow citizens and allows the president to shred the Constitution a little more every time he arbitrarily, and for purely partisan reasons, bypasses Congress and changes it by executive fiat?

And, finally, what the heck does Lois Lerner have on those guys on the Congressional Oversight Committee? Twice, she has refused to answer questions about the IRS scandal, once illegally hiding behind the Fifth Amendment after she had already spoken for the record, and twice she has been allowed to traipse out the door into that nutty parallel universe where she is still being allowed to collect her IRS pension.

In my world, contempt of Congress is regarded as an appropriate attitude. But, legally speaking, it also happens to be a crime that carries with it jail time. So why isn’t she being led out of the room in shackles with both incarceration and an IRS audit in her future?

This is a question I would love to be able to put to Committee Chairman Darrel Issa, but I suspect he, too, would take the Fifth.