Students at University of California schools have been protesting the decision of the Board of Regents “to raise undergraduate fees – the equivalent of tuition – 32 percent next fall.” But higher tuition, if it is accompanied with higher financial aid for lower- and middle-income students, improves equity. As Aaron Edlin and I wrote back in 2003:
Four of the 26 students in my Economics of Life class proposed delaying submitting their draft term project reports by one week. I emailed the whole class and gave them one day to let me know if they disapproved of this postponement.
The question was how heavily to weight the negatives — those who disapproved — compared to those who wanted to postpone.
I gave a talk not too long ago on a college campus. The event was sold out, so the administration started a waiting list for seats. The daughter of a good friend found herself on the waiting list. When I heard she still hadn’t gotten a ticket the day before the event, with just a touch of guilt for trying to bend the rules, I emailed a Dean at the college whom I know:
Amadu Jacky Kaba is a Liberian-born striver who first came to Seton Hall University as a basketball player and, several degrees later, has returned as an assistant professor of sociology and anthropology. Like our friend Roland Fryer, Kaba is a black scholar who studies a lot of racial issues with a perspective and a latitude that is unavailable to white scholars.
Ian Ayres recently posted about his returning to his students the royalties on his book that he assigned to them.
This has caused me trouble: one of my students read it and asked why I don’t do that as well for my little book, Economics Is Everywhere. I have done this before, when I assigned my labor economics text to a class of 35 students, but not in her class.
Students, if your professor has asked you to buy his or her book, ask for a rebate.
Memes are made to be heisted. So here’s one I heisted from the (U.K.) Times‘s Comment Central blog by Daniel Finkelstein, who of course heisted it from someone else.
It’s as simple as this:
One of my classmates wound up _____________________.
For years, colleges have treated their students as consumers, building ever more elaborate facilities and hiring ever more dazzling star scholars to lure applicants. They did this regardless of how high these investments drove tuition, since easy credit meant families could stretch to cover the costs. But with the credit crisis comes signs that the college bubble is bursting, as “consumers who have questioned whether it is worth spending $1,000 a square foot for a home are now asking whether it is worth spending $1,000 a week to send their kids to college,” the Chronicle of Higher Education suggests.
The city of College Station, Texas, home of Texas A&M University, will be marketing a section of its cemetery for A&M graduates. Although other schools have them, this is the first university-related cemetery in Texas.
Texas raises most of its tax revenue from the sales tax. We are one of only seven states without a personal income tax. Even with the exclusion of groceries from the sales tax, it is likely that the tax is regressive. Our legislators (who fortunately only convene for four months every two years) are now proposing that state-supported universities be . . .
For college students and their parents, the steady spike in tuition prices in recent decades has been not only troubling but mysterious: why on earth is tuition inflation double the general inflation rate? What’s behind these huge tuition bills: Massive legacy costs? Less public funding? The cost of acquiring real estate? While none of those reasons are necessarily off the . . .
I met a guy who has done a fantastic job of building up a department of economics at a major university. He is an impressive administrator, who clearly has both an absolute advantage and a comparative advantage at academic administration. I said that he will surely become a dean, then probably a university president, and would do a great job . . .
Reputations are powerful, vulnerable, fragile things. Sometimes they shift overnight (think Bernie Madoff); often they are decades in the making. I’ve always been interested in the reputations of institutions, especially universities, and the degree to which relatively small events loom very large in long-term reputation. Latest example: George Mason University is, in the public mind (or at least my mind), . . .