Friday, July 31, 2020

College students, beware: Do your own COVID-19 safety check before moving into a dormitory this fall

When I was young, I practiced law in Alaska, and many of my clients lived in the Alaska bush--that vast terrain of mountains and tundra that is off the road grid. Consequently, I traveled a lot in small single-engine airplanes. The bush pilots who flew these planes were all young, and many were inexperienced.

I knew nothing about aviation. I figured--incorrectly--that the pilots were the experts and I crawled into many a small, antiquated airplane without a thought about the danger I might be in.

But my senior partner set me straight. "Richard," he said:
You are responsible for your own safety. Before you get in a plane make your own assessment about whether the plane is overloaded or whether flying conditions are less than optimal.  If you don't feel safe, don't get in the airplane.
That was good advice, and I'm passing it on to young people who plan to enroll in college this fall. Every American university has adjusted its curriculum in response to the coronavirus pandemic.  A lot of teaching will be delivered online, through Zoom, or in socially-distanced class spaces.

 But notice how many colleges are assigning students two-to-a-room in campus dormitories, even though we are in the middle of a pandemic.  All across the nation, thousands of young people--not known for social distancing or wearing masks--are going to live together in close quarters for three or four months.  A good many will experiment with weekend binge drinking at the local bars where they stand an excellent chance of contracting COVID-19.

How safe will that environment be? The colleges say they are concerned about your safety, but they desperately need the revenue from dorm rentals because many of the dorms were built with borrowed money.   The universities have got to have students' cash to service that debt.

Before moving into a dormitory, ask yourself these questions:

1) Will you feel safe sharing a dorm room with another student and sharing restrooms and showers with people you don't know?

2) Will you feel safe eating your meals in a communal dining hall?

2) Does it make sense to live on campus when most of your classes will be delivered online or by Zoom, and there will be few if any opportunities to socialize with your peers?

The colleges want students to live on campus because they want your money. But make your own decision about whether it is safe to live in a dorm this fall. You may conclude it is better to find your own housing arrangements or live at home with your parents.  Remember, the coronavirus doesn't care who you are or where you live.


The Cessna 185 Skywagon: Alaska's flying pickup truck


Thursday, July 30, 2020

Things fall apart: MBA programs are collapsing across the U.S. Don't get buried in the rubble

COVID-19 is shaking business education to its core, highlighting weaknesses that were already apparent even before the pandemic.  The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that 100 business schools closed their M.B.A. programs between 2014 and 2018. Nearly half the schools in a professional association of business colleges anticipate enrollment declines this fall.

What happened?

First of all, the M.B.A. degree lost its luster.  When the federal student loan program lifted the borrowing cap on graduate education, universities all over the United States created new programs or jacked up tuition on the ones that already existed. M.B.A. programs became cash cows for colleges that desperately needed to increase their revenues.

People who already had professional degrees in law, medicine or other fields, falsely believed an M.B.A. degree would make them more marketable.   But suddenly it appeared that everyone had an M.B.A. As The Economist observed four years ago, "Simply put, M.B.A.s are no longer rare, and as such are no longer a guarantee for employment."

Second, as enrollments began to decline in the U.S. market, many business schools began aggressively recruiting international students.  Last year, 40 percent of business-school applicants were from overseas.  Foreign students were especially welcome because they often paid full tuition--no scholarships or grants for those folks.

But foreign-student enrollment has slipped.  The coronavirus has made international students wary of studying in the United States. And no doubt the Asians have figured out that M.B.A. programs at the elite schools are too expensive.

Third, second- and third-tier universities created online M.B.A. programs, diluting the prestige of M.B.A. degrees.  Although a handful of schools have maintained their prestige and allure--Harvard, Yale, Stanford,  etc.--people with online M.B.A.s from second-rank schools discovered that employers were not impressed.

I sympathize with working adults who took two years off from working to obtain an expensive M.B.A. degree. I did much the same thing when I went to Harvard to get a doctorate in education policy.  I was out of the job market for three years and learned almost nothing.

