pacino wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:

CalvinBall wrote:a few meaningful primaries today.

R: Hawaii (Caucus), Idaho, Mississippi, Michigan

D: Miss, Michigan

Seems probable that it will be a bad night for my hero. He could do OK in Idaho and Hawaii but The Narrative will be set with him continuing to bleed to Cruz in MS and Kasich in MI (though Kasich has basically lived in Michigan for three weeks). If Cruz finishes ahead of Kasich in Michigan that will be very impressive.

Cruz is pushing hard in Florida now, opening offices and trying to take away from Rubio.

Opening offices that he hasn't staffed, the election is next week, and a third of the votes have already been cast. Getting late to push hard. We'll see what he does. He can't win Florida with all the early votes, but he could throw it to Trump. My guess is he's not quite that evil and is doing this as a head fake sorta thing to keep Rubio penned in Florida so north Carolina, Illinois, Missouri are free for Cruz.

Marco is toast.

JFLNYC wrote:Marco is toast.

If he wins Florida, he'll be alive. If he loses, not so much.

Latest RCP average has him down to Trump 18% in Florida. And 1MM+ have already voted, which negates late voters who may be going to Rubio. I heard he'll need ~58% of remaining voters to win.

JFLNYC wrote:Latest RCP average has him down to Trump 18% in Florida.

The three polls that have been done with the voter file in the past week or two have him down 7, 5, and 8 to Trump. The negative ads are flying in finally, and Rubio has in built infrastructure advantages within the state party. I would guess it is going to be within a few percentage points either way.

I guess it's strangely possible that he could be ahead of Kasich in delegates after next Tuesday and still be the one to drop out with the narrative if he loses FL and Kasich takes OH.

I wonder how likely it is that Trump doesn't run 3rd party if he finishes with a plurality of the votes and is not nominated.

5%? I mean he's old, he could get tired of this. Doesn't fit his personality though.

lots of immigrants are trying to get their citizenship because of Trump
the thugs Trump is trying to save us from:

thephan wrote:

smitty wrote:

SK790 wrote:

Soren wrote:My generation is hella poor

No, we're just a lazy generation. Has nothing to do with wealth inequality and college tuition being extremely high and wages being incredibly low (roughly the same for us since the 80s!). It's that we're lazy and spoiled. Unlike Gen Xers and the Baby Boomers who could work a part time job in the summer to buy a brand new car.

The college tuition thing is a huge problem. After I graduated from Penn State in 1979, I owed zero. Tough to do anything close to that today.

It is completely outrageous. The professor ranks are not making out well because the tenure scenario where it was thought that academia would just fade away and still get paid has been replaced by a terrible wage that seems pretty unlivable for most. You could make a couple of thousand per class as an adjunct these day, so keep the day job. It is seriously not worth it to get into that game. But universities have cafe's and rock walls and all kinds of other crap for student life, that is nothing like life after college, so those are terrible investments. The community college near my house has been on a huge building and buying spree, so that seems like the investment strategy, but it seems flawed as well as that education path is becoming more expensive. Lousy.

So I did some quick checking and my education cost only increased by about 25% including room and board. I think most places are more then 50% more expensive in todays dollars. That remains a bargain. Like Smitty, I worked a few jobs rounding up to full time hours and paid as I went, but you could not do that today. Fact is that there are places like GWU in DC that are close to $70K/year. It is hard to see the ROI there with a retail price of ~$250K, because almost everyone needs to finance a part of that, even if there is a break (i.e., actual price. So if the debt load is $100K, that is a horrible place to start. It is complected by bad majors that will take forever to get over that hump.

On the upside, the horrific job market that greeted the first batch of Millennials is changing as Boomer retire. I think I saw that Accenture hired 40K Millennials last year. I know that Millennials are the largest demographic. Heck, there are more jobs then people/applicants. There is a DC company has like 5500 openings.

One thing to reconcile is what a starting salary is. My 2016 equivalent would be about $45k, the reality is that the market dictates $60-65K, but the ask with zero experience has often been $100K (equiv dollars is ~$57K when I graduated). We are starting to try to ask expectations before the interview so we can just skip the big demands/wasting my time. Maybe, just maybe with a masters from a big research school we could do that, but not a bachelors.

