STUCK WITH A 1995 MENTALITY. The Economics Department at Northern Illinois University has received word that its next two faculty to retire will not be replaced. That might be driven by the current budgetary exigencies, but it might also be evidence of the persistence of old habits, namely the downsizing mentality of the early 1990s, a period of falling enrollments owing to changing mating behavior in the 1970s. I still recall a 1995 meeting of a university committee discussing ways to increase "retention" by providing some, shall we say non-academic, courses that purported to help students find their way around university. Nobody was terribly interested in my observation that the middle schools were bursting at the seams and those would be our potential students in six years. We now face the possibility of enrollments returning to their mid-1980s highs, with a faculty smaller than we had in 1995, at the nadir of recent enrollments. There is scant consolation in learning that we are not alone. From Newmark's Door comes a William R. Johnson essay on the problems he faces at the University of Virginia (once home to Nobel Laureate Ronald Coase, but that's a rant for another day.) The money graf: "The future of the University of Virginia is in the hands of the citizens of Virginia. Continued tuition caps and depressed state funding will, in the absence of phenomenal private fundraising, surely defeat the goal of advancing to the top tier of national universities, broadly defined. Just lifting the tuition caps will help -- and it is appropriate that our students pay a larger share of the costs of their own educations. But if Virginians want a public university of the quality of a Michigan or a Berkeley, they must have the political will to finance it. For years the state has been lucky in getting a leading university at bargain prices and may be lulled into thinking that it always will, but eventually you get what you pay for." Professor Johnson notes that some students have discovered low tuitions are not a bargain. Indeed not: if courses are not available, key faculty take early retirement and are not replaced (or change jobs, albeit this is generally exchanging one set of nightmares for another) and degree completion takes five or six years even for students well-off enough to take a full load of courses. He has also discovered that there is no reserve army of the unemployed in economics, particularly those with interests in finance. I can confirm that: we were allowed to bring three candidates to campus for one opening. All three are good people and we have hired one. A second took a job with another institution (and advised us accordingly) before we had completed our interviews.