WHAT'S NOT TO LIKE? 400 miles in 160 minutes.

For several decades, the world's busiest air route was the "Puente Aereo" (air bridge) between Madrid and Barcelona. At a distance of about 400 miles on the ground, it's also a perfect distance for high speed rail. Ever since the AVE line was completed to Barcelona's Sants station early last year, high speed rail has been winning a greater and greater share of the Spanish travel market - despite Spain being hit extremely hard by the global recession, with unemployment of around 20%.

The trains now carry more passengers than the planes. (The articles do not discuss automobile trips: in the United States, rail and air jockey for a relatively small share of total travel miles, including the Northeast Corridor, where the not-much-faster-than-the-Congressional Acela Expresses have been taking passengers away from the airlines.)

California High Speed Rail suggests a parallel.

Once again, it is worth reminding readers that Spain offers a very good comparison to California in terms of not just high speed rail - but population density and geography. SF Transbay to LA Union Station is 432 miles, and our trains are projected to have a higher operating speed.

Ultimately, the Spanish experience suggests the SNCF report and the Brookings Institution are both correct in suggesting the LA-SF route, the nation's second busiest, will support a high HSR ridership. As our airports already burst at the seams during flush economic times and with rising oil prices, it's clear that we need the HSR option in California. Spain's success story will soon be replicated here.

There are a few corridors, closer to Cold Spring Shops headquarters, with histories of fast running, that might also benefit by faster and more frequent train services. Given the time it takes to clear security and load and unload through one door, a latter-day Hiawatha could load passengers and be past Wisconsin Dells before a plane bound for the Cities loads passengers and takes off. And it could set down and pick up passengers near Milwaukee and other online cities to boot, an unintended consequence of a rail network the Spaniards have discovered.

ON TO DOVER? Destination: Freedom reports on cooperation between New Hampshire and Massachusetts to extend commuter service to Plaistow, which is just over the border from Haverhill, the current outer end of service. Historically, the Boston and Maine ended its outer suburban service at Haverhill, with Plaistow and other communities Bostonside of Dover served by a few stopping trains on the Portland Division.

One of these days, the regional commuter train operators and Amtrak might think more carefully about interline ticketing. There's no reason some of the Portland trains, particularly those running during the rush hours, can't serve as expresses for the outer suburban commuters, and some of the Haverhill, or Plaistow, or Exeter trains, can't serve as feeders to the Portland trains, or when the service goes on to Freeport or Brunswick, to make convenient connections for shoppers. A single ticket, good on the entire route, will help. A Soviet department store is easier to deal with than the ordeal of buying tickets for Amtrak and for a commuter operator. In Boston and Chicago's Union Station, there are separate ticket agents for each carrier. On the other hand, for all the fragmentation of Britain's passenger train service, one ticket, good on any connecting carrier on any route, is all I had to carry to get from Manchester Airport to Telford Central.

THE RIGHT TIME TO RETRENCH. Some years ago, the president of the University of Chicago famously discontinued big-time football, a development that the University of North Texas blissfully overlooked.

"If you look at America's great universities, you'll see that they all have the three A's in common: great academics, great arts and great athletics," said UNT president Gretchen M. Bataille in a release. "All are key to a vibrant alumni community and continued growth. And all require great facilities. I am committed to ensuring that UNT, like many of the nation's best research universities, strives to be excellent in everything we do."

The stadium will hold about 30,000 fans and include luxury suites.

At Central Florida, the Orlando Sentinel recommends a different course.

A panel from the Knight Commission plans to recommend seven cost-saving changes for university athletics programs to the NCAA. Those include cutbacks in season lengths and team travel. But the panel is ignoring the middle linebacker in the room: sky-high coaching salaries.

It's ironic that university presidents would cite salaries for coaches as the biggest problem, yet do nothing about it. Until they declare a truce in their bidding war, athletics programs will be on shaky ground.

We like college sports. We understand winning programs can build school spirit and garner national publicity. But those worthy goals don't justify breaking the bank to pay for athletics, especially now.

Central Florida's basketball team currently has a problem, because a freshman player wants to wear his dad's shoes. But Central Florida is probably not positioned to load up on innovative economists, not to mention other talented scholars, in the Chicago way. (The editorial notes the university has been trimming programs and faculty.)

California, where Lr ( I learned it as Lw) and Bk and Cf were discovered, is another matter.

Now, the whole college athletics undertaking is one that deserves lots of scrutiny for its subsidies and excesses. Cal is certainly not alone in this. But for Birgeneau to take to the pages of the Washington Post, cry poverty, and call for the nation’s taxpayers to foot his school’s bills while he quietly pushes millions of dollars to water polo, rugby, golf, and sundry other sports? That takes a lot of gall. Of course, rent-seeking gall is not in short supply when it comes to higher education.

