TAIL TRACK. Barring signal troubles, links to any posts of substance ought to work.

SAD NEWS FOR THE STATE LINE. In the Fort Hood shootings, two northern Illinois soldiers, Francheska Velez and Michael Pearson, and two southern Wisconsin soldiers, Amy Krueger and Russell Seager are among the dead. Another four Wisconsin soldiers are among the wounded. Cruel February comes again.

BITTER CLINGERS. The Soviet Union is eighteen years past its sell-by date, and Stalinism is a great way to turn a poor country into a destitute one. On November 7, some people still have occasion to stage a Communist parade.

Global Times photograph.

I'm looking at those greatcoats and wondering how to render "Oh we loathe the oooold one" in Russian. Wait, maybe it IS Russian. о-и-я, ё-а!

COLLEGE, THE NEW HIGH SCHOOL. A Northern Star columnist discovers a twist on weeknight football.

Heck, at Virginia Tech, to get attendance up for weekday games, it cancels afternoon and night classes.

So if you want to play weekday games to make money, do so. But don’t try to sell it as a way to showcase the university and the program when in order to do so you have to endanger the mission of the university.

Endanger the mission? Redefine the mission perhaps: high schools, after all, turn the last class period on Friday into a pep rally. We're doing the high schools' work in remedial classes already, why not reproduce the social structure of high school too.

On Thursday night, Northern Illinois became bowl-eligible. That's a mixed blessing. Last year, the incremental return from the Independence Bowl was a negative $154K. Ball State, which lost $67K at the Motor City Bowl, defended its loss because it was smaller than Northern Illinois's. This year, Ball State stands to lose precisely nothing at a bowl.

THE CASE FOR RETRENCHMENT GROWS. University Diaries picks up a report from Berkeley with an unusual lede.

Home to the nationally ranked Cal Bears and a clutch of Nobel laureates, the University of California, Berkeley, boasts brains and brawn.

Tail. Dog. Wag. Never mind that Berkeley researchers were winning Nobel prizes during the Joe Kapp era on the field, as well as during the early 1990s when a weak California team offered the prospect of a first win for a new Wisconsin coach called Barry Alvarez. (Didn't happen.) Nevertheless, the faculty has taken a courageous (by faculty senate standards) stand.

But with budget cuts fraying the seams of campus life — fewer classes, faculty furloughs, student fee hikes — tension has developed over the millions that go to support Cal's sporting life.

A non-binding resolution calling on the university to reduce the subsidy to athletics has passed the faculty senate. (No news on whether the senate also endorsed carrot juice and clean air.)

Another University Diaries post recommends a student column out of Mid-American BCS runner to cellar dweller Ball State.

In reality, the vast majority of students do not attend sporting events and even though they do not attend, they are still being charged. I attend one, maybe two, football games a year. I would be much better off buying the tickets for $20, or whatever price on game day, and not having to pay $877. I would save $837. Ball State is making me $837 worse off. Why are we all being charged for something only a few of us use?

Ball State’s intercollegiate sports department would operate in the red if not for the student subsidy. For 2008-09, the athletics department budgeted expenses were $14.3 million, two of the main revenue sources to cover these expenses were almost $8.9 million from student fees and $2.5 million from additional university support. Ticket sales were only expected to be less than one million. Intercollegiate sports, at least at Ball State, are not self-sustaining.

The column goes on to recommend that student fees be detailed in order that students can identify the toll athletics takes. On general principles, the recommendation is a good idea, in order that students be able also to identify the advocacy organizations, often featuring exotic politics, that also take their toll.

There's more on the peculiar economics of college sport, and the possibility of retrenchment, at Market Power.

HIGHER EDUCATION'S SUBPRIME SECTOR. You can name names.

Outside of its elite private institutions, Chicago is the The City Where Diploma Dreams Go to Die, writes Kevin Carey of Education Sector.

You can propose hypotheses for the proliferation of dropout factories.

But catastrophic failure rates are a problem for any college. In reality, the accreditation system has evolved over time to accommodate diversity in quality to an almost infinitely elastic degree.

