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I was just thinking this. Debating has lost a lot of legitimacy from things like this https://www.washingtontimes.co... Sadly there is no intellect left, just party line non-sense. The non-sense portion was proved here https://www.chronicle.com/arti... I get that not all colleges or professors are this way but when it's given a pass it tarnishes them all.

Much of the increase has been traced to sinecure positions, a word coming from the old school church where the church created paid positions "without care" to the core mission of soul saving. I.e. graft.

I think you have no idea what universities spend their money on because the data doesn't support your position at all. Growth in tenured positions has been falling and salaries of professors barely keep pace with inflation in recent years. There are reasons for increasing college costs but not the ones you seem to believe.

Here, it is without care to the core mission of teaching.

What makes you think the core mission of every university is teaching? For some that is certainly true but it's definitely not true for a lot of big research universities. The teaching is almost just a little side hustle for them and only accounts for about 30% of costs. Universities are a lot more than some classrooms and blackboards.

Congress can stop these increases overnight by refusing to guarantee any loans for universities that increase spending more than inflation.

That's an idiotic idea for reasons almost too numerous to enumerate. I don't think you understand what inflation is. The rate of inflation has nothing to do with what causes university costs to increase or decrease nor is it a useful benchmark in most cases. There are perfectly legitimate reasons to increase costs more than the rate of inflation, some of which are not under the control of the university.

If you bother to look at the data as a whole instead of just state spending per student, you'll see that state spending has been increasing. A more detailed analysis even shows that the cost increases that are being charged to students to offset this, exceed the drop in per student spending.

What's been happening is that more and more people are going to college and it's got to the point where a lot of them shouldn't be. Here's one university where it was reported that 14% of students were failing an intermediate algebra course, which is for people who can't even get into the first 100-level math course.

You're not going to fix the problems with education by throwing even more money at it and the current financial model that gives loans to anyone who wants them regardless of likelihood of succeeding or the likelihood of being able to pay that loan back.

Oh, Jeez! Really!?

https://www.chronicle.com/arti...

* someone wanted to demonstrate they could get the press to print anything, no matter how ridiculous.

Here's an article about a series of academic-journal hoaxes which were trying to get printed in the "the best journals in the relevant fields." --- Is Huge Publishing Hoax 'Hilarious and Delightful' or an Ugly Example of Dishonesty and Bad Faith?

Of the 20, seven papers were accepted, four were published online, and three were in process when the authors [stopped.]

"It could be all of the above. But really, the story is bullshit." -- I complete agree with you here.

In general I'd agree, but there are people out there who have nothing better to do with their lives and some tickle in their brain or bug up their ass that leads them to devote as much of their time as possible to wasting your time or making you miserable. Here's but one example of countless many.

If you're blocking someone just because they disagree with you or aren't validating your belief structure, I'd say that kind of makes you a bit of a dink. If someone's just endlessly spamming you, why devote your attention to any of it?

Data here: https://collegecompletion.chro...

"Sexual harassment" isn't wrong because of a campaign some feminists ran in the 70s. It's wrong because it's harassment, it's wrong because the women in the Atari offices were being treated primarily as objects of sexual gratification instead of full human beings.

But the vast majority of people did not considered it to be harassment at the time. In fact, the definition that you appear to be using dates back, at most, to 6 or 7 years ago, when the US Education Department released its guidance letters. These letter redefined "sexual harassment" and a "hostile environment". Therefore, the defintion that you are using is very new.

By the way, your statement that "women in the Atari offices were being treated primarily as objects of sexual gratification instead of full human beings." is clearly false. The women were primarily employed to perform various work functions. I do not deny that many of the women may have been employed, in part , for their sexual attractiveness, but you seem to be trying to exagerate this fact and to reimagine the women as something like sex slaves.

For example, check out the work of Moon Duchin and the Matrix Geometry and Gerrymandering Group at Tufts: http://sites.tufts.edu/gerryma... Chronicle of Higher Ed profile: https://www.chronicle.com/arti... And other mathematicians also: http://www.ams.org/publication...

it fail at professional athlete then can make the college team and get free schooling.

But fail at becoming an tenured professor end up on food stamps with big loans over your head.

http://www.chronicle.com/artic...

Also seems silly to talk about grad students are disappearing when the GOP is proposing to tax them into oblivion.