Chicago dropped football just before higher education became a growth industry. California has the opportunity to unbundle academic excellence from sports visibility in a way that would shake up establishments. Therefore, expect any proposal to defund sports in the California members of the Pacific Twelve to meet the kind of resistance that proposals to privatize Social Security or Medicare did.

TIEBOUT COMPETITION. William Voegeli: The Golden State isn't worth it. He focuses on taxes, and the public services they provide.

One way to assess how Americans feel about the different tax and benefit packages the states offer is by examining internal U.S. migration patterns. Between April 1, 2000, and June 30, 2007, an average of 3,247 more people moved out of California than into it every week, according to the Census Bureau. Over the same period, Texas had a net weekly population increase of 1,544 as a result of people moving in from other states. During these years, more generally, 16 of the 17 states with the lowest tax levels had positive "net internal migration," in the Census Bureau's language, while 14 of the 17 states with the highest taxes had negative net internal migration.

Taxes are part of it, but not the only inducement to migrate.

These folks pulling up stakes and driving U-Haul trucks across state lines understand a reality the defenders of the high-benefit/high-tax model must confront: All things being equal, everyone would rather pay low taxes than high ones. The high-benefit/high-tax model can work only if things are demonstrably not equal -- if the public goods purchased by the high taxes far surpass the quality, quantity and impact of those available to people who live in states with low taxes.

Texas was also the destination of migrants from Michigan in the early 1980s (Texans blamed traffic jams on broken-down Michigan cars). The disparity in taxes and public services probably favored Michigan in those days, but sufficiently many people anticipated what has transpired in automobile assembly that they left, the temperate climate and abundant water or not.

Today's public benefits fail that test, as urban scholar Joel Kotkin of NewGeography.com and Chapman University told the Los Angeles Times in March: "Twenty years ago, you could go to Texas, where they had very low taxes, and you would see the difference between there and California. Today, you go to Texas, the roads are no worse, the public schools are not great but are better than or equal to ours, and their universities are good. The bargain between California's government and the middle class is constantly being renegotiated to the disadvantage of the middle class."

These judgments are not based on drive-by sociology. According to a report issued earlier this year by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., Texas students "are, on average, one to two years of learning ahead of California students of the same age," even though per-pupil expenditures on public school students are 12% higher in California. The details of the Census Bureau data show that Texas not only spends its citizens' dollars more effectively than California but emphasizes priorities that are more broadly beneficial. Per capita spending on transportation was 5.9% lower in California, and highway expenditures in particular were 9.5% lower, a discovery both plausible and infuriating to any Los Angeles commuter losing the will to live while sitting in yet another freeway traffic jam.

That last figure intrigues, given California's interest in building high-speed rail lines through mountains and Texas's reluctance even to provide the timings and frequencies of 1951 among its major cities.

SHAKING UP THE ESTABLISHMENT. Glenn Reynolds suggests it would do the Republicans some good.

Unhappy over immigration and spending, key parts of the GOP base stayed home in 2006 and 2008. They're even unhappier with Obama, but that unhappiness hasn't translated into a lot of enthusiasm for a Republican Party that many see as nearly as corrupt and elitist as the Democrats.

Though the media and the Democratic Party tried to portray the Tea Party movement as Republican-organized "astroturf," the GOP only wishes that were the case. Tea Partiers are still reachable by the GOP, but if the GOP mishandles things, a Perot-style challenge is very possible.

Rick Moran concurs.

An establishment that gets too comfortable is no good to anyone. And the message I like being sent from [the 23rd District of New York] race is that putting up good, reasonable conservatives like [Conservative Party candidate Doug] Hoffman for office is usually better than the alternative.

It's time to see off the notion of consensus and expertise anyway.

INCENTIVES MATTER. Check your bag at the check-in desk, and airlines charge you a fee. Get caught at the gate with an overly-large bag, or get preempted by the gate lice, and your bag goes fee-free.

Bags deemed too large at the boarding gate, or checked when there's no room on the plane, fly free — a fact that has not escaped a growing number of travelers.

"Gate-checked bags are usually the last ones loaded into the baggage compartment, the first ones out, and generally the first ones on the (baggage) carousel," flier [David] Brown complains. "There should be an inconvenience penalty for gate-checked bags."

Just one more small advantage for the passenger train, if the airlines impose that. You have all the passengers attempting to board through one door, you have the first- and business-class passengers blocking the aisles and downing their drinks, then you have the attempt to find stowage space for carry-ons. Now add to that the purser collecting penalty fees.

