LawTalkers - Know new taxes!

I have a similar feeling resulting from campus interviews that I do for my firm. Fuckers blow out their grades, take a 1 year sabbatical for Peace Corps shit in the jungle, found their own law review, and cure cancer in between classes. Now they're looking to me to hire them for some schlub corporate associate position? Just seems wrong.

Cletus Miller

12-11-2008 01:01 PM

Re: Are you rich?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Replaced_Texan (Post 373845)

doesn't it make sense to start building more schools that they want to go to?

Are you proposing "from scratch" or elevating (for lack of a better word) existing post-secondary institutions? A high schoool is a much different creature than a college or university.

Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)

12-11-2008 01:02 PM

Re: Are you rich?

Quote:

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield (Post 373837)

And Harvard and its immediate competitors being the only private institutions in this country, you are more than mainly correct.

There are plenty of third tier schools offering financial aid as well.

Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

12-11-2008 01:03 PM

Re: Are you rich?

Quote:

Originally Posted by notcasesensitive (Post 373841)

One or two per class is not state school numbers. I'd guess that about 15-20 in my class went to SU. Not sure if anyone went to Cornell (valedictorian went to Stanford, which he picked over Harvard, other people from the top of the class went to a sort of random assortment of schools that I don't recall including any Ivies, which I admit is odd). There were also a fair number that ended up at SUNY Albany because that was the local school. I'm just saying that SUNY Albany is no [insert name of state school that gets 80% of the funding in a given state here]. There were about 4-6 of us that ended up at my small upstate private school (ah, hell, it was U of R). Well for the first year or so at least. I think 2 of us graduated from there.

To be clear, I have absolutely no idea where you grew up other than in upstate NY, but I'm betting I know what high school you went to from this description and if so, it's kind of unique. I'll pm you. But my focus was on gazillion small towns with little high schools, where one or two good students are pretty significant. But I find it interesting that there was no cornell at all in your neck of the woods, because it really was the closest thing for us. Everyone wanted to go to Cornell.

But, yeh, Cornell's pretty unique itself. I suspect the University of Michigan draws a bunch even in those small towns.

Cletus Miller

12-11-2008 01:07 PM

Re: Are you rich?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.) (Post 373848)

There are plenty of third tier schools offering financial aid as well.

But they aren't good enough for the talented, but poor student, kids Sebby's talking about.

And aren't most schools with "Tech" or "Mines" in their names already what Sebby wants to turn PSU and Michigan into?

Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

12-11-2008 01:16 PM

Re: Are you rich?

Quote:

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield (Post 373844)

Respectable isn't getting anyone a scholarship.

I disagree. It won't get them into Harvard, but it should get them into a fine second or third level school that does have some scholarship money and is probably 20% less than Harvard to begin with.

The bigger problem comes when they aren't dirt poor, but kids of fire fighters, cops or teachers. Then, well, their family needs to save like crazy to make it work.

Replaced_Texan

12-11-2008 01:18 PM

Re: Are you rich?

Quote:

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield (Post 373843)

*BTW, we should fire all HR people, across the board. No offense to anyone in HR, but really? What the fuck is with that field? How can one sector of our economy be filled with so many useless robots? And then we wonder, 'How did a stunning incompetent like Sebby get hired?'

Two words - Human Resources.

Heh. I heard yesterday about someone who is the head of HR at the Four Seasons in Bali. He's now known King of Bali because pretty much everyone on the island has a family member that is, has been, or wants to be employed by the Four Seasons. Guy lives like a god.

ThurgreedMarshall

12-11-2008 01:19 PM

Re: Are you rich?

Quote:

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield (Post 373843)

Human resouce departments simply implement the hiring strategies of the business they are working for. At law firms they simply make sure candidates meet the minimum grade threshold and then facilitate and organize interviews and events. They may have more authority in corporations, but they're still just operating based on management's objectives.

That said, given my HR department, I have no problem with your proposal as long as we hire really hot people to take their places.

TM

ThurgreedMarshall

12-11-2008 01:22 PM

Re: Are you rich?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Replaced_Texan (Post 373845)

I do student interviews for the small elite college I went to for undergrad (not one that GGG mentioned above, but close enough; student faculty ratio 8:1, tuition now $35,000, room and board $12,200), and they're at the point that they only accept 15% of the kids that apply. Finding kids to fill the seats isn't a problem, at all. There isn't room for more kids at my college. It has maybe 100 more kids than it did when I was there, but expansion isn't exactly part of the mission.

I just filled out an interview report form for one kid that really, really wants to go there, and I don't think she's going to get in. She's smart, she's got lots of extracurriculars, she's personable, but her grades aren't quite perfect enough. And these days, there are so many applicants to my school that perfect grades are almost not good enough.

I'm not sure, after interviewing all these really smart kids, that I would have gotten in if I'd applied now, instead of 18 years ago.

One thing I did notice, though, interviewing her is that her elite private high school is relatively new. She's in the first graduating class that started out as a freshman, and they've already elevated to the point that they're sending kids to the really great places. I know at my own elite private high school, legacy status doesn't matter anymore, because there are too many legacys that want to send their kids there. There are just more good kids than there are spaces to put them. But someone out there is noticing that, and they're building more elite schools to accomodate demand. The Universities don't seem to be doing the same thing, though.

