Thoughts on Same-Sex Marriage & #SCOTUS

Same-sex Marriage will shortly be taken up by the US Supreme Court. I'll express my own legal opinion. If you're not prepared to read what I have to say then don't read further ~

My opinion is that if reason prevails, this will be the conclusive end of the ridiculous State-by-State, case-by-case lawsuits, and civil marriage -whatever you want to call it- will be fairly and equitably extended to all who meet the basic legal requirements. The reason has nothing at all to do with opinions about right and wrong, and everything to do with extending rights to a minority that have long been recognized by a majority.

Now, I'm sure that some will object based on their religious beliefs, interpretations of scripture, or other arguments. It is certainly your right, as a member of your church, to follow your own church's guidance and speak freely and as you wish. No freedoms of religion or expression are violated by others' private actions.

However, the first key legal point is that citizens of this country have had a separate and non-religious 'civil' pathway to marriage for many, many years. If the desire is to put marriage back into church, that would entail upending a very longstanding precedent. Not going to happen.

Yes, there are a [very] few countries that don't recognize civil marriage e.g. Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen...you get the picture. In these law-abiding United States, the issue is conclusively settled: you can get a civil marriage outside the church. Those wishing to marry are therefore not beholden to the strictures of any particular church.

It sends to me that the above point, alone, may not be quite sufficient to extend all same-sex marriage benefits, however. And so the second key point is that it would be unlawful to extend civil benefits in a way that discriminates on the basis of gender or race. This is perhaps not quite as legally enshrined as some might wish, but the spirit is well recognized throughout our legal system. You can't reward someone for being born as a particular gender or race; so too you can't penalize them.

Therefore, the right to civil marriage should ...and very certainly and inevitably.... will be extended to all who meet basic legal requirements e.g. age of consent and ability to recognize the terms and implications of the marriage contract. (And n.b. these latter qualifications very clearly exclude all the nonsense that some worry will turn us all to salt e.g. underage marriage, polygamy, unions between man and animal, and all the rest of the straw men typically offered!)

So, in conclusion, I say: the argument against same-sex marriage is already legally lost and that's the end of the story. We need to focus on far more important things than what consenting adults do in their own homes and whether they can share earned financial benefits.

Tuition Inflation in #HigherEd & why @SenWarren 's Proposal Won't Fix It

College tuition has been inflating severely since the early 1990s, at a rate far exceeding the CPI. This alarming trend defies simple explanation... and there is no simple cure.

Without question, tuition inflation is one of the most severe challenges for American millennials. Although the data assure impressive long-term (~30 year) return on college investment for most students, tuition inflation has made it almost impossible for students and their families to make that investment without long-term loans. And unfortunately, much student debt is serviced at interest rates far exceeding reasonable benchmarks e.g. the 30-year bond yield or the 30-year mortgage rates.

It is important to note that little of the cumulative student debt is served by the Federal assistance programs such as the Stafford program. This is well known to families with students in college today.

In the most cynical analysis, it appears that some parts of Higher Ed and the loan industry are in collusion, baiting students with promises of remunerative careers while luring them into loans they may never repay. Indeed this analysis seems particularly apt for certain for-profit programs, which have been the target of recent Congressional attention.

Highlighting the impending increase on Stafford loans from 3.4% to 6.8%, Senator Elizabeth Warren recently brought some much-needed attention to the problem of loan repayment; she summarizes her program in this PDF:

http://www.warren.senate.gov/documents/BankonStudentsFactSheet.pdf

One of Senator Warren's most compelling arguments is the following:

"This year, the federal government will make $34 billion on student loans. The government even makes money on its loans to low-income students – 36 cents, on average, for every student loan dollar it puts out. If Congress allows the interest rate on these loans to double, the federal government will bring in even more revenue – money that comes straight from the pockets of college students."


However, as noted before, only a fraction of student loan debt is served by the Stafford program.


Also, it important to note that a very simple market principle: in the debt markets, the demand for loans is inversely proportional to the loan rate. In other words, if the loan rates are depressed, more students will take on debt. Is that really what we want? or do we want to find ways to make it possible for stduents to complete college without a mountain of debt?

