There are 5 colleges in Amherst proper – Amherst College, Hampshire, U Mass (a large state school), and Smith and Mt. Holyoke, both women’s colleges.

Plus there are a bunch of other schools in the vicinity, in western Mass, Mass in general, New England in general, the Northeast in general, etc.

Or they will import zillions of Asians.

Your run of the mill suburban community college already is recruiting students from China. My guess is that the Chinese will build enough decent colleges to meet local demand within a decade or two.

Also, I’m guessing that Tiger Moms are allergic to it.

That’s Sinophobic!

Then the birthrate fell off a cliff in 2008-2009, so a lot of colleges will likely go out of business in 2026-2030. Or they will import zillions of Asians.

I don’t think many liberal arts colleges can count on this as a long-term solution.

My experience in HK/China/East Asia suggests that students and parents here are seriously brand-name driven when it comes to educational institutions. That means either Ivies/other household-name universities, or universities with state/big city names, e.g. Michigan, NYU, etc. Some ‘non-name’ universities such as Northeastern (sounds close enough to Northwestern? It’s in Boston?) have been able to ‘get famous’ over here, but not that many.

For liberal arts colleges, it’s very hard to recruit here.

First, no liberal arts college has a genuinely international ‘big name’. Some sophisticated people here, usually with US education experience themselves, will recognize Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Wellesley, and maybe a few more, but to most people those names mean nothing.

Second, the very word ‘college’ is used for high schools here, not for real ‘universities’. Students/parents can be assured that even someplace like Williams or Amherst is ‘really really good and famous’, but they’ll still shy away from that ‘college’ designation.

Many parents here, when they realize that the deck is seriously stacked against their kids ever getting into big name US schools, suddenly change tack entirely, and enroll them in community colleges with easy junior-year transfer to a state school. This saves loads of money, and the kid still ends up with a recognizable university degree on his or her resume.

Here’s some informative paragraphs from the article by Eliza Gray about college tuition in general, not just Hampshire:

It’s worth a pause here to explain how college pricing works.

Am I the last American to insist that tuition stick to its original, etymological meaning? That my fellow citizens think it’s what you pay, not what you pay for, is a big 🇲🇦 right there.

at nearby Amherst College, U.S. News’s No. 2-ranked liberal arts college, 34 percent of new students paid the list price of $71,300

Immediately, Frank Brownlow came to mind. But he wasn’t at Amherst, he was at nearby Mount Holyoke. After a conference talk, he told us sadly of his upcoming retirement. He said his English classes there were among the most popular, always reaching the enrolment limits, because he taught the subject straightforwardly, which is what his students were hungry for.

The rest of the department consisted of political and or gender types who’d be lucky to get six in a class. But those doing the hiring insisted on more of the same, making him part of a dying breed.

Cost of tuition at Mount Holyoke is about two-thirds that at Amherst. If what Prof Brownlow says is true, it’s still overpriced tenfold.

He calls this “the Great American Fee-Factory”:

https://fleming.foundation/author/fbrownlow/

Plus there are a bunch of other schools in the vicinity, in western Mass, Mass in general, New England in general, the Northeast in general, etc.

Which explains the bizarre voting behavior in those states today, compared to eighty years ago.

Admissions professionals call the tension between giving grants to entice affluent students and using the money to increase diversity with need-based aid the “iron triangle.”

So it’s almost as if random diversity doesn’t actually make us stronger. Never would have guessed.

This puts even more pressure on schools just below the top. “In the U.S., income disparity is growing, and we have fewer and fewer Americans in the middle.”

Neofeudalisms next victims: the useful idiots of neofeudalism, like Hampshire College.

The reality is that these colleges could probably survive if they stopped giving a shit about “diverse” student bodies and targetted some portion of the middle that could pay slightly-above state tuition prices. But that demo is mostly white and Asian, and they don’t want to survive that badly.

Many parents here, when they realize that the deck is seriously stacked against their kids ever getting into big name US schools, suddenly change tack entirely, and enroll them in community colleges with easy junior-year transfer to a state school. This saves loads of money, and the kid still ends up with a recognizable university degree on his or her resume.

I had a few friends try that. The education establishment has caught on to that maneuver. They apparently made transferring over a real pain even within interstate schools. Good luck trying to transfer quarter credits to semester credits. I believe state schools still favor the quarter system while private schools favor semester.

I went to a top tier liberal arts college many moons ago. Back in those days it was a well rounded education with a focus on developing critical thinking skills. Looking at the success many of my classmates and I have enjoyed, I suppose it was a good education. Lots of hedge fund and Wall St. people, doctors, lawyers, the mayor of a fair sized US city, a novelist and a sorta famous TV pundit.

I’d never send my kids there. (My eldest is studying engineering at a state college.)
1. I’d estimate the inflation adjusted tuition is at least twice what it was when I went there. Not worth the money.
2. From what I read, the school has gone full Woke. You cannot learn critical thinking skills if there are entire areas of thought forbidden to criticize. So the educational quality must have declined significantly.

I was a generous donor (coupla grand a year) for a long time, but stopped when I saw the school was having a “white privilege” seminar. Not on my dime…

Reg Caesar:

Prof Emeritus Brownlow is a gifted scholar and lecturer as well as being a real nice guy!

I wonder if some college will find a way to tap into the market of above average IQ young White guys who are all over rural America, but who are not encouraged to get a degree?

Or is the economic payoff from smart but not super-smart students too small?

Why Liberal Arts Colleges Are Starting to Go Under

You seem to have a sample size of one here — Hampshire was conceived when America was 90% white; it was a project of Amherst, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst; it enrolled its first students only in 1970 (it was “founded” years before, and conceived years before that); it never had much (if any) of an endowment; everything considered, problems at Hampshire are not very surprising, and do not represent a fall from a very great height.

It would be more noteworthy if Amherst, Mount Holyoke, or Smith were having similarly serious problems (or for that matter Oberlin, disregarding the self-inflicted financial wound there however).

Then the birthrate fell off a cliff in 2008-2009, so a lot of colleges will likely go out of business in 2026-2030.

Mal sehen.

Also, I’m guessing that Tiger Moms are allergic to it. … Or they will import zillions of Asians.

Which is it?

Personally, I don’t think international Asian students will have much interest in Hampshire, especially considering the high tuition — even as a kind of Trojan Horse to get a student visa, since I don’t believe it’s easy to switch schools (?) once you’re here — and as suggested above, Hampshire was never really foreseen as a college for Asians (or Hispanics or Blacks).

Finally, to hoist you on your own petard: when I Ctrl-F this article, I do not find the word “immigration” — yet the demographic makeup of “American” students has changed very significantly since Hampshire was conceived and began operating — if the country is running out of white students to fix “bad schools”, it would not be a big surprise if a place like Hampshire was also running short of white students.

Just saying.

I had a few friends try that. The education establishment has caught on to that maneuver. They apparently made transferring over a real pain even within interstate schools.

Interesting; I hadn’t heard about any crackdowns on this approach. Do you know/mind saying which state is involved in this case?

Everything you need to know, and perhaps more than you want to know, about why Hampshire College is doomed.

The Brits have wonderful expression about a certain kind of inept individual who “couldn’t organize a piss up in a brewery.” If you can imagine an institution made up entirely of such people . . . .

OT but it doesn’t get more “iSteve-y” than this.

‘Y’all were running from us’: Michelle Obama claims ‘white folks’ are ‘afraid’ of living in black neighborhoods

Michelle Obama spoke out against “white flight” in a recent interview, saying she experienced it as a kid and that it remains a problem.

Read more hilarity here: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/yall-were-running-from-us-michelle-obama-claims-white-folks-are-afraid-of-living-in-black-neighborhoods

Yet the Obamas moved to the Kalorama neighborhood in DC (76% White, 6% Black whereas DC as a whole is 49% Black), and bought a $15 million mansion on Martha’s Vineyard (88% White, 4% Black).

Who’s fleeing whom?

Oh, my sides!

Then there was this gem:

U.S. Is Investigating Jane Sanders Over Burlington College Bank Loan

July 10, 2017

Federal authorities are investigating a 2010 land deal for a Vermont college that was run at the time by Jane Sanders, the wife of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. The deal ultimately contributed to her ouster as president of the college.

The deal involved a $10 million sale of about 33 acres of lakefront property by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington to Burlington College — where Ms. Sanders was president — so the college could relocate and expand.

….

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/10/us/jane-sanders-vermont-burlington-college-investigation.html

Hampshire was the kind of place where the average student was a lesbian with blue hair. But recently, it became the kind of place where the average student is a BLACK lesbian with blue hair.

The smacking of lips must be tremendous.

Anyway, have some liberal arts lesbian college girl simulator by Dontnod Entertainment and published by Square Enix from ’14. Does it need to be updated?

Why do women’s colleges still exist?

Are there any men’s colleges left?

“It sounds counterintuitive, but choosing a public school to save money is actually a privilege for the affluent.“

An affluent family in Florida might be able to afford to send their kid to the University of Miami, which is a good school. But if their kid can get in there, he can likely also get into the University of Florida, which in addition to being way cheaper, is also better in many things, such as engineering and the hard sciences.

Chinese student enrollment has declined during the Trump years though.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/u-s-universities-see-decline-in-students-from-china

BURLINGTON, Vt. (AP) — After a decade of booming enrollment by students from China, American universities are starting to see steep declines as political tensions between the two countries cut into a major source of tuition revenue.

Several universities have reported drops of one-fifth or more this fall in the number of new students from China. To adapt, some schools are stepping up recruiting in other parts of the world and working to hold on to their share of students from China.

University administrators and observers say trade conflicts and U.S. concerns about the security risks posed by visiting Chinese students appear to be accelerating a trend driven also by growing international competition, visa complications and the development of China’s own higher education system.

Yet the Obamas moved to the Kalorama neighborhood in DC (76% White, 6% Black whereas DC as a whole is 49% Black), and bought a $15 million mansion on Martha’s Vineyard (88% White, 4% Black).

One does have to wonder if the folks already living there thought or said, “Well, there goes the neighbourhood!”

Oregon.

It’s essentially a battle between state schools near Portland and those which aren’t.

