THE JOYS OF SHODDY SERVICE. The major credit card companies are not making many friends, either among their cardholders or in Congress.

Americans use credit cards to pay for everything from groceries to speeding tickets. But they're increasingly besieged by colossal fees and interest-rate increases that seem to hit them without warning or justification.

Now, though, banks are under scrutiny from the Democrat-led Congress, which held hearings on credit card practices last week. Banks also are feeling competitive pressure to become more consumer friendly.

One practice, known as "universal default," is of particular interest.

Ever wonder why your card's interest rate spiked, even though you've always paid on time? The most likely reason is a practice known as universal default. That occurs when card issuers raise rates for those who made a late payment to some other company. Issuers may also raise your rate if your overall debt has increased. Nearly 45% of banks used universal default in 2005, according to Consumer Action, an advocacy group.

Credit card issuers defend this practice.

They argue that borrowers who are having trouble with other debts are more likely to fall behind on their credit card bills. But many consumers say the practice is grossly unfair.

The practice is of particular interest in that without the central clearing houses known as credit bureaus, a creditor only knows which of its own customers are slow to pay or nonpayers. The credit bureaus provide a potential efficiency-enhancing function in enabling any lender to discover which borrowers have bad histories elsewhere (it's more objective than asking your current squeeze's former boyfriend). At the same time, the credit bureau can serve as a facilitating practice for collusion (as .pdf; the shared information relaxes the "incentive compatibility constraint for collusion, in the absence of an explicit agreement among creditors to raise rates in response to the same evidence.) Thus there is a public policy tradeoff: is the public interest better served by expediting the discovery of delinquent and deadbeat borrowers or by making rational cooperation in an already cartelized industry more difficult?

The article also suggests that cardholders make use of the customer service department at the credit card company.

If you've been hit with a high fee because your payment was a day late, call your card issuer and ask for a reprieve. If you've been a solid customer, there's a good chance the issuer will waive the fee, says Linda Sherry, director for Consumer Action.

Getting your interest rate reduced is harder, [Card Rating's Curtis] Arnold says, but not impossible. Even if your bank won't give you your old rate, it might agree to reduce the new rate by a few percentage points, he says. A report by the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group found that more than half of customers who complained to their card issuer about their interest rate succeeded in having the rate reduced.

Yes, call, but expect to be frustrated. I had a small error to straighten out, and rather than write a letter, I rang the customer service line. The problem was cleared up. In fifteen minutes. After I had spent two minutes working through the "enter this information" nonsense to get in. After I had spent three minutes dealing with an agent who was unable to solve my problem and unwilling to transfer me to a supervisor without requesting irrelevant information. After I spent another five minutes getting the supervisor to concede that the agent was in error. After that supervisor asked me to confirm my mailing address (IT'S ON THE STATEMENT. I RECEIVED THE STATEMENT. ARE YOU TELLING ME THE REST OF YOUR RECORD KEEPING IS AS BAD AS YOUR TRANSACTION POSTING?)

I will be forwarding a complaint about the "customer service" functions at credit card companies to the House Committee on Financial Services, should Members be interested in pursuing further abusive practices. I will also report the facts to the Comptroller of the Currency, with the request that the complaint be held for a reasonable time in their files, should the Committee expand its inquiry.

HOW OTHERS SEE US. The Badger Blog Alliance's Lance Burri tackles an abstract of an article in Child Development.

The abstract begins with a description of the sample.

Using a representative sample of low-income, primarily minority adolescents (N=647, aged 10–14 years at Wave 1), this study examined bidirectional longitudinal relations between nonresident father involvement, defined as contact and responsibility for children's care and behavior, and adolescent engagement in delinquent activities.

As passes through panel data go, this is a relatively small sample. Economists who work with the Panel Study on Income Dynamics and other such longitudinal databases ("longitudinal" refers to observing a number of cases at different times; if the cases are the same individuals or businesses at each time, it's a "balanced" panel) get nervous if their sample size drops below 2,000. I've managed to make do with 52 power companies or 34 steel mills.