You can work the problem.

We have an excess of politeness and a deficit of candor in our discussions of higher education. As a result, public leaders in Chicago and elsewhere have turned a blind eye to dysfunctional institutions in the heart of their communities. Students are paying the price.

You might conclude that improvements in the status quo are unlikely. But it's better to identify the problem and propose solutions, which might (for lack of any other choices) gain some traction, than to post anonymous whinges that will accomplish precisely nothing.

YOUR RIGHT TO EXERCISE CHOICE. Protecting competitors is not the same as protecting competition. In Wisconsin, your right to have independent grocers to buy Thanksgiving fixings from is not free.

Wal-Mart has full-page ads in metro daily newspapers today promoting its prices for Thanksgiving dinner. It's a striking demonstration of the cost to consumers of the state's Unfair Sales Act, also known informally as Wisconsin's minimum markup law.

The ad in our paper offers frozen whole turkeys for 86 cents a pound. The same ad in the Chicago Tribune has turkeys for 40 cents a pound.

Ocean Spray cranberry sauce and Heinz turkey gravy are priced the same in Illinois and Wisconsin. But Green Giant canned vegetables cost six cents more here (56 cents) and Stove Top stuffing is $1.15 a box at Wisconsin Wal-Marts, compared with 78 cents in Illinois.

Wal-Mart's spokeswoman for the region has said the company will honor the law and will not offer its below-cost loss leader deals in Wisconsin. Wal-Mart prints different ad fliers during the holiday season, with higher prices, for stores in Wisconsin and three other states that ban selling below cost.

Proponents of Wisconsin's Unfair Sales Act say it protects small retailers who can't afford to sell things below cost.

The Wisconsin law does allow retailers to sell below cost to match competitors' prices, and I've never seen the state go after anyone for selling cheap Thanksgiving turkeys. I expect the prevailing supermarket price for frozen turkeys will go below 50 cents a pound this year, as it usually does.

The columnist is too young. Yes, the prevailing supermarket price for frozen turkeys will fall, but it's still covered by minimum markup. The state did investigate below-cost sales of December turkeys in 1973, and Morgan Reynolds, who was teaching intermediate price theory at Wisconsin at the time, had some fun with that news item.

MORE CASH FLOW GAMES. The state's propensity to allocate money but not to spend it is ubiquitous. The capital bill includes funding to renovate the Stevens Building and remodel Cole Hall, but the expenditures have not yet been authorized. The state's revenue enhancers include planned increases in taxes on cigarettes and video poker machines, an illustration of the inverse-elasticitity principle for reducing excess burden conflicting with the Pigouvian principle for offsetting externalities. At Urbana, the cash flow games have encouraged doomsday planning.

The University of Illinois has received only a small fraction of the $317 million it is owed by the state for this fiscal year and has effectively frozen many open positions.

University spokesman Tom Hardy says the state's government has paid the school only $400,000 so far as it wrestles with a budget
deficit.

Hardy says open positions that normally would have quickly been filled now require approval from a high-ranking administrator.

Outgoing university President B. Joseph White says furloughs are becoming an increasingly likely possibility for employees. The university set up a plan last summer to furlough workers if needed.

I'm on a search committee again, and I'd better buy trip cancellation insurance along with my 'plane tickets.

THE CHINESE ARE SERIOUS ABOUT HIGHER EDUCATION. Three weeks ago, I made a claim.

It's probably going to be some time until self-despising administrators in those Chinese universities go on guilt trips about underserved Tibetans or marginalized Uighurs. Until that day, Chinese higher education will gain ground on a United States higher education too consumed with inclusion and access and too involved in positional arms races in basketball and football, and too willing to take high school graduates that haven't really finished grade school.

No worries, mate.

China has been cranking out college graduates at a breakneak pace, but the quality of the education has become highly suspect and, perhaps more importantly, there haven’t been nearly enough jobs to employ all the newly credentialed. In other words, simply producing more graduates — no matter how much it has frightened some people in America – has largely been a waste.