In grad school, I got paid a stipend of about $25k a year. There was also $25k my school required in "tuition" from my mentor's federal grants. The proposals coming out of the "We love the poorly educated" party would have me paying taxes as if I owed $50k.

Grad students are cheap labor that America's cutting edge science depends on for it's preeminence. It's already priced out of reach for way too many bright minds. People working to put themselves through college likely can't take the required time to volunteer in a lab, a prerequisite to get into grad school. By making a STEM degree so costly AND tightening the screws on student loans, republicans are going to ensure those foreign PhD students stay overseas and only wealthy kids get their PhD.

I guess it balances out though. Sure, we won't do any science in the next ten years, nor will we keep ahead of everyone else in terms of science, but at least trust fund kids will be able to inherit more of their parents' wealth.

http://www.chronicle.com/artic...

http://www.chronicle.com/inter...

No, you would not. Stop with the absolutism.

That's your problem, isn't it? You're the absolutist here.

Consistently and repetitively. It leads to mendacity, myopia, and other negative qualities that only heighten your incompetence and ineffectiveness.

Not every part of government gets equal resources and funding nor identical increases/decreases in them. If anything, being able to devote more resources to effective enforcement due to reductions in government spending in other areas plus a reduction in duplicative bureaucracy and the red-tape they engender would mean *more* criminals are caught quicker, and with lower overall costs.

Evidence shows otherwise, that effective enforcement requires redundancy and thoroughness. What happens with weak government, is that the criminals are not caught, and people's expenses become higher and more burdensome.

Now, that program to fund studies that put shrimp on tiny treadmills? Yeah, we can much better use that money elsewhere. Like government oversight and ethics enforcement. (I know, the shrimp-study is old, but it gets the point across and I don't have time to search for the latest ridiculous gov. program that you know are out there in droves)

We know you believe it, but that's because you worship William Proxmire, but unfortunately, it turned out that his Golden Fleece awards ended up being bogus crap as he ranted at things he didn't understand. Just like the shrimp treadmill which was part of an overall research program about a major industry.

But mysteriously, mysteriously, you ignore that...

Which again, shows your incompetence. You should have spent the time to look up something that you haven't already been refuted on your lies about it. You'd probably still be wrong, but at least it wouldn't be trivial to catch you on it.

For example, see the following video produced by The Chronicle Of Higher Education.

http://www.chronicle.com/article/Ask-Me-What-LGBTQ-Students/232797

Really ? It took me all of thirty seconds to find this: http://www.chronicle.com/blogs...

1000 CPU's isn't even a rack. It's not even enough to handle a pittance of an Internet service.

WhatsApp is hardly my definition of a "pittance". 140 million concurrent connections on 800 servers, mostly dual-socket Ivy Bridge (40 threads each). That's 1600 CPUs and definitely more than twice a pittance. Contents of all that traffic is another story, a few precious needles embedded in even more of a pittance plague than our Slashdot exchange here.

For the quasi mathematicians among us, the size of the Go search space is completely irrelevant, as chess already exceeds direct search by repeatedly told (but generally uncomprehended) orders of magnitude. What makes chess different that Go is that a pruning gradient was far easier to construct, with material advantage acting as a New York phone book booster seat (they still had those then).

The search gradient in Go is far more subtle, but whatever it might be it didn't escape the neural networks for very long once they became any good. A really good article on this is The Believers by Paul Voosen, but it's moved behind a subscriber paywall since I last accessed it.

Here's a snippet for flavour:

These neural nets were little different from what existed in the 1980s. This was simple supervised learning. It didn't even require Hinton's 2006 breakthrough. It just turned out that no other algorithm scaled up like these nets. "Retrospectively, it was a just a question of the amount of data and the amount of computations," Hinton says.

FIRE does take a lot of those cases, but yeah your post is pretty ignorant and downright incorrect. Let me list a few: 1) Defending a self-described socialist - http://web.archive.org/web/200...
2) Student suspended for reading a book from school library on the downfall of hte KKK - http://www.thefire.org/article...
3) Defending a student who'd been unilaterally expelled over a joke - http://chronicle.com/article/F...
4) Defending an atheist college professor - http://insidehighered.com/news...
5) Calling out Depaul for not recognizing a pro-marijauna group - http://thefire.org/article/123...
6) FIRE calls out university for denying an LGBT group school recognition - https://www.thefire.org/fire-l...