Mr Burri quotes the second sentence, with emphasis added.

Autoregressive and fixed effects models found that higher nonresident father involvement predicted subsequent decreases in adolescent delinquency, particularly for youth with initial engagement in delinquent activities.

His response: "duh." What the abstract is really telling us, however, is that the seemingly innocuous decision of a father to get more involved in his kid's life once the kid has had a scrape with the law introduces all sorts of measurement difficulties that the "autoregressive" (meaning the error you committed last year influences the error you commit this year) and "fixed effects" (meaning we can generalize about people with similar characteristics) models attempt to cope with. There's also a phenomenon called "self-selection" that can arise in problems such as this.

The abstract concludes,

As adolescent delinquency increased, so too did father involvement, suggesting that nonresident fathers may increase their involvement in the face of adolescent problem behavior, with this pattern driven primarily by African American families.

Mr Burri notes,

That sounds like good news, and at odds with the usual wisdom. I wonder how true it is? And under what circumstances?

Sorry, I didn’t read the whole study. I know. Bad blogger. Bad. But come on, that was the abstract, and it was barely comprehensible.

Thus one difficulty in making use of academic research in formulating public policy. The conclusion is not that out of line with "the usual wisdom." Put simply, it means "Absentee dads get more involved after their kids have a brush with the law. The propensity of African-American dads to get involved in that way is somewhat greater." In a "low-income, primarily-minority" sample the frame of reference is "compared to other low-income dads belonging to other minorities." Left unsaid is whether greater involvement by those fathers before the kids run afoul of the authorities would keep those kids out of the juvenile justice system, but that's even harder to tease out of the data.

And the "barely comprehensible" nature of the abstract follows from the nature of the research. The authors have to emphasize the use of state-of-the-art methods of statistical inference in order to pass muster with the referees, who, if they are conscientious, will be more interested in the methods the authors used to cope with the measurement errors than they will be with the political reliability of the conclusions.

Academic abstracts are sometimes like that. Here, a relatively turgid abstract introduces a simple message: absentee dads get more involved after their kids get into trouble. That's called "putting out fires." Sometimes a relatively simple abstract introduces a complicated message. Consider "All elliptic curves are modular, thus xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ has no nontrivial solutions in integers for n>2." The proof runs some 300 pages.

LET THE GRIPING BEGIN. The brackets are set, and the selection committee gets second-guessed.

Why are mid-majors punished for losses in their leagues more than teams from the power conferences? [Men's selection committee chairman Gary] Walters said that isn't necessarily the case: "We really do look at the full résumé."

Perhaps so. On the other hand, where the stakes are lower, I'll accept Mid-American runner up Ball State and Horizon's Illinois-Chicago, but raise questions about Illinois (with a bye??) and Illinois State (more wins than Wisconsin, but no bye??).

MONEY IS FUNGIBLE. King Banaian at SCSU Scholars calls out the latest maneuvering between the Minnesota legislature and the state colleges and universities.

The budget situation on our campuses is not as bad as this sounds. Holding back tuition increases is another way of saying we're going to give more money to middle-class parents of college-age children. You can hold the headline tuition increase to 4%, but what matters to the university is net tuition, not gross.

The net tuition is a secret number known only to the university's financial aid office and the student, or possibly the student's family. One is more likely to see passengers on a crowded plane paying the same rate than one is to see students in a crowded class paying the same net tuition.

MAKING THOSE CONNECTIONS. In a February interview with the Northern Star, I mentioned the military origins of the DeKalb Taylor Municipal Airport. The reporter subsequently followed up with an investigation of our progenitor of the cruise missile.

During World War II, an airplane was made in DeKalb that was so top secret, it was not declassified until the 1960s.

