The 100 by 30 project

I suppose this is nothing compared to college tuition.

Raises were good to my husband and me this year -- A received a 7% raise and I received a 20% raise on my graduate stipend. Because we already save $1500/month (non-retirement), we were looking forward to pumping all the money into additional retirement contributions (which would bring us to about $1300/month in retirement savings).

It took us about a week to realize that we'll have two new family members come January! Our increased health care costs alone will eat up most of my raise. Not that I'm complaining -- we'll be paying $400/month for astonishingly good medical, dental, and vision coverage for four people. Rather than tie up all of A's raise in retirement, we'll probably just hold onto it as a cash reserve until we settle on a new postpartum budget.

For all the obsessing we've done about eventual daycare costs, we hadn't thought too carefully about these additional costs. In our defense, we still have six months to go. And apart from diapers and daycare, newborns don't sound especially expensive... obviously, our planning is going to have to get a little more sophisticated than that!

Talk about a happy May Day!

Out of the blue, our department chair just sent an email saying stipends will increase by 12.5% next year. That follows a 6% increase this year. I assume that our top rivals increased stipends significantly, and this is in response.

Sure, we still make less than the grad students in CS, but today I'm too pleased to care!

Advice for people who contact my department looking for tutors:

I can't speak for the other professors in the department, but my advisor bills out his consulting time at the rate of $2500/day. And we grad students are actually paid well enough that we don't see a lot of benefit to doing tutoring on the side, once you factor in the logistical hassle and the inflated expectations of tutorees.

So when you send an email to our department looking for a tutor for $20/hour and no one responds, leave it be. Don't follow it up with an angry email about how you can't believe no one is willing to earn "good money". We're all already taking financial hits in the interest of advancing our field and educating people in it: it's called "being a professor/grad student instead of being in industry". We don't owe you anything, although maybe we'd feel some obligation if you were actually an undergrad in our department -- or even taking a class in our department -- as opposed to being a grad student in a BS professional masters program who is only required to take an exceptionally watered-down class to begin with.

The profitability of jockery

This New York Times has an interesting series on athletic scholarships; my favorite article in the series is here.

My cousin currently has a baseball scholarship to a Div I university. I was shocked when my aunt once casually let it drop that the scholarship only covers half of his tuition. Because he's a state resident, it works out to $3500/year or so.

Which is fine -- I don't think that high school athletics, even at single-sport year round, very high level that both my cousin and I engaged in, should be seen as a financial investment one expects to recoup. Either the student is enjoying it or not, and if it's the latter they should (be allowed to) stop. In fact, I'd wager that my aunt and uncle easily spent $2000/year on travel alone traveling with my cousin's summer team from grades 8 - 12, not to mention league fees, uniforms and equipment, development camps, etc, so even a full tuition scholarship might not have covered the money they could have saved for college over the years if he hadn't been involved in baseball.

But even though I don't think profitability is the point, I still would have guessed that being a Division I college athlete in a mainstream sport would be more lucrative for the student and family.

“I Need This Class to Stay on My Parents' Health Insurance”

One of my favorite non-pf blogs is Confessions of a Community College Dean. Dean Dad always provides such caring and thoughtful insights into academia, especially the underfunded, non-sexy world of community college. The topic of his most recent post is especially interesting: students who register for classes they have no intention of taking so that they can stay on their parents' health insurance.

But there's something fundamentally wrong with a system that rewards people taking that extra class just to get the insurance. I don't entirely blame them for doing it – they've found a loophole in a ridiculously unfair system – but it certainly distorts what we're trying to do. These folks show up in our attrition numbers, our outcomes assessments, and our (non)-graduation rates, all of which get blamed on us. And they get lower GPA's than they probably ought, simply from spreading themselves unrealistically thin.

Go read it.

You'd never know that she didn't go on for a PhD:

From Megan McArdle:

"Academics are terrible, terrible snobs about certain forms of consumption, and painfully few of them are aware that these tastes are class markers, not ordinal virtue rankings written into the fabric of the universe at the beginning of time."

The value of B-school: none?

The Times has an article arguing that business school is a waste of time and money for anyone aspiring to be a Master of the Universe. They make two main arguments:

1. if you have a job in finance, a cost-benefit analysis will reveal B-school isn't worth it
2. if you do go, future employers will reject you for having bungled said cost-benefit analysis

The caveat is that if you're trying to transition into finance from, say, engineering, business school might not be your blackball.

And, of course, none of this necessarily applies if you aren't looking to be one of the hedge fund superstars.

Young adults increasingly vain?

This story reports on two research projects suggesting that "today's college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors". The first is focused on the "Narcissistic Personality Inventory" and compares college students of 1982 to those of 2006.

The researchers traced the phenomenon back to what they called the "self-esteem movement" that emerged in the 1980s, asserting that the effort to build self-confidence had gone too far.

As an example, Twenge cited a song commonly sung to the tune of "Frere Jacques" in preschool: "I am special, I am special. Look at me."

"Current technology fuels the increase in narcissism," Twenge said. "By its very name, MySpace encourages attention-seeking, as does YouTube."

The second study, out of UCLA, "found that nearly three-quarters of the freshmen it surveyed thought it was important to be "very well-off financially." That compared with 62.5 percent who said the same in 1980 and 42 percent in 1966."

What to think of this? I spend every day on a college campus, and there are massive differences between the undergrads here and the undergrads at my school eight to ten years ago. Mostly I'm shocked by how much time and money they apparently have to dedicate to their appearance, and I'm not just talking about the women -- the guys, too, are fond of outfits that just reek of effort. However, this could be for a variety of factors -- difference in location of the two schools, of wealth of the student body, the particular mores of the campus, difference in distribution of majors, etc. -- that have nothing to do with a widespread change in the behavior of college students.

The second study, though, I think might be making an unfair inference about young adults today. We're a generation that has seen the very public erosion of entitlements and traditional safety nets. Pension promises are being denied right and left. Enron. The hysteria about Social Security's longevity.

So, yes, I think it's very important to be well-off. Not because I have some mindless desire to be wealthy, but because I can't trust anyone else -- the government, a corporation I give a lifetime of work to -- to keep its promises to me.

Prepaid-Tuition Program in Texas Faces Long-Term $3.3-Billion Deficit

"The plan has been closed to new enrollees since 2003, after rapidly rising tuition rates at state colleges made it impossible for the board that oversees the program to set prices for new contracts. Other states also have considered altering or permanently closing their plans because of long-term deficits."

This has always been my big fear with wrt pre-paid tuition programs. I was curious whether it was
FDIC-insured, and discovered this:

The 75th Texas Legislative Session passed HJR 8, which was taken to the voters of Texas on November 4, 1997. The constitutional amendment passed creating a constitutionally protected trust fund backed by the full faith and credit of the State of Texas. Future tuition and fee payments are guaranteed by the State.

So it seems that investors are safe, but taxpayers are not. How did the fund manage to fall so far behind?

The program was launched with much fanfare in 1996. But it was closed to newcomers in the summer of 2003 after the Legislature deregulated tuition at state colleges and universities to help cope with a $10 billion revenue shortfall that year.

Deregulation triggered a record surge in tuition rates, which have jumped more than 40 percent over the last four years at the state's 35 senior colleges and universities.

The deregulation law allowed college governing boards to set their own tuition levels for the first time, rather than having to adhere to statewide rates set by the Legislature.

Fascinating.

Fantastic comment on Queercents that I want to highlight so I can come back to it:

"But, there is still something there about [academia's] almost singular emphasis on cultural capital as opposed to hard, cold money. It sounds more civilized but, in fact, it’s one of the more annoying dimensions of academic idealism."