Those bags with handles and rollers delay proceedings further, as passengers insist on rolling them on board (occupying more space) and then stowing the handles before stowing the bags, if space is available. Oh, for the days when John T. Molloy's success advice included not using such luggage, as it was a symbol of a flight attendant or some other plebeian calling.

The article hit a nerve with some readers.

As frustrating as it is to try to stuff bags in the overhead compartments, it is equally frustrating to wait for passengers to retrieve their luggage from the bins after the flight has landed.

Passengers who have not used the overhead bins should be allowed to exit the plane first, especially when they have a connecting flight. For passengers sitting in the back of the plane, exiting can take a half-hour or more.

You've got to cruise a lot of miles at 500 mph to offset the 75 minutes to two hours passengers lose in what the airlines call "boarding process" (felicitously conjuring images of processed meat) at one end and unloading through that one door at the other end.

ONE-NIL. Northern Illinois tallies in the 85th minute in Madison. In close contests such as that one, it doesn't matter who wins.

WORKING ON THE RAILROAD. I've modified one of the newer templates to take advantage of improvements in Blogger while retaining the look of Classic Cold Spring Shops. Commenting through Blogger is now available. Post rating remains temporarily unavailable now uses Blogger's scripts. Haloscan commenting will be turned back on the same time post rating will be restored, although Haloscan commenting will not be turned back on, and the Haloscan comment archive at left will be turned off again effective January 1, 2010 effective December 1, 2009. The blogroll and other features will be are now in operation in a few days. Thanks for your patience.

OVERTAKEN BY EVENTS? I recently picked up Keeping the Millennials: Why Companies are Losing Billions in Turnover to This Generation and What To Do About It at a secondhand bookstore. The previous owner, who left an airport coffee rewards slip in the book, made a few marginal notes in the first few chapters but left the remaining pages unmarked (and unread?) I got all the way through it and will write Book Review N^o. 43 before putting it in the box for the next trip to the secondhand bookstore. Imagine a breathless book-length infomercial for Key Group, complete with the usual business-guru format, including the obligatory "maximize your human resources" (otherwise known as "disguise your innumeracy by displaying it promiscuously.")

The book suggests that employers are hurting their businesses by not adapting their workplaces to the Millennial propensities (stereotypes?) of lots of positive feedback, lots of ability to work in teams, and lots of information technology. The generation most-medicated for attention-deficit disorder also has the most instant distraction. Discuss. Business gurus are apparently hyping the next management fad: a cursory search turns up Not Everyone Gets A Trophy: How to Manage Generation Y, which sounds like more of the same, but I suspect I'll not be tempted next time I'm detained at an airport.

On one hand, I welcome serious efforts (as opposed to airport-book infomercials) by employers to offer a variety of job descriptions rather than the one-size-fits-all we'll pay you a lot of money but you don't get to have a life that seems to be the working professional's reality: it matters not whether you call it Millennial-adapted or family-friendly or responding to the backward bending supply curve. On the other hand, when a book notes Millennial participation in the election of President Obama, but says nothing about the recession, there's a possible omission from the formulation. Two anecdotes: during the summer, I spoke with a former captain of a sports team here, now employed with a Fortune 100 company, who griped about the entitled attitude of many of the company's younger hires. Twenty-something going on curmudgeon ... Then comes "I don't have these graduates in Europe and Asia telling us they want to live with mom and dad or they don't want to relocate to Asia," via Newmark's Door. Key would tell the latter manager to change his ways: the reserve army of the unemployed (particularly among younger workers) provides a different incentive.

The generational analyses in these managing Millennials books also strikes me as odd. Perhaps for expository purposes, it suffices to group everyone born before 1945 (or per The Fourth Turning, before 1942) into one Mature (or in other examples of the genre, Traditional) cohort. That's not strictly accurate. Most of the GI era senior managers (born 1901- abt. 1925) are retired. The Silent Generation senior managers (born abt. 1925 - 1942) are retiring, although their last act may be to destroy all of health care over the same focus on government-as-manager that turned civil rights into a spoils system, diluted higher education, and impeded any serious reform of Medicare and Social Security. The Millennials will have to pick up those pieces, and somehow workplaces that allow text-messaging in place of written memoranda and provide flextime strike me as irrelevant to those challenges.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

OF POSITION AND EXCESS CAPACITY. I've long maintained that the positional arms race in higher education enrollments (until the recession brought austerity to the more affluent quarters) has been a flight to perceived quality in the presence of excess capacity in access-assessment-remediation-retention.

