41–50 of 162 posts
Many college towns and rental properties relying on student income will be devastated.
Forgive me, but I find it a bit hard to be sympathetic in a broad sense to the organizations that make their money from rental income.
The List, because wall: Beloit College Boston University Brown University California Baptist University California State University at Fullerton Chapman University Centre College Christopher Newport University Claremont Colleges Clemson University Cornell University Drury University East Tennessee State University Emory University George Mason University George Washington University Harvard University Haverford Colle…
I feel bad for the colleges. But anyone in their right mind that's going to college to learn things will take a gap year. Those going to college just for the paper are well advised to keep going. The next couple of years will be easy mode, for sure. You get an A, and you get an A--everyone gets an A!
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Forgive me, but I find it a bit hard to be sympathetic in a broad sense to the organizations that make their money from rental income.
Baffling comment. Providing rental property is a legitimate business.
I feel bad for the colleges. But anyone in their right mind that's going to college to learn things will take a gap year. Those going to college just for the paper are well advised to keep going. The next couple of years will be easy mode, for sure. You get an A, and you get an A--everyone gets an A!
Take a gap year and do what? Go nowhere, do nothing? Delay any hope of a reasonable income by another year?
I moved back home after my university moved my classes to online (mid-march). I’m now paying rent on an apartment I don’t need and have a lease for next school year that I might not use. Even if in-person classes start again, I’ll have to worry about being screwed again next spring. The only other option I could think of was subleasing but unfortunately I signed my lease in January.
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I don't believe virtual learning will be widely used long-term. I might be biased, coming from a mostly engineering school, but there is a lot of vital lab equipment needed for the curriculum, not to mention that social networking and connections are essential to most careers going forward, and I don't see that transferring over in the same way
I’d be happy if this was the beginning of the end for humanities departments that have become overtly political. More resources should be shifted to more utilitarian degrees like engineering and hard sciences.
We don’t actually live in a world governed only by the hard sciences. There are people here too, and I’d argue that understanding people is just as difficult as understanding the laws of physics.
Some of the biggest challenges in society today are not questions of hard science, but rather about people and groups and institutions. I think our current situation exemplifies this.
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I’d be happy if this was the beginning of the end for humanities departments that have become overtly political. More resources should be shifted to more utilitarian degrees like engineering and hard sciences.
Engineers are worthless if they can't communicate effectively and don't understand the context of their work.
We would be just as well served if we went back to learning classics, for example. I was disappointed to go through college having touched nothing older than Shakespeare officially.
But I got plenty of feminist and minority-focused literature that was irrelevant to my particular (non-white) echnicity. Why should these modern authors take such a heavy precedence? Isn't it hubris to presume that your ideas are superior simply because they are new? Students are a captive audience when the entire institution is leaning in the same direction.
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Read more Adam Smith. In practice, PMCs in college towns are bad actors. At least, on average. They are basically sitting on an investment (land) and providing the minimum level of work necessary to keep money flowing. It’s a legitimate business in the sense that it is “legal”. However, the profits do not correspond to the value that they provide to the economy.
> providing the minimum level of work necessary Is that how you measure the value of the business?
Landlords contribute a small amount of value relative to how much they are paid, compared to other businesses. Most of the value is provided by the land itself, and the landlords merely have a monopoly on it. So I am less inclined to be sympathetic to PMCs which are suddenly being paid less, since they are generally overpaid.
We have to be careful to distinguish rent from actual productive economic activity, because rent provides no value and requires no work. Speaking here of “rent” in the Adam Smith sense of the word.
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I’d be happy if this was the beginning of the end for humanities departments that have become overtly political. More resources should be shifted to more utilitarian degrees like engineering and hard sciences.
What a useless world that would create.
People don't have to spend thousands of dollars and four years of their life to paint or sculpt or whatever - it may not be proficient and lifelike but it'll still be art.
Your world wouldn't be all that much more drab if we stopped forcing engineers to learn "culture".