The rural schools (Western Oregon) and (Eastern Oregon) had a hard time keeping their students until graduation. (A lot of funding depends on graduation rates.) Many transferred to Portland State to finish their degree. So, they tried a few things to keep them on the farm. But this mainly:

1) Made transferring more difficult and time consuming. Credits had to be reviewed to be deemed worthy by comparing it to a similar class.

But this went on steroids after 2015. Oregon passed a measure disbanding the Oregon University System. Word on the street was OUS tried to syphon off money Phil Knight (Nike) gave to his pet University of Oregon. Bad move…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_University_System

From the article:

The loan was granted and the purchase was then made based on Ms. Sanders’s assurance that the college would receive millions of dollars in pledged donations that it would use to repay the loan, according to Mr. Dunn and reports by VTDigger and other Vermont news organizations. But some of the pledges turned out to be overstated, and enrollment did not increase.

When the donations fell short of the $2.6 million promised by Ms. Sanders, she was forced to resign in 2011. Financially strained, the college closed last year.

I think this is a foretaste of what would happen were Bernie to be elected president.

The demographics that Steve alludes to at the end are the main factors.

Rather than the occasional WaPo or NYT trend piece pegged off of a recent closing, I recommend reading the Inside Higher Ed and Chronicle of Higher Ed websites. They are sort of the FuckedCompany.com of education: constant articles about closings, possible closings, mergers (i.e., acquisitions by more stable colleges), canceled closings because of alumni coming to the rescue at the last minute, reengineering (dropping majors and departments and adding and expanding majors and departments), and so on. They also report on conferences for adminssions folks where the demographics data is analyzed.

Higher Ed websites also have a lot on “reforming curriculum” and the like. By “reform” they usually mean getting rid of STEM “weed out” classes, introducing group and project work, and other tricks to see to it that blacks don’t realize that they are not cut out for the major until it’s too late to bail out of the student loans. Higher Ed sites are generally progressive on their face, so it takes good reading skills and New York Times-style reading to the last paragraph and reading between the lines to get the real story. I consider these kinds of sites like crossword puzzles: a daily intellectual challenge.

As for colleges that do close, the real estate and physical plant would be nice for a billionaire to buy and use to start a non-woke university. There have been a few books on that topic recently. I am skeptical, since all colleges become woke over time, O’Sullivan’s Law and such, but it might be a fun project, better than buying a newspaper.

Interesting; thanks for the info.

The people I know were aiming especially at the U Washington system.

It’ll be interesting to watch what happens to these closed down colleges/universities. Might make some serious money turning them into residential homes.

And that’s why they hate the sumbiotch!

The top public universities used to try to do that. But then diversity happened.

A relative of mine went to a decent liberal arts school because it was cheaper for her than state. Except for her last year, because the new guys in admissions sent rejection letters to everyone who applied, so they only had 1/2 their normal freshman class size.

Liberalism is centralized, conservatism is local.

Smith is in Northampton and Mt. Holyoke is in South Hadley.

“Or they will import zillions of Asians.”

Steve,

U of I, my former home state flagship university, is waaaaay ahead of you:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/01/07/u-illinois-growth-number-chinese-students-has-been-dramatic

https://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/chinese-students-economic-impact-on-u-of-i/

So many Chinese students are attending and paying full freight that the school has an insurance policy in case their enrollment drops:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/11/29/university-illinois-insures-itself-against-possible-drop-chinese-enrollments

Unfortunately they may need to use that policy:

https://abc7chicago.com/education/chinese-student-enrollment-at-u-of-i-takes-hit-/5331084/

Note the skyrocketing growth in Chinese citizen students @ U of I from 37 in 2000 to 5K+ in 2019.

“Many parents here, when they realize that the deck is seriously stacked against their kids ever getting into big name US schools, suddenly change tack entirely, and enroll them in community colleges with easy junior-year transfer to a state school. This saves loads of money, and the kid still ends up with a recognizable university degree on his or her resume.”

The first two years of the four year curriculum are general education courses everyone has to take before jumping into the major (i.e. humanities and social science courses dumbed-down to idiocy by the SJWs + basic math and science), so it makes economic sense to get them out of the way at MUCH cheaper community college prices and then transfer to a four year university. Many of the 2nd and 3rd four year state regional universities already have articulation agreements with the CCs to make it easy. Some CCs, such as Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio (one of the largest CC’s in the state) are starting to offer four year degrees.

Theres a few more examples:

Antioch College, Yellow Springs Ohio – also known as being ultra-liberal is now at 102 students having temporarily closed previously.
Pine manor college – Chestnut Hill MA – previously a women only junior college finishing school now 85% POC, 84% first generation students.
Mount ida college – another former womens junior college. Closed completely. Umass bought the site.
Sweet Briar college – a more conservative niche womens school specialising in horse riding.
Wells college, Aurora NY – also formerly a womens college. Has struggled for years.

“Hampshire was founded in 1970” to offer the modestly rich a reasonably priced alternative to the very expensive and pointless University of Southern Vietnam, aka student draft exemption. It’s surprising how little they were able to charge back then in exchange for an educational experience that lasted the duration of the war, and sometimes forever, resulting the professional student phenomenon.

Can’t the closed colleges be recycled as High Schools?

I wonder if some college will find a way to tap into the market of above average IQ young White guys who are all over rural America, but who are not encouraged to get a degree?

Let’s not squander this resource!

Richard Feynman (from Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman):

To me, no real man ever paid any attention to poetry and such things. How poetry ever got written—that never struck me! So I developed a negative attitude toward the guy who studies French literature, or studies too much music or poetry—all those “fancy” things. I admired better the steelworker, the welder, or the machine shop man. I always thought the guy who worked in the machine shop and could make things, now he was a real guy! That was my attitude. To be a practical man was, to me, always somehow a positive virtue, and to be “cultured” or “intellectual” was not.

Of course, this is the reason why Democrats are pitching free tuition and national student debt forgiveness. They can’t allow their reeducation camps to close from free market pressures like excessive tuition and low demand, can they? Time to force YOU, Mr. Taxpayer, to keep these failing colleges in business…

My sister went to Hampshire in the late 70s early 80s. I think she did well in a less structured environment. Married with 3 kids, waiting for grandkids. No blue hair.

Why do women’s colleges still exist?

Maybe transgender males need to do to women’s colleges what they’re doing to women’s sports? Dominate and eliminate them.

Check out the Yuan to USD rate in recent years as to why less Chinese are going to US universities.

In my brief time in Boston in 2011 it looked as if the majority of US students were Orientals.

Note this:

The 55-year-old explained that because of this experience she had always felt a sense of injustice. Not just because of the racism, but because the families were ‘disinvesting’ in their community.

‘We were a part of creating… history, and a lot of people walked away from it, they disinvested. One by one, they packed their bags and they ran from us, and they left communities in shambles,’ she said.

‘There were no gang fights, there were no territorial battles but one by one they packed their bags and they ran from us.’

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7627817/I-make-people-not-afraid-black-people-Michelle-Obama-addresses-racism-US.html

From what I’ve heard, TLRC, from the mainland Chinese people, is that just any American university degree doesn’t mean that much in China anymore. It may be painful for Americans to hear, but lots of Chinese people send their one child to America to study only because he couldn’t get into a good school in China.

They pay out the nose too for tuition*, as we all know. I personally think most of these people made a big financial mistake doing this, unless it’s for a foot in the door for staying here.

.

* I hope I did that right, Reg.

Liberal colleges closing down? What’s not to like?

A while ago, I came across a letter from a great aunt at Smith to my great grandmother, written about 1920. She wrote that in anticipation of the college president taking a month long trip to California, all the students convened at a church on campus, listened to a speech by the president, prayed for his safe return, and sang a few hymns. After that, the students lined the streets and sang school songs for the president as rode between them in a carriage to his residence, where he made another short speech before going inside, and the crowd broke up.

It was a different world.

A while ago, I came across a letter from a great aunt at Smith to my great grandmother, written about 1920. She wrote that in anticipation of the college president taking a month long trip to California, all the students convened at a church on campus, listened to a speech by the president, prayed for his safe return, and sang a few hymns. After that, the students lined the streets and sang school songs as the president rode between them in a carriage to his residence, where he made another short speech before going inside, and the crowd broke up.

It was a different world.

Good work voting with your pocketbook. Hopefully you let them know why you stopped giving money–it gives an impression on the board of directors if enough people do it, and money always talks.

Question for everyone else, though: how would you teach critical thinking? How would you get young people to look through the lies of the media? How did we formerly do it? It seems like the texts, if any, would still be valuable (though the idea of a critical thinking text seems somewhat oxymoronic).

I always wonder about that. Regardless of whatever goes on, there are conservative and liberal personality types. How did we deal with the sorts of people who would have gotten blue hair ages ago when America worked, and how did it change?

I think a lot of failed colleges will be in small towns and the campuses will be white elephants with little value.

Think of the college towns. Privileged white communities with incomes substantially above average… perfect for section 8 housing and diversification.

I went to a similar school and when I read the alumni magazine, everything in it is about women, blacks, Hispanics, Jews, and homosexuals. My demography is being airbrushed out. I give them a token amount so they don’t call me.

We have way more potential slots at institutions of higher education than students who are legitimately qualified to go to college, and as the original commenter noted, this means there are tons of schools that cannot attract enough students at a price that keeps them afloat. I just read a piece in the NYT about Bennett College, a historically black women’s college that is in deep trouble. It is stated in the piece that it did pretty well when it was initially founded because a lot of women (esp. black) didn’t go to college, but once desegregation occurred, the better schools skimmed the best students and now Bennett is focused on serving women who didn’t do well in high schoool, at $27,000 per year.

I used to argue on a liberal site all day long that we ought to have the honesty to recognize that many college students are not college material at all and we have a system that exploits people of mediocre cognitive ability by encouraging them to take on a bunch of debt to help fund the jobs of administrators and subpar professors. The answer is to make it much more difficult to get student loans by actually tying your eligibility to academic and testing performance, along with the quality of the institutions you have been admitted to – but the answer from progressives is denial that there are millions of unqualified ‘students’ and we should just make all college free.

Higher education is basically a bubble, and there is going to be a ton of pressure to bail out low quality institutions, but resisting this and allowing the coming collapse proceed ultimately will be good for our society. There will be a lot less indoctrination into woke politics as well as resentful people with a ton of debt and lower salaried jobs who believe it’s society’s fault their diploma didn’t result in a six figure annual income.