Think about it this way: would diners be better served if only 20 restaurants earned a five-star rating, or if (with no dilution of standards) they had a choice among 50, 100, 200 five-star restaurants?

Now comes Caroline M. Hoxby, currently with Stanford, with a related perspective that does not cause me to change my mind.

This paper shows that although the top ten percent of colleges are substantially more selective now than they were 5 decades ago, most colleges are not more selective. Moreover, at least 50 percent of colleges are substantially less selective now than they were then. This paper demonstrates that competition for space--the number of students who wish to attend college growing faster than the number of spaces available--does not explain changing selectivity. The explanation is, instead, that the elasticity of a student's preference for a college with respect to its proximity to his home has fallen substantially over time and there has been a corresponding increase in the elasticity of his preference for a college with respect to its resources and peers. In other words, students used to attend a local college regardless of their abilities and its characteristics. Now, their choices are driven far less by distance and far more by a college's resources and student body. It is the consequent re-sorting of students among colleges that has, at once, caused selectivity to rise in a small number of colleges while simultaneously causing it to fall in other colleges.

I'll be able to obtain the full working paper at the office, time permitting. An Inside Higher Ed column comments.

The number of high school graduates in the United States, from 1955 to today, increased by 131 percent, she notes, but the number of freshman seats in the U.S. rose by 297 percent. "This suggests that the absolute standard of achievement required of a freshman who successfully competed for a seat was falling," Hoxby writes.

She adds that the standard of academic preparation to gain admission could still have gone up over the years if the academic standards of all high school students showed gains. But using data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and matching those results with college-going patterns, she finds the opposite. The number of college seats available to students who -- judging by NAEP scores and college admission records -- are only moderately or minimally prepared has gone up.

"[S]ince 1975, there has been more than one seat per minimally prepared student. In short, the achievement standard for obtaining a freshman seat in the U.S. is minimal and is falling," she writes.

The working paper, which I will have to read, provocatively excludes research expenditures, including those at the medical colleges, and still finds that the most selective universities have thrown more resources at students.

While there may be different policy responses to her findings, Hoxby concludes by stressing the need to shift discussion away from a framework that assumes most colleges are impossible to get into.

"Over the past few decades, the average college has not become more selective: the reverse is true, though not dramatically," she writes. "The reason that initially selective colleges are much more selective today is not that they have failed to expand to absorb greater numbers of extremely high aptitude students. In fact, they have expanded modestly, keeping up with the modest growth in the population of such students."

That reckoning of resources probably understates the effect on undergraduate learning: it's possible that Gary Becker's graduate assistant might do more to stretch introductory economics students' minds at Chicago than I do for mine.

At Minding the Campus, KC Johnson pursues one of the possible policy implications.

The clear policy ramifications from Hoxby's study: institutions that currently can't afford to spend the amount of money of students that we see from Ivy League schools ($92,000 per student, according to Hoxby) need to be more selective in both their admissions criteria and in their academic visions.

It's encouraging to read that. Motivated placebound students, and motivated students from modest circumstances, deserve better than to have their aspirations dragged down by unmotivated classmates.

According to the report, the willingness to attend schools far from home produced a "resorting" effect. High-aptitude students increasingly have clustered at the top schools. Decades ago, they were sprinkled more throughout the second-tier schools, but the increasing desire for Harvard-Yale-Princeton-etc. has driven them up the university ladder, resulting precisely in the lower selectivity of the remaining 90 percent.

The report doesn't pursue the implications of this stratification, but it does note that because of the application patterns of high-aptitude students, low-aptitude students increasingly encounter low-aptitude students in their classes. In other words, the resulting student bodies reinforce the division of selective from non-selective institutions. Low-performing students sit in class with other low-performers. They don't have the superior student who didn't want to travel far from home sitting next to them in English 101, raising the quality of class discussion and pushing expectations higher. We sometimes forget that much of the intellectual level of the campus depends not on the faculty but upon the undergraduates. Students often take their cue not from the syllabi but from their roommates.

In that post, author Mark Bauerlein, perhaps in a Swiftian way, proposes that students and professors periodically change places. I bet it's more productive for the land-grants and mid-majors and on down the status hierarchy to work on lifting their efforts. (As a side note, I think the author meant re-sorting, rather than some revealed preference for climbing walls and health clubs.)

