jamessmurphy.bsky.social
Sometimes I write slow, sometimes I write quick. Mostly about college stuff.
Email: [email protected]
Website: www.jamessmurphy.com
644 posts
968 followers
159 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
comment in response to
post
Right, right. Finance. Thanks!
comment in response to
post
Curious whether you think the ECCA or anything else in the HELP reconciliation plan will be subject to Byrd. Appreciate your work on this greatly!
comment in response to
post
The article hits on a a point I try to make here, too: the harm done by cutting research funding is not just to the funded projects but to the students and postdocs who work in them and will be the next generation of researchers. bit.ly/40g7hR8
comment in response to
post
Full piece is here. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
comment in response to
post
www.theguardian.com/news/2025/ju...
comment in response to
post
Here is how Harvard deals with legacy in a very different way.
comment in response to
post
There are about 27,000 high schools in the U.S. Over the past 15 years, 1 in 11 students at Harvard have come from just 21 high schools, or 0.07% of US schools. This is about merit, right?
comment in response to
post
Here's how legacy and athletic preferences play out at Harvard. This is about merit, right?
comment in response to
post
Congress needs to protect these federal grants and contracts that fund research that not only benefits all of us but also employs significant numbers of people and provides training and experience to the next generation of researchers. bit.ly/40g7hR8
comment in response to
post
Almost all the institutions that get the most money in federal grants and contracts are in blue districts, likely a function of size, location & political leanings of college-educated people. A number of them are in red states, where their senators have an interest in protecting this vital funding.
comment in response to
post
It’s even easier to see the bipartisan impact that cuts to federal grants could have on institutions of higher education if you look at it by U.S. House district.
comment in response to
post
If we look at the shares by state, it’s clear that institutions of higher education in red and blue states benefit from federal grants and contracts.
comment in response to
post
It's no big surprise that R1 universities get most of this funding, but I did not know how dependent tribal colleges are on federal grants and contracts.
comment in response to
post
Apologies for being over sensitive, but I worry that as states and institutions see tighter budgets (millionaires need those tax breaks!) holding onto the need-based aid we've got is going to be a fight.
comment in response to
post
Surely this is an BOTH/AND situation, not an EITHER/OR. All the advising in the world won't help a person with a negative SAI pay for college if they can't get a Pell Grant, need-based aid, etc. High quality advising should tell them where to find and use aid. It can't replace it.
comment in response to
post
There's a school of thought that the "elite" universities should have been massively expanding enrollment to increase access to opportunity.
I think we'll do a lot more good by increasing completion rates at the colleges most people actually attend than by putting a Stanvard campus in Arkansas.
comment in response to
post
Saying that highly ranked colleges and universities have grown is not the same as saying they have grown as much as they should have...although that raises the question of how much should they have grown? Not to mention, how much *can* they grow?
comment in response to
post
If we just look at IHEs with under 10,000 undergrads (i.e., most IHEs) it's even clearer how much more common it is to have shrunk over the past 20 years (the pink bar).
Shrinking, of course, is not something most of these places wanted to happen. The ability to grow is a fairly rare privilege.
comment in response to
post
If we look at undergraduate enrollment overall, you'll see a lot more places with declining enrollment.
comment in response to
post
Even if you just look at the schools that have been ranked in the top 20 in USNWR, almost all of them have increased enrollment.
comment in response to
post
The exemption for Hillsdale could be a big win for them.
In 2017 a few Senate Republicans rejected a similar exception, but don't expect that to be the case this time. Hillsdale has even more clout with the GOP and the Trump Administration now.
comment in response to
post
5. This is better than the House plan (lower tax rates) but it still effectively does nothing to decrease the deficit, help students, or create incentives to increase access and affordability.
Here's the text. www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/do...
comment in response to
post
4. The Senate is keeping the endowment calculation that divides the total value by the number of US STUDENTS, not by all students, which artificially inflates the per student value of the endowment at institutions that enroll a lot of international students.
comment in response to
post
2. Only applies to schools that get federal student aid, i.e., NOT Hillsdale
3. Religious exemption still there, unless you were founded pre-1776 (i.e. not most of the Ivys)
comment in response to
post
BREYER still going:
"How is that different than what a monarchist does? He says certain things, he finds certain things, he does certain things. That’s not where we live. We live in response to a monarchy … the constitution is a document of limitations."