On a similar note, there are a shit ton of good faculty out there looking for tenure track positions. I know quite a few of them. There just aren't that many tenure track jobs.

So if there are more kids who want to go than can be put in the good schools, and there are enough people out there to teach them, doesn't it make sense to start building more schools that they want to go to?

Yes. But I imagine the the capital investment costs are quite a barrier to entry.

TM

eta: Nevermind. ATP (Anticipate, then post)

Replaced_Texan

12-11-2008 01:27 PM

Re: Are you rich?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cletus Miller (Post 373847)

Are you proposing "from scratch" or elevating (for lack of a better word) existing post-secondary institutions? A high schoool is a much different creature than a college or university.

I think elevating is probably the way to go, because of the costs associated with founding a place.

The woman who just came to be Chancellor of the University of Houston apparently did an awesome job at getting the University of South Florida out of the gutter rankings, and they now get good facutly, good students, good research grants, and have a decent football team. I'm hopeful she'll do something similar at UH.

ThurgreedMarshall

12-11-2008 01:28 PM

Jimbaran Bay

Quote:

Originally Posted by Replaced_Texan (Post 373852)

I am thinking about this spot for my honeymoon. It is fucking ridiculous.

http://www.fourseasons.com/jimbaranbay/photo_gallery/

Go to photos 7 and 9. That's part of your room, man. Your room!

TM

Sidd Finch

12-11-2008 01:31 PM

Re: Are you rich?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Adder (Post 373832)

1. Huh? How are the deficits of the last 7 years screwing us now?

and

2. It sure would be fun to be trying to scramble to pass a consitutional amendment to allow for stimulus spending today. Or to allow for the post-9/11 recovery packages.

Granted, we probably would not have had the Bush tax cuts, which would have helped some.

re: 1., are you serious? Do you think it'd be easier to provide bailouts, stimulus, whatever, if we weren't already so deep in the hole, and didn't have a few hundred billion of interest obligations on the Bush II debt?

As for 2., I agree with you -- the Contract on America had the silly idea that the way to balance the budget was to advocate a Constitutional Amendment. Rather than, say, to propose a balanced budget, or to identify specific cuts or tax increases that, when aggregated, would lead to a balanced budget. But it sure would've been nice if W had maintained Clinton's fiscal prudence during the relatively good economic times we had in 2003-2007.

Sidd Finch

12-11-2008 01:33 PM

Re: Are you rich?

Quote:

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield (Post 373833)

Say a kid's pretty smart, tenacious, can read people and generally has a good mind for numbers, critical thinking, etc... But he's not a good enough student to get a scholarship. What's his option? Take out a fuckload of loans or go to a lesser state school and have less opportunities. We can do better for those people, but we never focus on them.

It sounds like you're saying that schools that are set up to serve the best and brightest (plus the richest), and are therefore very expensive, should downgrade in order to better serve the mediocre.

Because if the guy who is kind of smart but can't get a scholarship or student aid has to go to a lesser school, that is already set up precisely to serve people like him, then his opportunities will be reduced.

Tyrone Slothrop

12-11-2008 01:35 PM

Re: Are you rich?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy (Post 373822)

I'd consider the differences material, especially when you look at faculty composition (e.g., tenure track versus non-). You're saying Vanderbilt has a ratio 25% worse than Harvards, and a significantly smaller endowment - I'm saying that's part of the distinction.

The statistics are all over the place, and you can pull isolated comparisons and do what you like with them. Even with Vanderbilt and Harvard, Harvard's endowment is ten times larger, and yet the difference in ratio is pretty small -- 7:1 and 9:1. Mostly what I see there is that large research universities have far bigger endowments than liberal arts colleges, but the ratios are not comparably better. This makes sense, after all, in that liberal arts colleges are about providing an undergraduate education, while research universities have other missions as well. (I suspect that the ratios for schools like Harvard are inflated in the sense that professors at Harvard have graduate students to oversee, etc., and other duties taking them away from undergraduates, much more so than their peers at Reed and Whitman.)

Quote:

The three schools that are usually at the top of best colleges lists are Amherst, Williams and Swarthmore, which all have 7:1 and 8:1 student/faculty ratios. You go down the list, and everyone else in the top 25is 9:1, 10:1 or worse. And you get into the second and third tier, and 10:1 is good.

In a student body of 2,000, the difference between 8:1 and 10:1 is 50 faculty. That makes a huge difference.

If you are arguing now that lower ratios make for better schools, I won't disagree. But that's different from saying that large endowments are correlated with low ratios.

Tyrone Slothrop

12-11-2008 01:36 PM

Re: Are you rich?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cletus Miller (Post 373823)

Uh, "we told you so"? If we'd had a balanced budget during the good times, we wouldn't be sooo screwed now.

It's enough to make you wish we'd balanced the budget during the Clinton years.

http://www.kowaldesign.com/budget/images/defcon.gif

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