The obvious lesson from this should be that it’s foolish to simply make massively expanding the ranks of degree holders a national goal. But that doesn’t compute for many U.S. politicians, despite abundant evidence that we don’t need heaps more graduates anymore than China does.

Followup here.

HORIZONTAL AND VERTICAL EQUITY. Community colleges exist, inter alia, for second chances. But second chances are expensive.

If I had plenty of ambition and no conscience at all, this would be my plan to get my cc through the [budget] crisis and emerge with greater resources and cachet on the other side:

Upscale.

Although academics as a breed love to be idealistic, I'm increasingly convinced that economic class exerts a certain gravitational pull that can only be resisted with great and ever-mounting effort. Every institutional incentive we have is to go upscale.

If we dealt with the pincer movement of lower state aid and higher enrollments by imposing admissions standards -- say, by refusing to do remediation anymore -- the economics (and prestige) of the operation would take off. Blocking developmental students would, all by itself, result in a wealthier student body. We would have much higher retention, graduation, and transfer rates. We would have much less call for special services for students with severe learning disabilities. Our financial aid spending would drop dramatically, as would our spending on tutoring. We'd run proportionally more sophomore-level classes, to the understandable delight of the faculty. As our graduation and transfer rates went up, our standing as a college of first choice would go with it. And we could both impress our politicians and insulate ourselves from them, just like the University of Michigan has.

Anonymous Community has been dealing with more enrollments than it can handle, in part by students who might, under other circumstances, enroll at Michigan or Buffalo or perhaps one of the privates. Have any of those students griped to their professors, or to advisors, or even to deans, about the special ed students dragging down their classes?

As a matter of conscience, perhaps the land-grants and the mid-majors, and possibly even the community colleges, have obligations to ambitious and able students, whether place-bound or crowded out by the upscaling ambitions of their states' flagship campuses.

I've seen some public four-year colleges follow this strategy, and it almost always works. They decide at some point to become more exclusive, and a few years later, they're suddenly 'hot.' For whatever reason, they don't experience this move as a violation of their mission. If anything, they take pride in their newfound exclusivity.

That's a virtuous cycle, in which motivated students raise the intellectual bar for other students, and boost faculty morale along the way. I don't see how recognizing that a mid-major, or a regional comprehensive, is in the same business as Harvard or Michigan and has the obligation to offer the same intellectual challenge to ambitious placebound strivers that the more famous institutions claim to offer to whoever it is they are recruiting these days.

There is, however, that issue of horizontal and vertical equity.

(The marketing of something like that can get weird. "Your tax dollars at work, excluding the likes of you!" Tone is everything.)

The use of tax dollars to provide any kind of education is going to involve some sort of regressive transfer: perhaps most evidently in the tuition subsidy to students from wealthy state-resident families, more subtly in the creation of human capital that makes a university graduate, on average, richer than a high school graduate. But a system of public K-12 that reinforces the work habits of the upper middle class also does so. And the failure of public K-12 to do so, for whatever reason, both condemns young people who haven't learned those habits at home to a life of poverty, and saddles higher education, whether at Anonymous Community or Northern Illinois or Michigan or Harvard, to devoting resources to remediation. (Baldwin Locomotive went out of business when railroads got tired of having to repair oil leaks in newly-delivered diesels. Discuss the generalization.)

Moving to open admissions in a society with increasing class polarization leads to some extremes for which the system wasn't built. As the K-12 systems from which many of our students come continue to founder, we spend more on tutoring and support services to try to make up the difference. Students who need those services notice that we're good at them, so they seek us out. Our graduation rates suffer, and we get flogged for it in the press and the political discourse. Meanwhile, the public four-year college down the street jacks up its standards and all is well.

So lean on K-12 to counteract the class polarization by holding all students, beginning in kindergarten, to the standards of the middle class. And bill the high schools for the work you're doing that they should have done. Hard budget constraints have a way of focusing the mind.

And recognize that the public four-year with aspirations to becoming a graduate institution is probably doing something right.

