Look no further than the price policies of the leading universities. Northwestern's Burton Weisbrod presented some of his recent work on nonprofits in our departmental workshop series. Among the slides is this information (go to image 10) which I have modified ever so slightly. The entries refer to listed tuitions among universities in 2004, with out-of-state tuitions for the state universities ranked among the top 100 "best national universities" included in the calculations. Note that the net price is lowest among the top 10 (perhaps there is some discounting going on to obtain more low-income students, but there's almost no difference in net price among the 11-50 set, with somewhat lower but still comparable net prices for everybody else. The price differentials suggest somewhat strongly that both students and universities view their offerings as substitutable (otherwise, the top 10 would be able to get away with much higher net prices than their less-reputable rivals, with the net price decreasing in distance from number 1.)What's fascinating about the story is the protest against the speakers. One Adam Lerman said "Young people in this city are not going to accept being relegated to second class universities."
Pretty silly. Unless UCLA were to expand many times over, it's inevitable that most students in Los Angeles will have to be "relegated to second class universities." Moreover, there is no reason to treat UCLA as if it's Shangri-La and everything else as garbage. The courses at UCLA aren't taught any better than at the less prestigious schools. A UCLA degree is not a guarantee of success in life and a degree from, oh, Cal State Northridge isn't a badge of shame. Like so many others, this Lerman fellow has fallen for the notion that your life will be one of Hobbesian misery unless you get into a prestige university.
| Ranking | Average listed tuition | Average Institutional Grants | Net price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1-10 | $29,176 | $15,919 | $13,257 |
| 11-25 | $28,820 | $11,440 | $17,380 |
| 26-50 | $27,713 | $10,645 | $17,068 |
| 51-100 | $23,344 | $8,355 | $14,989 |
| >100 | $17,101 | $1,607 | $15,594 |
The short form of the paragraph that follows: Grow. A. Pair.Every week a student asks me for (a) lecture notes (b) a "retake" on a quiz or test (c) whether I "drop" low quiz/test grades and (d) whether he can take a quiz/test at his convenience because he has an ingrown toenail (an actual excuse).
I could blame the students for their wheedling and whimpering, but I blame other faculty. Where are students getting the idea that faculty hand out lecture notes so the little cherubs don't have to tire themselves by taking notes or attending class? They get these ideas from other faculty. Who is giving them lecture notes? Other faculty. Who is letting them retake quizzes, drop tests, and reschedule at their convenience? Other faculty. Some "teaching excellence" or "academic support" person will answer that these dumbing-down techniques improve student learning. They clearly don't. Have we seen any improvement in learning since faculty began handing out notes, powerpoints, and "retakes"? No.
I have a proposal. Faculty should hang together. Don't give lecture notes, and don't post lecture notes. The cherubs will learn that faculty expect them to attend class and take notes. Don't give retakes. The cherubs will learn that the first test or quiz is real and they have one shot at it. Don't give make-ups. Don't drop grades. Don't come in on Saturdays. If they miss class for Uncle Ernie's birthday party, then let them take the consequences. Don't IM with students. If the cherubs have something important to address, then they can address it like adults. Act like the bosses they will soon have. Stop making it harder on the rest of us.Indeed.
Even "planned obsolescence," a marketing ploy that made him, in [art curator Glenn] Adamson's words, "the Antichrist" to the doctrinaire left, had about it an engagingly populist aura.In that passage, there are multiple ideas that merit further reflection. Take first Mr Stevens's observation that dated models cascade from original owners to new owners. I recall a Newsweek economics column (sorry, can't give you the author or the exact year) from the mid-1970s suggesting that the used car market was one of the great engines of wealth redistribution (where else could one buy $2500 of car services for $500)? I believe that column preceded widespread knowledge of the Akerlof lemons principle. The vulgar understanding of "planned obsolescence" gave rise to popular criticisms of excessively materialistic consumer behavior, most notably Vance Packard's The Waste Makers. Mr. Stevens would suggest that the annual automotive model change actually reduced waste: consider this passage from page 130 of Mr Adamson's Industrial Strength Design, the catalog of exhibits at a Stevens retrospective in Milwaukee a few years ago."If companies did not bring out a new and better product each fall, volume would fall off, unit costs would increase, and employment would be reduced." Mr Adamson characterizes the observation as "Machiavellian" but "persuasive." A more accurate characterization might be "wrong." Perhaps the model change attracts buyers who would otherwise keep the existing model running for another year, but those are incremental buyers for whom the company has made an investment in tooling for the new design that it could avoid by continuing production of the existing model. Furthermore, continued production of the same model means a larger volume for that model, with perhaps economies obtained by learning by doing. At the time Mr Stevens made his observation, however, Armen Alchian's instructive "Costs and Outputs" might have still been a working draft for the Rand Corporation. Finally, the assertion that "employment would be reduced" is the lump of labor fallacy. Fewer people might have been tempted to drop out of high school to hire out with the Big Three and the Little Two at union wages, and perhaps some of the adjustment costs those people had to bear in midlife when the automobile manufacturers emphasis on style over substance encountered the realities of higher fuel prices and more dependable cars made elsewhere.