The M.B.A. boom is being seen now for what it often is--a big scam by universities eager to boost their revenues.

So--if you feel stuck in your present job and think you can make yourself more marketable by going to business school, think again.

How much money will you need to borrow to finance your studies? What will you gain from leaving your job for two years to take classes? If you opt for an online degree from a lackluster school, what will that be worth to you when you put that M.B.A. degree on your vita?

If you decide--against my advice--to enroll in an M.B.A. program, at least remember this. Business schools need you a hell of a lot more than you need them.  Don't pay full freight to get a graduate degree in business. Make the bastards give you a grant or a scholarship.


Wednesday, July 29, 2020

It's Awful Quiet Out There in the American Economy: Is It Time for Americans to Circle the Wagons?

I grew up when western TV series dominated the airwaves: Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel, Bonanza, etc. My childhood was one long cowboy show punctuated by irritating interruptions to eat and go to school.

How many times did I see that hackneyed scene of the settlers with their wagons in a circle, preparing to fend off an Indian attack?  Often the hero of the episode—Ward Bond maybe—would stand behind the wagon barricade staring into the darkness. He would hear a bird call—Native Americans signaling each other!

Then a trusted sidekick would say, "It's awful quiet out there." And the hero always responded laconically by saying, "Yeah, too quiet." And when dawn broke, all the Indians in Christendom would come howling down on the beleaguered settlers. Fortunately, the cavalry always galloped to the rescue just before the commercial break. "We're saved!"

Well, it's awful quiet out there in the American economy.  Life seems chaotic if you watch cable news—all those video clips of people rioting and burning down the cities. But who wants to watch that stuff? 

The stock market is doing fine, and millions of Americans are getting regular handouts from the government—payroll-protection checks, enhanced unemployment benefits, student loans. Tax breaks for the wealthy and food stamps for the poor. What could be lovelier?

But maybe it's too quiet. Why is gold drifting toward $2,000 an ounce while 10-year treasury notes earn only one-half of one percent interest? Why are people buying guns who never bought guns before? Why are people hoarding ammunition?  Why have Americans developed a sudden interest in growing their own food?

Even our television commercials are signaling that we have reason to worry. When we watch television, what do we see? William Devane at a country estate peddling gold. Tom Selleck trying to persuade elderly people to take out reverse mortgages. Joe Namath, hawking health insurance for people on Medicare. 'Get the healthcare coverage you deserve,' Namath tells us.

That's it exactly. Americans are afraid we are going to get what we deserve. We'll get what we deserve for electing thugs to public office. We'll get what we deserve for allowing our universities to become criminal rackets. We'll get what we deserve for mucking up our health care system and for creating an economy that silently eats away at the middle class.

Yes, it's too quiet. Ward Bond would tell us it's time to circle the wagons. And we know, as we await the catastrophe, that the cavalry isn't coming to our rescue this time.

Is it time to circle the wagons?


Tuesday, July 28, 2020

Rubash v. U.S. Department of Education: 60-year-old law-school graduate unable to shed student debt in bankruptcy

Peter Rubash is a sixty-year-old graduate of Duquesne University School of Law. He practiced law for a time but lost his job and eventually went to work as a project manager for a public agency.

In 2018, Mr. Rubash filed an adversary action in a Pennsylvania bankruptcy court, seeking to discharge approximately $230,000 in student loans. According to a medical expert, Rubash was depressed.

According to the expert, Rubash's "occupational failure as [a] lawyer and his resulting debt have caused, or at the very least, exacerbated his psychological dysfunction." The expert also said that Rubash was underemployed in his present position and was unlikely to obtain "suitable employment consistent with [his] education and past levels of employment" (p. 2).

The U.S. Department of Education opposed Rubash's effort to shed his student-loan debt in bankruptcy. DOE argued that Rubash earned enough money to make payments on his college loans.  The agency
presented a long-term income-based repayment plan (IBR) that would require Rubash to pay $838 a month.