I would argue that there are probably only a small handful of private universities and colleges that are worth their cost--I'd put that number at less than 50. Of course, one reason for that is those places tend to have the most generous need based aid available as well, so even if your parents are relatively well off, chances are you'd get a ton of aid at say Penn. That calculus gets a little more difficult when you factor in "merit aid" (known often as tuition discounting) that is now widespread in higher ed. I'm not sure the extent to which relatively respected places like Bucknell fit into this, but unless you've got a big merit award or your parents are rolling in cash and you don't need loans, I'd think long and hard about borrowing to go someplace like that.

I'm also convinced that for most undergrads, at least in terms of education, big state research universities aren't great places to go. Unless you're a very confident and persistent person who is likely to take advantage of the opportunities such places offer and go after a top leadership position or somehow work your into a slot as some kind of research assistant in a genetics lab, you're going to most likely be lost in a crowd, taught primarily by bitter TAs and even bitterer adjuncts.

Smaller state schools are probably the best option for most students. Though even there, you need to do your homework.

There's definitely a problem with a kind of arms race among institutions that involve things like climbing walls and such. But I'm not sure how much of a driver of costs that really is. Ever nicer dorms, and room+board fees that cost more than sharing a nearby apartment and cooking for yourself is sort of ridiculous. And there's a ton of dumb thinking out there about costs--many for instance say on line education can result in huge cost savings, but I'd disagree. First of all, the infrastructure needed to maintain a viable on-line system isn't cheap. Second, while the "MOOC" model might save in faculty costs, that's really not much different than the large lecture model common at most universities (though you can certainly scale up a MOOC even more than a large lecture). Administrative costs keep increasing, as well as an army of student affairs personnel. I'm told parents like to hear that their children will have access to lots of adults like RAs and counselors and such. All that costs money too. For all but a handful of schools, athletics costs a ton as well. (I think at Rutgers the figure was something like $3000 per student!)

For state schools, funding has been flat at best, and in most cases declines in real dollars and students are making up the difference. Of course, there too there is lots of tuition discounting. So for both public and private schools, tuition discounting actually drives up costs as well. (Think about it--if a school needs to generate $50,000 of revenue from two students, you can either have both pay 25k, or you can give one a full scholarship and the other can pay $50k.

About the only onus I'd actually place on millennials themselves is that many of them have no real strategy about how they're going to transition out of college. I don't really think this is all that different from proceeding generations, but schools do seem rather exploitative of their anxieties and convince them to enroll in sketchy and expensive masters programs which are often entirely debt financed. GWU for instance has a masters in political campaigning which strikes me as a huge scam. If you want to work in political campaigning, get a job or even volunteer for one. True, you aren't going to get paid much if anything, but it's still a lot less than whatever tuition+living in DC is for a year. There does seem to be a kind of fear of just going out and living on your own for awhile. I'm sure some of that is a product of high housing costs in many cities.

Any of the Dems on the board have a view what the Democratic Primaries would have looked like with Bloomberg in the picture running as a Democrat? Would Bernie and Hillary split a progressive block and Bloomberg got all the centrist votes? Or would he just have looked like O'Malley on steroids.

i don't see his shtick playing anywhere. big government except against big business?

drsmooth wrote:drumpf already squealing like a stuck pig

Imagine the noises he'll make while he's bleeding out

Will bring me joy. Shady McFreud!

I like Bloomberg. He's a good example of what the Republican party should be right now. I don't agree with all of his views but he's shown in his time here in NYC that he's reasonable.

TenuredVulture wrote:

thephan wrote:

smitty wrote:

SK790 wrote:

Soren wrote:My generation is hella poor

No, we're just a lazy generation. Has nothing to do with wealth inequality and college tuition being extremely high and wages being incredibly low (roughly the same for us since the 80s!). It's that we're lazy and spoiled. Unlike Gen Xers and the Baby Boomers who could work a part time job in the summer to buy a brand new car.

The college tuition thing is a huge problem. After I graduated from Penn State in 1979, I owed zero. Tough to do anything close to that today.

It is completely outrageous. The professor ranks are not making out well because the tenure scenario where it was thought that academia would just fade away and still get paid has been replaced by a terrible wage that seems pretty unlivable for most. You could make a couple of thousand per class as an adjunct these day, so keep the day job. It is seriously not worth it to get into that game. But universities have cafe's and rock walls and all kinds of other crap for student life, that is nothing like life after college, so those are terrible investments. The community college near my house has been on a huge building and buying spree, so that seems like the investment strategy, but it seems flawed as well as that education path is becoming more expensive. Lousy.

