Mighty timely New York Times story this morning about colleges, institutions created to set bright young people on a course of lifetime penury. What with all the attention paid to the fact that students are drowning in debt due to student loans, we often overlook the financial situations of the schools themselves. How are they doing?
Lawrence Mitchell is the dean of Case Western Reserve University's law school, ranked #67 by US News, not that a doctor of jurisprudence like Lawrence Mitchell would concern himself with pedestrian matters such as his law school's low, low ranking. No—Lawrence Mitchell is concerned with more elevated matters, such as the wanton meanness of mean people who say mean things about law school. Have persons no respect?
Four Ohio college students were indicted earlier this month on a multitude of drug charges, after they were caught last May trying to steal chemicals from a school chemistry lab in order to cook up some ecstasy in "an empty dorm room." An all too typical tale. For purposes of instruction—and to ensure that future college ecstasy labs are more professionally run—allow us to examine what mistakes they made in their budding criminal enterprise, all detailed exhaustively in this Plain-Dealer story:
Earlier this year, Appalachian State University sociology professor Jammie Price was suspended for showing her (college, adult) class a documentary about porn, containing porn. She also had the temerity to suggest, in class, that college athletes get special privileges. I know; I know. You will be happy to learn that she appealed, and that a faculty committee largely vindicated her, saying in its report that her actions, for the most part, fell under academic freedom, and that she should not be punished.
A 22-year-old college student in Rhode Island learned the hard way that, while you can get away with a lot of dumb drunken shit in college, what you absolutely cannot do is defy basic physics and do something like run through an eight-inch wide alley. For reasons that escape even her, Courtney Malloy attempted just such a feat and, of course, got stuck.
There's not a ton to say about this picture, really. It's Kate Middleton wearing a diaper and a bib while covered in what looks like shaving cream. It's reportedly from a 2001 event at St. Andrew's University, which makes sense; who doesn't have embarrassing photos from college floating around the internet? And, of course, this photo is a lot less scandalous than those other Kate Middleton photos on the internet, although, as The Cut points out, there is a set of droopy balls to Kate's right. Scandal! NSFW!
Many theories have already been bandied about for why Barack Obama secured his reelection last night: fundamental demographic changes in the voting base, ossified Republican proposals, the creaky inability of Mitt Romney to appear convincingly humanoid. But only one member of the pundit class has been incisive enough to peer more deeply into the true rotten, beating heart of Obama's victory: our national system of liberal zombification centers. (Colleges.)
It's been evident for more than a year now that "for profit colleges"—which is to say, "shitty colleges which exist only to make money and which run a lot of advertisements and which you would never ever recommend to a true friend"—are on the decline, after years of virtually minting money. Enrollment is down across the board. Last week, the University of Phoenix announced it's shutting down half of its physical locations. Could this be... real progress?
The University of Phoenix is shutting down 115 of its bloodsucking fake college locations in the U.S., about half of the total number of centers of flimflammery. This may be seen as part of the larger trend of the decline of so-called "for profit colleges," which is a good thing, in the sense that these schools are best not at education, but at sucking money out of desperate people who can scarcely afford it.
One thing you can do on Friday, at the end of the day, when you have a couple free minutes, is to pick up the phone fire all of your "financial adviser" and "investment consultants" and anyone else who takes money from you in exchange for recommending investments to you. Then just buy some low-cost index funds in a mix of stock and bonds, and then go to bed, because that is what smart people who don't like getting hustled do.