PARIS IS TAKEN. Two years ago, I recommended Antony Beevor's The Fall of Berlin 1945. I'll parallel that review in this year's Book Review N^o. 42 by recommending his D-Day: The Battle for Normandy. In the Cold Spring Shops library, it's an excellent supplement to Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day and to Stephen Ambrose's D-Day: June 6, 1944 -- The Climactic Battle of WWII. If you don't have either of those books, buy this one. There's less individual detail than Ryan's or Ambrose's, but more overview of coordination, or not, among the allies, as well as an overview of the breakout from Normandy, the second invasion through the south of France, and the liberation of Paris. Mr Beevor suggests that the most difficult part of the invasion, Omaha Beach, still featured the fortunes of war, with some units landing almost unopposed and beginning to work their way up the bluffs within the hour, and with the Germans unable to oppose the landings their as vigorously as they might like, thanks to the success of the British and Canadian units to their right. And perhaps those optimists, including me, who gave some credence to the notion that Iraqis would welcome American liberators, will gain perspective from the stories of unrest and score-settling among the French as their liberation occurred. There was the potential for a civil war loosely along communist and republican lines: possibly an area for future research? And Mr Beevor has no brief for his countryman General Montgomery. Perhaps he will follow up with an investigation of Market-Garden -- after all of General Montgomery's lapses in the dash from the beaches to Paris, it's hard not to sympathize with General Patton griping about General Eisenhower holding Monty's hand and starving Third Army of supplies.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

CONFIRMING THE EXCESS DEMAND HYPOTHESIS. I've made use of Richard Vedder's argument that the top colleges price their services in such a way as to generate excess demand. I only insist that people apply the argument consistently.

That last sentence, however, suggests that tuitions at the top schools are inefficiently low, not "jacked up."

Now comes Mark Schneider of the American Enterprise Institute offering what might be confirmation.

His purpose is to deconstruct the argument that a university degree is worth a million dollars to its holder, on average.

After subtracting tuition and discounting at 4.8 percent, the earnings increase, stratified by university type, looks like this.

Graphic by Richard Schneider

The returns to the land-grants and mid-majors ("public most selective" and "public very selective") are comparable. The returns to "nonprofit most selective" are substantially higher than the returns to "nonprofit very selective", suggesting that the "nonprofit most selective" are leaving some rents unextracted. That the returns to "nonprofit very selective" are on average less than the returns to attending a land-grant or a mid-major clearly call for further research.

OBSERVATION OF THE DAY. The dean at Anonymous Community reacts to a story of Californian college administrators indulging themselves like tsarist princes.

From high office, pettiness is amplified. That can be frustrating, since leaders have all the same human failings as everybody else, but less license to indulge them. That's the price of leadership. There's a real and generally unacknowledged unfairness to that, but there it is. If the best response to generally fair criticism you can come up with is to kick the critics off campus, you're probably in over your head. (I say 'generally fair' to distinguish this from, say, slander. Slander is not protected by academic freedom, and those who commit it are fair game.) Worse, playing the heavy in such an obvious way simply galvanizes the other side. One of the easiest ways to get a disparate group to cohere is to unite against a common enemy. Making yourself that enemy simply plays into their hands. It's an amateur's mistake.

There is a generalization, elaborated further.

Yet while this is all hilarious, it is also scary when you think it through. Great power entails great responsibility. There is little to suggest that Obama and his aides appreciate their responsibility, and much, including their incessant complaining that the previous president did a lousy job, to suggest an attitude of total irresponsibility.

Amplified pettiness, forsooth.

MORE CASH FLOW GAMES. A local social service agency is awaiting federal money due it. The money goes through the state, which has not yet released it.

The fiscal drawbacks are due not to mismanagement or the economy, but the state government, which is holding funds allocated to Safe Passage by the federal government, Interim Director Jerry Lane said.

“We’re hoping the state starts paying its bills,” Lane said. “The state is holding federal money and not releasing it.”

The problem is made worse by the fact that 80 percent of funding received goes toward personnel costs.

“When we can’t make payroll, it’s a very serious problem,” Lane said.

I've been informed that the state has not yet released the funds it appropriated for Northern Illinois University, including the one-time injection of federal stimulus money that could imply a permanent reduction in subsequent state appropriations. We're currently running on tuition revenues. Meanwhile Springfield is kiting checks and lapping receivables.

EXPORTING HUMAN CAPITAL. In an earlier cash crunch in Illinois, the state's Board of Higher Education proposed to eliminate a number of degree programs. Some made the hit list for admitting what the planners perceived as disproportionately many overseas students, that despite many such students hiring out at LaSalle Street trading houses or at local colleges.

Now comes another Illinois cash crunch. There's a different set of planners, but they might raise the same objections, particularly if they fear human capital leaving the United States.