So I did some quick checking and my education cost only increased by about 25% including room and board. I think most places are more then 50% more expensive in todays dollars. That remains a bargain. Like Smitty, I worked a few jobs rounding up to full time hours and paid as I went, but you could not do that today. Fact is that there are places like GWU in DC that are close to $70K/year. It is hard to see the ROI there with a retail price of ~$250K, because almost everyone needs to finance a part of that, even if there is a break (i.e., actual price. So if the debt load is $100K, that is a horrible place to start. It is complected by bad majors that will take forever to get over that hump.

On the upside, the horrific job market that greeted the first batch of Millennials is changing as Boomer retire. I think I saw that Accenture hired 40K Millennials last year. I know that Millennials are the largest demographic. Heck, there are more jobs then people/applicants. There is a DC company has like 5500 openings.

One thing to reconcile is what a starting salary is. My 2016 equivalent would be about $45k, the reality is that the market dictates $60-65K, but the ask with zero experience has often been $100K (equiv dollars is ~$57K when I graduated). We are starting to try to ask expectations before the interview so we can just skip the big demands/wasting my time. Maybe, just maybe with a masters from a big research school we could do that, but not a bachelors.

I would argue that there are probably only a small handful of private universities and colleges that are worth their cost--I'd put that number at less than 50. Of course, one reason for that is those places tend to have the most generous need based aid available as well, so even if your parents are relatively well off, chances are you'd get a ton of aid at say Penn. That calculus gets a little more difficult when you factor in "merit aid" (known often as tuition discounting) that is now widespread in higher ed. I'm not sure the extent to which relatively respected places like Bucknell fit into this, but unless you've got a big merit award or your parents are rolling in cash and you don't need loans, I'd think long and hard about borrowing to go someplace like that.

I'm also convinced that for most undergrads, at least in terms of education, big state research universities aren't great places to go. Unless you're a very confident and persistent person who is likely to take advantage of the opportunities such places offer and go after a top leadership position or somehow work your into a slot as some kind of research assistant in a genetics lab, you're going to most likely be lost in a crowd, taught primarily by bitter TAs and even bitterer adjuncts.

Smaller state schools are probably the best option for most students. Though even there, you need to do your homework.

There's definitely a problem with a kind of arms race among institutions that involve things like climbing walls and such. But I'm not sure how much of a driver of costs that really is. Ever nicer dorms, and room+board fees that cost more than sharing a nearby apartment and cooking for yourself is sort of ridiculous. And there's a ton of dumb thinking out there about costs--many for instance say on line education can result in huge cost savings, but I'd disagree. First of all, the infrastructure needed to maintain a viable on-line system isn't cheap. Second, while the "MOOC" model might save in faculty costs, that's really not much different than the large lecture model common at most universities (though you can certainly scale up a MOOC even more than a large lecture). Administrative costs keep increasing, as well as an army of student affairs personnel. I'm told parents like to hear that their children will have access to lots of adults like RAs and counselors and such. All that costs money too. For all but a handful of schools, athletics costs a ton as well. (I think at Rutgers the figure was something like $3000 per student!)

For state schools, funding has been flat at best, and in most cases declines in real dollars and students are making up the difference. Of course, there too there is lots of tuition discounting. So for both public and private schools, tuition discounting actually drives up costs as well. (Think about it--if a school needs to generate $50,000 of revenue from two students, you can either have both pay 25k, or you can give one a full scholarship and the other can pay $50k.

About the only onus I'd actually place on millennials themselves is that many of them have no real strategy about how they're going to transition out of college. I don't really think this is all that different from proceeding generations, but schools do seem rather exploitative of their anxieties and convince them to enroll in sketchy and expensive masters programs which are often entirely debt financed. GWU for instance has a masters in political campaigning which strikes me as a huge scam. If you want to work in political campaigning, get a job or even volunteer for one. True, you aren't going to get paid much if anything, but it's still a lot less than whatever tuition+living in DC is for a year. There does seem to be a kind of fear of just going out and living on your own for awhile. I'm sure some of that is a product of high housing costs in many cities.

What's driving costs is the money available for colleges to vacuum up.