The courses aren't taught better just because the faculty is loaded with "academic stars." If anything, it goes the other way. Students at schools where the professors actually handle most of the teaching are likely to get more out of a course than at schools where the profs are mainly preoccupied with their publications.

This claim is inaccurate, and probably not a useful claim for a conservative commentator to make. That professor who is "preoccupied" with publications might be aware, for instance, that the vulgar Keynesianism pushed by so many wanna-be court intellectuals for the Democrats (that idealism conceit in practice) has been rebutted by the permanent income hypothesis and rational expectations and real business cycles. That professor with the four- to six- sections of introductory (read, where the special ed students predominate, as high school) economics might be so burdened with accommodations and assessments and all the other impedimenta imposed by the Colleges of Deaducation that he or she is still teaching the Samuelson version that treats Keynesian macro and welfare economics micro as received truths.

I don't think the mania for admissions preferences is really about the students. Rather, it's about the academic administrators. It makes them feel good about themselves to believe that their social engineering matters a lot. When mean people like Roger Clegg say that they ought to drop racial preferences, that's like telling them to stop playing make believe and grow up.

That argument does generalize to the special education function, and to treating remediation and retention as positive goods for their own sake.

UNIVERSITIES ARE FAILING AT THEIR MISSION. Five theses nailed to Newmark's Door develop the point. The proprietor issues a disclaimer. "I'm not going out of my way to look for it. It just seems as though there's more of it these days." Market Power proselytizes. "Each link is worth a careful read by anyone who cares about the direction of colleges and universities in the US." Amen.

REFRESHING THE TREE OF LIBERTY. The people who obsess over such things are making a lot of today's relatively few elections.


The Irony of Democracy might characterize elections as "imperfect instruments of accountability": nonetheless, the decisions thus reached are reversible in a way that outcomes determined with pitchfork and tumbril are not.

WHAT'S NOT TO LIKE? 400 miles in 160 minutes.

For several decades, the world's busiest air route was the "Puente Aereo" (air bridge) between Madrid and Barcelona. At a distance of about 400 miles on the ground, it's also a perfect distance for high speed rail. Ever since the AVE line was completed to Barcelona's Sants station early last year, high speed rail has been winning a greater and greater share of the Spanish travel market - despite Spain being hit extremely hard by the global recession, with unemployment of around 20%.

The trains now carry more passengers than the planes. (The articles do not discuss automobile trips: in the United States, rail and air jockey for a relatively small share of total travel miles, including the Northeast Corridor, where the not-much-faster-than-the-Congressional Acela Expresses have been taking passengers away from the airlines.)

California High Speed Rail suggests a parallel.

Once again, it is worth reminding readers that Spain offers a very good comparison to California in terms of not just high speed rail - but population density and geography. SF Transbay to LA Union Station is 432 miles, and our trains are projected to have a higher operating speed.

Ultimately, the Spanish experience suggests the SNCF report and the Brookings Institution are both correct in suggesting the LA-SF route, the nation's second busiest, will support a high HSR ridership. As our airports already burst at the seams during flush economic times and with rising oil prices, it's clear that we need the HSR option in California. Spain's success story will soon be replicated here.

There are a few corridors, closer to Cold Spring Shops headquarters, with histories of fast running, that might also benefit by faster and more frequent train services. Given the time it takes to clear security and load and unload through one door, a latter-day Hiawatha could load passengers and be past Wisconsin Dells before a plane bound for the Cities loads passengers and takes off. And it could set down and pick up passengers near Milwaukee and other online cities to boot, an unintended consequence of a rail network the Spaniards have discovered.

ON TO DOVER? Destination: Freedom reports on cooperation between New Hampshire and Massachusetts to extend commuter service to Plaistow, which is just over the border from Haverhill, the current outer end of service. Historically, the Boston and Maine ended its outer suburban service at Haverhill, with Plaistow and other communities Bostonside of Dover served by a few stopping trains on the Portland Division.