We surveyed 1,224 foreign students from dozens of nations who are currently studying at U.S. universities or who graduated in 2008. The majority told us that they didn’t think that the U.S. was the best place for their professional careers and they planned to return home. Only 6 percent of Indian, 10 percent of Chinese, and 15 percent of European students planned to settle in the U.S.

Many students wanted to stay for a few years after graduation if given a choice—58% of Indians, 54% of Chinese, and 40% of Europeans. But they see the future being brighter back home. Only 7% of Chinese students, 9% of European students, and 25% of Indian students believe that the best days of the U.S. economy lie ahead. Conversely, 74% of Chinese students and 86% of Indian students believe that the best days for their home country’s economy lie ahead. National Science Foundation studies have shown that the “5 year stay rates” for Chinese and Indians science and engineering PhD’s have historically been around 92 % and 85% respectively (NSF tracks these 5 years at a time, and the vast majority stay permanently). So something has clearly changed.

Never mind that higher education runs a balance of payments surplus, something one would expect of a country with a comparative advantage in advanced-technology, skill-intensive products.

Cold Spring Shops headquarters, mid-October.

As Insta Pundit notes, "Talent goes where it's rewarded."

OWING YOUR CADEUCEUS TO THE COMPANY STORE. Professor Mankiw points to several columns in the New York Times on the merits of government-managed health care. His own column raises a salient point.

A dominant government insurer, however, could potentially keep costs down by squeezing the suppliers of health care. This cost control works not by fostering honest competition but by thwarting it.

Recall a basic lesson of economics: A market participant with a dominant position can influence prices in a way that a small, competitive player cannot. A monopoly — a seller without competitors — can profitably raise the price of its product above the competitive level by reducing the quantity it supplies to the market. Similarly, a monopsony — a buyer without competitors — can reduce the price it pays below the competitive level by reducing the quantity it demands.

You don't have to be an author of a best-selling textbook to get this. The author of a mid-major course pack concurs.

The exercise of buying power by the canonical coal mine, or the chain store, is a bad thing, but somehow it gets transmuted into something good in the canonical state liquor store, or the state health service.

Health service workers, however, are not as placebound as the canonical Appalachian coal miners, or as tied to a vendor as Vlasic Pickles might have been. Back to Professor Mankiw.

To be sure, squeezing suppliers would have unpleasant side effects. Over time, society would end up with fewer doctors and other health care workers. The reduced quantity of services would somehow need to be rationed among competing demands. Such rationing is unlikely to work well.

His argument, however, relies on there being robust labor markets for other uses of human capital. Further inferences are left to the reader.

FULL TRAINS. This fall, the Make A Difference Day Express, which began with a young man collecting aluminum cans to charter a train for sick kids, again filled several trains.

We had a great time with lots of candy and fun!!!!! For all those that had to cancel due to health reasons, we hope you get better soon and you guys can come for next years train ride. We would also would like to thank mother nature for holding back the rain until we were on the way home from our last trip.

Perhaps there will not be an early-season flu next October.

STEALTH FURLOUGHS. We received a missive from headquarters today.

President Peters, following consultation with the Operating Staff Council, Supportive Professional Staff Council, the divisional Vice Presidents, and other area representatives, has approved an extension of the 2009-10 university winter holiday closure schedule to include Monday, December 21, Tuesday, December 22, and Wednesday, December 23 as Scheduled Closure Days. This will allow for an additional three-day extension of the winter closure period resulting in a total closure period of 16 days, extending from the close of business on Friday, December 18, 2009 until operations resume on Monday, January 4, 2010. This measure is consistent with the continuing efforts of President Peters and the university community to identify operational and utility cost savings.

Scheduled Closure differs from Floating Holiday, in that employees paid on a timecard basis will not receive pay. Thus the Operating Staff Council and the Supportive Professional Staff Council have committed to small pay reductions, perhaps offset as involuntary vacation days.

December 21, 22, and 23, 2009 will be designated Scheduled Closure Days and will not be considered designated holidays for pay purposes. Accrued vacation benefits or compensatory time off (if available) will be utilized for non-instructional employees normally scheduled to work on December 21, 22, and 23; otherwise, the days may be taken without pay. Non-exempt (hourly Civil Service) employees will be required to mark their timesheets as either vacation or “deduct.” Exempt employees (salaried Civil Service, SPS, and Faculty on 12-month appointments) wishing to take the day without pay must contact Contracts, Records and Reports no later than December 11 regarding necessary paperwork. Otherwise, their benefit usage forms should be marked as vacation usage. Vacation usage recorded on time sheets and benefit usage forms will be deducted from available accruals to the extent that such accruals are sufficient to cover the three-day Scheduled Closure period. Human Resource Services will coordinate accrual deductions on a case-by-case basis if accruals are not sufficient to cover the Scheduled Closure Day period. Employees retiring January 1 will be contacted to coordinate benefit usage procedures. This policy pertains to non-negotiated employees. Any employee required or authorized to work on December 21, 22, and 23 will receive straight-time compensation.