Hampshire College not only did not require that applicants submit SAT or ACT scores, but outright refused to accept test scores.

In 2017, a Hampshire College student named Carmen Figueroa of Brooklyn, NY demanded that white players on a community college women’s basketball team remove their culturally appropriated braids. When they didn’t, Figuora physical attacked a player.

A college business model of accepting academically unproven, mentally deranged students who hate the white classmates who are subsidizing their tuition is not going to work for very long.

O/T Watching YouTube, I have been getting commericals that encourage me to take the ACT exam (as opposed to the SAT). According to the commercial, more scholarships are awarded to ACT test takers.

Next September, if a student wants to retake the ACT, they only have to retake sections of their choosing, not the whole exam.

An outsider’s perspective:
I went to a State School-mostly out of habit, finances, and region of the country (i.e. not Northeast).

But I’m the kind of guy that would have wanted to go to a liberal arts school-heavy reader, heavy interest in history/philosophy/literature/etc. In a different family background, I may have ended up studying liberal arts at some small school, and, essentially, reading for four years.

But that was over thirty years ago (and it was probably too late even then). Because I would have wanted to go to a small liberal arts school for a classical education (maybe not classical in terms of Greek and Latin, but classical in terms of the study of what’s great in Western Civilization).

Over the last thirty years, the woke have won-not merely in terms of today’s militant students: in terms of the curriculum, and even the value of a classical education. Its not merely that undergrads are woke: faculty are woke, and thus the classes themselves, or even the interpretation of the books themselves, are woke. I wouldn’t want to go to a liberal arts college if I were independently wealthy and had the time: I don’t believe I would learn what I would want to.

Consequently: I would never even allow my kids to attend a liberal arts school. College is for job training. The idea of college as edification or education or cultural development is dead.

Presumably, I’m not the only one: I’d guess plenty of parents and students themselves must realize that if there is no Western Canon worth learning, there is no purpose for spending extra money on a liberal arts education. If the philosophy of Star Trek counts as college credits just like the philosophy of Plato, there is no reason to pay a premium to learn philosophy.

So, the entire idea of a liberal arts college, which must have appealed to a certain class of studious high school student, can’t have the same appeal (whether Liberal, Conservative, or Moderate-but most especially Conservative or Moderate). Liberal Arts’ own self definition destroyed it-wokeness is just the icing on the cake.

If my kids want to read Shakespeare and European History, they can do so on their own time and their own dime-they’ll have plenty of both as engineers and medical professionals.

joe

Those university names mean almost nothing to me, as well. Or less than nothing, perhaps.

I just read a piece in the NYT about Bennett College, a historically black women’s college that is in deep trouble.

In 2018, Jasmine Harrison was accepted into 113 colleges. Three of the colleges awarded her full-ride scholarships. She accepted a full-ride scholarship from Bennett College, which is located in her hometown and where her sister also attended. Jasmine plans on becoming a neonatal intensive care nurse. Bennett College does not have a nursing program.

Someone asked in a NYT comment section why Spelman was doing fine financially. I responded that Spelman was founded by the Rockefellers, named after Laura Spelman Rockefeller, and that the Rockefellers still help run the college to this day. My comment did not get posted.

“Or they will import zillions of Asians.”

Apparently the flagship state supported technical university in North Carolina is taking that to heart– right this very minute.

http://www.technicianonline.com/news/article_14cc9f3e-ee17-11e9-9646-db2c5c383eba.html

In 2017, a Hampshire College student named Carmen Figueroa of Brooklyn, NY demanded that white players on a community college women’s basketball team remove their culturally appropriated braids. When they didn’t, Figuora physical attacked a player.

https://turtleboysports.com/this-is-carmen-figueroa-the-hampshire-college-cheesehog-who-attacked-a-white-chick-playing-basketball-because-her-braids-were-cultural-appropriation/

Meet Carmen Figueroa – The Hampshire College Cheesehog Who Attacked A White Chick Playing Basketball Because Her Braids Were Cultural Appropriation

As we have seen with things like the recent NBA dustup, the Chinese have the ability to turn off the flow of their patronage on a dime if you “insult the Chinese people” (i.e. the CCP), so building your business model on Chinese mainland customers is extremely risky. There are places like resorts in S. Korea that found this out the hard way when China decided to put pressure on S. Korea to stop them from allowing the US to deploy the THAAD anti-missile defense system. Their bookings disappeared overnight.

…they don’t want to survive that badly

Agree.

Most interviewees could scope out the needed changes to attract higher tuition-paying students, and help fundraising; but then they would quickly launch into how awesome it was to help under-served students realize their dream of uniting all of mankind into one happy family through the exploration of outer space etc etc blah blah blah.

They’d rather die on their knees than live on their feet.

Ironically, the race among low-tier colleges to rename themselves “university” has left the “college” name to places like Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, etc.

I figure that all of the real action in SJW-ism, being a projected expression of psychological disturbance, is in bothering others. While at a place like Hampshire one can probably engage in scholastic angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin quibbling about the finer points of intersectionality, there probably aren’t people not credulous enough to swallow all of the cutting edge identity politics jargon and therefore the best you’re going to do in terms of bothering someone else with your projected disturbance is a “I’m sorry and I absolutely need to read this new piece by Ta’Jamelle Xander LeDuque Smith-Jones on the intersection of xirselfs’ trans-Nubian and genderflux identities in navigating the white supremacist patriarchy and beard-shaming in the Amish competitive quilting circuit.” It’s just no fun to be part of the insurgent tribe when there are no other tribes around to menace with your outsized social-political power.

At a more mainstream institution, the SJW monsters can really get down to bothering people otherwise engaged in legitimate academic and extracurricular pursuits. There’s also an ample pool of resources to serve as targets for their extortion schemes which are not as easy to come by at a place like Hampshire. Additionally, a four plus year odyssey of bothering people at a place like Wisconsin-Madison can still result in a degree and transcript that has the veneer of marketable plausibility in the parasitic field of political censoring in corporate America, whereas an ungraded senior thesis in bellybutton gazing is a hard sell even to thoroughly whipped corporate America.

I have a daughter attending college in Boston. A fairly large university.

There is quite literally another college across the street. And a couple more small schools within a few blocks.

Extend the radius a few miles and there are tons of colleges.

In Cambridge and the suburbs, a lot more.

Thanks! That’s hilarious.

The defiance of reality (particularly of arithmetic) at Hampshire reminds me of this, from Greg Cochran:

Nongqawuse

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/07/01/nongqawuse/

“Just in case you might be thinking that the United States is the craziest country that has ever existed, I thought I would mention the Xhosa famine.”

In reply to myself to add that given the slightest opportunity as ’s posted video demonstrates, the natives took the opportunity of some naive lady charged with raising $100,000,000.00 to save their beloved institution from closure as an opportunity to bother her into resigning and probably sealing the institution’s grim fate.

My nephew is a recent Hampshire graduate.

There are four other colleges in town, and Hampshire has always had the LEAST minority students. By far! That includes UMASS the big public school with decent sports programs, and Amherst the preppy one named after a racist white dude.

It’s quite demoralizing to fall over yourself to be the wokest, most minority-friendly college in America– but ALL the actual brown people go to schools full of fraternitites and “insititutional racism.” Haven Montana country.

Most of the few brown people at Hampshire were adopted by rich white liberals, I’d bet.

If you’re a pink haired black lesbian, let alone a normal black guy trying to make good (maybe while hanging out with other normal/ success minded black people) there really isn’t much to recommend Hampshire. They have a quirky structure that focuses on independent learning, and they don’t have majors or minors– but how much is that worth?

In 2019, practically every other college is 95% as woke as Hampshire, but with larger endowments, more famous alumni, better financial aid, better facilities, more normies who throw cool parties… Plus Hampshire is borderline dumpy, full of 1970’s brutalist buildings vs the picture perfect colonial/ Hogwarts private colleges on practically the same street.

I wonder if some college will find a way to tap into the market of above average IQ young White guys…

From my experience, these guys are going straight into the trades/workforce/military.

The college scene is becoming a Liberal ghetto.

Why do women’s colleges still exist?

Are there any men’s colleges left?

More and more I think that women’s colleges, with a strict in loco parentis duty, might find a market.

And men’s colleges also.

With all the thousands of colleges, why not some experimentation of this sort?

Don’t take federal money, ban trannies. Why not give it a try?

This is something that an individual school could do but not all of them, because America is running out of white people.

There are other strategies that can work. In my area there is a junior college called Harcum College which was originally a sort of finishing school for upper class girls, which is not a promising demographic nowadays. They have successfully reoriented themselves and now run vocational programs such as dental hygienist training for a largely minority student body. The key is to offer programs that have some economic payoff. $70,000/yr for a degree that will get you a job at Starbucks is not tempting to too many people.

Greek philosophers, German philosophers, Copi’s Fundamentals of Logic, and no philosophers after WW2, which shattered the European psyche.

Good points.

Maybe Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren will bail them out.

My solution is to simply allow student loan debt to be discharged in bankruptcy. No need for government or institutions to attempt to pick winners through your idea of performance standards. That would end up causing grade inflation and disparate impact lawsuits.

Focus on the backend once students have graduated (or not) to find out which institutions and degree fields were actually credit worthy. Lenders would dry up overnight for poor performing schools/degrees when students begin to enter bankruptcy en masse. Those schools with negative ROIs will go out of business.

Most American private liberal arts colleges and even whole segments of public university systems have ceased to be in the business of higher education and career training. They have become taxpayer subsidized job programs for low skill academics. They use student loans and grants as the means to transfer wealth from taxpayers to administrators and professors. Students are simply the go between carrying the bags of cash.

Unfortunately, students don’t realize the scam until they seek employment and find out their overpriced parchment from SJWU isn’t worth anything in the real world. But then they are already saddled with debt while their former professors have a new crop of 18 year old suckers.

Let former students get rid of the debt through bankruptcy and the whole system crashes.

Maybe the entrance test for college Freshmen should be the ability to understand a simple truism:

Money talks and bullshit walks

Trying to encourage kids to go to colleges that are:

1. Grotesquely overpriced
2. Offering inferior degrees
3. Have very limited activities outside of study
4. Super saturated with the stench of holier-than-thou-ism.

