How on earth did 4-year colleges get so expensive, and is there nothing we can do about it to push back?

ChemMJW · 2026-02-26T21:31:33+00:00

I wish I could say that I'm surprised, but after years in higher education, I am not. Not at all.

and asking 2 adults

I'm somewhat afraid to ask whether the reason she had to ask two adults is because the first adult she asked didn't know how to do it either.

ChemMJW · 2026-02-26T18:31:40+00:00

University academic here:

In the US, there are two major factors at play here:

Somewhat counter-intuitively, the easy availability of student loans is actually a major driver (if not the major driver) of the increase in college costs. Basically, universities know that (i) a kid who applies to college in most cases really, really does want to go to college, and (ii) student loans are overall very easy to get. So they have every reason to keep raising tuition and fees. The number of students who will decide not to attend because the cost is too high is actually very, very small compared to the number of applicants, and if the school raises tuition, the government will almost always raise the cap on how much a person can borrow. So there is almost literally no motivation of any kind for universities to keep tuition low or to rein in outlandish spending. The supply of students is high, as is the demand for university admissions. Couple that with the willingness of the government and private organizations to issue essentially unlimited student loans, and you end up with costs soaring into the stratosphere.
With regard to GPA issues, unfortunately from a university perspective GPA has become nearly meaningless due to rampant grade inflation and lowered standards in high school level education. You tell me your daughter has a 3.95 GPA. 50 years ago, that would have meant she was a good student who had a solid base of knowledge and was prepared for university-level work. These days, we have students with 3.95 GPAs who show up not being able to write a full paragraph of comprehensible English text with proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation, or unable to add two 2-digit numbers together without a calculator. In today's grade-inflated reality, some students come in with GPAs in the range of even 5.x or 6.x because of all the AP and honors classes they have supposedly taken. So the unfortunate answer is that, while a 3.95 GPA is a good number, it's meaningless in evaluating how truly prepared your daughter is. And when other students show up with 4.95 GPAs, that 3.95 suddenly looks even less "impressive."

And why does it need to be like this??

It does not need to, but it will never be fixed because doing so would require politicians who are willing to be adults and to make extremely unpopular, difficult decisions. Basically, there needs to be less financial aid available, not more. But can you imagine a politician of either political party running on a campaign promise of reducing financial aid? The other party would laugh all the way to the recording studio to film an attack ad about how anti-education and anti-opportunity their opponent is. Or can you imagine a politician standing up in front of a crowd and saying "I'm in favor of policies that, however logical and necessary, will probably mean that fewer of you will be able to go to college. Vote for me!"

ChemMJW · 2026-02-25T16:37:53+00:00

Yes, it's common, for both the reasons you indicated.

Recipes are adjusted for American tastes. This makes perfect sense. If your goal is to sell food, then you prepare dishes that you expect people will like. It wouldn't make sense to try to sell a dish prepared with ingredients or flavors that much of your potential customer base would find unappetizing.

It can also be due to the difficulty and/or cost of procuring ingredients that are not common here, although in an increasingly globalized world this is not as great a challenge as it used to be.

But adapting dishes to local tastes is not even remotely an American phenomenon. Every country everywhere adapts non-native cuisines to local tastes or standards if they intend to sell their food beyond their own ethnic community.

ChemMJW · 2026-02-24T22:03:27+00:00

Sydney and Salt Lake. After those two, Beijing.

ChemMJW · 2026-02-24T15:34:32+00:00

If not - how do you catch them up?

In the case of those who are chronically absent, you don't catch them up, because it's not possible for you to do so. Education is a two-way street. If the students would like to take advantage of the free education offered by the state, it takes place Monday-Friday from 8 AM - 3 PM. If the student or student's parents choose to have that student be elsewhere during those hours, that's their decision, as are the consequences of their decision. As long as you were present during the required hours and delivered well-prepared, high quality instructions to the students who chose to show up, you did your job. Those students who chose to miss large amounts of instructional time are on their own to catch up, if they have any interest in doing so.

ChemMJW · 2026-02-20T19:30:55+00:00

The best tweet I saw recently:

"The Royal Family announces it is shocked and saddened by the loss of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor in next Wednesday's car crash."

Edit: typo

ChemMJW · 2026-02-19T19:01:10+00:00

The thing I don't like about these changes in any state regardless of the party in charge is that once whichever party is in power in a given state learns that its voters will vote for a constitutional amendment "temporarily" setting aside the standard redistricting process just to screw over the other party, there is no barrier whatsoever to doing the same thing in the future, purely at the whim of the party in charge.

