Us Memo to Colleges Proposes Terms on Ideology, Foreign Enrollment for Fed Funds

Honestly, whom? Because I mostly see cowardice being draped in morality.

Is it, this is just a hunch, but I’d imagine Texas or Ohio republicans stand to gain a lot more from redistributing districts than democrats in California do.

Okay, then the Democrat governor wins. I’m not seeing the problem.

> How the heck are Democrats supposed to stop us from bombing Venezuela?

They’re not.

Step one is Democrats need to stop overfocusing on foreign policy. Nobody cares about foreign policy except for comfortable wonks.

When they take the initiative. That's the point. The current political environment strongly favours taking the initiative over reacting.

> The two items you mentioned (detaining ICE agents and not sending federal tax money to Washington DC) are against federal law

Yes. So are the things Trump has been doing. As you say, one can "do things first and deal with push back from the courts later." That's what the GOP is doing. I'm saying Democrats need to do the same (or concede the game).

We can remake the judiciary to have more teeth later, when everyone is in compromise mode or one side has won.

Sort of.

McConnell found it necessary to prevent some of the nominations from coming to a vote, because he didn't have the votes to stop them. So, yeah, they held enough of the Senate to dick around procedurally, but not enough to win an up or down vote. Which is kind of not that different from a filibuster, which is also a procedural move you use when you'd lose an up or down vote.

And it's one thing to vote down a single nomination, and a different thing to categorically state that you're going to torpedo all of a President's nominations. If there's a Constitutional requirement for "advice and consent", then the Senate has a duty to engage with that.

The ACA?!

We wasted our trifecta under Biden, but that's the point.

> 49 + A guy who refuses to push democrat policy isn't an actual "majority"?

Anyone who believes this doesn't deserve to govern. You know what we'd have if we had a few more Manchins and Sinemas today? A majority.

> "majorities" are rarely more than a couple politicians

Sure [1].

> Republicans empirically "fall in line" for votes more than "democrats"

Source? Trump 1.0 was Republicans constantly falling over themselves. Even this time, McCarthy versus cocaine Chucky almost blew up the party.

> They weren't the minority

Republicans were in a complete federal minority when we passed the ACA, and in a legislative and executive minority in 2021.

> If republicans literally break the law to do things, as Trump keeps doing, they still get re-elected. If a democrat does the same, the entire party suffers

We don't know this! Obama was, erm, creative with a lot of limits. He won re-election.

> lets have the tiny amount of democrats remaining in government do blatantly criminal things

Totally unnecessary.

> There is no solution that Democrat politicians can do on their own. The long term solution is Americans finally re-learning the Republican governance doesn't work well

If Democrats can't use their state majorities and federal minority productively, they can't govern. The choice, then, isn't between Republicans and Democrats, because the latter gave up the game. (Biding time doesn't work when the other side is strategically repositioning to their advantage.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_Stat...

Then change that rule. The sixty-vote threshold can be changed by the majority. They're literally chamber rules, not even statute.

> US population is living comfortably enough that they simply do not care about any of these things

I wouldn't say this. Americans care about pocketbook issues. Not democratic ideals. Not foreign policy.

[1] https://balkin.blogspot.com/2012/04/who-won-new-deal-confron...

I mean yes, SCOTUS rules supreme until at least 2026. My point is Democrats have had two trifectas in the last 20 years. We used one to pass ACA. We wasted the second.

The idea that the current structure of SCOTUS is immutable has somehow become lore. It is not true. The Constitution is brief on the courts because it left constructing them to Congress.

It's not as simple in that case because the Constitution requires a 2/3 vote in the Senate to remove, which cannot be overridden without an amendment. The nation is split pretty much 50/50 not 60/40, so a 50 vote threshold is easier to achieve.

I talked about this a little in my reply to your comment's sibling, but I'll say more here. Yes this is a reality, but it's also vastly more complicated than that because the cost one actually pays to attend an institution can vary between sticker price and them actually being paid to attend (through tuition remission and stipends). There are still free community college, elite institutions offer free tuition to low income students, there are merit programs at state colleges that are free, you can get into PhD programs without having to pay tuition...