Is going to be a real tough sell, when someone could go to Michigan, Texas, UCLA, etc, cheaper, with a “brand name” degree, and vastly expanded extra-curricular activities. Maybe the Academic Types need to take Freshman Economics so that they can begin to comprehend the idea of market forces at work.

Which explains the bizarre voting behavior in those [New England] states today, compared to eighty years ago.

If you mean the shift from Republican to Democrat in most of New England, the change was in large part because of the way the Republican party changed. Classic New England Republicans were never particularly conservative as that term is defined today. They generally were reasonably liberal/libertarian on social issues but believed in being financially prudent when it came to government spending and were not pro-military. They had a place in the Republican party until that party became dominated by Sun Belt Christians, and now fit better in the Democratic party.

“Legitimately qualified to go to college” is a racis’ concept and is going to have to go in our new Woke world. Some coalition of leftist organizations is threatening to sue the University of California system unless they get rid of the SAT/ACT due to its racis-ness. For all I know, this is one of those collaborative lawsuits where the bureaucrats are secretly in favor of the suit and will “settle” by giving in to the demands.

The Sanders story is even worse than the excerpt suggests.

Bernie used his political clout to extort the college loan out of a regional bank (Peoples United). Either pay up or we investigate you (think Trump “impeachment” witch-hunting and you get the idea) and drag your name through the mud.

This is my bank–sound and well run, brags (correctly) that they never needed a bailout.

Bernie wants to rob the “rich” to pay for perks for the New Royalty (which includes his family, of course, as well as anyone he deems “special”).

His logic–it isn’t crime when the government does it.

Schools like this are already too far gone to try that maneuver. They have already put so much emphasis on diversity it would be impossible to create an environment on campus that wasn’t hostile to white 18 year old boys. Plus their costs have run so high they wouldn’t be able to lower them to a level where they could set a reasonable tuition.

I know folks in New England who have told me for years that Boston is basically just an overrated college town.
Based on the number of schools in the area, that sounds about right.

Obviously, the weakest gazelles in the herd get picked off first and the strongest will be the last to be threatened, might even benefit as competitors drop out. Oberlin, BTW, even putting aside the massive judgment that they owe to the shopkeeper, is in financial trouble.

As for “we’ll see” – what are these schools going to do? Conjure students out of thin air? We already know how many freshman there will be in 2026. You can’t fill your school with people who were never born. The Chinese are not interested in attending liberal arts colleges. The losses won’t be spread evenly – the weakest schools will take the brunt and will fold. The only question is how far up the chain the losses will extend. Hampshire was toast even before this hit but the crisis will take out some well known schools with long histories. You can bet on it.

For the most part, true ‘liberal arts colleges’ (teaching institutions devoted to academics and the arts, with little in the way of vocational instruction) have vigorous admissions standards and an ample constituency given the number of slots you find in them. The schools likely to be under siege are run-of-the-mill private teaching institutions (whose students are, more often than not, following vocational courses), marginal institutions of long standing, and crank schools. The crank schools are terrible and more of them deserve to disappear than will disappear. The marginal institutions are facing competition from commercial schools and community colleges who can exploit either economies through innovation or public subsidy. As for the run-of-the-mill teaching institutions, what have they to offer that state colleges do not have? There are a few that have some exceptional aspect that students and parents seek out (and, quite often, faculty who would like to strip the institution of its particularity). Beyond that, it’s a business that doesn’t pay dividends. The one thing to mourn from its closing is the damage to any small towns in which they might be located (and the inconvenience to their better employees).

College tuition rates should be public information and non-negotiable, with all students paying the same amount. Scholarships should take place outside the college as a private process, with scholarship money paid directly to the school to offset part or all of the tuition. And admissions should be based solely on standardized test scores and high school GPA.

America is a rotting…maggot infested…stinking corpse….that doesn’t know that it has expired….So that makes America a Zombie….Walking Dead….

There are other strategies that can work. In my area there is a junior college called Harcum College which was originally a sort of finishing school for upper class girls, which is not a promising demographic nowadays. They have successfully reoriented themselves and now run vocational programs such as dental hygienist training for a largely minority student body. The key is to offer programs that have some economic payoff. $70,000/yr for a degree that will get you a job at Starbucks is not tempting to too many people.

Jack, are you familiar with the Mainline law firm Harcum, Parkem, Humpem & Dumpem?

NB, the community college system in Illinois has a fall enrollment that is equivalent to 272,000 full-time students, but issues about 35,000 associate’s degrees each year. Plenty of bloat in the public sector, and it’s likely this boil will never be lanced.

Shame for Oregon.

Arizona’s system is absolutely top tier.

Good lord – she wants to be a nurse and decided on a school that doesn’t have a nursing program?!

At what point does the right do the intelligent thing and start pointing out that the business model of large numbers of higher ed institutions is basically a massive transfer of wealth from low quality students via loans to administrators and staff? Pass legislation requiring any school that accepts a student with federal loans to be on the hook for repayment of 25% of it if the student falls behind or defaults. Overnight dozens of colleges would close and those that remain would ditch every program with the word “studies” in it.

It’s clear at this point that the white left is going to fail – in fact it may fall even worse than the white right since literally every race hates white liberals…

They think importing the aliens will cause badwhites to fail but the reality is that in the long run goodwhites will probably end up worse.

As the country gets more “brown” whatever stupid things they used to do becomes increasingly irrelevant… like anti racism, niche liberal colleges, homosexual rights, trendy coffee shops, etc.

Idk… as steve says the immigration issue is like a $100 bill on the sidewalk that the stupid party refuses to pick up.

Are rural white guys the $100 bill the colleges refuse to pick up?

From my experiences, the average redneck is highly competent in many fields and likely has an IQ of around 95. I can tell you right now that this g and s is miles ahead of any negro or Hispanic getting admitted right now.

explains former Hampshire president Nelson. “What we have in higher education is exactly the same thing. Institutions with over a billion in endowment are getting stronger and stronger as they can attract the best students. … And financially under-resourced institutions are going to get weaker and weaker.”

Use a single-dose of QE to eliminate existing university debt – we all take the hit but this time its for a good cause, not to fill the piggy banks of big bankers – and cancel the student loan program.

Tell everyone to sit it out a year while the market and consolidation do their magic.

Higher Ed has a year-long Great Depression.

For the rest: recession averted.

Obviously, the weakest gazelles in the herd get picked off first and the strongest will be the last to be threatened, might even benefit as competitors drop out. Oberlin, BTW, even putting aside the massive judgment that they owe to the shopkeeper, is in financial trouble.

This is conventional wisdom but I don’t think it applies uniformly to colleges and Universities, simply because they all have endowments of differing sizes and therefore some are far less reliant upon tuition and fees and even alumni giving than others.

It’s entirely conceivable in a hypothetical world that a Harvard or a Princeton could indefinitely weather years upon years without admitting a single undergraduate, whereas other less well endowed institutions are always only a bad year or two of collections receipts from going under. (Indeed the point has been made here that Harvard’s outsized endowment perpetually grows untaxed and is of a size that not collecting tuition from undergraduates wouldn’t amount to a rounding error).

The “weakest” gazelles in this metaphor will not necessarily be those with the most obscure or ridiculous educational programs, but those in a tier and if a type of institution with less competitive admissions and without resources in reserve to weather downturns in tuition receipts.

Does anybody in America actually go to college to learn about truth and beauty and become a better, more enlightened person?

It doesn’t feel like it.

China is very powerful due to their sheer numbers and affluent overseas communities, however on a per capita basis it’s fairly weak. I think the USA can outlast them in the coming battles.

I do agree that some of the marginal universities have become to reliant on Chinese dollars and that bubble is about to burst.

In Hampshire’s case, hilariously, the students condemned the place (which was already top 1% in SJWism) as a haven of racism and sexism and would approach kids on tours and tell them NOT to come for this reason.

It’s funny you also mentioned tiger moms, because this demonstrates an attitude I like to think of as Tiger Mom Progressivism. “You only got a B+ on your test in oikophobic arts and self-flagellation studies? You have brought shame on the family!” “But mom, it’s the highest grade in the class! Everybody else got a C or lower!” “YOU ARE NO LONGER MY SON.”

Reminds me of a DC school scandal two years ago. Ballot high school, located in the poorest ward of the city, announced that all of their graduating seniors were accepted into four year colleges. Big hoopla as you can imagine. The following year the local NPR station did some digging and found that most of the students missed more than half the school year. That reading and math proficiency were below 5%.

I’m waiting on the follow up as to how the class of students faired. Evidently some had already dropped out of college less than a year later.

Wow 113 colleges, I know many HBCUs will admit students on the spot at college fairs but this is ridiculous.

They’ll just import millions of Asians or Nigerians. They won’t fold. Or the they’ll find some way to get more Government financing. The Taxpayers have paid for this College pricing bubble through guaranteed loans and other financial aid. The College Libs will just keep ripping off the boobs, just like always.

As for “we’ll see” – what are these schools going to do? Conjure students out of thin air?

Here’s an idea that is so crazy it just might work: Some enterprising person could start (or take over and rebrand) a college that is brazenly anti-PC.

No affirmative action, no “speech code,” no groupthink, no snowflakes allowed, and no doctrinare socialist professors. No off-limit topics – in fact, the curriculum would go out of its way to study forbidden topics.

This kind of “contrarian university” would obviously appeal to some segment of the student population. And it would have that segment all to itself.

‘… Institutions with over a billion in endowment are getting stronger and stronger as they can attract the best students. … And financially under-resourced institutions are going to get weaker and weaker.”…’

Is this actually new? Even back a century-plus ago, America had a fantastic plethora of small colleges — particularly compared to Europe.

They bred like rabbits — and, I suspect, died like them as well. So an Amherst has made it into adulthood, thrives, and continues to thrive, while a Hampshire goes into a death spiral and dies after a generation.

It all sounds like the cats in Greece or Turkey. You can see the adults — they made it, and found a niche, and are (usually) doing alright. It’s the scads of kittens that are depressing. It’s summer, and most are barely clinging to life. Come winter, you know most of them are going to turn into a little piece of rotting garbage at some point.

So ditto for small American colleges — and I’d guess it’s always been that way.