Imagine a wooden plane loaded with a 500-pound bomb and a television camera in its nose. Then, imagine a person in another airplane watching a TV, aiming the plane into a target.

"The reason it was so top secret is the television camera. It was totally built as a remote control plane, so it would actually take off from a dead stop on the runway," said historic preservationist Roger Keys.

The technology of remotes and joysticks available today was not around in the 1930s and '40s, so a different method was used.

"To control this radio-controlled [plane], they used a telephone dial, an old, little rotary telephone dial. They would dial, like, 3, and it would tell the plane to do something. [Dial], like, a 6, and it would tell the plane to do something else."

I learned about this aircraft at the June breakfast fly-in a few years ago.

ONE AND DONE FOR ARIZONA. No surprise that, but in this bracket, Ohio State, Kansas, and Oregon also make early exits. The details are in the latest report from the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport. (Via Doug Lederman at Inside Higher Ed.)

MODEL RAILROAD READING. Just in time for the Chicago March Meet, evidence of model railroading going down the tubes.

WE SOLICIT YOUR ATTENTION. Via Rick Moran's Right Wing Nut House, an invitation to participate in a college basketball tournament pool to honor PFC Tim Hines, Jr.

Tim was an amazing guy that was filled with life and love, and his absolute favorite sport was basketball. Because of his love of basketball, my family and I have decided that having a March Madness Fundraiser would be a great way to raise funds for the scholarship that is given in his name (each year this scholarship is given to a high school student). This scholarship is a great way to remember Tim and the sacrifices that he made for all of us and to help a high school student attend college (which is the reason why Tim joined the army).

The closing deadlines are noon Thursday, 15 March for bracket sheets (apparently the play-in game is irrelevant) and Wednesday, 21 March for entry donations.

LEARNING TO WIN. Last Friday, Twelve O'Clock High ran on one of the movie channels. There's relatively little aviation footage in the movie (unlike the television show that was inspired by the movie.) The plot is relatively simple. Gregory Peck plays hard-nosed General Savage, who has the responsibility of getting the 918th Bomber Group into shape. He's up against the tendency of his crews to take what seems like the easy course, which in the usual way tends to make their life more difficult, and he's not at all popular for insisting that members of the unit do what looks like the more difficult things, although those more difficult things make the unit's tasks easier. He gets the usual advice from the usual suspects to lighten up, and, at the end of the movie, suffers what appears to be a stroke as his now proficient unit is off to Germany to finish a job they had begun on the previous raid.

What is the explanation for the propensity of people to make their lives more difficult by stinting on the hard but necessary things, and why must the task of the leader who emphasizes the hard but necessary things be so difficult?

TOP AND BOTTOM ALL THE WAY. The coming of spring break offered an opportunity to head to points south. Here, the southbound City of New Orleans changes crews at Jackson, Mississippi, on a sunny Saturday.


The train appeared to be the conveyance of choice for numerous northern academics getting away at spring break. There was probably a quorum for a college senate in the lounge car, although everybody was more interested in getting away than in working.

I had ample opportunity to rest and didn't bother recording times at any of the intermediate stations. The consist was Genesis 8, Superliner sleepers 32026-32043, diner 38036, Sightseer lounge 33045 (with cafeteria style service area belowdecks), and coaches 31011-34099. The train got away from Chicago on time at 8 pm and arrived in Jackson at 11 am with an 11.30 am departure time. I was picking up my rental car by the time the train left for New Orleans. More on the ensuing drive to Vicksburg soon.

The schedule has a great deal of recovery time in it. The Sunday consist replaced the 8-spot (shouldn't that be pulling the Olympian Hiawatha) with Genesis 135 and added a third coach 34082. Something about leaving a rake idle in New Orleans for the better part of a day bothers me. Here's the train arriving Jackson at 5.10 with plenty of time to make its 5.44 departure.