One of these days, the regional commuter train operators and Amtrak might think more carefully about interline ticketing. There's no reason some of the Portland trains, particularly those running during the rush hours, can't serve as expresses for the outer suburban commuters, and some of the Haverhill, or Plaistow, or Exeter trains, can't serve as feeders to the Portland trains, or when the service goes on to Freeport or Brunswick, to make convenient connections for shoppers. A single ticket, good on the entire route, will help. A Soviet department store is easier to deal with than the ordeal of buying tickets for Amtrak and for a commuter operator. In Boston and Chicago's Union Station, there are separate ticket agents for each carrier. On the other hand, for all the fragmentation of Britain's passenger train service, one ticket, good on any connecting carrier on any route, is all I had to carry to get from Manchester Airport to Telford Central.

THE RIGHT TIME TO RETRENCH. Some years ago, the president of the University of Chicago famously discontinued big-time football, a development that the University of North Texas blissfully overlooked.

"If you look at America's great universities, you'll see that they all have the three A's in common: great academics, great arts and great athletics," said UNT president Gretchen M. Bataille in a release. "All are key to a vibrant alumni community and continued growth. And all require great facilities. I am committed to ensuring that UNT, like many of the nation's best research universities, strives to be excellent in everything we do."

The stadium will hold about 30,000 fans and include luxury suites.

At Central Florida, the Orlando Sentinel recommends a different course.

A panel from the Knight Commission plans to recommend seven cost-saving changes for university athletics programs to the NCAA. Those include cutbacks in season lengths and team travel. But the panel is ignoring the middle linebacker in the room: sky-high coaching salaries.

It's ironic that university presidents would cite salaries for coaches as the biggest problem, yet do nothing about it. Until they declare a truce in their bidding war, athletics programs will be on shaky ground.

We like college sports. We understand winning programs can build school spirit and garner national publicity. But those worthy goals don't justify breaking the bank to pay for athletics, especially now.

Central Florida's basketball team currently has a problem, because a freshman player wants to wear his dad's shoes. But Central Florida is probably not positioned to load up on innovative economists, not to mention other talented scholars, in the Chicago way. (The editorial notes the university has been trimming programs and faculty.)

California, where Lr ( I learned it as Lw) and Bk and Cf were discovered, is another matter.

Now, the whole college athletics undertaking is one that deserves lots of scrutiny for its subsidies and excesses. Cal is certainly not alone in this. But for Birgeneau to take to the pages of the Washington Post, cry poverty, and call for the nation’s taxpayers to foot his school’s bills while he quietly pushes millions of dollars to water polo, rugby, golf, and sundry other sports? That takes a lot of gall. Of course, rent-seeking gall is not in short supply when it comes to higher education.

Chicago dropped football just before higher education became a growth industry. California has the opportunity to unbundle academic excellence from sports visibility in a way that would shake up establishments. Therefore, expect any proposal to defund sports in the California members of the Pacific Twelve to meet the kind of resistance that proposals to privatize Social Security or Medicare did.

TIEBOUT COMPETITION. William Voegeli: The Golden State isn't worth it. He focuses on taxes, and the public services they provide.

One way to assess how Americans feel about the different tax and benefit packages the states offer is by examining internal U.S. migration patterns. Between April 1, 2000, and June 30, 2007, an average of 3,247 more people moved out of California than into it every week, according to the Census Bureau. Over the same period, Texas had a net weekly population increase of 1,544 as a result of people moving in from other states. During these years, more generally, 16 of the 17 states with the lowest tax levels had positive "net internal migration," in the Census Bureau's language, while 14 of the 17 states with the highest taxes had negative net internal migration.

Taxes are part of it, but not the only inducement to migrate.

These folks pulling up stakes and driving U-Haul trucks across state lines understand a reality the defenders of the high-benefit/high-tax model must confront: All things being equal, everyone would rather pay low taxes than high ones. The high-benefit/high-tax model can work only if things are demonstrably not equal -- if the public goods purchased by the high taxes far surpass the quality, quantity and impact of those available to people who live in states with low taxes.