It’s good to be skeptical of claims that college “teaches you how to think”. Success after college is mostly a function of:

1. Your abilities and family networks going in
2. Doors opened by the credential
3. Peer effects (your peer influences and the doors they open for you via networking)

The actual content of what you learn is far, far less important than any of these. Also, any measurable benefit on critical thinking from education is small and likely disappears shortly after finishing:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/11/30/college-and-critical-thinking/

A lot of what we call “critical thinking” is just an inborn personality trait. A very small percentage of people in any time or place are independent thinkers. You can introduce people to tools and resources to help them sharpen their minds, but unless they have a natural inclination to pursue this on their own, it won’t make any difference.

Unless you belong to a subculture or community that is counter-cultural in some way (Hint: religion) and have a tight two-parent bond with your children, your kids will probably just adopt the mainstream culture’s values. And even then, they might.

It is far easier to discover truth, beauty, and knowledge outside the university system than in it these days. Where would you suggest attending were you interested in such things?

One of the intangible benefits of these small schools is their size. Many parents seek a smaller place for their special bundle of joy. Lots of kids have little experience with or taste for conflict on any level and perceive that the smaller colleges will be more sedate. Wait ’til they meet the angry blue haired black lesbians!

I think the Trump administration is being a tiny bit more selective about which students are allowed in the US.

Yes, there are some fine universities in China. Back in the 1980s, MOST of the first Chinese students in the US were graduate students. The college I attended had a Chinese student back in 1980, and a couple of others in 1981. These students were all VERY well connected politically. For several years afterwards, it was very difficult for a Chinese student to get permission to leave the country unless s/he had good political connections.

From the beginning, a certain number of Chinese students in the US have been rumored to spy on other students and report their behavior to the CCP. That was part of the rationale when Bush I decided to let EVERY Chinese student in the US at the time of the Tienanmen Square massacre stay in the US, because many protested their own consulates and embassies.

I remember an event in Madison that showed the heavy hand of the CCP on Chinese students at the U of Wisconsin:

Madison has the biggest farmers’ market in North America every Saturday during the more clement months, on the sidewalk outside the state capitol building. One time a group of Tibetan students got a permit to hold a pro-Tibet demonstration on the steps of the state capitol during the farmers’ market. A group of Chinese students at U Wisconsin decided to have a “spontaneous” counter demonstration.

The Tibetan demonstrators were waving homemade signs. The signs varied in color, size and lettering.

The Han Chinese counter-demonstrators were waving signs which were all precisely the same size, all with precisely the same lettering, and the same colors of text and background.

I asked a Chinese friend of mine, who really hates the PRC government, if he thought the signs had been prepared by Party functionaries and stored for any such demonstrations. He said that was the way the CCP worked.

I remember this – I think NPR of all outlets is the one who broke that story. It highlights one of the huge problems with doing away with using SAT/ACT scores, as a lot of urban schools inflate grades to just get kids out of school, and even the ones who legitimately passed did so at a level of coursework that is well below that of the typical aspiring college student.

One thing I remember from the WaPo was how every couple of years they would do a story on black HS students from the District who had gotten into Georgetown, GW, or other fairly competitive schools. Almost without exception they were struggling with the coursework expected of them, and several flat out said they realized that getting straight A’s at Ballou or whatever didn’t really mean much once they experienced the quality of students from elsewhere. It was demoralizing for a lot of them, which I feel bad about. If schools had the courage to do away with the diversity crap and just decide they were going to admit students of whatever stripe within whatever band of qualifications they wanted to serve, these kids would be in an environment more suited to their abilities. Instead they are getting eaten alive and every day confronted with the fact that they really don’t have what it takes to be there.

I also recall Georgetown setting up some kind of fund and effort to recruit students who are the descendants of slaves that helped build the place…good luck on finding enough of them that can actually hack it. Just another example of how institutions love to virtue signal but don’t really care what happens to the kids they admit.

the answer from progressives is denial that there are millions of unqualified ‘students’ and we should just make all college free

The other standard retort is that once you start putting qualifications on student loans, NAM’s will be the most to suffer.

They wouldn’t get accredited by the powers that be.

There are 5 colleges in Amherst proper – Amherst College, Hampshire, U Mass (a large state school), and Smith and Mt. Holyoke, both women’s colleges.

Smith and Mt. Holyoke are not in Amherst proper; they’re 10-15 minute drives away in Northampton and South Hadley, though they do have some kind of resource sharing arrangement. “The five college area.”

I often used Hampshire college’s library to do my physics/calculus homework with friends. Mostly for the freakshow environment (this was in late 80s, early 90s -no youtube, so you had to find your own entertainment). You’d occasionally find women scizzoring in the stairwells, or people running around freaking out on drugs. Rumor was it was mostly for super rich kids who couldn’t get in anywhere else because of behavioral or drug problems. The curriculum was widely seen as a joke; basically “do what thou wilt.” I think one of Spielberg’s kids went there at the time, and rumor had it, some of the rich kids would arrive by helicopter (I think it was BS, but no way to google things like this at the time).

FWIIW for those commenters that think Western Mass is some den of shitlibbery: it’s actually pretty right wing/deplorable as most of the towns nearby are decaying factory towns. It’s the cities which make the area lean left.

Hampshire College is in trouble. The liberal arts college in Western Massachusetts was founded in 1970 as a radical experiment in education: there are no grades, and students chart their own coursework. But now the school is finding itself on the verge of bankruptcy and is in danger of shutting down.

Hampshire College costs about $65,000 a year to attend, but only has an endowment of about $48.5 million — which pales in comparison to other, older colleges (neighboring Amherst College has a $2.2 billion dollar endowment, for example). Student enrollment steadily declining over the last few years could mean the death knell for the school, as tuition and fees make up about 90% of their operating budget.

65K per year for discussing anime and do breathing exercises is a bit much.

“We have a problem, we need to rise a 100 x 10⁶ dollars (sic) to keep it running”.
“You are hired by the Chinese to close the college!!”

AW LULZ!

The last holdouts on the quarter system (mainly schools with strong co-op programs) have given it up in the last five-ten years and gone semester. UC transitioned a few years back.

Don’t the Fundamentalist universities (e.g. Bob Jones) already more or less fill that need? I guess there is some segment of the population that is not Woke and also not Fundamentalist but I don’t know whether that’s a big enough market. Also getting academics to teach there would be a problem – people with faculty qualifications are overwhelmingly leftist nowadays.

The fact that a place like this doesn’t exist already is a hint that it would be difficult to get started. It would be nice to have a place like this but it may be an impossible dream in Current Year America.

Bernie praised Hugo Chavez. If Bernie had his druthers we’d be on the path towards surviving by eating zoo animals and garbage.

It’s actually pretty interesting to read about ol’ Hugos policies back when oil prices were sky high. They’d seize people’s vacation homes to give to homeless people. Result: no one maintains anything since it could be seized at any time.

Uh, they love the big black lesbians. That’s who bullies anyone with the temerity to question anything. It’s why they’re there in the first place.

There’s a big market, but they’re not going to college at all.

CEASE ALL MERRYMAKING!
You yourself explain what’s really happening: Hampshire was an unknown late-starting outlier.
Leftism is a societal engineering project of the maximally wealthy. You hear about blatantly unconstitutional gun control proposals because Michael Bloomberg, who has more money than God, wants you to hear about them, and he is neither running out of money or hatred for our Bill of Rights any time soon. Harvard is more important to the academic normalization of degeneracy than Nevahearda U and it’s so well endowed it doesn’t need tuition.
Blogging wittily and waiting for the other side to suffer a cardiac arrest as they beat the stuffing out of us is no strategy.

Glorious sun-lit Constitution-defending Hillsdale College, which offers several courses and materials online free, and the entirely online Prager U, which is neither a prayer nor a university.

On the other hand, Thomas Aquinas College, a traditional Catholic liberal arts college near Santa Barbara, has just opened a second campus in Massachusetts. Needless to say, blue hair and tattoos are not big there.

Sure, the most rigorous schools (and those with large endowments – a largely overlapping group) are not in danger. The article points out that while Hampshire is in a financial (and academic) death spiral, nearby Amherst is doing fine in attracting paying customers (and better qualified minorities that paying customers wish to have as decoration). But, once you get beyond the top names, it’s going to be dicey, especially when the total # of students drops – it’s going to be a game of reverse musical chairs, with more chairs than people, so someone is going to be left with empty chairs. Not all of these place have the kind of massive endowment that would enable them to withstand a drop in tuition revenue. Those “vigorous” academic standards are going to go by the wayside when they run out of paying white customers (Asians are not interested in these places to begin with) and become desperate to fill seats.

A degree from a TOP liberal arts school (e.g. a Swarthmore) is still a valuable commodity even if it doesn’t provide you with a marketable skill per se. But once you get below the top 20, the value of a liberal arts degree becomes really really questionable. That many places below the top 50 are going to close their doors when the demographic crisis hits is not in doubt. But I predict that even some of well known and long standing schools in the 20 to 50 rank are not going to make it either. Oberlin is an obvious candidate but there will be others as well.

For all I know, this is one of those collaborative lawsuits where the bureaucrats are secretly in favor of the suit and will “settle” by giving in to the demands.

This is definitely the way to bet. The long march of the Left through all the institutions of our society has left us with a civilization-wide agency problem.

Yeah, I’d say my sister is a conventional liberal, anti-Trump, but doesn’t make that her life’s work, married to a conservative, who likewise gets along with liberals. They throw good cocktail parties with people of all stripes invited, my brother-in-law an impeccable host, always making sure your glass is full.

And agreed, we’ve lost that to a degree with the next generation.

42% of whites age 18 to 24 attend college. Some of the 58% must include people who have already graduated. The rest must largely consist of whites in the left half of the IQ curve. In the right half, college (even it if is your local community college or a for profit vocational college) is almost universal nowadays.

Some of this doesn’t make sense. More students than ever are applying to college than they did a generation ago. The US has a bigger population of students who want to go to college, and there are more students applying to US colleges from overseas who can pay full freight. If places like Hampshire are suffering, it’s because they’re not attracting rich foreign students, or attracting minorities on paid scholarships (who are likely being cherry-picked by the better Ivys and liberals arts colleges), or they’re pricing themselves out of the common sense market.