I can go on if you want. Lots of these cases do seem skewed toward benefitting white males, but if you look at the actual cases well you'd see why. Lots of the decisions they draw FIRE's ire are fucking stupid, short-sighted, and somehow scraped their way out of a poorly run administration meeting.

Feminist Majority Foundation
Advocates for Youth
American Association of University Women
Association of Reproductive Health Professionals
Black Womenâ€(TM)s Blueprint
Black Womenâ€(TM)s Health Imperative
Center for Partnership Studies
Center for Women Policy Studies
Champion Women
Clearinghouse on Womenâ€(TM)s Issues
Digital Sisters/Sistas
End Rape on Campus
GLSEN
Hollaback!
Human Rights Campaign
Institute for Science and Human Values
Jewish Women International
Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights
Legal Momentum
Media Equity Collaborative
Muslim Advocates
National Alliance for Partnerships in Equity
National Black Justice Coalition
National Center for Lesbian Rights
National Coalition Against Domestic Violence
National Council of Jewish Women
National Council of Womenâ€(TM)s Organizations
National Disability Rights Network
National Domestic Violence Hotline
National LGBTQ Taskforce
National Organization for Women
National Womenâ€(TM)s Law Center
SPARK Movement
SurvJustice
The Andrew Goodman Foundation
Turning Anger into Change
UltraViolet
WMC Speech Project
Womenâ€(TM)s Media Center
YWCA USA

Local Organizations
Atlanta Women for Equality
Collective Action for Safe Spaces
DC Coalition Against Domestic Violence
DC Rape Crisis Center
Democratic Womenâ€(TM)s Club of Northeast Broward
Empowerment Center â€" Maryland
Lincoln County Oregon Democratic Central Committee
National Organization for Women â€" Akron Area, Ohio Chapter
National Organization for Women â€" Beaver Valley, Pennsylvania Chapter
National Organization for Women â€" Boulder, Colorado Chapter
National Organization for Women â€" Brevard, Florida Chapter
National Organization for Women â€" Central Oregon Coast Chapter
National Organization for Women â€" Florida Chapter
National Organization for Women â€" Greater Orlando, Florida Chapter
National Organization for Women â€" Indiana Chapter
National Organization for Women â€" Maryland Chapter
National Organization for Women â€" Middlesex County, New Jersey Chapter
National Organization for Women â€" Ni-Ta-Nee, Pennsylvania Chapter
National Organization for Women â€" Oregon Chapter
National Organization for Women â€" Palm Beach County, Florida Chapter
National Organization for Women â€" Pennsylvania Chapter
National Organization for Women â€" Rhode Island Chapter
National Organization for Women â€" Shore Area, New Jersey Chapter
National Organization for Women â€" Tacoma, Washington Chapter
National Organization for Women â€" Tampa, Florida Chapter
National Organization for Women â€" Thurston County, Washington Chapter
National Organization for Women â€" Virginia Chapter
National Organization for Women â€" Washington Chapter
National Organization for Women â€" Washington, DC Chapter
Network for Victim Recovery of D.C.
PFLAG Oregon Central Coast
Womenâ€(TM)s Production Network (Florida)

That is not accurate. The Washington Post has a better article which links to the complaint, at http://chronicle.com/items/biz...

Even in the area of extracurricular activities, contrary to the stereotype, there are no data to
indicate that Asian-American students are doing less. As cited by Students for Fair Admissions
Inc. in their complaint against Harvard University, xv "Studies also have shown that high-
achieving Asian-American students are equally, if not more, qualified than other racial groups
with regard to non-academic criteria. At the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), over
several years, undergraduate admissions readers assigned each applicant three types of scores:
`academic achievement' (principally high school grades, AP courses, and standardized test
scores); `life challenges' (mainly socioeconomic background); and `personal achievement' (such
as leadership, musical ability, and community service). These three scores jointly determined
virtually all admissions decisions. ... The data cover over 100,000 undergraduate applicants to
UCLA over three years and show absolutely no correlation between race and `personal
achievement.'"

RTFA. That is not accurate.

http://chronicle.com/items/biz...