The City appears to be a popular way of traveling overnight between Memphis and Chicago, and more than a few passengers held sleeping car space for a day drawing room on the New Orleans-Memphis segment. Out of Memphis the sleepers were full. I heard one car attendant explaining to another that some passengers were holding tickets for space that didn't exist (roomette 19??) but that he was able to find room for everybody. Although we did wait on some freight trains, including some maneuvers in which the City headed into a siding behind a freight train, met an opposing freight train, then backed out to pass the freight train ahead, our 10.20 arrival in Memphis still provided ample time to grab some pictures in the station, which has some classic Illinois Central neon signage. (There is really only one working platform,)


The fuel and water tanks are topped off and it's time to go.


The Illinois Central has a long tradition of using its sidings intensively. The famous April 29, 1900 wreck in which engineer John Luther (Casey) Jones died involved a time-consuming "saw-by" maneuver of freight trains. That wreck also occurred between Memphis and Jackson, although on a different line east of the one currently used by the City of New Orleans.

MARKING OFF. Several deadlines loom. Next week is spring break. More stuff then.

INVENTION, INNOVATION, DIFFUSION. Nikola Tesla might have solved the problem of transmitting electricity great distances, and Thomas Edison might have turned on the lights in cities. The credit for turning on the lights in the suburbs and farms, as well as providing the capacity to power appliances and machinery and electric railways goes to Samuel Insull, the subject of a recent biography, The Merchant of Power, making up this evening's Book Review No. 4. Mr Insull is one of the more obscure figures in business history today, although in the Crash of 1929, the rumor on Wall Street was that he had been wiped out (one broker quipped, "take off a zero" from his net worth), Orson Welles gained weight and grew a mustache to imitate him in Citizen Kane, and Franklin Roosevelt railed against "Insulls and Ishmaels" in his 1932 presidential campaign. Railroad enthusiasts might be familiar with the "Insull interurbans" without full knowledge of the power conglomerate that included mines, generating companies, railroads, and land developers that shaped and continues to serve the Midwest to this day.

The collapse of that conglomerate in the Crash, and Mr Insull's spending of his own money in a failing effort to save it, may be the best-known part of the story. The disclosure regulations of the Securities and Exchange Act and the ownership limitations of the Public Utilities Holding Company Act are direct, and not unjustified, regulatory responses to the collapse of the Insull holding companies, which were a highly leveraged capital structure vulnerable to a failure of any of the operating companies. Merchant raises the possibility that Mr Insull was creating holding companies on top of holding companies as a way of making it more difficult for Cleveland capitalist Cyrus Eaton, who figures in the railroad maneuvering of the 1920s and 1930s, to obtain board seats or outright control of the Chicago power and traction companies. The acquisition intrigues involving the railroads of that era might be a project for future research. The failure of the holding companies, with the concomitant losses of small investors, rendered Mr Insull less popular in Chicago than Al Capone. Mr Insull, however, was acquitted of any wrongdoing after he testified that he had lost his own fortune in attempting to protect shareholder value.

And what of the infrastructure he left behind? There are still a few Arthur Gerber buildings on the rapid transit, the South Shore interurban still takes over the streets of Michigan City, Exelon produces and Commonwealth Edison distributes the power, his estate (was Hawthorn-Mellody Dairy an Insull property??) is a museum, some people still know the CIVIC OPERA HOVSE as "Insull's Throne", and University of St. Mary of the Lake (not to be confused with the other Our Lady of the Lake at the end of the South Shore) recognizes the Insull role in developing northeastern Illinois.

In 1921, Archbishop George Mundelein opened a new seminary forty-five miles northwest of the original campus. Saint Mary of the Lake Seminary would operate under the same charter originally granted to the University of St. Mary of the Lake, making it the longest continuous academic charter in the State of Illinois. In 1926, the new seminary was host to the world, as one of the sites of the International Eucharistic Congress. The campus made transportation history with that event for it required the largest movement of people by rail in the history of the country.

