mortiz055

I'm going to use a lull in my travel for  The Great Mistake  to start clearing my post backlog, starting with a response to the most recent review, by the sociologist Andrew Perrin.  His piece is at the public sociology blog Scatterplot , and, among its other virtues, it offers the most sustained engagement on research costs (Stage 2 of the book's decline cycle) that I've received.  I posted a comment on his post and crosspost it here.  His skeptical analysis of the emphasis I place on research costs is essential reading. It advances the kind of debate whose general absence has helped dumb down university policy.  I'm very grateful to him for the intelligence and energy that went into his analysis. This blog has covered research costs many times ( "How Can Public Universities Pay for Research?"   "UCLA Loses LONI: Why Budget Silence is Bad for Science,"   "UCSD and the Crisis in Public University Research Funding, " etc.) In The Great Mista...

The most visible item on this week’s University of California Regents agenda has the Board considering a cap on the enrollment of non resident students . It appears towards the end of the second month of a Trump administration that has not dampened enthusiasm for debt-free college or free college but increased it. Democrats in California, New York, and elsewhere are proposing debt-free plans and are weighing tuition-free as well (" Degrees Not Debt, " "The $48 Fix") . In January, the California Legislative Analyst's Office published a report calculating the costs of debt-free college degrees in the state's public systems. When I extended their arithmetic for UC, it showed that UC could be debt-free for less than 10% of its current tuition income. That would be an amazing thing. It would change what the public thinks universities can do for them. But the UC Regents are talking about a different tuition issue this week. In California, nonresident (NR) enrol...