For ever-upward spiraling costs (healthcare, college), look no further than where government is throwing money at it to "help"

Doll Is Mine wrote:I like Bloomberg. He's a good example of what the Republican party should be right now. I don't agree with all of his views but he's shown in his time here in NYC that he's reasonable.

Other than a few stupid vanity projects (the 16oz soda thing), Bloomie is pretty good. He's a centrist and pragmatist. Of anybody being mentioned as POTUS candidate, he'd be #2 for me after Kasich.

So the religious nuts are now boycotting the Girl Scouts.

Franklin Graham

The Girl Scouts organization sure isn’t what it used to be! St. Louis Archbishop Robert Carlson isn’t worried about being politically correct in letting people know about it either. He told church members and scout leaders that the Girl Scouts is wrong in their support of transgender rights and homosexuality and is not aligned with the teachings of his church. The archdiocese also revealed that a Girl Scout troop in Utah was formed specifically to reach out to transgendered youth and that the Girl Scouts celebrated the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage on its Instagram and Twitter accounts. Archbishop Carlson is exactly right—the “ways of the world” are incompatible with biblical values. More church leaders need his boldness in speaking the truths that set those who follow God’s Word apart from the rest of the world. I don’t know about you, but I won’t be buying any Girl Scout cookies this year.

TomatoPie wrote:

TenuredVulture wrote:

thephan wrote:

smitty wrote:

SK790 wrote:

Soren wrote:My generation is hella poor

No, we're just a lazy generation. Has nothing to do with wealth inequality and college tuition being extremely high and wages being incredibly low (roughly the same for us since the 80s!). It's that we're lazy and spoiled. Unlike Gen Xers and the Baby Boomers who could work a part time job in the summer to buy a brand new car.

The college tuition thing is a huge problem. After I graduated from Penn State in 1979, I owed zero. Tough to do anything close to that today.

It is completely outrageous. The professor ranks are not making out well because the tenure scenario where it was thought that academia would just fade away and still get paid has been replaced by a terrible wage that seems pretty unlivable for most. You could make a couple of thousand per class as an adjunct these day, so keep the day job. It is seriously not worth it to get into that game. But universities have cafe's and rock walls and all kinds of other crap for student life, that is nothing like life after college, so those are terrible investments. The community college near my house has been on a huge building and buying spree, so that seems like the investment strategy, but it seems flawed as well as that education path is becoming more expensive. Lousy.

So I did some quick checking and my education cost only increased by about 25% including room and board. I think most places are more then 50% more expensive in todays dollars. That remains a bargain. Like Smitty, I worked a few jobs rounding up to full time hours and paid as I went, but you could not do that today. Fact is that there are places like GWU in DC that are close to $70K/year. It is hard to see the ROI there with a retail price of ~$250K, because almost everyone needs to finance a part of that, even if there is a break (i.e., actual price. So if the debt load is $100K, that is a horrible place to start. It is complected by bad majors that will take forever to get over that hump.

On the upside, the horrific job market that greeted the first batch of Millennials is changing as Boomer retire. I think I saw that Accenture hired 40K Millennials last year. I know that Millennials are the largest demographic. Heck, there are more jobs then people/applicants. There is a DC company has like 5500 openings.

One thing to reconcile is what a starting salary is. My 2016 equivalent would be about $45k, the reality is that the market dictates $60-65K, but the ask with zero experience has often been $100K (equiv dollars is ~$57K when I graduated). We are starting to try to ask expectations before the interview so we can just skip the big demands/wasting my time. Maybe, just maybe with a masters from a big research school we could do that, but not a bachelors.

I would argue that there are probably only a small handful of private universities and colleges that are worth their cost--I'd put that number at less than 50. Of course, one reason for that is those places tend to have the most generous need based aid available as well, so even if your parents are relatively well off, chances are you'd get a ton of aid at say Penn. That calculus gets a little more difficult when you factor in "merit aid" (known often as tuition discounting) that is now widespread in higher ed. I'm not sure the extent to which relatively respected places like Bucknell fit into this, but unless you've got a big merit award or your parents are rolling in cash and you don't need loans, I'd think long and hard about borrowing to go someplace like that.

I'm also convinced that for most undergrads, at least in terms of education, big state research universities aren't great places to go. Unless you're a very confident and persistent person who is likely to take advantage of the opportunities such places offer and go after a top leadership position or somehow work your into a slot as some kind of research assistant in a genetics lab, you're going to most likely be lost in a crowd, taught primarily by bitter TAs and even bitterer adjuncts.