Of course, Sen. Warren intends to migrate student debt away from predatory loans to less expensive loans, and is one way to help today's students in debt crisis. But the larger issue -much larger than Sen. Warren's well-intended vision of debt relief- is ongoing tuition inflation in higher ed, which will continue to hit tomorrow's students very hard. And that inflation arises from complicated institutional effects that aren't easily distilled into political sound bites. The uncomfortable truth is that I and many of my colleagues were able to complete college with ~zero debt only a few decades ago, and that is almost impossible today. Why?

In the coming weeks, I'll visit the various sources of tuition inflation in an informal way, and suggest reasonable ways to address them. and I pledge that nothng will be sacred. So stay tuned!

Education Market Enriches Apple and Microsoft

In this letter to the Chronicle of Higher Education, I express my concern about the huge profits taken by companies like Apple and Microsoft in the education market:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/letters/education-market-enriches-apple-and-microsoft/

Looking forward to meeting @jackandraka...

Inspiring and energetic young inventor Jack Andraka will visit me and the students at #UVa next week. First he'll visit my nanoelectronics class, ECE 4140, and then he'll give talk and do some Q&A on Monday at noon in the dome room of the UVa Rotunda. It'll be a lot of fun, and I am expecting a lot of other young inventors to attend.

Biomedical engineer Alex Zorychta, himself a clever inventor whose team recently won a UVa Entrepreneurship Cup and secured substantial funding, has set up a FaceBook Event to help me publicize this event.

Given the source of Jack's inspiration, the topic of his research, and the venue for his talk, I thought it'd be appropriate to comment about Randy Pausch, the brilliant computer scientist who inspired so many people with his "Last Lecture" and "Time Management" during his final days here in Virginia. Here are the introductory ppt slides that I will present on Monday:

Keith Williams' intro slides for Jack Andraka's visit on Monday April 21st

k.w.

Is #CNN wagging the dog over #MH370?

CNN has given me the motivation to blog again… and unfortunately not for a positive reason.

By now, almost everyone on the planet is familiar with the sad mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, lost for more than two weeks after departing Kuala Lumpur. Certainly, this is a tragic event and the families and friends of the passengers deserve our ongoing support and consolation.

There are two tragedies here: foremost, or course, the loss of the passengers. The second tragedy is the inexplicable and sudden loss of CNN’s credibility as a news organization. The network has been parroting wild speculation, and repeating the same news ad nauseum. Worst still, CNN appears to be manufacturing or at least repurposing old news, to give viewers the impression that they are delivering something significant... when in fact the story has barely advanced in weeks. And some details, presented as sufficient grounds for wild speculation, have been revealed incorrect, e.g. the famous "alright goodnight," now refuted. The truth is that this could be an approximate repeat of the Helios Airways Flight 522 tragedy... we simply don't know yet, and we may not know for months or years.

The tactics that CNN has used to boost ratings are rather obvious. At regular intervals, we see “Breaking News” splashed across the screen. This is accompanied, of course, by the familiar theme reinforcing the urgency. We see a checkerboard of ‘experts’ who, instead of clearly delineating what is known from what is not, as any responsible expert should do, often appear to attempt to outdo each others’ gut feelings. We see two “pilots” installed in a flight simulator, where they game all manner of scenarios, with no apparent relationship to evidence. CNN has entertained virtually (pun intended) every possible scenario… and a few impossible ones too. Anchors of several CNN shows have been pulled into the ratings frenzy, shoving aside many stories for which far more substantive information exists, e.g. the tragedy in Washington, and the annexation of Ukraine and subsequent massing of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border.

It’s not CNN shouldn’t report on MH370- of course they should. But shouldn’t the amount of coverage be proportional to the availability of newsworthy content? That this isn’t the case opens the door to the frightening proposition that CNN is manufacturing a story… wagging the dog, so to speak. Meanwhile, CNN’s ratings have indeed improved. But at what cost?

There is news, there are newsmakers... and then there are journalists. Does anyone at CNN know the difference?

How Many of our Students are Adequately Prepped for Maximum Return on a College Investment?

The subject of how to prepare a student for college continues to be on my mind...

Recently, an article appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education that describes many of the issues associated with computing return on the college investment:

Chronicle: How to Assess the Real Payoff of a College Degree 

As I consider the viewpoints expressed in this article, I again wonder if the role of preparation is given sufficient attention.