Judge Carlota Bohm, who decided Mr. Rubash's case, agreed with DOE and refused to discharge Rubash's student loans. Rubash earned about $49,000, the judge pointed out, and he received additional income as a consultant.  In Judge Bohm's opinion, Rubash could make payments of $838 a month and still maintain a minimal standard of living. (Judge Bohm's decision did not specify the repayment period--probably 20 or 25 years.)

Judge Bohn justified her decision by citing ample citations to case law. But let's think a little bit more about Mr. Rubash's situation.

Rubash obtained his bachelor's degree 38 years ago and probably got his law degree within three or four years after getting his undergraduate degree.  He's 60 years old now.  If he enters into a 25-year IBR plan, he will be 85 before he finishes his repayment obligations.  That means he will make his last student-loan payment 63 years after he graduated from college.

Somehow, our society has got to come to terms with the fact that millions of people have taken out student loans to obtain undergraduate degrees and professional degrees that are not worth what they paid for them. I don't know what Mr. Rubash paid to attend law school at Duquesne, but today the tuition price is $46,000 a year.

 Thousands of law-school graduates have taken out six-figure loans to get J.D. degrees only to enter a saturated job market.  We've got to come up with a better way of addressing this problem than 25-year income-based repayment plans.

References

Rubash v. U.S. Department of Education, Bankruptcy No. 18-20449 CMBA Adversary No. 18-2028-CMB, 2020 WL 2554234 (Bankr. W. D. Pa. May 19, 2020).




Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Portland protesters: Are student loans and a crummy job market driving the anger?

Like many Americans, I have been surprised by the intensity of the Black-Lives-Matter protests that take place nightly in Portland, Oregon. Why Portland?

USA Today speculated yesterday that Oregon's racist past is fueling the city's protests.  As the newspaper pointed out, Oregon's territorial constitution, adopted in 1857, barred people of color from entering Oregon Territory.  And Oregon had a very active Ku Klux Klan during the early 1920s, as USA Today noted.

But I don't think Oregon's "dark history" of racism explains the violence in Portland's streets.  Portland is, after all, one of the most progressive cities in America. US News and World Report recently listed Portland as one of the nation's top ten best cities.

And no one can accuse Portland's politicians of being racist. The city's progressive political scene is so famous that the television series Portlandia lampooned it for eight seasons.

Nor is Portland torn by racial strife. Portland is a mostly white city in a primarily white state.  Only two percent of Oregon's population is Black, and only about one in twenty Portland residents is African American.  Compare that ratio to Baton Rouge, where I live. My city is 52 percent African American, and no one is rioting.

Watching the Portland protests night after night, I have been struck by the fact that most of the protesters are young, white people. I find myself wondering whether these enraged wokesters have college degrees, whether they have good jobs, and whether they have student-loan debt.

We know that millions of Americans are burdened by student loans that hinder them from getting married, buying homes, or saving for retirement.  And we know that a majority of these debtors are not paying down their loans.  Education Secretary Betsy DeVos admitted as much almost two years ago.

I'm guessing that a lot of the people who are protesting on Portland's streets have student-loan debt that is completely unmanageable. Although the demonstrators may have college degrees, those degrees did not lead to good jobs for many of them.

I am not questioning the sincerity of people who have taken to the streets of Portland this summer. I am sure most of them are genuinely disturbed by racism and economic injustice.

But I wonder: How many people who are throwing bricks and bottles at the police would stay in their homes at night, munch on popcorn and watch a Netflix movie if they believed they were financially secure, had a good job, and were not weighed down by student loans.

Portland protesters: most are young and white

Thursday, July 16, 2020

"First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out." Reflections on Martin Niemöller, who stood up against the Nazis

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Martin Niemöller
 (1892-1984)

Like most Americans, I am familiar with Pastor Martin Niemöller's famous quote, but I knew almost nothing about him until recently. I knew he was a Protestant pastor who opposed Adolph Hitler during the 1930s, but I did not realize that Niemöller spent seven years in a Nazi concentration camp.

As William Shirer noted in his memoirs, Niemöller would seem to be an unlikely person to stand up to the Nazis. Niemöller had been a decorated U-boat commander during the First World War. He was a fervent nationalist during the post-war years, and he welcomed the day when Hitler became the chancellor of the Reich in 1933.