Even in the area of extracurricular activities, contrary to the stereotype, there are no data to
indicate that Asian-American students are doing less. As cited by Students for Fair Admissions
Inc. in their complaint against Harvard University, xv "Studies also have shown that high-
achieving Asian-American students are equally, if not more, qualified than other racial groups
with regard to non-academic criteria. At the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), over
several years, undergraduate admissions readers assigned each applicant three types of scores:
`academic achievement' (principally high school grades, AP courses, and standardized test
scores); `life challenges' (mainly socioeconomic background); and `personal achievement' (such
as leadership, musical ability, and community service). These three scores jointly determined
virtually all admissions decisions. ... The data cover over 100,000 undergraduate applicants to
UCLA over three years and show absolutely no correlation between race and `personal
achievement.'"

Author has apparently never heard of Strunk & White.

There are quite a few people who have heard of Strunk & White and found it horribly wrong and self-contradictory: "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice" - note that this isn't written by some random blowhard, but by a department head for linguistics and English at a prestigious UK university, and a co-author of "The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language".

Author has apparently never heard of Strunk & White.

...good thing, too.

Absolutely not. Strunk and White's little book has probably done more to destroy knowledge of actual English grammar than any other book. The authors demonstrate again and again that they are not only completely ignorant of many concepts they are talking about, but they violate their own principles as much as they conform to them. (For a review by an actual expert in grammar, see here.)

Yeah, the fact that men just happen to be in the teaching jobs that get paid better is total coincidence.

I'm not sure what that had to do with what I was discussing. Just because I don't think affirmative action is morally justifiable or effective doesn't mean I believe women should be paid less. But what the heck, let's go there...

Simple economics factor can explain the discrepancy between K-12 and college professors. There are far fewer available tenured positions at colleges, and the educational requirements are tougher to become a professor. Highly trained specialists always get paid more. So of course a college professor will earn more than a K-12 teacher.

However, that doesn't explain the gender gap within the tenured professorship level. Note that fields such as science and engineering tend to command higher salaries, and since these are male dominated, it likely skews the results. We'd really have to see male/female salaries per department and at roughly equivalent experience levels and professional credentials / awards, or else we're comparing apples to oranges. If we compare apples to apples and see a disparity, then of course, that indicates a problem.

As far as K-12, all grades typically use the same pay scale, and of course, aren't different for men and women.

Did you just assume that high school teachers earned more than kindergarten teachers? Or are you suggesting that college professors earn more than kindergarten teachers simply because of sexism?

Something like reports referenced here, probably, conflating any unwanted sexual advances with rape.

But is that figure accurate or even plausible? Research on sexual assault is notoriously hard to conduct, and the studies are wildly inconsistent. A 2003 Bureau of Justice Statistics special report, "Violent Victimization of College Students, 1995-2002," found that among the nation's nearly four million female college students, there were six rapes or sexual assaults per thousand per year during the years surveyed. That comes to one victim in 40 students during four years of college—too many, of course, but vastly fewer than Ali's one in five.

The study cited by Ali used an online survey, conducted under a grant from the Justice Department, in which college women were asked about their sexual experiences, on campus and off, and the researchers—not the women themselves—decided whether they had been assaulted. The researchers employed an expansive definition of sexual assault that included "forced kissing" and even "attempted" forced kissing. The survey also asked subjects if they had sexual contact with someone when they were unable to give consent because they were drunk. A "yes" answer was automatically counted as a rape or assault. According to the authors, "an intoxicated person cannot legally consent to sexual contact."

Who, specifically, is making that argument? I don't think I have ever seen anyone argue that the primary goal of a college education was to create well-rounded people. Not even Coryoth, the person to whom you originally replied, made that argument. I often see it as a justification for requiring non-major classes, but I have never seen anyone claim that this is the primary goal. See, for instance, the The Chronicle of Higher Education's compilation of answers to the question. Most of the respondents argue that higher education is about learning critical thinking skills, building a foundation of knowledge for future work, and providing students with the necessary information to choose a career-path that is of interest to them.

My original point still stands: universities were first established to foster research. Students went to college to become academics and to make contributions to human knowledge. Over time, the emphasis has shifted towards more vocational or professional training though much of the curriculum remains the same (possibly due to institutional inertia). At no time was the primary goal of a college education to become a "well-rounded" person.