A common assumption made by students and their families is that college will illuminate a clear career path and guarantee a certain salary. In other words, college is a ticket to the good life; you simply buy that ticket, and off you go.

My feeling is that we need to communicate much more clearly to the students that college is an enabling experience... not an entitling experience. If a student doesn't understand that key difference and realize that this is in fact a good thing, then that student probably isn't ready for college.

A transformative college experience is something in which students must truly participate- i.e. it's not a movie that they can sit through, passively view, and exit with more than they arrived. College should not be viewed as mere credentialing. Our students should be better prepared to engage and expected to engage; this is the "collegium" of college- it's not just some high-priced theatre that you watch. When students are ready to come and participate with the faculty and with each other, then the outcome is far greater for all.

And on this overarching topic of preparation to engage... what I think is most obviously missing from so many discussions of college's return on investment is how to gauge preparedness. Pre-college preparation is not measured simply by points on an ACT or SAT! The important question is whether the student has the academic and social maturity to get the most out of their experience. Many parents seem unaware that their students simply aren't ready to dive in... in which case, all the points and counterpoints about the college return on investment are fairly moot. Even the very best programs will do little for an underprepared student. 

I first wrote about the 'prep problem' on this blog around a year ago.... and I'm even more convinced of its importance today.

America's Two-Lane Higher Education

Campus Counseling Visits on the Rise.. Why?

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that "The number of college students with severe psychological problems continues to increase, while anxiety, depression, and relationship issues most commonly send students to seek help at their campus counseling centers, according to a report released last month."

Here's the article link; you probably need a Chronicle subscription to read it:

Campus Counseling Centers 'Are as Busy as They Ever Have Been'

First, I have to say that it's very sad to read this today, on the anniversary of the tragedy at Virginia Tech, which took place six years ago. Have we made any progress toward prevention of such events? It doesn't seem to me that we have. There are so many distressed young people, and our discussions about these issues are still so superficial.

Interestingly, the study cited in the Chronicle reports an inverse correlation between the number of counseling visits per student, and school size:

"Centers at small, private colleges typically draw a greater percentage of students than do those at large, public institutions. At private four-year colleges with enrollments between 1,500 and 2,500, roughly 18 percent of students visited the counseling center, the report says. At public universities of more than 30,000, only 7 percent of students did."

On this topic, I suspect that financial issues are one of the main drivers behind the anxiety that students feel. If that's the case, then there may be a correlation between counseling visits and sticker price. Also, based on recent discussions with several sets of parents, I'd say too many parents make an incorrect assumption that a small school is necessarily more socially welcoming and supportive than a larger one. Usually, those making this assumption cite the student-teacher ratio, which is very limited metric, in my opinion. Parents often assume that smaller is better, but it's really not that simple. I have worked with a number of students who really loved and took great advantage of the more diverse student population that they found in a large public university. They like the social options and, perhaps to some extent, the anonymity. 

One young fellow I've worked with on career goals for a few years told me that a small college he visited felt too much like high school... cliquey and full of the same kinds of kids. This is consistent with my own experience. I don't know about you but for me, high school was a rather awful social experience, where it was very hard to find kids with whom I could identify. My transition into a fairly large public college brought tremendous relief!

Overall, it seems to me that many of our schools have become places of great stress, with too many students believing that every test is make-or-break... and too many faculty teaching to the tests, rather than really connecting with the students. Grade inflation has made it so hard to distinguish oneself that the students are scratching and clawing over every plus or minus. And we now have a quarter or more of our students resorting to amphetamine-based prescription medications to assist with cramming... 

College students take ADHD drugs for better grades

Adderall abuse on the rise among college students

...not to mention the anti-anxiety medications and anti-depressants. It seems that college has become a fabulously profitable pharmaceutical enterprise. Is anyone really surprised? Is today's college environment where students want to come and feel inspired to take those first, tentative steps toward finding themselves?

Far too many discussions I have with students now revolve around finances and related anxieties, e.g. whether there will be a job for them, whether they can cram it all into three years, etc. In addition to that direct financial stress, several other factors seem to elevate the anxiety in our colleges. The enrollment surge is something many of our colleges were ill-equipped to handle, and that surge led to larger and less personal classes and now perhaps even acceptance of courses that students won't even attend in person, because that's how the system thinks it can pare instructional costs. And this is "college"... collegium... a social environment.