Rich parents with a ditzy liberal kid can send that kid anywhere. In the days when Hampshire was cheap, they’d send their feckless kid to a place that wouldn’t stress the brat too much academically. But if Hamilton is now charging 70K full freight (and 280K for 4 years), it no longer looks like a cheap daycare for a dopey kid, and if you’re paying that kind of scratch, you’d like a school that’s cheaper. That’s means a state school, because almost no private schools are cheap any more.

One think I’ve noticed at one particular big state college in a ‘boom town’ in a ‘boom state.’ Bizarre stories about parents buying houses for their enrolled kid to live in. These people sure aren’t poor if they can cough up both tuition for their kid and buy another house at the same time. But what they’re doing is establishing in-state residency a year in advance for their out-of-state kid for the cheaper tuition rate, then they either sell the house at the end of the five years (and pocket a profit that offsets the cost of sending the kid there), or they rent out the house to other students for an income property. All in all, it means the rich parents end up getting an almost free education for their kid.

Well, these rich people do know how to make money. They didn’t get rich by being stupid.

A couple generations ago, rich parents weren’t necessarily well educated. Nowadays they are, and they know the value of what they’re getting for their money. Since the 60s, lots of people have been going to college.

Lots of truth to that.

In New England and the Midwest there used to be a liberal wing of the Republican Party. In Wisconsin, this wing was led by the La Follete family.

Often in the Midwest the second party wasn’t the Democrats, but some more local left wing party, such as the Socialist Party in Milwaukee and the Farm-Labor Party in Minnesota. The La Folletes sometimes ran with the Progressive Parry as well.

From around the 1940s to the early part of this century, the US had a big realignment of political parties. The Farm-Labor Party merged with the smaller Democratic Parry in Minnesota, which helped launch HHH’s career.

The anti-Joe McCarthy wing of the Wisconsin GOP left the party in the 1950s to form the Wisconsin Democratic Party. My local state senator, Fred Risser, was one of the original party switchers. He is the longest serving state legislator in US history and the only WW II vet in the US still in an elected position.

Risser’s father had been a Republican legislator.

The party switching really snowballed after Nixon’s Southern Strategy.

But it goes to show just how recent the changes are, that one of the very first party switchers is still in office, albeit well into his 90s.

Black lesbians are an economic dead end for a college. Most blacks come from poor families and will never pay for college themselves or be a donor after they graduate, and black lesbians don’t have kids who can be sent to a college. It makes no economic sense to educate a black lesbian from a college’s perspective. They are not part of, and will never be, a cog in the economic system that keeps all colleges afloat.

Lots of folks grow up in poor families and desire to acquire at least a middle class existence.

I recall a NSF study that said engineers were basically smart boys of the lower classes.

Can’t understand why people denigrate the community college system in Illinois; those that choose to be actual physically productive can do a lot worst.

Lots of people who “actually go to college to learn about truth and beauty and become a better, more enlightened person” soon discover they have to actually PRODUCE something that people will pay for, and go to community college.

Keeping misfits in business to insult us and try to brainwash our children, is not “a good cause.”

I’ll be glad to see so many of the people who hate us and call for our dispossession, lose their bullshit academic jobs.

This is how the Chinese currently rank the world’s universities:
http://www.shanghairanking.com/ARWU2019.html

It appears Russian and Eastern European universities are way, way low in the list.
Apparently these folks still haven’t recovered from Soviet times. Perhaps as the GloboHomo West goes down the Soviet rabbit hole, sooner or later the levels will converge tho…

They should seek those things in college. But first and foremost, most of us cannot afford to explore those finer points until and unless we are sure that we are much likelier to support ourselves decently after getting the degree.

In the real world, the main point for responsible non-wealthy students (as I was) has to be acquire marketable knowledge, habits, skills, and competencies.

I’d guess that people who are neither lefty white-hating / self-hating gender-fluid politically-intolerant freaks (“woke”) nor fundamentalist Christians, greatly outnumber both those groups COMBINED. It’s probably a good thing too.

Graduated from a very large, top 100 USNWR private school over a decade ago. Of course, in the Midwest the Big 10 schools have been a quarter Asian for some time.

But I visited my alma mater a year or two ago and was shocked to see that the Chinese plus Indian student population had gone from maybe two percent to at least 20%, maybe even 25%.

The small public and private schools I visit or pass through, in the Midwest, also do not seem to be experiencing a slow down.

What the hell are “culturally appropriated braids”? What kind of braids? Does that mean like Bo Derek style cornrows?

Instead they are getting eaten alive and every day confronted with the fact that they really don’t have what it takes to be there.

When black students are staging an angry demonstration at their university, as in the Halloween brouhaha at Yale a few years ago, they’ll say things like, “You make us feel that we don’t belong here!”

That’s projection. They know they don’t belong there.

From the article:

If the economic troubles of elite liberal arts institutions have you mock-playing an air violin, consider the consequences. For one, there’ll be fiercer competition for spots at the most prestigious schools — a sport already so gruesome, actress Felicity Huffman is doing jail time for gaming it. For another, there will be fewer opportunities for low-income students who rely on generous financial aid packages at small liberal arts colleges as one of the few tickets into the upper class.

So low-income students won’t suffer the opportunity cost of a wasted four (or more) years: good result.

And they won’t be tricked into thinking they should jump in one generation from the lower class to the upper class. Instead they’ll get right to work, or go to a trade school, and shoot for entering the middle class: good result.

But all of this “thinking about the future” is moot, given the looming demographic and fiat money destruction in store for us. Ummm… sorry about that last part! I would say I’m in a dark mood, but that would be racist.

From your description of the alumni, I’m almost certain we went to the same school. Did they show a keen interest in an uncommon sport? My guess is that we attended at least one year together. Anyway, although I have some nice memories of the place, I also wouldn’t send my children there. My fondest memory of the place is probably the pizza.

Tough market in Wisconsin.

For second class of Bucky’s Tuition Promise students, shock and relief at free tuition

October 28, 2019 By Doug Erickson For news media

Kaya Halverson first heard about Bucky’s Tuition Promise as a junior at Green Bay East High School. She assumed there was a catch.

“Honestly, it seemed too good to be true,” she says.

So she researched it, and researched it some more. She learned that as a Wisconsin high school student whose parents earned less than the state’s median income, she qualified for free tuition at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

No fine print. No catch.

“I was beyond excited,” says Halverson, a UW–Madison freshman. “It’s the reason I applied to UW–Madison, and it’s the reason I’m here today.”

Halverson is one of 848 new students this fall benefiting from Bucky’s Tuition Promise, now in its second year. Last fall, the first group of students covered by the pledge — 796 of them —arrived on campus.

https://news.wisc.edu/for-second-class-of-buckys-tuition-promise-students-shock-and-relief-at-free-tuition/

Hampshire was founded in 1970 to be a hippy college so it doesn’t have a big endowment nor beautiful buildings like older liberal arts colleges often do. Also, I’m guessing that Tiger Moms are allergic to it.

Indeed. Tiger Mothers prefer campuses that are at least 100 years old and look like this

In contrast, campuses like this repel them.Too raw,too new, too too obviously lacking in prestige:

Not really. I have two cousins who graduated near the top of their class, now 22 and 19. One already had her own business and took/is taking some business classes at a local two-year and the other was already working part-time as a mechanic and I think he’s now in some John Deere engine repair program.

I’d say if you can avoid it these days it would be a good idea. My twins will probably go because they’ll be .1 percentile, but I won’t be making them nor saving up to pay for it, that’s for damn sure.

The 2nd from the top building at Hampshire is not bad as brutalist structures go. The brick warms it a bit and the massive pillars create some interest.

The last building is horrible. It looks like either an elementary school from the 70s or a factory from the 40s. Apparently the picture was taken to illustrate that Hampshire was now flying the American flag again – there was a point where the SJWs made them stop flying it when Trump was elected. But then they came under pressure from veteran’s groups, etc. and they reverse their decision after a few weeks.

(Asians are not interested in these places to begin with)

Courtesy the Digest of Education Statistics, 2016.

Orientals and East Indians account for about 6.5% of total fall enrollment in post-secondary institutions. They account for 6.2% of the enrollment at private post-secondary institutions.

The Digest doesn’t compile data on the distribution of racial categories between research and teaching institutions, but you can look at a smattering of each to get an idea:

Princeton: 16% Oriental &c.
Stanford: 16.5%
Dartmouth: 13.3%
Washington in St. Louis: 12.8%
Georgetown: 8%
University of Rochester: 8.5%
Tulane: 3%
Syracuse: 8%
GW: 7.3%
Brigham Young: 3.4%
Loyola of Chicago: 10.4%
Illinois Institute of Technology: 7%

Now:

Williams College: 12.8%
Haverford: 9.9%
Harvey Mudd: 19.4%
Kenyon: 3.6%
Lafayette: 6%
Trinity [Connecticut]: 3.9%
Bard: 5.5%
Hobart: 3.4%
St. John’s [Santa Fe}: 2.2%
Ursinus: 4.4%
Southwestern [Georgetown, Tx]: 3.3%
Elizabethtown: 3.2%

This Tiger had to put up with my fill of nonsense and then some on a campus that looks just like that first picture.

Don’t think Tiger Moms will be fooled much longer.

Not like this:

Does anybody in America actually go to college to learn about truth and beauty and become a better, more enlightened person?

Why would you look for any of those things at an American college or University?

That would be my guess.

Anyone who has a daughter who has been involved in team sports knows that occasionally some or all the girls on a team will fix their hair in a certain hair style. If the entire team has spent time fixing up their hair in a certain way, they would not take it well if someone demanded they all change their hair styles. Especially if it took a long time to prepare.

Once I saw a game where the officials asked the team coaches and captains to come out before the game. Pretty standard. But one of the captains was fixing another girl’s hair, so the pre game introductions were delayed a few seconds.

Yes, this proves my point. Asians are overrepresented at the strong schools like Williams (endowment $2.6 billion) and Haverford that will likely survive the crunch and underrepresented at the weaker schools like Elizabethtown (endowment $80 million – this is not even the catering budget for the Harvard endowment ) that probably won’t.

I would bet that using Asian enrollment % as a metric for “likely to be open in 10 years” would work as well as size of endowment.

When black students are staging an angry demonstration at their university, as in the Halloween brouhaha at Yale a few years ago, they’ll say things like, “You make us feel that we don’t belong here!”