Texas was also the destination of migrants from Michigan in the early 1980s (Texans blamed traffic jams on broken-down Michigan cars). The disparity in taxes and public services probably favored Michigan in those days, but sufficiently many people anticipated what has transpired in automobile assembly that they left, the temperate climate and abundant water or not.

Today's public benefits fail that test, as urban scholar Joel Kotkin of NewGeography.com and Chapman University told the Los Angeles Times in March: "Twenty years ago, you could go to Texas, where they had very low taxes, and you would see the difference between there and California. Today, you go to Texas, the roads are no worse, the public schools are not great but are better than or equal to ours, and their universities are good. The bargain between California's government and the middle class is constantly being renegotiated to the disadvantage of the middle class."

These judgments are not based on drive-by sociology. According to a report issued earlier this year by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., Texas students "are, on average, one to two years of learning ahead of California students of the same age," even though per-pupil expenditures on public school students are 12% higher in California. The details of the Census Bureau data show that Texas not only spends its citizens' dollars more effectively than California but emphasizes priorities that are more broadly beneficial. Per capita spending on transportation was 5.9% lower in California, and highway expenditures in particular were 9.5% lower, a discovery both plausible and infuriating to any Los Angeles commuter losing the will to live while sitting in yet another freeway traffic jam.

That last figure intrigues, given California's interest in building high-speed rail lines through mountains and Texas's reluctance even to provide the timings and frequencies of 1951 among its major cities.

SHAKING UP THE ESTABLISHMENT. Glenn Reynolds suggests it would do the Republicans some good.

Unhappy over immigration and spending, key parts of the GOP base stayed home in 2006 and 2008. They're even unhappier with Obama, but that unhappiness hasn't translated into a lot of enthusiasm for a Republican Party that many see as nearly as corrupt and elitist as the Democrats.

Though the media and the Democratic Party tried to portray the Tea Party movement as Republican-organized "astroturf," the GOP only wishes that were the case. Tea Partiers are still reachable by the GOP, but if the GOP mishandles things, a Perot-style challenge is very possible.

Rick Moran concurs.

An establishment that gets too comfortable is no good to anyone. And the message I like being sent from [the 23rd District of New York] race is that putting up good, reasonable conservatives like [Conservative Party candidate Doug] Hoffman for office is usually better than the alternative.

It's time to see off the notion of consensus and expertise anyway.

INCENTIVES MATTER. Check your bag at the check-in desk, and airlines charge you a fee. Get caught at the gate with an overly-large bag, or get preempted by the gate lice, and your bag goes fee-free.

Bags deemed too large at the boarding gate, or checked when there's no room on the plane, fly free — a fact that has not escaped a growing number of travelers.

"Gate-checked bags are usually the last ones loaded into the baggage compartment, the first ones out, and generally the first ones on the (baggage) carousel," flier [David] Brown complains. "There should be an inconvenience penalty for gate-checked bags."

Just one more small advantage for the passenger train, if the airlines impose that. You have all the passengers attempting to board through one door, you have the first- and business-class passengers blocking the aisles and downing their drinks, then you have the attempt to find stowage space for carry-ons. Now add to that the purser collecting penalty fees.

Those bags with handles and rollers delay proceedings further, as passengers insist on rolling them on board (occupying more space) and then stowing the handles before stowing the bags, if space is available. Oh, for the days when John T. Molloy's success advice included not using such luggage, as it was a symbol of a flight attendant or some other plebeian calling.

The article hit a nerve with some readers.

As frustrating as it is to try to stuff bags in the overhead compartments, it is equally frustrating to wait for passengers to retrieve their luggage from the bins after the flight has landed.

Passengers who have not used the overhead bins should be allowed to exit the plane first, especially when they have a connecting flight. For passengers sitting in the back of the plane, exiting can take a half-hour or more.

You've got to cruise a lot of miles at 500 mph to offset the 75 minutes to two hours passengers lose in what the airlines call "boarding process" (felicitously conjuring images of processed meat) at one end and unloading through that one door at the other end.