To be clear, I am not arguing that there is no merit to the observation that a liberal education produces well-rounded people, and I am not arguing that this is a bad (or good) thing. I am merely attempting to point out that the primary goal of higher education is not simply to produce such people, nor has it ever been.

These articles may be of interest to you.

Arguably you are still correct, in that you, yourself should consent, making it a Tragedy of the commons

One of the main reasons for rising tuition, especially at public universities, is the disappearance of taxpayer support. Support for public universities is down 25-30% in the last 25 years. Universities make up for that by raising tuitiion and shifting faculty from teaching to extramural-funded research. And by lowering salaries.

The big difference between tenure-track and adjunct faculty is that tenure-track faculty are expected to pay their own salary through grants and contracts. Professors are profit centers for universities, and the less time they spend teaching, the more income they can raise. Adjuncts are cost centers.

Strunk & White were "grammatical incompetents," and The Elements of Style is considered by linguists to be a pretty awful book.

But to learn what "Darmok" means, you'd have to have an entire comic book or something -- "Darmok on the ocean" means something like "loneliness." "Darmok and Jilhad at Tanagra" means something like "people coming together to face a common obstacle or foe or problem." "Darmok and Jilhad on the ocean" means something like "friendship," perhaps "friendship resulting from overcoming a shared problem."

I'm not an early educator, so I don't know how children are actually taught what words like "loneliness" or "friendship" mean, but my understanding is that they learn them through stories and picture books. Looking at a simple childs picture book, it's a not a stretch to suggest this is how a sptry like Darmok would be learned.

Except this is terrible. The point is precisely what you identified in English -- we have idioms all over the place, and that's actually how most languages work. So, if the universal translator fails to work for this alien language, it should fail for ALL languages, including English. That's the stupidity in the premise.

I think this is being too pedantic. The universal translator is meant to translate, presumably language with things like atomic nouns, adjectives, etc. Basically the Chomsky model of language.

And in the episode, it does actually do this. The problem was that the sentences themselves did not make sense without a deeper context -- without actually having read the Darmok and Jalad picture book. The translator was basically translating "Coloured green ideas sleep furiously" or "Buffalo, buffalo buffalo buffalo , buffalo buffalo buffalo." or "Darmok and Jalad, at Tanagra".

By the way, speaking of Chomsky, his Universal Grammar was challenged recently by the description of the language of a particularly obscure Amazonian tribe which seemingly breaks the rules of Universal Grammar. Once again, I note that, especially compare to some of the standard technoballe in Start Trek (FTL Drives, teleportation, psychics), the idea of an alien species who communicate through idioms, methaphor, analogies, etc is not actually that much of a stretch.

It's a fucking good idea and one that's LONG overdue. Huh wonder why it took so long for researchers to think of it , especially since literally every other conceivable aspect of reality, meta-reality and hyper-meta-reality has been plumbed.

Next up, journal of completely worthless careers spent discovering trivial "effects" within say, Human Computer Interface "research" that just don't matter , at all.

After that let's start a record of lectures by professors' that are actually, really, I mean in reality, incomprehensible because most of the language constructs they're forming literally make no sense even to experts ion their field or are just plain factually wrong or are merely recitations of advanced findings in their fields offered without first introducing basic concepts or how about professors who make it an art to rummage around in the theoretical junk bin delivering lectures about theories no one including themselves believes at all. That's a special one too. l Loved it when i mentioned mid lecture that something about the theory didn't seem right and my prof answered "just one thing?" and then toddled on through the whole landscape the rest of the semester.

Fucking college is a scam where the admin and profs suck the financial life out of their unwitting students like vampires and then leave their victims to wander, the financial undead, trying to pay off the student loans which finance their professors' lavish and hypercompensated lifestyles:

https://chronicle.com/article/...

Is there any way to avoid such a thing short of cutting my net connection? Generally I am not too worried about the NSA. I think it is BS what they do as far as invasion of privacy. But I personally have nothing to hide. But this has completely changed the small amount of reluctance I had in becoming a "ZOMG da sky iz fallinz!" type.