The missive has been circulated by electronic mail. Paper copies, at some additional expense, will be forthcoming.

Headquarters has not yet designated these days as furlough days for salaried employees.

GETTING THE MISSION RIGHT. State universities quote state residents a lower rate, reflecting some recognition of taxes paid or taxes anticipated. Nonresident students pay a higher rate, notionally reflecting fully allocated costs. Although the taxpayer-benefit and allocated-cost arguments are long-established, they are survivals of efforts by state legislatures to reduce the influx of out-of-state protestors (nobody being so crass as to say "East Coast Jews") to midwestern campuses during the Vietnam era. The mathematics of fully-allocated cost include a healthy dose of leverage: make your nut at a standard volume, but if you can enlarge the proportion of out-of-state students while holding enrollment constant, you can bring in additional revenue, or perhaps replace appropriations a stingy legislature has taken away. The dean at Anonymous Community suggests the dynamics of revenue replacement are unstable.

In discussions I've had with state legislators, the issues that prick up their ears are the number of students who live in their district, the number of employees who live in their district, and the relationships we have with employers in their district. Out-of-state students don't count. And I don't want to have the conversation in which I try to explain why our scarce marketing dollars are being spent out-of-state.

Even leaving the politics aside, there's a basic irrationality to the entire idea. If we simply traded a third of our student body with a counterpart school across the state line, what, exactly, would we have achieved? As near as I can tell, we'd simply shift more of the cost of instruction onto students, thereby effectively licensing our home state to make even more cuts. If the students keep paying, why not? And it's not like those students vote here anyway.

No. It's not what cc's are for, and the long-term cost would dwarf any short-term gains. I get the 'premium tuition' argument -- this week, more than ever -- but some premiums just aren't worth it.

Mild disagreement on the voting: students are free to register with college town city clerks -- how else the majority for George McGovern in Madison? -- but the economics of leverage are remorseless in the trading of students. (On the other hand, Minnesota and Wisconsin have maintained, despite recent difficulties, a reciprocity agreement in which residents of either state pay the in-state rate in either state. Swapping leftish Lutherans across the Mississippi is a different proposition from bringing in those East Coast radicals.)

The Anonymous Community post is a reaction to an Inside Higher Ed column on the phenomenon of recruiting out-of-state students that focuses primarily on the horizontal equity of such policies.

A concern for the universities seeking more out-of-state students, [University of Vermont president Daniel] Fogel said, is a shift away from public mission. "There is the risk of subtly and not so subtly undermining the public mission," he said. "Then you are like a private university that isn't at the top of the pecking order, looking for the sweet spot of the kids who are qualified to come and can pay all or most of the cost, and that's a pretty market-driven agenda."

In this instance, it's a market-driven agenda that does the right thing. See "Addressing the Excess Demand for Prestige Degrees."

I have maintained for some time now that the wise strategy for the flagship universities and the mid-majors has been to cater to that excess demand rather than give into the mob's demand for universal access, standards be d**ned, and that such a strategy is not likely to be fostered by urging faculty to forever be testing the job market. It doesn't have to be Princeton or Harvard offering that "very high quality" of education as the efforts of Illinois and Wisconsin to go after Coasties as a way of increasing the revenue yield.

Why not aspire to making Vermont a public Ivy, President Fogel?

At Inside Higher Ed, however, we see the Diversity Boondoggle's contortions.

Others share that concern. Patrick M. Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, said he worried about any state -- like California -- that moves to recruit more out-of-state students at a time when there are qualified residents losing slots, and those being recruited are likely to be less diverse than the residents of the state. He noted that most University of California campuses have more ethnic and racial diversity than much of American higher education. "So now that the majority of kids in the state will be more Latino, you are going to recruit more out-of-state students" who are likely to be white? he asked.

I can only interpret "less diverse" to mean "too white." Is the goal of the Californian system to have a student body that looks like Mesoamerica, which will put aspiring California fast-trackers at an even greater disadvantage in Reloville, or might diversity mean bringing in cultural diversity from the Great Plains?

While Berkeley officials and UC faculty members have said that they believe any lost slots in California will build political pressure to support higher education, Callan said he was "very skeptical." He said he doesn't see signs that the public would respond in that way. "There's a danger here that you cut off your long-term support," he said.