Cardinal Mundelein offered St. Mary (I really must explore Insullvania in the area of Mundelein) as a wartime refuge for the Vatican, and the North Shore Line was a Catholic railroad. (As was Northern Pacific. Great Northern was Lutheran.)

ON! WISCONSIN! More reason, as if I needed any, to put my full support behind the men's basketball team at Wisconsin.

"Our student-athletes are students first," Wisconsin Chancellor John Wiley tells correspondent Bernard Goldberg. "They are students first, athletes second."

Goldberg mentions the success the team has enjoyed this season, including being ranked No. 1 in the nation. "And they have done it all without a hint of scandal with players who actually graduate," Goldberg says.

Goldberg cites the graduation rates at programs where basketball players are not expected to graduate: New Mexico (7%), Georgia (9%) and Iowa State (12%).

"In fact, of the top 10 ranked college basketball teams in the country right now, fewer than 50% of the players graduate," Goldberg reports.

But at Wisconsin, 64% of the basketball players get their degrees. Alando Tucker, the Badgers' best player, is expected to graduate this spring.

Goldberg refers to coach Bo Ryan as "the most successful coach in college basketball you have never heard of."

Goldberg asks Ryan what happens when he finds himself recruiting a "really, really good" player who is not interested in education and makes no effort to hide it.

"There have been young men who have come here and while the professor or the dean of one of the schools was talking to him, he was text messaging," Ryan said. "We just stopped recruiting the kid."

Ryan said there are "a couple of guys" like that who have joined other programs that the Badgers play or will play. Ryan did not identify these players.

The broadcast, unfortunately, ran on pay-per-view.

In other basketball notes, let me commend the Big Ten for keeping its tournaments on a fairly tight schedule. The Mid-American women's tournament, by contrast, began last Sunday with the winner to be determined Saturday. That means the players on the more successful teams will be away from class for a full week. (Graduation rates in excess of 90% are common in women's basketball, disruption of their studies notwithstanding.) In addition, they are confined to Cleveland for a week, which is cruel and unusual punishment with Cedar Point and Geauga Lake closed until May.

KUDOS. The Northern Star staff announce the 2007 Hall of Fame class, including practitioners of traditional and new journalism.

CARNIVAL CALL. The impresario of Carnival of the Capitalists has hoisted this week's bannerline at a site dedicated to that purpose. The Carnival now appears to be edited, and the editor was kind enough to bend a rule on my behalf.

Cold Spring Shops presses one of my hotbuttons with what might normally be a post excluded for excessive quoted text: Emergence. Ultimately it’s about children discovering property rights, creating spontaneous order, and learning about economics through a Lego game, twisted by teachers ...

He's kind enough to characterize the post as "fascinating stuff." I chose, in the academic fashion, to err on the side of quoting excessively rather than to quote too little and be accused of quoting out of context. Go and check out the other business reading, including a recession watch.

MORE PIECES OF THE PUZZLE.

Robert Sobel's The Fallen Colossus will provide a quick Book Review No. 3. Colossus came out after The Wreck of the Penn Central, which was journalism's second draft of history, and just before The Railroad Mergers and the Coming of Conrail, which in revision as Merging Lines sets the stage for the railroad renaissance chronicled in Main Lines and in The Men Who Loved Trains. Although these books cover many of the same events and many of the same personalities, the sequence of events is a bit different in Colossus than in Main Lines or Men Who Loved Trains. That Colossus suffers from a number of annoying proofreading slips might be an indicator of quality control difficulties elsewhere in the research.

Fallen Colossus does devote more space to corporate intrigues during the 1920s and 1930s that culminated in securities analyst Robert R. Young becoming a rail baron, first picking up the pieces of the Van Sweringen network and then taking control of the New York Central. These intrigues appear to be neglected in business history, compared to the maneuverings of the Vanderbilts and Morgans and Goulds (oh, my!) that conventional wisdom credits with midwiving regulation. There appear to be opportunities for additional research. I intend to reinforce this assertion in a review to follow.