The "I have nothing to hide" argument is quite the slippery slope. Do you truly, really, honestly have nothing to hide? Let's put up cameras in every corner of your house, then. Perhaps we can get full copies of your bank statements? You may trust the NSA as a whole, but Snowden already showed that even a single bad apple can ruin a lot of days. What if he leaked compromising information of private citizens as part of his escapades? Would you have something to hide then? Hyperbolic? Sure. But because we've had even just a handful of instances of people having their lives screwed while innocent because surveillance - legal or illegal - uncovered something about them, it's a valid point. Read more. (article about why privacy matters)

Also? Cynthia Than's headline is the opposite of the conclusion in the research results. A more serious treatment of the structural problems that lead to these gaps.

According to at least a few sources, the decrease was in beer, not wine or hard alchohol. Which makes sense: the overlap between beer drinkers and alcoholics is less than alcoholic beverages with higher ABV. Furthermore, the thriving beer industry in America was crippled by prohibition and didn't recover until recently.

Citation needed on pot consumption rising. Could easily be an artifact: if it's legal, it no longer is hidden.

Citation also needed on the pedophilia rising. "Seems to be nearing the state of homosexuality" sounds like it was taken straight from some televangelist shithead's rantings.

Tell me again why college in the US costs sooooo much?

Colleges need to adapt so that university education doesn't become too expensive for all.

. In his book on administrative bloat, The Fall Of The Faculty, Johns Hopkins professor Benjamin Ginsberg reports that although student-faculty ratios fell slightly between 1975 and 2005, from 16-to-1 to 15-to-1, the student-to-administrator ratio fell from 84-to-1 to 68-to-1, and the student-to-professional-staff ratio fell from 50-to-1 to 21-to-1. Ginsberg concludes: "Apparently, when colleges and universities had more money to spend, they chose not to spend it on expanding their instructional resources, i.e. faculty. They chose, instead, to enhance their administrative and staff resources."

And when they had less money to spend, they did the same thing.

Administrator Hiring Drove 28% Boom in Higher-Ed Work Force, Report Says

University Administrative Glut Worse Than We Thought

Over the last 25 years the number of administrative employees at U.S. colleges and universities more than doubled, according to a joint study by the New England Center of Investigative Reporting and the American Institutes for Research. The ratio of nonacademic positions to faculty positions doubled at both public and private institutions. Overall, the industry has added an average of 87 administrative positions per day, a rate has scarcely slowed since the economic downturn, despite tuition increases. Even more surprising, academic institutions have added more administrative employees despite part-time faculty taking on more teaching duties than full-time professors.

As far as anyone can tell, edX is surviving on investment money (such as this one). Schools join the consortium by putting up more investment money.

They're burning through this money with no clear business plan; specifically, they don't have a product to sell.

On top of this, edX at least seems unconcerned with the quality of their offerings. For example, their course offerings aren't searchable by keyword (that I can determine), you have to slog through the entire catalog to see if they have something with, for example, "neuroscience" in the title. Having found a neuroscience course, the introductory video tells the prospective student nothing about the course - it's completely useless.

Pointing this out to them, they said that there's nothing edX can do - Harvard is responsible for that course, and edX is only being used as a marketing vehicle.

Other players are making innovative changes in infrastructure and technique. None of this is happening at edX or Coursera - it's all videotaped traditional lectures. There's nothing that distinguishes the big MOOC product in a business sense; ie, nothing that says "our product is better for *this* reason".

As an outside observer, the big MOOC players appear to be living a bubble similar to the 2001 tech bubble: lots of hype with no clear business plan.

Or the Chronicle, at least: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/posting-your-latest-article-you-might-have-to-take-it-down/48865

By "edited by Elsevier", you mean of course "edited by someone else not getting paid either".

Claiming copyright on layout - a mechanical function - is severely questionable given Bridgeman v. Corel. Sweat of the brow does not earn you a copyright in the US.

Here's the Chronicle on this kerfuffle: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/posting-your-latest-article-you-might-have-to-take-it-down/48865 The scientists are not happy.

At the end of every speech, announce: "Elsevier delenda est."

This has made the Chronicle: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/posting-your-latest-article-you-might-have-to-take-it-down/48865

"...You Might Have to Take It Down." http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/posting-your-latest-article-you-might-have-to-take-it-down/48865

Otherwise, you'll be working as an adjunct instructor, teaching 3-hour semester courses at $5K to $15K a pop. You'll find plenty of those at every school nowadays.

In what dream world do adjuncts earn $15k per 3-hour course??