ONE-NIL. Northern Illinois tallies in the 85th minute in Madison. In close contests such as that one, it doesn't matter who wins.

WORKING ON THE RAILROAD. I've modified one of the newer templates to take advantage of improvements in Blogger while retaining the look of Classic Cold Spring Shops. Commenting through Blogger is now available. Post rating remains temporarily unavailable now uses Blogger's scripts. Haloscan commenting will be turned back on the same time post rating will be restored, although Haloscan commenting will not be turned back on, and the Haloscan comment archive at left will be turned off again effective January 1, 2010 effective December 1, 2009. The blogroll and other features will be are now in operation in a few days. Thanks for your patience.

OVERTAKEN BY EVENTS? I recently picked up Keeping the Millennials: Why Companies are Losing Billions in Turnover to This Generation and What To Do About It at a secondhand bookstore. The previous owner, who left an airport coffee rewards slip in the book, made a few marginal notes in the first few chapters but left the remaining pages unmarked (and unread?) I got all the way through it and will write Book Review N^o. 43 before putting it in the box for the next trip to the secondhand bookstore. Imagine a breathless book-length infomercial for Key Group, complete with the usual business-guru format, including the obligatory "maximize your human resources" (otherwise known as "disguise your innumeracy by displaying it promiscuously.")

The book suggests that employers are hurting their businesses by not adapting their workplaces to the Millennial propensities (stereotypes?) of lots of positive feedback, lots of ability to work in teams, and lots of information technology. The generation most-medicated for attention-deficit disorder also has the most instant distraction. Discuss. Business gurus are apparently hyping the next management fad: a cursory search turns up Not Everyone Gets A Trophy: How to Manage Generation Y, which sounds like more of the same, but I suspect I'll not be tempted next time I'm detained at an airport.

On one hand, I welcome serious efforts (as opposed to airport-book infomercials) by employers to offer a variety of job descriptions rather than the one-size-fits-all we'll pay you a lot of money but you don't get to have a life that seems to be the working professional's reality: it matters not whether you call it Millennial-adapted or family-friendly or responding to the backward bending supply curve. On the other hand, when a book notes Millennial participation in the election of President Obama, but says nothing about the recession, there's a possible omission from the formulation. Two anecdotes: during the summer, I spoke with a former captain of a sports team here, now employed with a Fortune 100 company, who griped about the entitled attitude of many of the company's younger hires. Twenty-something going on curmudgeon ... Then comes "I don't have these graduates in Europe and Asia telling us they want to live with mom and dad or they don't want to relocate to Asia," via Newmark's Door. Key would tell the latter manager to change his ways: the reserve army of the unemployed (particularly among younger workers) provides a different incentive.

The generational analyses in these managing Millennials books also strikes me as odd. Perhaps for expository purposes, it suffices to group everyone born before 1945 (or per The Fourth Turning, before 1942) into one Mature (or in other examples of the genre, Traditional) cohort. That's not strictly accurate. Most of the GI era senior managers (born 1901- abt. 1925) are retired. The Silent Generation senior managers (born abt. 1925 - 1942) are retiring, although their last act may be to destroy all of health care over the same focus on government-as-manager that turned civil rights into a spoils system, diluted higher education, and impeded any serious reform of Medicare and Social Security. The Millennials will have to pick up those pieces, and somehow workplaces that allow text-messaging in place of written memoranda and provide flextime strike me as irrelevant to those challenges.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

OF POSITION AND EXCESS CAPACITY. I've long maintained that the positional arms race in higher education enrollments (until the recession brought austerity to the more affluent quarters) has been a flight to perceived quality in the presence of excess capacity in access-assessment-remediation-retention.

Think about it this way: would diners be better served if only 20 restaurants earned a five-star rating, or if (with no dilution of standards) they had a choice among 50, 100, 200 five-star restaurants?

Now comes Caroline M. Hoxby, currently with Stanford, with a related perspective that does not cause me to change my mind.