THE AMERICA THAT WORKED. I'm watching Remembering Chicago: The Boomer Years, which is available either as a single CD or as part of a set for a premium membership in WTTW. Riverview Park, people got around on streetcars and buses, kids scrounged bottles to use the deposit money for penny candy, and when the streetlights came on, it was time to go home for supper.

EMERGENCE.

The Case of the Redistributed Legos has drawn commentary elsewhere. Betsy's Page observes,

These teachers are so ignorant that they don't realize that the rights to private property are not only the essence of our democratic system as well as the best guarantee for a thriving economy. Who would want to invest and improve anything in an economy if they didn't have guarantees that they would be able to reap the profits from their invested time and money? And these teachers are so proud of their Lego lesson on socialism that they wrote it up and submitted it to an education journal. Amazing.

What's more amazing is the way in which the lesson, which is a bit more subtle than socialism for preschoolers, emerged. Joanne Jacobs links to a Bizzy Blog post that has kindly saved the case study. It appears that my conjecture about the future of these kids as either screaming libertarians or excessively earnest and perpetually aggrieved is sound.

Hilltop is located in an affluent Seattle neighborhood, and, with only a few exceptions, the staff and families are white; the families are upper-middle class and socially liberal.

What is more interesting is the way in which the original Legotown took shape.

[Children] carefully assembled them to add to a sprawling collection of Lego houses, grocery stores, fish-and-chips stands, fire stations, and coffee shops. They were particularly keen to find and use "cool pieces," the translucent bricks and specialty pieces that complement the standard-issue red, yellow, blue, and green Lego bricks.

"I'm making an airport and landing strip for my guy's house. He has his own airplane," said Oliver.

"That's not fair!" said Carl. "That takes too many cool pieces and leaves not enough for me."

"Well, I can let other people use the landing strip, if they have airplanes," said Oliver. "Then it's fair for me to use more cool pieces, because it's for public use."

Discussions like the one above led to children collaborating on a massive series of Lego structures we named Legotown. Children dug through hefty-sized bins of Legos, sought "cool pieces," and bartered and exchanged until they established a collection of homes, shops, public facilities, and community meeting places. We carefully protected Legotown from errant balls and jump ropes, and watched it grow day by day.

Apparently the kids figured out eminent domain even before the teachers shut them down. What's more instructive is that the town was an example of emergent order. Sure, the kids have been born into a world in which they see others engaged in truck, barter, and voluntary exchange, but the original town reflected no one person's vision.

BUILD IT AND THEY WILL COME.

Earlier this week, I expressed skepticism about Phoenix's super-wide super-highways doing anything meaningful about traffic jams. The basis for my skepticism is Anthony Downs's Still Stuck in Traffic: Coping with Peak-Hour Traffic Congestion, which I picked up in order to map the theoretical foundations of high-occupancy toll lane pricing. (The phenomenon appears to have emerged despite the lack of any formal analysis. That I haven't linked to a working paper of my own yet might tell you something about the cumbersomeness of the necessary and sufficient conditions.) I finished the book anyway and offer Book Review No. 2.

About the same time that the Edens Expressway strangled the North Shore Line, Traffic Quarterly published Mr Downs's "The Law of Peak-Hour Expressway Congestion." In those days, the law was dismal enough: a limited-access highway capable of moving commuters more rapidly than they could move on the existing arterial streets would attract commuters until the marginal commuter was indifferent between using the limited-access highway or sticking to the existing street grid. In Stuck, the Law becomes the principle of triple convergence.

Thus even greatly widening any major commuter expressway cannot long reduce peak-hour congestion there. Additional drivers will shift onto that improved road from other routes, other times, and other modes (such as walking or public transit) until movement on it is just as slow as the movement on alternative routes. Since those other routes are less direct than the expressway, such equalization means expressway traffic is usually crawling at the peak hour. Even most wholly new roads will soon fill up during peak hours.

