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College funding

I could probably go on for hours about the cost of college - not to mention the actual value of college (what you get for what you pay), but I'll save my ranting about not learning anything in class for another post.  Aside from the hassle of student aid and the know-nothings who fill the student aid office (at least where I'm taking classes at the moment) there are the endowments.

Lynne Munson of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity goes into some detail about those endowments in her U.S. Senate testimony. 

So here's the thing.  The state of Michigan has no money.  One of the cuts made to remedy that problem was to education - to Michigan's public universities.  The universities, of course, became hysterical.  Tuition just had to be increased.  Irvin Reid, president of Wayne State University, needed a pay raise (he's resigning next year).  The University of Michigan - Dearborn had to install foot baths.  Etc. etc. etc.

From Munson's testimony:

The University of Pittsburgh, Purdue, Michigan State, and little 1500-student Grinnell College each have endowments larger than a billion.

(P)lenty of public schools also have impressive endowment-to-student statistics. The University of Virginia and the University of Michigan bank $322,000 and $150,000 per undergraduate, respectively.

According to this list at Wikipedia MSU had an endowment of $1,483,000,000 and U of M had an endowment of $5,652,000,000 in 2006 (no information for either for 2007, but the endowments for every other university on that list with 2007 information increased).  So why the hysteria over funding cuts - especially when the state is in such dismal fiscal straits that coin-operated lockers now 'have' to be taxed?

Interesting article at CNBC from September 4, 2007:

University endowment managers may be little-known, but they invest more than $340 billion and have an uncanny knack for beating the market.

Over the last four years, endowments and foundations as a group have beaten both the S&P 500 and a mix of the S&P and the Lehman Aggregate Bond Index. Over the last 10 years, endowments worth more than $1 billion averaged returns of 11.4 percent per year compared with the S&P’s 8.3 percent.

“The endowments and foundations don't have the incentive to go public in quite the way that other investments managers do,” said Brett Hammond, chief investment strategist for TIAA-CREF. “Their job is to work behind the scenes to develop options, asset allocation alternatives that can do well for them.”

As such, these managers lead the push into alternative investments like private equity, hedge funds, real estate and natural resources, helping them earn an average one-year return rate of 10.7 percent for fiscal year 2006.

I realize endowments generally come with strings attached - the donor has earmarked his donation for some specific purpose within the university.  That doesn't make me anymore sympathetic to these hysterical institutions that peddle a product whose price far out paces inflation.

And get this (from this post at the CCAP blog):

I looked at three schools --Harvard, Yale, and the University of Virginia. At all three schools, less than four percent the average daily endowment base in the 2006-7 school year was spent. If Harvard and Yale had spent 5 percent and dedicated the increased spending to tuition reduction, they could have eliminated undergraduate tuition charges altogether --easily. If Virginia, which is a less well endowed public school, spent 5 percent and dedicated the added spending to tuition reduction for all students from families with less than $100,000 annual income, I would guessetimate that tuition could have been reduced well over $5,000 on average per student --an amount equal to about 60 percent of the in state tuition charges.

CCAP's non-blog website can be found here.

h/t Instapundit

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My class has issues

We had to come up with things we are concerned about.  Each student came up with some issues earlier and today we narrowed those down to five for the entire class.  These are the 5 things my political science class thinks the government (any level of government - local, state, or federal) should also be concerned with - in order of importance:

1.  Ignore basic economics (free trade is bad)
2.  Create government controlled health insurance
3.  Allow for a genocide in Iraq
4.  Ignore slightly more complex economics (lower gas prices)
5.  Stricter sentencing for child predators

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Do these people pay attention?

Ahmawatchinthewell's speech at Columbia is being touted as an exercise of free speech - a way to bring controversial ideas to the attention of the American people.  No doubt 60 Minutes is thinking along the same lines.  Lame excuse since anyone who has been paying the slightest bit of attention to this crazy knows exactly what he thinks already.  And nevermind Ahmadinnerplate's singular ability as a two-bit dictator to make whatever statement he wants whenever he wants.  He has freedom of speech.  He's about the only person in Iran who may exercise that right without fear of death.

The Columbia Spectator put together the Ahmadineblog to cover this story.  This post sort of sums up what I'm thinking.  You mean you didn't know Ahmainfantasyland had his own blog?  Don't you people up there in the tower look at the BBC occasionally - like, maybe, August of 2006?

No wonder Bollinger and his ilk think the American people aren't hearing Ahmamanonamissionfromgod's message.  How did such a mental midget get to head one of the most prestigious universities in America?

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Fall '07 Day 3

On the second day of my latest attempt to obtain a shiny piece of paper Tammy Erickson wonders about the future worth of said document (h/t Instapundit).  The old musings about the same thing pop up again in my own mind today, the third day of this current college try.  Especially this thought from Erickson:

And finally, although I hate to say it: a perception that at least parts of today’s college education are actually not particularly relevant may pervade more and more young people’s (and older employers’) consciousness.

Not particularly relevant or flat out wrong.  Something along the lines my political science professor comparing Nixon and Reagan - as opposed to contrasting - in terms of the philosophies of each regarding the size of government.  With Nixon we have wage and price controls, an indexing of Social Security for inflation, the creation of Supplemental Security Income, implementation of the Philadelphia Plan (a federal affirmative action program), and the creation both the EPA and OSHA.  Not exactly Reagan.

There was also the imposition of the national speed limit - 55 mph - in 1974.  He brought this up, but failed to mention a date or a President - merely put it into the context of the energy crisis.  I wonder what the answer would be to a question like:  Who was President during the energy crisis?  More importantly, what was the actual effect of the federal speed limit?  Somewhere around a 1% reduction in gasoline consumption.  Blessed are the regulators.

I also found out John Edwards is more of a Republican than I am because the more education you have, the more money you make, and the more Republican you are.  Also, the more in debt you are, but only if the financial aid office can motivate itself to do something.  Funny that.

Now is between class time.  Next up is an English class. 

English teacher by day, rent-a-cop by night - drive-thru operator on the weekend.  He's a busy guy - not that there's anything wrong with that.  He does give off strong Trekkie vibes though, and of the four books we're scheduled to read I've already read three.  He's also really into issues.  Great.  The Jungle, Catcher in the Rye, and Death of Sales Man are chock full of issues.  A hotdog vendor kills himself by becoming his own product. 

Would it be a terribly bad idea for an English class to read something like Moby Dick or, maybe, something by Shakespeare?  Maybe A Modest Proposal to introduce us to satire so we don't fall into this sort of stupid (the Lewis excuse, not the Captain's Wookiee-like take down of Lewis).  Or is this all about the number of books you read (or buy) in a year as opposed to the type of books you read?  Quality or quantity - aspects of this education thing being wholly irrelevant.

Nuance.

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