This paper shows that although the top ten percent of colleges are substantially more selective now than they were 5 decades ago, most colleges are not more selective. Moreover, at least 50 percent of colleges are substantially less selective now than they were then. This paper demonstrates that competition for space--the number of students who wish to attend college growing faster than the number of spaces available--does not explain changing selectivity. The explanation is, instead, that the elasticity of a student's preference for a college with respect to its proximity to his home has fallen substantially over time and there has been a corresponding increase in the elasticity of his preference for a college with respect to its resources and peers. In other words, students used to attend a local college regardless of their abilities and its characteristics. Now, their choices are driven far less by distance and far more by a college's resources and student body. It is the consequent re-sorting of students among colleges that has, at once, caused selectivity to rise in a small number of colleges while simultaneously causing it to fall in other colleges.

I'll be able to obtain the full working paper at the office, time permitting. An Inside Higher Ed column comments.

The number of high school graduates in the United States, from 1955 to today, increased by 131 percent, she notes, but the number of freshman seats in the U.S. rose by 297 percent. "This suggests that the absolute standard of achievement required of a freshman who successfully competed for a seat was falling," Hoxby writes.

She adds that the standard of academic preparation to gain admission could still have gone up over the years if the academic standards of all high school students showed gains. But using data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and matching those results with college-going patterns, she finds the opposite. The number of college seats available to students who -- judging by NAEP scores and college admission records -- are only moderately or minimally prepared has gone up.

"[S]ince 1975, there has been more than one seat per minimally prepared student. In short, the achievement standard for obtaining a freshman seat in the U.S. is minimal and is falling," she writes.

The working paper, which I will have to read, provocatively excludes research expenditures, including those at the medical colleges, and still finds that the most selective universities have thrown more resources at students.

While there may be different policy responses to her findings, Hoxby concludes by stressing the need to shift discussion away from a framework that assumes most colleges are impossible to get into.

"Over the past few decades, the average college has not become more selective: the reverse is true, though not dramatically," she writes. "The reason that initially selective colleges are much more selective today is not that they have failed to expand to absorb greater numbers of extremely high aptitude students. In fact, they have expanded modestly, keeping up with the modest growth in the population of such students."

That reckoning of resources probably understates the effect on undergraduate learning: it's possible that Gary Becker's graduate assistant might do more to stretch introductory economics students' minds at Chicago than I do for mine.

At Minding the Campus, KC Johnson pursues one of the possible policy implications.

The clear policy ramifications from Hoxby's study: institutions that currently can't afford to spend the amount of money of students that we see from Ivy League schools ($92,000 per student, according to Hoxby) need to be more selective in both their admissions criteria and in their academic visions.

It's encouraging to read that. Motivated placebound students, and motivated students from modest circumstances, deserve better than to have their aspirations dragged down by unmotivated classmates.

According to the report, the willingness to attend schools far from home produced a "resorting" effect. High-aptitude students increasingly have clustered at the top schools. Decades ago, they were sprinkled more throughout the second-tier schools, but the increasing desire for Harvard-Yale-Princeton-etc. has driven them up the university ladder, resulting precisely in the lower selectivity of the remaining 90 percent.

The report doesn't pursue the implications of this stratification, but it does note that because of the application patterns of high-aptitude students, low-aptitude students increasingly encounter low-aptitude students in their classes. In other words, the resulting student bodies reinforce the division of selective from non-selective institutions. Low-performing students sit in class with other low-performers. They don't have the superior student who didn't want to travel far from home sitting next to them in English 101, raising the quality of class discussion and pushing expectations higher. We sometimes forget that much of the intellectual level of the campus depends not on the faculty but upon the undergraduates. Students often take their cue not from the syllabi but from their roommates.

In that post, author Mark Bauerlein, perhaps in a Swiftian way, proposes that students and professors periodically change places. I bet it's more productive for the land-grants and mid-majors and on down the status hierarchy to work on lifting their efforts. (As a side note, I think the author meant re-sorting, rather than some revealed preference for climbing walls and health clubs.)