From Stevens' perspective, planned obsolescence was the consumer's desire "to own something a little newer, a little better and a little sooner than necessary."
Manufactured objects traded in for the newest thing weren't necessarily scrapped, he emphasized. They simply went on the resale market, becoming available to another level of purchaser who might not be able to afford the very latest sensation.
One year has passed since two sad occasions when unknown vandals caused nearly $2,500 of damage to the old playground equipment, which included a “Discovery Tot Tree,” a “Country Cottage House” and an “Easy Stove Table.” The top of the plastic treehouse was ripped from the bottom, hoisted over the 4-foot fence and later found adrift in the river. The house and the table were torn apart.There is now an eight-foot fence around the tot-lots. I asked a colleague if that was required by some safety regulation and the colleague indicated that from time to time they'd have the apparatus damaged by collegians who got over the old four-foot fence to play on it. Although some of the new features can handle the live load of an adult, this stuff is engineered for toddlers. But again, as with the beanbag, does the propensity of collegians to use the tot-lot indicate insufficient opportunities for spontaneous play with other youngsters?
The direction Residence Life has taken with its meetings and programs is also unsettling. In previous years, floor meetings and programs were focused on social icebreakers and interacting with new members of the residence hall community. Testimonials from both sides show that many of these meetings have been redirected to focus on tolerance and diversity issues.(Via The Torch.)
The exquisite irony of watching Democrats fall all over themselves trying to kill impeachment after spending most of the last 7 years accusing Bush/Cheney of the most dire impeachable offenses was almost too delicious to watch. It showed the Democrats to be shallow political hacks, eager and capable of using rhetoric to undermine the presidency during a time of war but without the balls to match their actions to their words.Representative Kucinich: merry prankster, certifiable loon, but please don't call him a leftist.
[President] Bush, then, emerged as a kind of prophet. Because his image-makers had already portrayed him as having abandoned Boomer frivolity for Greatest Generation discipline, he seemed the natural choice to lead the country through its trials. In 2002, after congressional Democrats suffered losses in the mid-terms despite heavy campaigning from Bill Clinton, Time's Margaret Carlson concluded this was due to a post 9/11 "shift in the culture," in which "Clinton-era values are no longer America's."Although it's true that the aftermath of September 11 gave the national-greatness conservatives opportunities to influence the President in ways that the business and libertarian factions of the Republican coalition would have rejected if Third World grievances had remained in culture-studies departments and Southwest Asian mosques, it's also true that the Clintons fancied themselves prophets, with she often asking herself what Eleanor Roosevelt (from an earlier Prophet cohort) would have done, and he expressing some regret that no great challenge came up on his watch. (Signing the Iraq Liberation Act is one thing, having the opportunity to enforce it another.)
I missed that detail the first two times I watched the movie. The DVD is on hand, should I get some breathing time. The metaphor, however, might refer to the process-worshippers more generally, not necessarily to the truest believers among the Prophets.But [Saving Private Ryan]'s real message revolves not around Ryan, but Cpl. Timothy Upham. We first meet Upham when Miller goes to fetch him from his desk where he is poring over maps and translating communiqués from French and German.
Young and wispy, with hair brushing his upper lip, Upham is a translator, not a fighter: He hasn't fired a gun since basic training and wants to take his typewriter with him. He quickly earns the unit's ire by annoyingly chatting everyone up and quoting books and poetry. At one point, after engaging a German tank that manages to kill one of their own men, the American soldiers capture the lone surviving German and force him to dig his own grave before they execute him. As the German pathetically mutters nonsensical English phrases, Upham objects to Miller. "Captain, this isn't right," he says, "You know this. He's a prisoner, he surrendered. He surrendered, sir." Miller is skeptical, but ultimately swayed. He blindfolds the German and tells him to walk 1,000 paces and then turn himself in to the first American soldiers he sees. The other men grumble.
It's not the last we see of the German. In the film's climatic battle, as the Americans try to hold a bridge under a heavy German attack, this same former prisoner returns to shoot and kill Captain Miller. Meanwhile, during the battle, Upham is paralyzed by a fear so total that, as his Jewish comrade wrestles hand-to-hand with a menacing Nazi, he can only cower in the stairwell below, crying as the Nazi plunges a knife in the Jewish soldier's chest.