Quit wasting time screaming at people on the fucking quad and go do your chemistry homework!

Really now…..was that so hard?

This is from datausa

Swarthmore College has an endowment valued at nearly $1.85B, as of the end of the 2015 fiscal year. The return on its endowment was of $41.5M (2.25%), compared to the 2.13% average return ($717k on $33.6M) across all Baccalaureate Colleges.

In 2015, Swarthmore College had a total expenditure of $138M. Of that $138M, they spent $61.3M on salaries and $138M (sic) on benefits.

Swarthmore College employs 92 Professors, 83 Assistant professors, and 40 Associate professors. Most academics at Swarthmore College are Male Professors (52), Male Assistant professors(43), and Female Professors (40).

The most common positions for non-instructional staff at Swarthmore College are: Service, with 133 employees, Management, with 102 employees, and Librarians, Curators, Archivists, and Academic Affairs and Other Education Services with 87 employees.

1.85 billion endowment strikes me as pretty crazy.

As Steve alludes to, the death of Boomers and the bowing of our culture to feminism has shrunk the number of college attendees, despite women today being assumed to go to college.

By not having a culture that prioritizes childbearing, we get fewer children. Israel and Hungary are doing it right, we are doing it wrong.

That, and baby-klling—-ahem, abortion—has destroyed millions more potential college applicants.

When Toys R Us announced bankruptcy, someone found out they had supported planned parenthood, and put together a witty, black-humored meme where it showed the executives announcing their plan to donate to the abortion factory, only to realize they were killing off their customers.

Women should be taught to marry young and have as many children then, and then do college (if they want) after the last kid is out the door. Oh, and that Gosnelling children is evil and wrong.

My ex-wife went to Amherst, while her parents paid the full tuition–35 years ago. Something that similarly situated middle class parents today could not justify–much less afford–today.

Another feature of white privilege: pay full sticker-price tuition so non-whites get a discount.

Yes, this proves my point.

No, it refutes your point. It’s just that, being a lawyer, you lie a lot and are bad with numbers. What it demonstrates is that interest in these institutions is variable among Orientals &c, not non-existent.

At College of New Rochelle in suburban NY, the strategy was to simply hide mounting losses and unpaid taxes for several years, then collapse and die last year when the shortfall, fraud and mismanagement came to light. They are certainly one canary in this college-bubble coalmine.

CNR was a formerly all-female, Ursuline Order school that finally admitted a few men, and more significantly recruited many foreign students. But even a well-regarded nursing program (along with the usual lib arts filler) couldn’t save it.

In my work I talked with many CNR students and alums. They would often say it was a school their parents could feel safe and secure about sending them to.

Suffer in the sense that they won’t have the opportunity to take out loans that will be an anchor around their neck. The narrative is that college is good for everyone, but it’s long past time for people with a platform to point out all the jobs that can be done with an apprenticeship or 2 year certificate that pay well and don’t require a massive amount of debt.

They’ve been told that they are exceptional and have earned their way in. When they start to struggle, it’s a lot easier on the ego to buy into the narrative (often pushed by their own educators/administrators) that malign forces are working against them rather than to look in the mirror and admit that you’re in over your head. The school certainly isn’t going to tell them that.

No it just proves that you literal minded and incapable of understanding verbal nuance and exaggeration for effect. When I said that “Asians are not interested” I didn’t mean that ZERO Asians are interested. But when Hampshire is 2.5% Asian (vs 43% Asian at Caltech) I think it’s fair to say that Asians are not interested in mediocre liberal arts schools, certainly not enough to rescue them when whites go off the demographic cliff.

Also you’re not supposed to say Orientals any more.

I think Hampshire is the thin end of the wedge. I’m all over this story. My wife worked at Hampshire in the 90s, and moved across the Connecticut to a more prestigious college 20 years ago. When this broke neither of us were surprised. For obvious reasons my wife has more affection for the place than I do; I always thought it was a repository for the spoiled annoying, spawn of rich SJWs. I see no scenario where it doesn’t close.

Our two younger boys went to Midwestern liberal arts schools (In OH and WI, respectively) as recruited lax players . Both their schools are old New England- y type places, with decent brand names, but are stuffed to the gills with Wokeness. The Wisconsin school is way worse though- protests, fake hate crimes, the whole deal. There’s a good chance that neither school will be around to host their 20 year reunions.

The Woke view is that not only should all NAMs attend college, they should attend for free and all existing student loans to NAMs should be forgiven. The current Dem candidates are competing with each other as to who can put the most gibmedats in their platform and free college is high on their list.

America used to have a variety of idiosyncratic colleges and universities with unique traditions and atmospheres. Accepting federal funding has created an interchangeable mono- campus.

Pick any two colleges, public or private, small or large, urban or rural, any state at random and the feel on campus is identical. The talking points, the posters on the pin boards, fliers are now indistinguishable.

So much is lost.

No it just proves that you literal minded and incapable of understanding verbal nuance and exaggeration for effect.

Except that you aren’t employing decorative or illustrative language. And it’s not going to take you any more effort to say, “Chinese are less interested in teaching institutions than research institutions”, which has the merit of being true.

Could be ideal housing for struggling, underemployed millennials. Keep the dorms, dining halls and gym, but burn down the classrooms, labs and library.

It could also work for the crowd of impoverished boomers we’ll get after the next financial collapse, but only if all facilities are fully ADA compliant. And even then the crowds of mobility scooters at the ramps might get out of hand.

how would you teach critical thinking?

I suppose everything comes around to politics, but it helps to keep things technical: study why the Russian army performed so poorly circa WWI compared to other powers; why was the US able to build the Panama canal where France could not.

Today someone stands up and announces that Harriet Tubman was a great person, and students clap until the bell rings.

I’m sorry, but you’re not permitted to use the verb “to transition” outside of certain, limited contexts. Re-write your comment, or it will be deleted, and you can expect a visit form hate crime investigators.

ROFL. And paid troll Art Deco loses again.

Man, don’t you commies ever get sick of getting pwned so badly?

P.S. “Orientals”, eh? RACIST! MR. BROCK IS GOING TO FIRE YOU FOR HATE SPEECH!!!

Not here. Not yet.

God willing not ever.

Let them come.

But if their kid can get in there, he can likely also get into the University of Florida, which in addition to being way cheaper, is also better in many things, such as engineering and the hard sciences.

Keep in mind, a lot of these kids don’t have the IQ to handle the hard sciences. It’s a big reason why so many parents/schools are so cagey about IQ. What are you supposed to do if your middle-upper class and your 3rd kid has a 95 IQ?

-You hook him/her up to the social sciences.

He must give easy As, because students choose courses based on nothing else. “Teaching the subject straightforwardly” is hardly a criterion. If you believe it is, then you don’t know college students.

There are vanishingly few Asians attending Miami Dade College, the largest community college in the country.

The Kendall campus, a masterpiece of late ’60s/early ’70s Brutalist design, sprawls across 185 acres:

The centaur has no visible genitalia:

Just admit you’re having a weird grammar Nazi freakout and move on already. If you were right, then we can’t say things like “Blacks are not interested in solving differential equations” anymore!

Don’t tell me how to write and I won’t tell you how to be a ‘sperg.

Nitpicking, but Russia’s WWI military record was mixed. The Brusilov Offensive of 1916 was a pretty good display of proto-blitzkrieg at work to counterbalance debacles like Tannenberg or the Masurian Lakes earlier in the war. They completely broke the Austro-Hungarian army’s back. They weren’t as skilled as the Germans, but nobody was: it was why the German army (in many ways, Germany was far more formidable in WWI than they were in WWII) could only be kept in check with a multi-front war. They weren’t the most militarily skilled power, which was to be expected: despite Russia’s immense, economic progress in the final decades of Romanov rule, they were still making up for a late start on the Industrial Revolution, and it showed. Literacy was still a massive issue in the Tsarist ranks. These memories would lead the Wehrmacht to massively underestimate the Red Army during the next war, not fully appreciating how much things had changed. But neither did they have the worst showing of the bunch.

But by 1916, it was too late. Durnovo’s prophecy that the Tsarist regime as it stood simply could not survive another war, no matter how skilled the Ohkrana was in keeping left-wing terrorists in a perpetual state of paranoia-born infighting and meltdown, was proving true. A full year before 1917, there were already Islamic-inspired uprisings breaking out in Central Asia that it would take the Bolsheviks-using tanks, planes, and general massacres of the locals-a decade to fully quash.

I used to teach remedial college students. Most colleges have a program like this.

To call them mediocre is generous. Some students were what we used to call retarded. They could never write a coherent sentence or add two whole numbers. It’s boggles the brain what colleges think they will do with such students. In another time or place a purpose is found for such people that doesn’t entail the bitter frustration they experience in college classes.

All of them received federal financial aid. There’s gold in them hills.

I wonder if the Harvards and Yales of America know that these smaller colleges can’t sustain wokeness, and are deliberately pushing it to put them out of business. Sort of like regulatory capture for academia.

Most of it is pure left-singularity, no doubt, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find a smidge of machiavellianism in there.

There are a lot of girls that have the IQ to do the hard sciences but not the interest. They need human interaction and would go nuts if they were locked up in a lab looking at a microscope all day. Conversely, there are a lot of Asians who have the IQ to do something like psychiatry but not the talent for human interaction but yet they end up doing it anyway. Of course psychiatry nowadays is more about writing ‘scrips than about talking so maybe they are not wrong.

Believe it or not, IQ 95 people don’t have to switch to sociology or such nowadays. Upper middle class kids who are “learning disabled” (cough IQ 95) get all sorts of “extra help” and “untimed testing”, etc. all the way thru med school – there is no point at which the schools are not required to make “special accommodations” for the “disabled”.

Your not, I was there only a few years ago. (Though, the Library was superb.)

You have to keep in mind colleges/universities are High School 2.0. It just offers more freedom like comparing a jail to a halfway house. You might have some superb discussions occasionally, but that can be settled at a fraction of the cost at UNZ. The bar near the college has better discussions than the college itself. Students (quite literally) exist for the college, not the other way around. People attend just from family pressure and federal law. (If you hire a white person with only a High School degree over a black woman with a college degree (even if its Women’s Studies) that’s a lawsuit.) So college is nearly a complete (but necessary) loss. The traditional reasons for attending are moot because:

1) The job market is horrific. (A lot of people can’t retire so you just wait.)

