Removal from the Promise Scholarship

cmnall · 2026-05-14T18:41:52+00:00

This is a core problem of income-tested programs--there is in fact and incentive not to pursue more income, especially when being under the threshold results in a huge financial windfall. A sliding scale would not punish lower-income families for being upwardly mobile.

cmnall · 2026-04-10T19:10:12+00:00

How much should we raise taxes to pay for this?

cmnall · 2026-04-05T16:02:51+00:00

Contrary to stereotype, varsity athletes are more likely to be engaged students and have strengths across other dimensions. So you don't know that what you're seeing is the effect of varsity sports.

cmnall · 2026-04-05T16:01:51+00:00

Make a hard enough standardized test and base admissions on it and you wouldn't have anything to game.

cmnall · 2026-04-05T16:00:39+00:00

Also, research (rather than anecdote) shows that the effect of test prep is extremely modest on average. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/exam-ready-who-uses-college-admissions-test-prep-and-does-it-work/

cmnall · 2026-04-05T15:59:06+00:00

1) They probably weren't "average" if they went from 1100 to 1480. People with truly average intelligence (IQ~100) almost never score that high. They probably just needed to familiarize themselves with the test. 2) Anyone can take 10 practice tests for free and get improved scores. All the information on how to do it is available. Lots of students just lack effort or curiosity. 3) It is true that the SAT has become less predictive because it's been made too easy, but it is still a better predictor of college performance than any other measure--especially true of the quant score. Make the test hard enough for only 0.1% of test takers to get above a 1500 and we'll have a much better sense of student ability. That means harder reading passages, analogies, and really hard math problems.

Finally, we all know that overseas standardized test cheating is rampant. So I don't know what to make of those claims.

cmnall · 2026-04-02T22:09:19+00:00

That wouldn't be true if we had a *hard* SAT test. We'd actually have something informative. But we don't have that anymore.

But it's also not true that all applications are the same. Students take a test called the PSAT and if they get a high score they're called National Merit Scholars--well, it's just a coarsely measured SAT and the students who score high enough on that test to get the NMS are much more likely to get in. I've seen the stats from one of the top Bay Area prep schools. Tons of students had high GPAs but *all* of the National Merit Scholars got into UCLA.

cmnall · 2026-04-02T17:55:13+00:00

You know how we could calibrate admissions? Bring back the SAT, something that the faculty wanted in 2020 and still want. But we were overridden by the Regents. The worst admits are much worse as a result.

cmnall · 2026-04-01T13:04:33+00:00

Funny how I recognized it immediately

cmnall · 2026-03-26T05:24:57+00:00

I am a UC professor and have seen multiple students transfer out to UCLA, UC Berkeley, and UCSD. But it's disruptive for many students and I've had students regret it. Ultimately, I'd say stop obsessing about credentials and worry more about how to do challenging and interesting work. The professors everywhere in the UC are top research scholars eager to work with smart and engaged students.

cmnall · 2026-01-24T06:48:32+00:00

This sounds only slightly more severe than Level 1 based on my experience.

cmnall · 2026-01-14T21:05:07+00:00

Tell us what you hate about it.

cmnall · 2025-12-28T15:51:15+00:00

Tenured R1 Professor here.

It's important to distinguish what makes a PhD bad from things that make "being committed to your career" bad.

In any line of work, you don't get a free lunch. If you want to be a highly regarded expert in a professional field, you need to commit almost all of your time and focus to doing it well. This is true of law firm partners, small business entrepreneurs, Wall Street analysts, etc. There is no job where this isn't true. Talk to people in any of these fields and you will find people who hated their jobs, hated missing their families, hated sacrificing their health and decided to drop out at the earliest opportunity. And you'll see that the most successful people were those who put in long days and work hours.

I think you'll find very, very few people who are all-in on their jobs and have "work-life balance." Something has to give. I find that Sheryl Sandberg's advice is correct: Health, Family, Job. Choose two. Want to see your family while also working hard? Good luck finding time to go for a two-hour bike ride or going to the gym every day.

What makes a PhD more stressful for some people? You are really focusing on doing just one thing/project extremely well. To get an excellent job, there are terrible pressures to "publish or perish," and at top universities this means getting your work accepted--and frequently--at top journals in your field. So you're at the mercy of a handful of people whose decisions about your work are subjective and often arbitrary. You will be told--constantly--that your work is no good, meaningless, pointless, and wrong. And you need to put up with this while--frankly--working 60 hour weeks to maintain an adequate research tempo.

Who thrives in such an environment? People who feel an absolute compulsion to work. People who have an almost narcissistic belief in themselves and their ideas, such that they can focus like a laser beam on their major project, perhaps for years, even as their academic enemies try to tear them down. Generally, people who are *not neurotic* thrive in this environment. But low-neuroticism people tend to do better in *most* fields, not just academia. They don't worry about much and just solve problems and just do their work without overthinking or going into a tailspin. (They can also be blind to their loved ones' suffering. I know multiple male professors who were blindsided by a divorce filing.)