But Niemöller slowly became disillusioned with Hitler, and he spoke out publicly against Nazism from his pulpit. At some point, Niemoller realized that Hitler meant to wipe out Christianity in Germany and replace it with the National Reich Church.

Indeed, Hitler's national church publicly repudiated the "strange and foreign" Christian religion. The Reich church openly acknowledged that it intended to place Mein Kampe on church altars instead of the Bible.

With great courage, Niemöllerdefended his Christian faith against Hitler's paganism. In 1937, he was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Dachau.

Shirer, reflecting on the struggle between Hitler and German Christians during the 1930s, admitted that he had perhaps paid too much attention to it. After all, most Germans were not alarmed by what the Nazis were doing. "I should have realized," Shirer wrote, "that a people who had so lightly given up their political, cultural and economic freedom were not . . . going to die or even risk imprisonment to preserve freedom of worship."

Today, the United States is swirling in a witch's brew of cancel culture, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and "wokedom." Elected politicians publicly denounce the police, and demonstrators feel free to throw bricks and bottles at police officers. Day after day, vandals posing as protesters destroy statues and monuments that memorialize America's heritage. Churches and businesses are being set afire, and almost no one is prosecuted.

If the United States had a free press and healthy universities, all this destructive rhetoric and criminal behavior would be thunderously denounced in the media, much as some newspapers denounced the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

But America no longer has a free press. Instead, as Bari Weiss wrote this week in a letter to the New York Times," a new consensus has emerged in the press . . . that truth isn't a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else."

If our nation's universities were truly a marketplace of ideas, as the Supreme Court once described them, our intellectuals would speak up when a professor is bullied and even fired for failing to acquiesce to the destructive agenda of the cancel culture. But they are not speaking up.

For the most part, Americans are indifferent to the mass assault on traditional American values and our nation's democratic traditions. Our media and our universities are hell-bent on destroying American society, and few people dare to stand up to them.

We are like the Germans of the 1930s who stayed on the sidelines instead of opposing Hitler's thuggery. And like the Germans, we will eventually regret our cowardice.



Pastor Martin Niemöller spent seven years in a Nazi concentration camp.


Monday, July 13, 2020

Two Hispanic cops killed while responding to a domestic disturbance in the border town of McAllen, TX: Do Brown lives matter?

Last Saturday, two police officers were shot and killed in the Texas border town of McAllen. Officers Edelmiro Garza and Ismael Chavez were responding to a domestic disturbance call at a local residence. When they arrived, a man identified as Audon Ignacio Camarillo opened the door and shot both men, who had no time to draw their weapons. Camarillo took his own life later that day.

What does Black Lives Matter have to say about this tragedy? Good cops are dead cops, perhaps.

And how about those lunatics on the Minneapolis City Council--the people who want to dismantle the police department even as they buy personal security for themselves. Do they have any comments?

And the "Defund the Police" nut jobs--what is their take on this?  I suppose they will argue that the city of McAllen should have sent a "woke" social worker to deal with Mr. Camarillo instead of two cops.

Both slain officers were Hispanic, shot in a town that is overwhelmingly Latino (or Latinx). Does ethnicity affect the way anti-police yahoos think about this tragedy? If blue lives don't matter, can they at least acknowledge that Brown lives matter?

All over the United States, the police will tell you that the most dangerous scenario for them is a domestic violence call. The guys who beat their wives are unstable and often have guns. Alcohol is frequently a factor.

What is the best way to deal with these perilous situations--which happen every day all over the United States? Do we dispatch a SWAT team in an armored vehicle? Do we send an unarmed community caseworker? Or do we ask the police to deal with guys like Audon Ignacio Camarillo?

Right now, our society sends cops--both men and women--to deal with domestic abusers, who are human time bombs that can explode unexpectantly.  It's a dirty job, but someone has to do it.

Is it too much to ask, then, to say that blue lives matter? Is it too much to ask Americans to say thank you?