2) Student loans are financially castrating.

3) The building of social networks are pointless, due to reasons 1 & 2.

4) Even picking up hot girls is a challenge. There’s (almost) always a convent of fat lesbian blimps flying around keeping a eye out for “toxic masculinity.” I graduated soon after the 2013 “Great Awokening” but they were building up before that. They were priced out of the sexual marketplace and trying to improvise price controls.

Not ‘denigrating’ the system. Pointing out it hoovers up large masses of people who never earn a degree or certificate. As in 70% of those who matriculate.

Thanks. What fantastically awful students.

It could also work for the crowd of impoverished boomers we’ll get after the next financial collapse, but only if all facilities are fully ADA compliant. And even then the crowds of mobility scooters at the ramps might get out of hand.

I don’t think that’s a complete answer. Yes, the hard sciences are harder to fake than the liberal arts but you notice that most of our leadership class doesn’t have a technical background (nor do they necessarily make better leaders if they do).

The French BTW are formidable engineers. Most French stuff tends to stay in France so we are not exposed to it but it is usually pretty good and within a hair of being world class. If you look at all of the major technical developments of the modern age – the automobile, the airplane, nuclear power, etc., the French were always right up there in the 1st rank of early adopters if not necessarily #1.

The French succeeded in building the Suez Canal. Their main reason for failure in Panama was failure to control mosquitoes resulting in yellow fever and malaria. By the time of the American attempt, tropical diseases and the importance of mosquito control were better understood due to the work of Finlay and Walter Reed.

This is probably the weak corollary to Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy….

In any institution in which SJWarriorship is allowed to be taken seriously, BOTHERING will increase without bounds until anyone capable of maintaining the institution or having an interesting in keeping the institution liveable has left.

“We’re skipping Boston, it’s not a big college town.” Ian Faith (Spinal Tap, 1984)

When Gretas attack!

Also, Austrian economics.

all the way thru med school

But wouldn’t they eventually get grilled by medical malpractice?

That might be a good Sailer article. To see if anyone’s been excepted from malpractice due to a doctor’s diversity level.

A good topic today about Hampshire.

My own alma mater is a small, highly selective private university with a huge endowment. In the past two decades it has become infected with East Coast presidents and administrators who want to replicate the leftist style universities where they formerly worked. Don’t give a damn about the locals.

They just announced creation of a “black studies” type program, though very few blacks attend (the few who do are mostly athletes, but most are otherwise qualified). It is now nearly half Asian due to the remaining selectivity for admissions. I probably wouldn’t be admitted today regardless of my qualifications.

On my “to do” list at the next opportunity is to remove this place as a residual beneficiary in my will. It is sad to see them catch SJW disease and publicly boast about Wokeness. Their PC persecution of anyone publicly dissenting from neo communism is harsh. Free speech is outlawed, etc. So they can go to hell and let nature take its course.

There’s a letter from a Yale Law alum or professor that was written to the Yale Law dean in the 60s objecting to affirmative action. He predicted that black students admitted on the basis of their race would feel overwhelmed and would be behind academically. However instead of acknowledging that they’d seek to make their mark through other methods, via acting out and protesting.

One of my kids got a full scholarship to State U, and that is the only kid to go there.

One of my kids went to a small college for engineering. It was only a few thousand a year more than State U at most. However, it usually takes 5 years to graduate State U in engineering; he took 4 years at the private college. This saves tuition money and he was paying back his student loans instead of racking up more loans after graduation.

Another kid is at a moderately big name school in Boston. The grants make the school a few thousand a year cheaper than State U.

Moral: if you are from a middle class or working class family, it is often more cost effective to go to a seemingly expensive private college than State U.

I don’t think you get how it works these days. The kids paying full price are all Asian foreign nationals. They’re subsidizing people of all races, who are US citizens.

I’m up for it.

“Many parents here, when they realize that the deck is seriously stacked against their kids ever getting into big name US schools, suddenly change tack entirely, and enroll them in community colleges with easy junior-year transfer to a state school. This saves loads of money, and the kid still ends up with a recognizable university degree on his or her resume.”

Former boss of mine did this in the early 90’s Two years at Chabot College in Hayward with an easy transition to UC Berkeley for his Chemical Engineering degree!

Nobody ever asks him if he attended all four years!

The Kendall campus, a masterpiece of late ’60s/early ’70s Brutalist design, sprawls across 185 acres:

Yeesh. Talk about soul-crushing architecture. Get me some Beaux-Arts, stat!

Tucker Carlson on Fox News had a segment a few nights ago featuring much of what you post. He did indicate that filing bankruptcy does not cancel the student loan debt. Apparently it would take an act of Congress to change the law.

(Chuckles Sovietly)

“Traditional Catholic”? Has T.A. College hired all nine remaining heterosexual Catholic priests to teach?

Why did you write “mal sehen”? It is colloquial German, and almost none of the people who comment here know even text-book German.

Is it perhaps also a Yiddishism?

Oberlin. Couldn’t happen to nicer people. The faculty and administrators there are kinda, well, deplorable to me.

I’m more focused on any state universities that might close down. They face the same financial difficulties as small private schools but may or may not have Uncle Sam to bail them out. Some such schools are in ideal real estate zones. If you move fast enough during another great recession, you might be able to buy some land for pennies on the dollar.

beard-shaming in the Amish competitive quilting circuit

this made me giggle.

An aerial view:

The college offers two years (60 credits) of free tuition to any graduate of the Miami-Dade school system with a GPA of 3.0 or higher:
https://www.mdc.edu/financialaid/scholarships/american-dream.aspx

At this point, despite all of Russia’s problems and flaws, there’s a changing calculus when we compare Russian culture to “Western” culture. We’d probably feel more comfortable sending one of our children to a Russian university than most of the indoctrinating higher-“ranked” university in Soviet America.

Parents buying houses for the kids to live in and keeping it for a rental property is fairly common. Financially it’s a good deal. Your kid can live off the rents instead of paying dorm fees to live 3 in a 9 by 12 room with no closets and get fat on the high carb low protein dorm food.

College towns are a great place for rental properties. You need a gardening service if it has a garden of any kind as your kid probably won’t take care of it and certainly the other tenants won’t. And of course, the parents sign the leases always. Best to find a local landlord attorney as soon as you buy the property.

There are a few decent property management companies. If things go south, sell.

No.

In the old days student loans could be discharged with bankruptcy. The problem was, a few students were in a situation where they suddenly had massive debt, no assets, and just a starting salary. So there was a great incentive to declare Chapter 13 bankruptcy.

Well, the banks are too powerful to allow that to happen. The banks first got Congress, led by Delaware Senator Biden, to completely stop bankruptcy for student loans. Then, the banks got Congress to make Chapter 13 bankruptcy much harder.

Not long after the second of these changes, the banks went completely nuts with bad loans that were hard to pay off. Then the recession happened. Oops!

Notice sometime that Elizabeth Warren absolutely despises Joe Biden over his role in the student loan debt situation. Whatever you think about Ms. Warren, it kind of goes to show what happens when corrupt politicians allow a problem to get worse because the problem profits their donors.

I see no scenario where it doesn’t close.

Their current freshman class consists of 12 students so they are as good as closed already. They are just trying to come up with some graceful exit or rescue plan such as a merger or a generous donor, although I’m not sure that one exists. They have some high profile alums but they are mostly in the arts with no billionaires so I doubt that they are going to come up with any massive donations. Big donors love winners anyway. Rich people who never went to Harvard give money to Harvard, which really doesn’t need the money, because they want to be associated with a winning brand.

It’s nothing if not brutal:

Earlier this year, the adjuncts formed a union. The longtime president retired a few months ago and they’re having trouble finding a suitable replacement.

Architecturally, the University of Miami is a mixed bag. It has some nice landscaping, though.

All of me, body and soul, was being crushed by those terrifying photos. I literally felt the breath being squeezed out of me.

So thanks for the alma mater.

Then the Harvard endowment of $40 billion is REALLY crazy.

A lot of the smaller schools have endowments under $100 million, which means they are pretty much toast in the next baby bust.

I didn’t actually think it was. Just wondered why you understood it.
I suppose the answer is that all cultured people of central European background know know what their lingua franca is and learn enough of it to get by.

Student loans could be discharged in bankruptcy until about 2005. Then the banks that made the loans lobbied congress to change the law.

There’s some hardship exceptions. If You’re totally permanently disabled and a single mom with 3 kids on welfare type person.

Even picking up hot girls is a challenge. There’s (almost) always a convent of fat lesbian blimps flying around keeping a eye out for “toxic masculinity.”

Isn’t this where the Greek system comes in? Good sororities full of hot girls don’t let in the blimps, its bad for their brand.

Doctors have money but no time unless they get a 9 to 5 specialty, and residencies for those are scarce goods.

Engineers likewise, until they are at a certain point where they go management or wind up chasing work or changing careers. Especially EE/CS types.

The education establishment has caught on to that maneuver. They apparently made transferring over a real pain even within interstate schools. Good luck trying to transfer quarter credits to semester credits. I believe state schools still favor the quarter system while private schools favor semester.

That’s not the case in this state. Many states do mandate easy transfer of CC credits. I think most states are on the semester systems. Do you mean intrastate instead of interstate? I advise students to take all remedial and general education classes at their local CC’s before coming to big state U.

The French are nearly as good as the Germans at designing stuff, as are the Italians. Making it, selling it, supporting it, not so much.

Drug rehab clinics are in short supply.

There was an anonymous call-in to a radio program dedicated to awful racism (which I hate) describing almost exactly this situation: The caller can’t ever study because black roommates are partying all night. One night, there’s no other place to go and no way to put off studying or sleeping. Angrily, he summons the [guy who’s in charge of a floor at a dorm]. The [guy] talks to both “sides” in the dispute of whether or not studying and rest should take place at a college. Then the [guy] sits the caller down and explains to his white ass that staying up all night frontporching with friends is his roommate’s culture, you know, just like how a Jewish student’s dietary restrictions and special holidays should be accommodated.
It is at this point that, in real life, a black and white photograph of a bleak-faced veteran soldier in a dirty fighting hole can be seen fading in over the full-color face of our protagonist.