The message is clear. In the great struggle for the future of the free world, the intellectual cannot be trusted. His concern for the laws of war means he is weak and cowardly, and will contribute to defeat. Only the true soldier can win the war. This is the ethos of the Cult of the Soldier, which would come to entirely dominate our politics in the years to follow.
Radical faculty members did not hesitate to presume guilt, and emerged to denounce the players. Houston A Baker Jr, a professor of English and of African and Afro-American Studies, was particularly prominent in the media. In a public letter to the administration, Baker wrote that the team embodied ‘abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence and drunken white, male privilege loosed amongst us’. And in an email to the mother of a lacrosse player, Baker called her son and his teammates ‘farm animals’. A ‘Group of 88’ faculty signed a full-page advertisement in the campus paper that described Duke as a ‘social disaster’ for students who are ‘objects of racism and sexism’ and ‘see illuminated in this moment’s extraordinary spotlight what they live with everyday’. The signers asserted without qualification that something ‘happened to this young woman [Mangum]’, and thanked protesters ‘for not waiting and for making yourselves heard’.All wrong, as we now know. But there's nothing quite like a Tight Prior. That's Bayesian-speak for "narrative that confirms our prejudices."
The toughest question for any empirical researcher to answer is "What evidence would persuade you to reject your hypothesis?" It may not be wise to couch that answer in terms of statistical significance. I suppose, though, that if you've argued yourself into a position that denies the possibility of any objective reality, it's easier to fall back on that position rather than cope with the cognitive dissonance.In its details, news coverage generally followed DA Nifong’s statements uncritically. But most of the national media bathed the Duke affair in the light of a modern-day PC morality tale. On one side were white, privileged, racist, drunken, arrogant jocks at the ‘Harvard of the South’; lacrosse players in particular were from the upper classes and violent in nature (not unlike their description in Tom Wolfe’s novel I Am Charlotte Simmons – set at ‘Dupont University’, which is a thinly-veiled disguise for Duke). On the other side was a poor African-American single mother working hard to advance through a local community college. The case was presented as personifying broader social problems of sex and race in the United States.
This set-piece outrage made for a compelling story. There was only one problem: it wasn’t true.
At Duke, university president Broadhead changed his tune over time, and eventually (in September 2007) apologised to the lacrosse players for not supporting them. But the radical professors were not in the least bit embarrassed. A group of them issued a ‘clarification’ letter to their original advert, rejecting all ‘public calls to the authors to retract the ad or apologise for it’ and claiming they were misinterpreted. The letter-writers implicitly blamed the Duke student body for an ‘atmosphere that allows sexism, racism and sexual violence to be so prevalent on campus’. The faculty were the real ‘victims’ – victims of ‘intimidation’ for their views.In the same way, I suppose, that anonymous academic webloggers whinge when somebody questions their logic, or lack thereof. But academic tenure, for all its advantages in protecting the audacious for challenging entrenched orthodoxies, is also a rampart for milquetoasts. Incentives matter.
However, the New York Times held on to its pro-Nifong stance until the bitter end. Even as late as August 2006, when much of the case had fallen apart, the Times continued to bang on about the ‘tangled American opera of race, sex and privilege’ and tried to resurrect the case by taking as good coin a police sergeant’s notes cobbled together after the fact. Like the Duke faculty, the Times remained unapologetic: after the defendants were declared innocent, the paper’s ‘public editor’ concluded that its coverage was balanced, and any flaws were not the result of ideological bias.Perhaps that paper exists, much like Pravda and Izvestia did until 1991, to make true believers comfortable with their prejudices. Duke's students appear to be made of sterner stuff.
If there is a redeeming feature of the Duke story, Taylor and Johnson find it in the response of the Duke students. Although some were against the players early on, many reserved judgment, and, as the facts emerged, campaigned for the accused students. Abandoned by adults in the administration and faculty, perhaps the students at Duke (and elsewhere) have learned that it is now up to them to get American society back on track.Yes, if anyone can agree on what that "track" is. (The review notes that the diversity hustlers find unlikely allies in Christian temperance types who would just as soon cast the demon rum out and in law-n-order politicians wedded to zero-tolerance policies.)
That reference to "specialty periodicals" includes Don Phillips's columns inWith the exception of The New York Times’ editorial pages, the news columns of The Wall Street Journal, and until recently only a handful of other general news circulation papers, few news outlets, print or otherwise, have understood or written about in depth the transportation crisis we have created, or successfully explained it.
The article, by author Peter Richmond, is one of the most important to appear in more than a generation of generally spotty or shallow news coverage of the American transportation crisis, outside of specialty or academic periodicals, in large part because of its broad reach. Until recent congestion became “gridlock”, general assignment reporters were usually only able to spend a small amount of time on any given subject, and could not become instant experts at everything they covered.
