Supply & Demand, Supply & Demand, Supply & Demand

If only our members of Congress could grasp the concept. Introducing a new House bill designed to lower the cost of a college education....by spending $97 billion dollars in aid for students and schools.

The steep price of a college education was targeted yesterday as the House overwhelmingly approved a massive bill that would hold colleges and universities accountable for rising costs, authorize billions of dollars in aid to students and schools, and give families more consumer information. [...]

The measure would authorize Congress to provide some $97 billion over the next five years for programs that aid students and schools, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate from December.

Despite decades of federal funding, the price of tuition has continued to rise sharply and it's becoming increasingly out-of-reach for average families, lawmakers said.

It's pretty simple. As long as we keep telling everyone that they need to go to college, and as long as we keep subsidizing that education with generous loans, we will never "solve" the problem of rising tuition costs. Lots of people want to go to college. Getting the money to pay for that college is pretty simple and cheap. Therefore, schools will continue up their prices and spend like crazy when they know they have a wildly increasing revenue source. Both from guaranteed tuition payments, and straight-up payments from the state and federal governments. If you really want to cheapen college prices, abolish state schools and get rid of government sponsored loans and force every student who needs assistance to go to a private lender or a private charity.

But who wants to do something hard like that? Politically that's a losing play. Shit, it's not even in a playbook. No, it's a lot eaiser for them to continue this whole charade that makes college cheaper for white, middle-class families off the backs of poor brown people, because that's really what our politicians are doing.

Full article here. Previous stuff from us on tuition inflation here and here.

Taser This

Is it just me, or did the "Taser This... Fuck Bush" editorial not really make much sense?

It's big news because of the word "fuck," obviously. So if the editor wanted to make national news, he definitely succeeded. But couldn't he have done that with almost any use of the word "fuck" in a university newspaper?

The thing is... the tasering of the Florida student at a John Kerry speech and Bush really don't have much to do with one other. The only point I can think of in the "editorial" is that speaking or writing critically of politicians can get you tasered. But that's not true in most cases.

It's not that the Florida student deserved to be tasered, but he was being a rude, obnoxious prick. Many, including myself, find it very difficult to feel sympathy for him.

There's no doubt that the now common use of tasers is disturbing. And there's no question that Bush has really fucked things up (I'm sorry, I mean messed things up)...

But besides using the word "fuck" to make the news, I really can't make much sense out of the "editorial."

Help me out... am I missing something?

Boulder Crashes Down on Ward Churchill

Something good happened yesterday. The utterly despicable Ward Churchill got canned.

The University of Colorado Board of Regents on Tuesday fired Ward Churchill, the professor whose remarks likening some Sept. 11 victims to Nazi Adolf Eichmann provoked national outrage and led to an investigation of research misconduct.

Churchill vowed to sue after the 8-1 vote was announced, saying: "New game, new game."

Wrong. Game over, d-bag.

Rogier van Bakel, guest-blogging here last year, correctly predicted the end was nigh for Churchill. I called CU-Boulder a hate-filled cesspool a few months back.

Safety on Campus: Why a Reactionary Military Model is All Wrong

MSNBC military analyst Jack Jacobs thinks he's figured out how to deal with violent episodes on college campuses, like the massacre at Virginia Tech last week.

Events such as this are unpredictable and unlikely, but that doesn’t mean that institutions don’t have to plan for them. In the military, we spend a great deal of time on planning, and for two good reasons: we can’t predict the future, and good planning is the essence of success in crises. It should come as no surprise that the Department of Defense has plans to conduct all kinds of military operations against a wide variety of real, imagined and potential foes. Defend against an incursion by Russia into Western Europe? We have a plan for that. Invade Iran after it attacks Turkey? We have a plan for that, too.

Though Jacobs makes a few good points about the unforgivable inaction of the university after the first homicides on campus last week, Jacobs, a military hero, is wrong about pretty much everything else in his piece -- and for a host of reasons.

First, Jacobs isn't proposing any measures that would prevent future shooting sprees. Instead, he suggests measures to help minimize the messy aftermath of such events. (Appropriately, Jacobs uses a life-insurance metaphor to illustrate his point.) What good is a plan to lock down a campus during a shooting? None, unless you see a positive in trapping unarmed students inside a campus building alongside a gun-wielding madman.