But yes, we can broadly say college is getting more expensive to attend. But it's also true that colleges are expected to teach more. 50 years ago there were hardly any Computer Science departments. Today, every school has a CS program, and now they are starting to have AI programs. Schools that started serving small towns have now grown to eclipse the size of those towns, becoming cities of their own. This kind of growth is nonlinear -- once you reach a certain size the security office becomes a police department, the nurse's office becomes a full health clinic, the cafeteria becomes a food distribution network, the IT department becomes an ISP. Tuition at these schools is less about credits for classes and more like a membership fee for a private city.

But then there's the question of ROI. The ROI for attending college is twofold:

1) education. For some reason, this is never really included when people talk about ROI of college because maybe it's implicit, or maybe it's not actually part of what they value, but that is the whole point.

2) the network. Even if you don't value the education per se, the network is probably more economically valuable to you. But also it's socially valuable, as you'll meet a lot of friends and lovers in college. As they say the real value was the friends made along the way.

That brings me to the value of the credential. It's true, for most of my life at least, this has been the selling point of attending college: you go to college to earn more money. But the problem with this selling point is it's self-defeating -- the only reason the credential was ever valuable in the first place was because corporations were willing to pay more for degree holders if it absolved them of having to train them. But of course as it became normalized to hold a degree, they now simply expect it as a given, and won't pay more for it. So the value of the credential has dwindled, and maybe that makes going to college less appealing to the middle class given the tuition. I feel that, which is why they should have more affordable options. I don't think the value of the credential is coming back.

--

Anyway I've talked a lot about problems, and I don't have any solutions. But I think the pathway forward is to stop treating every school the same in these discussions. Some schools are mini cities and should be treated differently from a school that's a couple departments and a handful of students and faculty. To a large extent, small schools are just existing in a marketplace that's set by larger institutions.

They also have difficulty operating as nonprofits in a capitalist system, where the product they deliver (education) is regarded has not being a return for what they pay. It's very frustrating delivering a quality education to someone, for them to turn around and say "Yeah, but corporations won't pay me more, so you haven't done anything for me".

What they're really saying is "it wasn't worth it" and I feel that, education should be cheaper and accessible to anyone. To that end, I think if we want to go back to the tuition of the 80s we should start by going back to a 46% corporate tax rate. Maybe that means fewer people are able to pay that sticker price. But in a world where the rich pay $100k for a car and $150K for a country club dues, I don't see a $70k tuition bill at Stanford coming down anytime soon.

Full tuition at Yale and Stanford essentially represents the maximum amount of money rich families are willing to pay for membership into an elite club, and doesn't bear close resemblance to the actual cost of delivering the service, which is funded from myriad sources so it's hard to frame it as a typical profit-maximizing corporation. IIRC Stanford is free for students whose parents are under a certain threshold, so there's all kinds of funny accounting at work to come up with the Stanford tuition rate.

This is a key reason why tuition at elite colleges has outpaced inflation -- rich families' income has also greatly outpaced inflation. And because they aren't qualified for any financial aid or support, schools want to charge them as much as much as they can (which is a lot but not infinity). Rich people are used to dropping 10s of thousands on club memberships or private daycares and boarding schools, so elite colleges set their tuition at a level rich people grumble about but nevertheless pay. Note that for this segment of the population, paying more than everyone else is actually a flex. Like they will moan about how high the tuition bill is, but they're happy to moan about it because it lets everyone know they're paying full tuition at Stanford.

Note this is only a strategy for the elite schools that get those uber-rich families. But the economic effect downstream is that all college tuitions are inflated. So because we want everyone to have an education, we've tried to ease the economic burden on the middle class by instituting loan programs, grants, scholarships, etc.

Which brings us to how colleges expand - typically it's not going to be through tuition. Again, growing a university depends on exactly what/how (new department? new laboratory? new library? new academic building?) Ultimately it's usually through a combination of state/local/federal/private partnerships depending on the kind of school. For example an existing school might partner with a hospital to create a med school. Or they might get some wealthy individual to donate a bunch of cash and put his name / her on the building (there are several Gates' centers for Computer Science).