Smaller state schools are probably the best option for most students. Though even there, you need to do your homework.

There's definitely a problem with a kind of arms race among institutions that involve things like climbing walls and such. But I'm not sure how much of a driver of costs that really is. Ever nicer dorms, and room+board fees that cost more than sharing a nearby apartment and cooking for yourself is sort of ridiculous. And there's a ton of dumb thinking out there about costs--many for instance say on line education can result in huge cost savings, but I'd disagree. First of all, the infrastructure needed to maintain a viable on-line system isn't cheap. Second, while the "MOOC" model might save in faculty costs, that's really not much different than the large lecture model common at most universities (though you can certainly scale up a MOOC even more than a large lecture). Administrative costs keep increasing, as well as an army of student affairs personnel. I'm told parents like to hear that their children will have access to lots of adults like RAs and counselors and such. All that costs money too. For all but a handful of schools, athletics costs a ton as well. (I think at Rutgers the figure was something like $3000 per student!)

For state schools, funding has been flat at best, and in most cases declines in real dollars and students are making up the difference. Of course, there too there is lots of tuition discounting. So for both public and private schools, tuition discounting actually drives up costs as well. (Think about it--if a school needs to generate $50,000 of revenue from two students, you can either have both pay 25k, or you can give one a full scholarship and the other can pay $50k.

About the only onus I'd actually place on millennials themselves is that many of them have no real strategy about how they're going to transition out of college. I don't really think this is all that different from proceeding generations, but schools do seem rather exploitative of their anxieties and convince them to enroll in sketchy and expensive masters programs which are often entirely debt financed. GWU for instance has a masters in political campaigning which strikes me as a huge scam. If you want to work in political campaigning, get a job or even volunteer for one. True, you aren't going to get paid much if anything, but it's still a lot less than whatever tuition+living in DC is for a year. There does seem to be a kind of fear of just going out and living on your own for awhile. I'm sure some of that is a product of high housing costs in many cities.

What's driving costs is the money available for colleges to vacuum up.

For ever-upward spiraling costs (healthcare, college), look no further than where government is throwing money at it to "help"

That's not true. Government spending overall is probably flat or declining. States have cut spending pretty drastically, and some of that has been replaced by the feds.

One problem that higher ed and health care both share is that they unlike most industries, where technology reduces costs, in higher ed and healthcare, technology actually leads to increased cost. That is, in both fields, technology does not replace workers, and in most cases actually increases workers.

Government regulation is also some part of the reason that college administrations have ballooned so much over the years. As well as schools trying to provide a lot more services than they did in the past.

That's a pretty underrated cost, it's not just buildings, there's a lot more mouths to feed than there used to be.

Bloomberg's ideas on foreign policy (the few he's ever given), privacy, the way he wants to gut SS and medicare, and the way the NYPD ran under him are all fairly disqualifying if he were to run as a Democrat. Clinton receives grief for a cozy relationship with Goldman-Sachs but Bloomberg is almost quite literally buddies and runs an organization that basically IS Wall Street. He's disqualified from the Republican ticket because he believes in equality for LGBT and is one of the most anti-firearm politicians in the US. it would be incredibly difficult for himself to even divest himself of his holdings in order to avoid impropriety. Hardly any significant part of the populace actually holds his mix of views and they are only moderate to themselves.

i also don't think he's very likeable or a good campaigner. he has a lot of money. he did a few good things for NYC. he then used his money to change the rules for himself. he's no savior or better than anyone else.

MoBettle wrote:Government regulation is also some part of the reason that college administrations have ballooned so much over the years. As well as schools trying to provide a lot more services than they did in the past.

That's a pretty underrated cost, it's not just buildings, there's a lot more mouths to feed than there used to be.

To be sure--I referenced the ballooning costs in "student affairs" in my initial post. There's a small army of people supervising dorms, counseling students, entertaining them and so forth. And, as I noted above, I've been told that parents really like hearing about all the student support services that are available.

I do see this as a problem not just in terms of costs, but I think all those people really retard the development of students into adults. They are denied real leadership opportunities for one, and in many cases those leadership opportunities turn into jobs--a student who runs a successful campus concert series is well positioned to do that work professionally for instance. On a more everyday level, the amount of adult supervision means students leave college without basic conflict resolution skills.