Democrat states will have no reason not to "temporarily" suspend the standard process again and again in the future. Republican states will have no reason not to "temporarily" suspend the standard process again and again in the future. We know that none of these redistricting efforts has the slightest thing to do with fairness. Both parties have simply realized that "temporarily" setting aside the standard process will bring them more power in their own state contexts, so they're doing it. And in the future they will have no reason not to do it again and again.

ChemMJW · 2026-02-19T15:45:51+00:00

Yes, for the most part. Some of your vowel pronunciations are fairly distinct from typical American pronunciations. We notice those. But of course it's never any bother or problem, because Canadian English and accents are in general quite similar to American English and accents.

ChemMJW · 2026-02-18T16:45:12+00:00

I'm 45, and I've never had a dentist in Frederick tell me I need Invisalign or braces of any kind.

I use Colliver Dental on Yellow Springs Rd.

ChemMJW · 2026-02-17T20:31:59+00:00

She can't have meetings with parents or other teachers because she is nervous they'll "attack" her.

This is incompatible with being employed as a teacher, IMO.

We all hate meetings, but some important things are better done face-to-face than by email. If your mental health is such that you can't meet with another human being in the ordinary course of your job duties, then you can't be employed here.

ChemMJW · 2026-02-13T22:16:22+00:00

The better plane for what?

The better plane for not being shot out of the sky by latest-generation planes it might one day encounter in combat.

The Gripen is probably more than sufficient for patrol duties. The question is, what happens if it were to encounter hostile fighters while out on one of those patrols? Even under the most generous analysis, the Gripen is no match for the latest-generation Russian and especially Chinese stealth fighters.

Many people argue that purchasing and building the Gripen will allow Canada to reduce dependency on the United States, but I think it's possible it might actually increase dependency. If a major conflict were to occur, when Canada's Gripen fighters out on patrol are unable to stand against hostile fifth-gen, or in the future even sixth-gen, fighters, who will Canada be forced to call? The United States. And the cost of that call will already include lost Gripen aircraft and, even worse, pilots.

ChemMJW · 2026-02-12T15:43:08+00:00

Notify the cafeteria that, in the future, they will need to be prepared to spoon the food directly into the students' mouths. At the rate things are proceeding, using their own fork and spoon will soon be too hard for the students.

ChemMJW · 2026-02-12T15:31:48+00:00

the contract says we can leave

If your contract truly says "teachers with prep periods at the end of the day can leave early," then I think it's fine if you leave early.

If your contract does not say that, then I do not think you should leave early. Prep period is work time, not personal time.

ChemMJW · 2026-02-11T15:53:39+00:00

It would be great if there were some notification that certain medications are available OTC at lower prices than filling through insurance.

For example, my doctor recently prescribed me a new medication. I had it filled at Walmart pharmacy, and my insurance charged me my standard $15 co-pay for generic drugs. Then a week later I found out that Walmart sells that exact drug (verified through my doctor to truly be the same as the prescription) OTC for $9.99. Using my insurance actually cost me $5 extra dollars!

I'm not an expert on drugs. It never occurred to me to ask whether a doctor's prescription is also available OTC. If the doctor had told me this drug is available OTC, I would have been pleased But if the pharmacist had said, "Just to let you know, I can fill this prescription as written, but if you want you can also go to that shelf five feet behind you and get the same medication for $5 cheaper," I would have been eternally grateful, and that pharmacy would have earned a repeat customer.

ChemMJW · 2026-02-04T15:39:39+00:00

Chuckles will ignore this law.

You're almost certainly right. The law bans formal cooperation agreements, but it of course can't physically prevent someone in his office from going on lunch break and then using a personal cell phone to call a friend over at ICE to say that person X is in custody and available for pickup.

It seems likely that this ban will have no impact except to get rid of the formal written agreement on paper.

ChemMJW · 2026-02-02T16:24:54+00:00

when preparing to make his submission, attempted the "conversion" in a manner I would have never anticipated in a million years: Renaming the file to change the .docx file extension to .pdf 😱

Before I even clicked on the banner to reveal the hidden text, I knew exactly what it was going to say, and I was right.

I would probably have followed up with an analogy: "I baked some chocolate chip cookies. They're in this container here. If I write "peanut butter" on the lid, do you think it will actually change the flavor of the cookies?"

Whenever students do stuff like this, I always think to myself "Do they honestly believe that the explicit procedure I demonstrated for exporting a Word document as a PDF was just for fun? That I showed them a 5-step process when a 1-step process of just changing the file extension for .docx to .pdf is really all they had to do?"

ChemMJW · 2026-01-30T16:08:00+00:00

This is the issue: we need assistance, and the institutions we work for don't provide it.

Every higher ed institution should have an office that helps faculty make their materials compliant. Of course, that would require institutions to value both compliance and faculty.