Or you might change the direction of citizen activism. See "Can One Really Discipline Commuter Students?"

Milwaukee has been primarily a commuter campus for residents of Southeastern Wisconsin. With Madison solving some of its budget problems by expanding enrollment of Coasties, there are more Wisconsin residents enrolled at Milwaukee than at Madison. That some would attempt to introduce the residential college experience into their neighborhood does not come as a surprise.

That's been a perennial theme here. Wisconsin or Illinois are reasonable substitutes for Harvard or Stanford (perhaps not for long, considering recent developments) that attracts more applications from the coasts. Do the administrators at Milwaukee or Northern Illinois simply tell frustrated Badgers or Runs-from-Huskies that their institutions are good enough, or do they make the efforts to provide comparable intellectual challenges?

Inside Higher Ed prefers to elaborate the equity issues.

At the same time, Callan acknowledged that in California and elsewhere, state officials considering these options face terrible budgets. "It's the dysfunctional nature of state government that makes these things possible."

David L. Kirp, a professor of public policy at Berkeley and the author of Shakespeare, Einstein and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education, said he viewed the out-of-state trend as "one of those lamentable necessities." He said that the University of California campuses and some other flagships have been "an equal opportunity gateway" for so many low-income students. Ultimately, he said that these plans work financially only by going after well-off students, and thus can encourage universities in that direction. You can easily end up, he said, with public universities "with a private school profile."

Perhaps so. But see "The Issue is Insufficient Selectivity"

The argument presupposes that tuition increases, particularly at state-subsidized colleges, are unreasonable per se. The ratings-driven excess-demand-generating below-equilibrium tuitions at the private universities shift some applicants to state universities, implying a ceteris paribus increase in the selectivity rankings there and perhaps an incentive for administrators to resist raising their tuitions and fees so as to further enhance their selectivity rankings.

Genl Grant had to fight it out on his line for one year. I've been at it somewhat longer, but I've not been persuaded that the course Inside Higher Ed's interviewees recommend, which is the status quo inside higher ed, will work.

ALLOCATING SCARCE RESOURCES. Albert Camus's The Plague considers the way a community can be overwhelmed when almost everybody gets sick. That's not a classroom situation for philosophers only, as Florida officials are discovering.

Florida health officials are drawing up guidelines that recommend barring patients with incurable cancer, end-stage multiple sclerosis and other conditions from being admitted to hospitals if the state is overwhelmed by flu cases.

The plan, which would guide Florida hospitals on how to ration scarce medical care during a severe flu outbreak, also calls for doctors to remove patients with poor prognoses from ventilators to treat those who have better chances of surviving. That decision would be made by the hospital.

The story prompts Charlie Sykes to quip, "Whatever you do, don't call these 'death panels'." The arguments over whether "death panel" is Inappropriate Language, or misleading, or wrong miss the point. Where resources are scarce and have competing uses, somebody has to make do with less or with none. And where incentives to convert resources from some other use to the use in question are missing, making do is more constrained than otherwise.

Here's Patrick McIlheran on that point.

"The problem is that there are enough people running the show who have said some human life is worth more than others," said Cynthia Jones-Nosacek, a Milwaukee family doctor who's spoken out on ethics. The cure is to say all human lives have value.

Even ones likely to end soon. Jones-Nosacek is particularly troubled by the idea of pushing patients toward their end, as in Oregon, which offers suicide pills but not necessarily chemo, or as in Britain, where patients deemed terminal now can be sedated and starved.

She's got patients with terminal diseases, and with the advent of hospice care, if "their needs are being cared for, they don't ask for death." She's had patients go on breathing tubes to overcome pneumonia and then live for happy, bonus months. The dying need to be adequately helped, not rushed.

"Adequate," however, does not make the underlying problem of allocating resources subject to constraints go away. Britain's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence faces that reality head-on.

The Government's rationing body said lapatinib is too expensive even though its makers will provide the first three months' treatment free of charge.

I'm not sure that mau-mauing the institute as a death panel changes the underlying reality of allocating resources under constraint, although the strategy has been used previously.

NICE will issue guidance shortly that in effect bans the drug, which is used in 18 other European countries.

It comes despite a pledge by NICE to be more flexible in giving life-extending drugs to terminally ill cancer patients after a public outcry last year over 'death sentence' decisions.

NICE was forced to apply this end-of-life criteria to lapatinib by its own appeals panel.

The acronym is infelicitous, especially given the difference in the British use of "nice" from the North American. The flexibility the institute applies, however, must mean that some other treatments, perhaps less obviously life-extending, are reduced to release resources for cancer patients.