Links for 3/2/10

Ramesh Ponnuru

let's face it: college isn't for everyone, especially if it takes the form of four years of going to classes on a campus.

To talk about college this way may sound élitist. It may even sound philistine, since the purpose of a liberal-arts education is to produce well-rounded citizens rather than productive workers. But perhaps it is more foolishly élitist to think that going to school until age 22 is necessary to being well-rounded, or to tell millions of kids that their future depends on performing a task that only a minority of them can actually accomplish...

Rob Manwaring

This Wednesday, the ACLU brought a lawsuit against Los Angeles Unified to stop anticipated layoffs at three low performing schools that were decimated by last year’s layoffs… illustrates the need to carve out schools from collective bargaining contracts in order for school turnaround to have a chance…

Tim Ranzetta

this loan occured during a time in which one student loan executive admitted was "a bad lending bubble" which this lender inflated with over $5 billion of loans to high-risk students. The private loan market has overcorrected to the point now where this same lender is making loans to borrowers with average FICO score of 750 with cosigner rates north of 90%. So, I suspect there will be fewer stories like this based on loans being made today since underwriting criteria have become so much more stringent. The problem is that for the loans in this $5 billion portfolio of "non-traditional" loans (what a sweet sounding euphemism for what others might call subprime) that are now in repayment, have already charged-off at a rate over 30%...

Paula V. Smith

A biologist declared, startling the economist and physicists, “To us, equilibrium is death!”…

An influential book by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (1980), asserts that all conceptual thinking relies on metaphor…