The next great American crisis
The recent collapse of the financial sector was only felt by most after it happened. Today, we face yet another financial crisis that is quietly creeping up on us. And I’m not talking about a double-dip recession or a renewed threat from Wall Street. I’m talking about college loans, especially when combined with the current 9.8 percent unemployment rate. Like mortgages, the financial product that played a large role in the more recent collapse, college loans are widespread. Approximately two thirds of all college students graduate with college loans, and in 2008, The Project on Student Debt estimates that 206,000 students graduated with debts of $40,000 or greater. And the situation is not improving; total student loan debt in the United States is increasing at a rate of about $2,853.88 every second.
Ms. Hockfield, tear down this wall
The past few years are not a fluke: a four-year MIT education is in high demand. From 2004 to 2010, the number of applicants to MIT’s undergraduate program has gone up 48.5 percent, from 10,549 to 15,663, and early application numbers suggest this year will reveal a further 7-8 percent increase. This is not merely a matter of students applying to more colleges — the matriculation rate of admitted students has gone up, not down, from 58.7 percent to 64.6 percent.
MIT’s Libertarians
Last October, The Tech surveyed the undergraduate and graduate population about their political views, and 2,145, or 20 percent of the total student population, responded. We promised to provide follow-up analysis after our original overview in the November 2, 2010 issue of The Tech. Some readers wrote in and requested a breakdown of specific survey questions. Here, we take a look at how students responded when asked if they consider themselves libertarians.
Add India to a revamped Security Council
On Nov. 8, on the final day of his visit to India, President Obama gave an address to a joint session of the Indian parliament that included this gem: “In the years ahead, I look forward to a reformed United Nations Security Council that includes India as a permanent member.”
Letters to the Editor
We were incredibly excited to read in The Tech a few weeks ago that MIT is planning to create an official plan for undergraduate computational biology education. Having graduated from MIT last spring and spent three years in UROPs (with one of us continuing as an MEng) in the Berger Computation and Biology Group, we appreciate the need for increased guidance for undergraduates who are interested in computational biology. When we first came to MIT, we remember many people wondering why we, as math and computer science majors, were taking biology classes and attending biology-related talks. We often felt unsure of which classes to take and how to best prepare ourselves for careers in interdisciplinary research, and without the guidance that we were fortunate to receive from faculty and graduate students, we may not have found our way. The enthusiasm that both Professor Grimson and Professor Kaiser expressed about guiding undergraduates interested in computational biology was wonderful to hear.
Wise up about Wikileaks
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called the latest Wikileaks/Bradley Manning revelations “very irresponsible, thoughtless acts that put at risk the lives of innocent people all over the world.” Mike Huckabee stated that anything less than execution is too kind a penalty. Sarah Palin said of Julian Assange, the front-man of the Wikileaks ensemble, “He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands ... Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders?”
Being liberal doesn’t work — to remain relevant, Democrats must revise their agenda
There’s an interesting fairy tale that Democrats (and Mr. Veldman) have been telling themselves for more than a decade. “If we were simply better at getting out our message, we’d win more elections.” This is an incredibly facile analysis — it is akin to saying that the U.S. Army would win more wars if its soldiers shot more enemies and got shot less themselves. Even if it had the power to explain why Democrats win in some years and lose in others (which it doesn’t), it’s less than worthless as a form of strategic advice. The “voters are stupid, why else wouldn’t they vote for us” meme has been rampant on the left for quite some time — if it really had insights to offer, surely these lessons would have been capitalized upon by now.
UA Update and Answers
At last week’s Exec meeting, there was a short discussion on dining at Simmons, but not many residents showed up to express their opinions. It transitioned into a discussion on FinBoard reforms. Changes have been made to split the Spring allocation period into two periods, and there was further discussion on changes to policy and funding, as well as the creation of a committee to revise FinBoard policies over IAP.
Who is out of touch, you say? Republicans regularly and unashamedly disregard the wishes of the American people
Penn Jillette once observed that the Republican Party was essentially the “party of fear” and the Democratic Party the “party of hate.” During the Bush era (when he made the remarks) these designations hit the nail on the head. Republicans used the awful specters of Islamic terrorism, the Radical Gay Agenda, abortion and — gasp! — taxes to bully voters into thinking there was only one way they would make it through the next decade with their churches, families, money, or guns safe. Democrats, conversely, used George Bush as a symbol for everything that was wrong with Republicans. He, and by extension the Republican Party, wasn’t just incompetent, he was greedy and racist and ever eager to encroach on our rights — he took from the poor to give to the rich, he turned a cold shoulder to the victims of Katrina, and he routinely disregarded the constraints of the Constitution.
The undergraduate entrepreneurial ecosystem at MIT
Entrepreneurship is one of those things that belongs to our generation. Our lives are continually defined by companies that have been started by entrepreneurs our age. Entrepreneurship is something that we all want to try.
Your evaluations are meaningful to us
With another end of semester upon us, finding time to complete subject evaluations is often difficult given the usual crunch of papers, projects, and exams. I wanted to briefly describe how these evaluations are used at the Institute, encourage students to fill them out, and offer some suggestions for how we might look to improve upon the way in which subjects are evaluated.
The new dining plan and the fate of scientific collaboration
This is my brief attempt to illuminate the MIT administration as to why so many students and affiliates are offended by the recent dining plan, and maybe, by the end, justify my title.
‘Patriot Probes’ at the airport
This past Thanksgiving I, like many of you, passed through Boston Logan Airport in order to get home. Prior to my trip, I had been looking forward with a mixture of giddiness and dread to the opportunity of being subjected to an “enhanced pat down,” an experience I hoped would be illuminating, if not mortifying.
Bowles-Simpson deficit report surprisingly useful
On February 18, President Obama created the “National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform,” a bipartisan 18-member panel of senators, representatives, and other luminaries. Co-chaired by Erksine Bowles (a former Chief of Staff to Bill Clinton) and Alan Simpson (a former Republican senator) the commission was charged with “identifying policies to improve the fiscal situation in the medium term and to achieve fiscal sustainability over the long run… including changes to address the growth of entitlement spending.”
WikiLeaks serves the global community by keeping governments in check
Nihilist and criminal labels aside, WikiLeaks has done a lot of good. In 2007, WikiLeaks published the Kroll Report, a secret report detailing extensive government corruption by the richest man in Kenya, Daniel arap Moi. The news came out shortly before the Kenyan national election and received intense airtime on Kenyan TV. According to a Kenyan intelligence report, the leak shifted the vote by 10 percent, changing the result of the election.
Junior varsity terrorism
On October 27th, two packages, each containing a Hewlett-Packard printer with plastic explosive hidden in the toner cartridge, were sent to Chicago, Illinois from FedEx and UPS offices in Sana’a, Yemen. The packages were intended to explode inside planes mid-air over U.S. soil. Instead, authorities were alerted to the bombs (likely by an active double agent within al-Qaeda), and two days later, both bombs were defused.
The nihilism of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange compromises U.S. security
In a recent interview with The New Yorker, Julian Assange, the director of WikiLeaks, was asked if he would ever refrain from releasing information he knew might get someone killed. The question was not just hypothetical: a year and a half earlier, Assange had published a study that detailed technical vulnerabilities in actively employed U.S. Army countermeasures against improvised explosive devices.