(Stuck, pp. 327-328). At best, the expansion reduces the duration of the most congested times of the day, but even that is not a given. Meet the principle of the swamping effect.

[R]elatively small reductions in initial traffic congestion in a rapidly growing metropolitan area will be fully offset within a few years by the arrival of more people, jobs and vehicles there.

(Id. at 328.) The book provides an extended inquiry into the nature and causes of traffic congestion, and a near-encyclopedic evaluation of possible policies to deal with congestion. There's a useful summary table at p. 348. Capacity expansion, whether augmenting existing expressways, with or without separate carpool or truck lanes, or of public transit service, grades out as "moderately effective, costly." The "most effective" policies are also those most difficult to sell to the public: peak-hour pricing of all expressways and arterial streets, possibly including satellite tracking of vehicles to enforce time-of-use tolls (invasions of privacy be hanged?); higher gasoline taxes (conscripting soccer moms into the Pigou Club?); expressway expansion in the form of high-occupancy toll lanes only; and surcharges on long-term parking in the morning. The policies favored by technocrats tend to be "very ineffective": concentrating jobs in clusters in new-growth areas; driving bans based on license plate numbers; zoning to put jobs closer to houses; higher automobile licensing fees; growth limitations. I am pleased to note that synchronized green lights receive a "relatively effective" grade. The existence of rapid-response crash teams to remove road obstructions is also relatively effective. The book is a 2004 revision of Stuck in Traffic: one item that escaped greater scrutiny is distracted drivers. Mr Downs notes that congestion is a consequence of a difference between individual and collective costs (the driver sees the delay created by all the vehicles in front, but is not required to compensate all the vehicles in rear for getting in their way.) Is a similar wedge at work when drivers take advantage of the delays to multi-task, thereby leading to inefficiently high levels of distraction and more crashes?

IF YOU WANT TO CALL THE TUNE, PAY THE PIPER. The editorial board of the Northern Star publishes a signed open letter to the governor.

We're falling short on money for faculty salaries, thusly encouraging professors to leave for higher-paying jobs. We lack the funding for much-needed construction on and around campus.

An example of this comes with the Stevens Building, where theater and anthropology classes are held. Garbage cans are used to catch leaking water, and oftentimes overflow. Garbage bags form roofs above computers to protect them from being damaged by water entering through moldy, dripping ceilings. There is a computer lab in an ex-janitorial closet, where pipes are exposed and tarps must be used to create a door. We don't have the money to fix any of this.

According to NIU's 2005-2006 Data Book, state appropriations to NIU covered 80.3 percent of the operating costs for 1976. Only 19.7 percent came from the university income fund. Student fees, tuition, that type of thing. This number makes 2006 figures jump off the page: The book states that for 2006, state appropriations covered 51.4 percent of NIU's operating costs, leaving 48.6 percent to be covered by NIU. Mr. Blagojevich, how have we come so far from 80.3 percent?

To maintain the level of operations currently in place at our school, students will be confronted with higher tuition costs.

Although a state subsidy for tuition is likely to be a regressive transfer, the editorial writers correctly note that at current levels, a student has a difficult time working his or her way through college with a full-time summer job and a part-time job during the academic year.

The editors also note that potential students look beyond the front porch.

Mr. Blagojevich, we're a state university. Our reputation reflects upon the state. This institution can boast of distinguished alumni until faces turn blue, but when prospective students come for visits, it won't matter how many success stories orientation leaders gush out. They see buildings with leaky ceilings, dilapidated resources and classrooms small enough to pass for residence hall rooms, and they beeline for the door.

At the moment our enrollment managers are able to balance applications with capacity, but I am not aware of any efforts to quantify the effect of deferred maintenance on outbound transfers.