Americans spent about 3.7 billion hours stuck in traffic last year, burning gasoline whose price had soared by 60%. At the airports, security lines snake endlessly, runways are choked, and delays are common. One recent study found that, between January and August 2007, one in four flights arrived late; 159 flights were kept on the tarmac for more than three hours in August. As a result, more than half of U.S. businesses augment commercial air travel with expensive corporate jets and charters. Isn’t there a better way?Policy problems. Looking for a term paper topic?
Many transportation experts insist that the best answer to transportation gridlock is efficient intercity rail travel. Trains use one-fifth less energy than cars or planes. They run in bad weather. They’re business-efficient and tourist-friendly. Yet, since the early 1960's—with the exception of the Northeast Corridor, from Boston to Washington, D.C.—railroad transportation in the U.S. has become largely irrelevant. For most Americans, train travel from city to city remains an afterthought. And for good reason: Our national rail system is inadequate, relying on aging equipment and a shrinking route-map. The system sorely lacks both financial resources and government support.I suspect that some Southern Californians might bridle at that "irrelevant," and the emerging corridors outside Chicago, including but not limited to the Hiawatha, continue to attract new riders without alienating too many existing riders. The ultra-fast electrified corridors, or the InterCity 110s that I keep advocating, are only part of the story.
(The nice thing about cut-and-paste is that I can lift chunks out of a column in a different order than the author put them in, in order to maintain the flow of my argument.) Note that the Springfield line might be good for 110 once all the advanced signalling and four-point grade crossing protection is in place. Excessive caution, I say. That expanded Springfield service uses Illinois money, which might reduce the public-choice dynamics (Turbotrains to Parkersburg, West Virginia?) inherent in Federal funding of the rail network.As our airways and highways have slowed down, demand for train travel has been increasing. In fact, Amtrak ridership was up for the fifth year in a row, reaching record levels—despite the fact that a third of trains arrived late last year. In the Northeast, since Amtrak introduced higher-speed Acela trains in 2000, the railroad’s share of 10,000 daily commuters between Washington, D.C., and New York City increased from 45% to 54%.
“Train travel is the thing for a one-day business trip,” says Malcolm Edgerton, a Chicago architect who travels often from Chicago to Springfield on Amtrak for work. A recent trip, he said, “would have meant seven hours of driving, and I would have been exhausted. Instead, I left in the morning, did work on the train, got there at noon, did my thing, even had time to visit a museum. Then, on the way back, I drank Scotch in the bar car and traded stories with a salesman and another architect. The round trip was $40.”
I'm not sure why the Shinkansen envy. The article misses a lot of the more prosaic action, including the six-car off-peak rakes on Metra, the San Francisco commute expresses to Silicon Valley, and the Lackawanna Electric into Penn Station. And although the Europeans might be investing heavily in upgrading their intercity lines, it's no accident that state-of-the-art electric and diesel multiple unit technology tends to be European: there's a lot of that Vienna to Wiener Neustadt or London to Oxford business to accommodate, and a lot of upside potential for that traffic in the States.The key to improvements may be federal incentives for state investment, say train watchers of all stripes. They point to two successful projects that relied heavily on state funding. Amtrak recently expanded service from Chicago to downstate Illinois and St. Louis, where ridership is up about 50%, and major improvements were made to the Philadelphia-Harrisburg line.
In light of those successes, the newly Democratic-controlled House approved $50 million in matching funds for state Amtrak projects, and the Senate approved a similar program for $100 million. “We are on the edge of a revolution in thinking and the thinking of policy-makers of the future of transportation,” says Rep. James Oberstar (D., Minn.), who heads the House transportation and infrastructure committee. “And that future is filled with high-speed, reliable rail service.”
Residence Life is not taking kindly to having their program immediately and completely shut down. Faculty and RAs who stand up against the program have been feeling the heat.Developing.
Announcer Wayne Larrivee made his "dagger" call in the wake of a subsequent interception return for a touchdown by Charles Woodson.Favre rallied Green Bay past Kansas City 33-22 and joined Tom Brady and Peyton Manning as quarterbacks who've beaten all 31 other teams in the NFL.
In an odd confluence of timing among three of the game's greats, Manning and Brady both achieved the career milestone only one week ahead of Favre, who had been 0-3 against the Chiefs and was probably seeing them for the last time.
Mason Crosby added a fourth field goal, from 45 yards, and with 59 seconds to go Charles Woodson intercepted Huard's pass and went 46 yards for a touchdown that made the game look much more lopsided than it actually was. The Packers scored 17 points in the final 3:05 on a defense that hadn't given up more than 20 all year.
