Pun Salad

Renu Mukherjee notes that Colleges Have a New Scheme to Get Around the End of Affirmative Action. And, fair warning: there's a considerable amount of educratese coming:

If only segregationists in the 1960s were so clever! "We've reconsidered and recalibrated our criteria for our bus seating, Ms. Parks. And you have to move to the back."

Hopefully, the "new scheme" will be quickly shot down in the courts.

Also of note:

• Elizabeth Warren is unavailable for comment. Allysia Finley runs some numbers and concludes: Harvard Is Big Business at Its Worst. Excerpt:

  Columbia is New York City’s largest private landowner, with more than 320 properties, valued at nearly $4 billion. The school saves more than $182 million annually by not paying property tax. Harvard avoids some $50 million annually. Property tax exemptions allow colleges to offer low-cost housing to faculty and reduce the cost of building facilities to house new bureaucracies.

  At the same time, Ivy League endowments—Harvard ($50.7 billion), Yale ($40.7 billion), Princeton ($34.1 billion) and the University of Pennsylvania ($21 billion)—exceed the market values of most publicly traded corporations. These endowments wouldn’t be anywhere near as large if the schools had to pay a 23.8% tax on capital gains, as their wealthy alumni must on their investment earnings.

  Ivy League schools also practice price discrimination by awarding financial aid to lower-income kids so the schools can market themselves as diverse and accessible even though most of their matriculants are affluent and ideologically homogenous. It’s essential to their branding that customers—i.e., undergraduate students—believe they are open to all.

  Ms. Finley goes on to note:

  Yet the Ivy League differs from corporations in an important respect: The schools don’t have shareholders who can force changes. In public capital markets, investors have the power to replace corporate management. Mr. Ackman, however, can’t wage a shareholder campaign to oust Ms. Gay or Harvard Corp. members.

  Big donors doubtless have some influence. University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill resigned after Stone Ridge Asset Management CEO Ross Stevens threatened to withdraw a $100 million donation. Smaller donations, however, are a drop in their endowment buckets. Ivy League schools can also easily raise tuition to compensate for lost funds, covered in part by financial aid at taxpayer expense.

  It's tempting to fantasize about higher ed getting the same scrutiny as (say) Liz Warren and Lina Khan provide for "Big Sandwich".

• And it's even not a hard math problem. Kevin D. Williamson says We Don’t Have a Wealth Problem. We Have a Math Problem..

  Anybody who tells you that his favorite policy costs nothing, imposes no pain, and involves no trade-offs is a liar. That being stipulated, the United States does not want for material resources to throw at our problems. There is no eliminating scarcity, human being and their appetites being what they are, but if the United States does not have the material resources to solve a problem, then there is no solving the problem by means of material resources, at least under current economic realities. (My friend Jonah Goldberg is fond of James Burnham’s proverb: “Problems without solutions aren’t really problems.” They are instead, as Goldberg writes, only facts.) The United States has enough money to do the things it wants to do—all of the private-sector things as well as the public-sector ones, including maintaining the kind of military it wants to have, funding a more-than-adequate welfare state, subsidies for education and scientific research, etc. I’d disinvent the federal highways system if I could (sorry, Ike!), but we can afford to maintain that, too. Basically, a problem that can be solved with money is a problem the United States can solve—the kind of problem we want to have.

  But no matter how much money you have, x is less than 1.5x. Our deficits and debt are mainly driven by entitlement spending, and our entitlement-spending model doesn’t work, because it is based on the mistaken notion that we can transfer to Peter more than we are willing to take from Paul—forever. You can fix that by cutting spending or by raising taxes (or, if you want to get really wild, by means of a sensible bipartisan compromise incorporating a bit of both), but it doesn’t matter how much tax revenue you collect if you are committed to spending 130 percent of whatever it is, as we did in 2022 and as we are more on less on track to do forever.

  Since I do remember some math, and since I am also a helpless pedant, I'll note that x is only less than 1.5x for x > 0. I don't blame KDW for not mentioning that, though.