What’s going on here? I’m dividing into a freelance article, first one in a while. The first step is to figure out who to interview and then set up a time to talk. It’s the annoying secretarial work that actually is a big part of journalism. I’m snuggling kittens. I’m getting estimates on fixing up the basement for the book business. I have to write the disability newsletter. But first, I’m drop some links:
Nobody seems very enthusiastic about student loan reform. This is going to bite Biden in the ass — Olen, Yglesias, Sasse, me.
Check out some great music writing.
There is not enough places to put disabled young people with disabilities. It’s sinful.
I would like to be an old influencer.
Watching: 1882, Kenobi
Picture: This is the ceiling of a restaurant in the city. I took a picture of it, because I want to rip off the sheetrock from our basement ceiling and do this.
Apt. 11d 
Really, something that Sasse says is going to be relevant to Biden? I think not. You, Olen, and Yglesias might be different, but only if it would influence your vote (or if you represent others who would). The 10K is a sop to progressives who want to make things easier for younger people (as opposed to the fed dollars we spend on the old).
I tried to read the Sasse article, thinking it was actually going to offer some answers on “how to really fix higher ed”. But it offered nothing and it took me too many paragraphs to realize that it was actually just an excuse for ranting against student debt forgiveness. And the “paradigmatic” schools that he complains about are not the ones who are not successfully launching students. Complaining “much of what is wrong with higher education lies in our political class’s fetishizing of the Ivy League” comes off rather badly to me from a Harvard/Oxford/Yale grad, who either fetishizes them himself, or thinks there’s something to gain from the degrees.
LikeLike
He gets a lot of mileage out of just being not directly opposed to democracy. The bar is really, really low for Republicans these days. Nobody expects a solution to a problem from one, unless you think the solution is destroying something in the public sector.
LikeLike
“Nobody expects a solution to a problem from one, unless you think the solution is destroying something in the public sector.”
Yes, and that’s sad, because different ideas for solutions would be good.
Say on gun violence in schools, arming adults and training adults in schools (Cruz, Gingrich), a 10 billion+ idea, if it were a plan, but its not, it’s a distraction.
LikeLike
Not related to the loan articles, which I haven’t read, but Freakonomics has a series of podcasts about college, which contains this helpful reminder: “One sign of the inequality in the U.S. university system is how much time we spend talking about a handful of elite schools, which educate a tiny fraction of all college students. The Ivy League schools, for instance — Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale — they have a combined undergraduate and graduate population of 145,000, or roughly 0.8 percent of all U.S. college students.” (https://freakonomics.com/podcast/what-exactly-is-college-for/).
I have some quarrels with other things that come up, but every article that talks about the Ivies should be required to include this information. Even if you add the elite SLACs, you are still talking about well under 200,000 students.
LikeLike
Cornell is more of a safety school.
LikeLike