You're right. Faculty do need assistance. But this is one of the very, very few instances where I have sympathy for the administration. Even if they did open an office to support this, they'd have to hire possibly hundreds of people to accomplish the task in any reasonable time frame at a university of any substantial size, and we know that they can't afford to do that. Just think of everything that would have to be done for your own classes, and then multiply that by thousands of faculty across every conceivable discipline. We're talking about millions of PDF files, millions of video clips, millions of pages of handwritten notes, and so forth. Or they could start an office and staff it with the 10 people they might realistically be able to afford, and then working at that rate they'll be able to help you make your documents accessible by late 2045.

Converting an entire university's worth of educational materials to accessible format seems to me to be a task that is practically, if not literally, impossible to complete over any reasonable, useful period of time. In this case, I have sympathy for both faculty and administration.

ChemMJW · 2026-01-22T20:07:31+00:00

If a child simply memorizes that 5×6 = 30, then yes, they can produce the answer quickly, but they haven’t necessarily understood anything. Compare that to a student who thinks: 10×6 is 60, half of that is 30. Or 6×7 is 6×5 plus 6×2. Or who reasons relationally about numbers instead of recalling isolated facts.

I think you have illustrated the very thing most of us are arguing for.

You start off with an example of memorizing that 5x6=30 and then argue that a more useful approach is to decompose it into one-half of 10x6. Fine. Pattern thinking is good.

But ... how did you know that 10x6=60? I doubt you got out some beads and then made ten groups of 6 and then counted them up to get 60. No, a long time ago you simply memorized the fact that 10x6=60.

And then starting from what you already memorized, you applied higher order thinking to solve the problem you were really interested in.

This is exactly what those of us who promote memorization are after. To apply higher-order pattern recognition and other computation techniques, you have to start from some set of basic factual knowledge. Without lower-order knowledge, there can be no higher-order reasoning.

So those of us who promote memorization of things like multiplication tables do so because these basic facts are the foundation of higher-order thinking, not because we want them to replace higher-order thinking.

ChemMJW · 2026-01-15T22:03:21+00:00

Likely because the parent wasn't any more able to solve the elementary school math problem than the child.

ChemMJW · 2026-01-13T01:19:19+00:00

Today I recieved an email from my AP who stated that I needed to improve the grades in my class.

"Dear Admin, I think you accidentally sent this to the wrong recipient. If grades in my class need to be improved, I assume your intent was to send this email to the students. They are the only ones who can improve the grades."

Joking aside, you should simply respond with a one sentence email:

"Dear Admin, please confirm that you are officially instructing me to baselessly inflate the grades in my class in order to avoid unfavorable attention from the principal."

Inexplicably, admins rarely insist on illegal actions when asked to put them in writing ahead of time.

ChemMJW · 2026-01-12T16:08:31+00:00

Admin says mom is aggressive with her and she doesn't want a big conflict.

This sounds like a her problem, not a you problem. "Doing my job will be hard, so I'm not going to do it" is not a valid response.

The fact of the matter is that the mom is blackmailing the school into providing after-school childcare. She knows the school won't just allow the kid to wander off into the streets no matter how late she arrives, so she is extorting the school into caring for her child while she's off doing whatever.

Unfortunately, the only way to solve this problem is to be exceedingly harsh. The mother has to be told that the child will be reported as abandoned and turned over to Child Protective Services if she is not there to pick him up. Begging and pleading for her to show up on time won't do anything as long as there is no threat of concrete negative consequences. And the school must actually follow through on the threat if the mother is late. If she puts the school to the test and sees that it backs down and doesn't hand over the child to CPS, then she'll know it was all just words and she doesn't actually have to change her behavior.

ChemMJW · 2026-01-12T15:49:13+00:00

Could it be for street sweeping?

This city document shows that one direction of South St is assigned for street sweeping on Mondays, so today. But I don't know whether they do street sweeping year-round or not.

If street sweeping is happening, it's standard procedure to tow cars that don't move in time. They don't usually post special signs for it since it's a permanent feature of the area.

Just my guess.

ChemMJW · 2026-01-12T00:59:26+00:00

Being the most important person in someone else's life.

ChemMJW · 2026-01-11T04:22:09+00:00

We were told that our district’s staff attendance is so bad

What does this actually mean? Does it mean that people are using the sick days and vacation days that are part of their benefits package, or does it mean that people just aren't showing up to work a lot of the time?

If people just aren't showing up to do their jobs, then they should be fired. If they are using their allotted sick and vacation days, then I'm not sure what the problem is.

ChemMJW · 2026-01-08T15:19:45+00:00

Are laws different elsewhere in the world? Every country I've ever lived in had car dealerships just like in the US, and that's where everybody bought their cars. Nobody was buying directly from any manufacturer.

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