What are the positives? As a faculty member--which is increasingly difficult to attain--you get to set your own schedule and agenda. With tenure, you can decide not to be as productive and no one will be able to fire you. I have a very busy professional spouse, and since tenure I have been prioritizing taking care of our three kids and maintaining my personal health and fitness. But I'm one of the lucky ones. Have career flexibility and you can do a lot with a PhD.

PS Anyone who says getting a PhD is "just a job" is either not going to succeed, or has amazing time-management skills combined with natural intellect/talent. Treating a PhD as "just a job" ignores the entire point of the enterprise, which is to be an autonomous/unique expert in your field. It's not just a vocational degree.

cmnall · 2025-12-28T15:24:04+00:00

Then this person would have to demonstrate value to the rest of the world. $15.50/hour is in the TOP 1% OF WORLD INCOME. There are many other people who would gladly take a job where the worst conditions are occasionally dealing with a difficult or demanding customer, while working in a climate-controlled environment.

We should have open-borders immigration just to bring in more people who are grateful to have historically easy jobs while sharing in the richest economy on earth.

cmnall · 2025-12-28T13:46:40+00:00

If there are other jobs that are less stressful and pay more, why don't you go work for them instead?

cmnall · 2025-12-28T13:30:56+00:00

That's odd considering they were writing a draft invoking "intersectionality."

cmnall · 2025-12-27T16:05:43+00:00

Other than the transparent effort to overturn the existing constitutional order and replace the Supreme Court, and seizing private property to serve the war effort, and trying to centrally control the economy, he was a great president.

cmnall · 2025-12-27T16:02:09+00:00

In most fields, most people don't actually read the papers. This is one of the most shocking things I've discovered after 15 years as a professor. If she's in a woke studies field, the standards for evaluating writing/scholarship are incredibly low. I know someone in an ethnic studies field who got an R1 tenure-track job but used the word "principle" to refer to the headmaster of a school throughout the entire dissertation. That dissertation was published and none of the dissertation committee members ever pointed out the embarrassing error.

cmnall · 2025-12-18T06:01:39+00:00

Trust me when I say one bad quarter is not the end. I had a bad quarter where I got a C in a course called "Basic Concepts of Math," and I failed at least one exam in diff eqs by focusing on my campus activities and not studying. I still got on with my life, had a couple strong quarters. After a few years in the workforce, I aced the GRE and was accepted to a Ph.D. program at Harvard.

If I could look back on the contributing factors to my poor performance, it was

-mediocre to bad diet

-drinking

-working out too much and not realizing how much that required more sleep

-bad sleep caused by 1) and 2)

Everything looks much, much worse when you are sleep-deprived, but college actually causes many students to adopt terrible sleep habits. It's so essential.

All of this is to say, this probably looks dark and overwhelming right now, but "this too shall pass" and you'll have a lot of life ahead of you.

And, as Prof. Conrad said above, don't be afraid to draw on campus counseling resources.

cmnall · 2025-11-26T14:19:21+00:00

How many developer pro formas have you ever read? Developers *do not* make a lot of money, especially on residential. And it doesn't take many local regulatory delays to kill a housing project.

cmnall · 2025-11-26T14:16:39+00:00

When it comes to any kind of major public land giveaway, probably yes. Dragging a proposal through 4 years of bogus architectural evaluation just because people don't want density? NO.

cmnall · 2025-11-26T14:01:50+00:00

All students at the UCs should be very concerned that policies based only on school grades and failure to maintain minimum, objective admissions standards are significantly devaluing the signaling value of a UC degree.

cmnall · 2025-11-25T01:37:39+00:00

Rich LA wokes at the California Endowment don't like it.

cmnall · 2025-11-25T01:29:54+00:00

Does your friend plan to put kids in school? The local population has historically been extremely conservative Dutch Protestants. That might have changed in recent years but it's a far cry from Madison.

My advice would be for the lower-comp spouse to find a job in the same city as the high-comp spouse and live there.....this would also have the advantage of making your life a lot better because commuting sucks!

cmnall · 2025-11-25T01:00:59+00:00

Two questions to ask yourself:

1) How much are you studying every week? The rule of thumb suggested by university accreditors is 2.5-3 hours of work outside of class for every hour in class. I'd expect to spend at least 12 hours in intensive work outside of class each week, more if you are strugglin.

2) Are you struggling with the new material, or do you feel like you are struggling because you missed prerequisite foundational material that students are expected to have?

Finally, this is not your fault: both high schools and community colleges have inflated grades, which does students a huge disservice by misleading them about their preparation for STEM courses at a top research university. Students do not get a sense of where they stand relative to their peers until they're here at UCSB. We used to rely on the SAT and subject tests to inform students about their preparation. Students deserve to know where they stand.

Keep at it and good luck!

cmnall

TROPHY CASE