Second, just because the military has a whole bunch of plans in place and "spend[s] a great deal of time on planning" doesn't mean all that planning does a whole hell of a lot of good. The military may or may not have had a plan in advance of 9/11 -- and I'm suggesting the existence of a contingency along the lines of what Jacobs notes above, not a conspiracy -- to prevent just such attacks. If it did have one, the plan failed. Instead, it was the people on the ground (and in the air, as was the case aboard United 93) who saved lives with spontaneous cooperation rooted in courage, ability, intuition, fear, and patriotism. (As the closing credits of the United 93 docu-drama note, military commanders were authorized to shoot down unresponsive aircraft on 9/11 but chose not to share that information with subordinates in the skies. So much for planning.) Our military may also have had a plan to invade Afghanistan before they actually did, but that mission, spurred as it was by the 9/11 attacks, has gone decidedly better than the U.S. military's well-planned slog in Iraq.

Third, Jacobs ignores a major factor that makes murder on domestic military bases so rare as to be the stuff of movies (albeit true-to-life ones): everyone's armed. If Jacobs wants to make state college students safer, as I no doubt believe he does, he should suggest that Virginia support its students' right to bear arms on campus.

CU-Boulder's 'Little Churchills'

Remember University of Colorado-Boulder professor Ward Churchill? He's the apparent fraud who infamously referred to victims of the attacks on the World Trade Center as "little Eichmanns". Seems his savagery of innocent victims of mass murder is what passes for thoughtful discourse at Boulder.

A CU-Boulder student was arrested Tuesday for allegedly threatening his classmates during a discussion about the Virginia Tech massacre.

CU sophomore Max Karson was arrested after making several comments during a morning class in the journalism school that some classmates perceived as a direct, physical threat, according to Cmdr. Brad Wiesley of the CU Police Department.

Karson has been suspended from CU, according to his father, Michael Karson. CU-Boulder spokesman Bronson Hilliard could not confirm the suspension, citing privacy laws.

“He made comments along the lines that he could understand how somebody could be angry enough to kill 32 people,” Wiesley said. “He said that there were things about CU, the fact that the classroom walls were unpainted [and] the lighting in the classroom, were all things that were making him mad enough to do something.

“They felt, in their mind, there was a good chance he was capable of carrying out something, based on the threats that he made in the class,” Wiesley said.

More here and here. Karson's site here. Karson recently attacking a fellow Boulder idiot here.

Should Karson have been arrested for saying what he said? Based only on what Karson's alleged to have said above, absolutely not. There was no imminent or "direct physical threat" in what Karson said.

Should he be mercilessly ostracized by his peers for being a contemptible prick? Absolutely.

What's a Year of College Really Worth?

Tiny Oklahoma Wesleyan University boasts that it's "a Christian university rated #12 in comprehensive colleges and universities in the west by US News & World Report." It's wedged on that list in between academic powerhouses East Texas Baptist University (#11) and McMurry University (#13), and charges students $23,000 per year for tuition, room and board.

One purportedly lucky student, though, has a chance to cut that rate dramatically by buying a year's tuition on eBay.

The university on Saturday kicked off an eBay auction of a year of tuition, room and board at the private college. The bidding had reached $4,425 by 11 p.m.

Nine bidders have so far driven the price now up to $5,100.

The university says it launched the auction for publicity's sake. One might call this clever. One might also call it a case of the university slapping it's own face, considering that OWU is currently pulling in only 22% of what it regularly charges students who, presumably, pay the university's inflated tuition with a windfall of low-interest, federally subsidized student loans. (Full disclosure: I have taken out low-interest, federally subsidized student loans.)

Not to pick on OWU -- tuition inflation is rampant just about everywhere. But if a year of college is only worth on the open market one-quarter (or maybe a half by the time bidding closes on Sunday) of what the university is charging as a fixed price to every other student, well that, my friends, points to quite a bubble just waiting to pop. If not everywhere, then at least among those highest rated comprehensive colleges and universities in the west.