Hi, Bell Fen! - Luminous Hyaena

colorjustice:

My cousins are in town! She’s five and finishing up a journalism degree, he’s three and on the engineering track and ridiculously excited about moon shuttle tech and automated trucking. They’re staying with a friend of hers who has a software engineering internship, but they came over for dinner.

We talked a lot about her university. There’s a bit of a tendency for the best yellow universities to emulate the more prestigious (and let’s face it, objectively better) green universities. But the green ones get state funding, and we don’t, so tuitions creep higher and higher so that we can have a concert hall and a theatre program and study-abroad and so on. Honestly, I think it’s ridiculous, but it’s hard to opt out - if you get into the best school in the country in your program you want to go there, even if the tuition bill is inflated by silly imitation of the prestige green schools. And it’s still financially worth it to go there - the lifetime earnings stack up, even if you graduate 40,000 ni in debt. This is especially true in an industry like journalism where being from the top programs is a huge leg up. 

But it’s an empty arms race - the benefits to your career prospects are from attending the best yellow university, not from having a concert hall or spending a term in Cene. Eventually tuition will rise right up to the point where you’re better off going to a non-prestigious school, only that school, too, has incentive to start chucking in amenities. 

I don’t generally favor solving problems like this with an instrument as blunt as ‘forbid yellow schools from offering arts and humanities programs packaged with tuition’ but talking to her I was kinda tempted.

Automated trucking is going to crater some good purple jobs and that’s going to be used as an excuse to price out some good purple families. (Bit of a derail, ignore me if you rather.)