REMIND ME AGAIN ... TUITIONS ARE TOO HIGH? Yesterday was moving-in day at Northern Illinois, and it's apparently done despite the thunderstorms that arrived a bit earlier than anticipated. Senior administrators turn out to help drive golf carts and otherwise help people get settled, and they solicit assistance from staff and from faculty (the call goes out in particular to campus politicians on the various shared governance bodies.)

This gesture is symbolically wrong in two ways. First, it sends the message that participants have nothing better to do than help move boxes at this time of the year (although administrators occupied moving boxes are not up to more damaging stuff) and second it sends the wrong message about the proper social distance between students and faculty.

But it is not to that aspect that I wish to speak. Rather, I want to focus on what is being moved in. Michael Lopez, covering for Joanne Jacobs, reflects on computer-shopping.

I'm not saying that we should go back to the days when going to college meant packing a briefcase and a suitcase full of clothes... but frankly even my low-budget college assembly of STUFF was obscene... and it was dwarfed -- DWARFED -- by every single other person on my hall. Refrigerators, full stereo systems, top of the line computers, more clothes than Jesus (actually, Jesus probably didn't have a lot of clothes but it's an expression), cases of CD's (now obviated by digital media), televisions, VCR's (back in the days of VHS), dishes, knick knacks, stuffed animals, tanning lights, heaters, portable air
conditioners....

Enough stuff to make a senior administrator's cardiologist cringe?

Don at Cafe Hayek finds a Christian Science Monitor article that quotes one of our own housing managers contemplating future changes to student housing. And if some of our charges are dropping $2-3K on dorm furnishings and bringing a new car, I have to agree with the Cafe Hayek assessment that there is an element of special pleading in gripes about rising tuitions.

It also transpires that all this stuff has to be moved again at the end of the school year, or perhaps at the end of summer sublet. In Madison, that gives rise to Hippie Christmas, and there's a LOT of stuff available for the taking.

What was that about a research paper on the contents of college-town dumpsters?

SECOND SECTION: Arnold at Econ Log has additional thoughts on the student cargo cult.