Aside from some sort of special appointed lectureship, the highest adjunct pay I've ever heard of was in the $12k range, and that's only at one top-tier university that is a known outlier.

Most top-tier research universities pay $4-8k per course, with actual salary surveys showing an average of $4,750 per course.

And that's top research universities, usually in desirable disciplines like engineering and science.

Smaller schools, rural schools, satellite campuses for state universities, etc.? You're looking at more like $2-5k per course. Community colleges? Often less than $2k. A lot of adjuncts have to cobble together a teaching load of 5-10 courses PER SEMESTER at multiple colleges just to get a salary of $30k or so to live on each year (generally without benefits).

While you have a lot of insightful elements in your post, the magnitude of pay disparity between tenured professors and adjuncts is woefully underestimated. It's not at all unusual for tenured or tenure-track professors to earn over 5 times the salary for teaching the exact same course as an adjunct.

If they actually had adjunct jobs that paid $15k per course, I know loads of people who would immediately jump into such jobs. They could teach 3 courses per semester and earn $90k per year, with absolutely no research expectations? With that sort of pay, I bet you'd see a huge number of regular faculty volunteering to take adjunct jobs.

We've been helping China. In the 1990s, we gave them Most Favored Nation (MFN) status. We did this not because their government was democratic, because we wanted to profit from trading with them. Since then, we've transferred factories there, sold companies to them, and are currently educating many of their students.

It would be wonderful if Chinese aggressiveness discouraged American companies from moving their factories to China, but I don't think that will happen.

Yeah, and all these conservatives have college campuses where they can expel people for expressing themselves on and off campuses. Damn consevatives.

Student Expelled for Facebook Posts Sues 2-Year College in Minnesota

Court Rebukes Le Moyne College for Censorship

University of Cincinnati: Speech Code Litigation

Modesto Junior College (MJC) students were barred from passing out copies of the U.S. Constitution in celebration of Constitution Day

Big Brother’s Lawyers

College Republicans lobbying against open club membership

FAU College Student Who Didn't Want To Stomp On 'Jesus' Runs Afoul of Speech Code

...and the Chinese follow suit on speech with the support of US universities.

China’s Peking University fires professor who criticized government

Not Orwellian enough? How about this:

'US citizen has no right to free speech?' State Dept spokesperson grill

The TL;DW version of Cold Fiord's video on Conservative policy think tank Hoover Institution intellectual Thomas Sowell and his book "Intellectuals and Society"... for those that are interested...

Who are you hiding from? If it's simple google searches, sure it'll help. Just doing a quick search on my schneidafunk nick turns up a surprising amount of info. However, the NSA has a wide variety of tools to track down me down, including writing analysis.

if you dig in, you can find lots of small places where costs could easily be cut, and together they add up to big inefficiencies.

How about this tiny litte place where costs can be cut: Coach Salaries Or, how about professor salaries.

The real reason it costs so much is because of fiddling by the government and professor unions. Loans, subsidies, mandated maximum working hours by professors, and a host of other, "minor" things as you call them. Not only that, but the colleges themselves are more than willing to raise the barrier for entry into the college market through supposed "accreditation" rules, stiffling competition from leaner/more efficient colleges that might spring up.

And some more info on the subject, from Thomas Sowell here.

The problem is we are graduating a lot of attorneys with $150K+ school debt so they charge $300 an hour for their services. Simply, we have too many attorneys that no one can afford!

I would submit that the stranglehold on the bar exam that the ABA has be loosened and allow accredited online law schools. I know that many believe in the "socratic method", but it doesn't mean a hill of beans if no one can afford it!

Doing that frames the discussion all wrong. Privacy is not about hiding wrong-doings! If you imply that, then "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" becomes a valid retort and this is an uphill battle that needn't happen.

Netflix removed the six device limit some time ago. You're still limited to two streams (though Netflix offers a four stream plan now for a little bit more money).

And Netflix doesn't care if people share streaming subscription plans.

(Netflix cared, a little, when libraries were using a DVD subscription to offer their patrons movies -- and given that the incremental cost to ship a DVD was way higher than the incremental cost to stream a movie, this sort of makes sense -- but still didn't do anything to even contact libraries that were public about doing this and ask them to stop. See http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/academic-libraries-add-netflix-subscriptions/27018 for more info)