Old guy

Welcome to the Bills Jax Kerr.

All the best to JG, he deserves it.

@MusicCityBilliken The secret factor underlying the kind of morphing you describe is money, not money to be distributed to the member schools but money which in one way or the other go to those running the conference. Look at A10 and how it has gone from a multi bid conference to a single or occasionally two bid league.

@White Pelican I fully agree with you. I do not expect to see a merger of A10 and Big East in my lifetime. I also could not care less about McGlade or Ackerman's jobs.

Do you think it is likely that A10's Bernadette Mc Glade will accept a secondary position to Big East's Val Ackerman or vice versa in a new merged conference? This is not likely to happen in my opinion. @slu72 & @MusicCityBilliken, hope you enjoy the dreams.

Shows you how close I follow.

Dayton, in my opinion, has a problem. They have a tough OOC schedule and if they win repeatedly they will do just fine. The problem is that Holmes will not be playing this season because of his injury and I assume they were counting on Holmes to play the good OOC teams. We will see how well they do without Holmes playing.

Believe me, going down one spot or more than one spot in the rankings of any sport has no significance in the IVY league. They look at athletes not as athletes but as students first and athletes second. They can get good players because there are good players out there that really want an IVY education. As long as they get new kids in the schools that are satisfactory to them in terms of academics, they will be perfectly satisfied with their sport teams. They really do not care if Duke or anyone else's teams are better in terms of sports performance than theirs. This way of thinking about sport teams and their recruitment was published in the Harvard magazine some time ago. The academics come first athletic prowess comes second. Other academic focused schools like Wash U use the simpler method of choosing Division 3 for their teams. As long as the school is satisfied with its focus on sports teams, they have no problems with sports teams rankings.

A large amount of debt after graduation from college increased by grad school debt is a very large burden upon anyone. If you can obtain grants, scholarships or signing bonuses to lower the level of debt you should do it. For example, MDs joining the active military services used to get a $100,000 signing bonus (I have no idea what the bonus is now). Most of these MDs went to line units, not military hospitals. If you are choking on your debt level, maybe you should consider the military services as an option. Remember that there are very limited spots for MDs in Navy ships, but lots of spots are generally available in the Marine line units. If you choose the Air Force they will drag you through a lengthy security clearance investigation since MDs in the AF have access to highly secure locations and need a high level security clearance. I have no idea what the deal is with the Coast Guard, but during Nam they manned the boats patrolling the Mekong River. The Uniformed Public Health Services (UPHS)provides medical services, among other things, to icebreakers and weather ships (not sure the weather ships are still in operation). If you have any desire to visit Thule in Greenland or the adventurous spirit to desire a tour of duty to the South Pole, also covered by this service, this may well be the service for you. Please remember, in the South Pole you have no place to spend your salary and are probably paid extra for hazardous duty. The UPHS provides many other opportunities for MDs. By the way, I served in the Army, as an MD in an infantry division, not a hospital or MASH unit.

Willie the kids coming from St. Louis may wind up going to school far away and kids from far away may come to St. Louis, it is not only a matter of academic reputation and standards. Some kids going to small high schools may choose very large schools and vice versa choosing a place to go to college is a complicated issue and kids may have strong ideas about what kind of school they want to go to. It is not a matter of money either, not as far as the kids are concerned. Young kids are largely ignorant about the burdens of debt.

The money to pay for all these outflows has to come from somewhere. Is it possible that excess tuition money coming primarily from those paying the full amount is redistributed to those determined to be unable to pay the full amount? Something that could be viewed as an institutionalized Robin Hood redistribution system? I have never heard anything like it, not that it cannot be done. Wow!

What I see here are a lot of generalizations about sticker prices and who pays for what regarding a child's college education. I think every single family sending a kid to college somewhere has to make a decision about payments and sticker prices. Once more, money does not grow in trees, and the loss of purchase value affecting the dollar is significant. Students may decide to take debt to pay whatever the family is not willing or capable of paying for. However that means these students will reach graduation date with a high level of debt. Generalities are not accurate to describe individual / family conditions and ability to pay, and the students do not realize the burden that a high level of educational debt will be after graduation. Each separate family has unique factors that have to be taken inlto account reaching a decision about how much financing will be provided for each one of their children's eudcation. By the way, when the student has divorced parents, which is not a rare situation, the discussion as to who pays for what among biological parents gets a lot more complex. Sometimes (my case with my ex) you have one parent that does not follow his/her agreed obligations to provide funding to to help finance the education of a child. Financing a child's college education is a lot more complex for at least some families than can be described in generalizations. This is particularly applicable to the education of a child with divorced parents.

That is a very good question.

Another point about the IVYs: They really don't care much about sports. There are exceptions as any games between Harvard and Yale, or the rowing contests down the Charles river. Otherwise a team might win a major tournament and have almost no one waiting to greet the players at the airport when they come back.

I am very aware that there is are a lot of issues other than inflation that affect lots of people. Inflation affects everybody, everything else boosting prices affects some people more than others, and anything at all in this day and age can become a political football at any time. The government money will or will not be used to pay your debt after hundreds of photo / video op events with different politicians beating their chest vowing to help their constituents in whatever way they say will be best for all. Until this series of photo / video op events of all kinds of politicians is done and over, and until the decision is made to pay or not to pay your student debt, the debt is most certainly your own personal debt that you have to pay. However, paying student debt is not a major issue any way you look at it, unless you are a student or ex student with unpaid debt. The most terrible problem that is currently affecting lots of people is losing their jobs. John Deere just fired lots of people and transferred manufacturing to Mexico, Stellantis will eliminate the Chrysler Headquarters, the workers will be terminated in October. You may not feel the pain of the people affected, but a lot of people are jumping from a middle class level into a vacuum. And if you look at it from a political point of view this is an issue that does provide ample material to become another major political football with politicians of all kinds having their photo / video ops where they claim to be the great defenders of their supporters. Do you honestly think that the pool at the rec center is a major concern for anyone? It may indeed be an issue given the fact that SLU is charging too much in tuition and then giving money to students. Where does the money come from? Donors do not have money trees in their backyards and sooner or later their seemingly eternal sources of income may well become less bountiful. If and when this happens, and it may well happen, where does their money go to? The answer is simple, the donor's money goes where the Donor wants it to go. What donor wants to give money for a pool, do you know? What really concerns me most of all is the talk of war going on in the media. I hope and pray a real war does not happen. If it does they will draft lots of doctors. During my induction physical, during my internship, early 1972, I saw the Sargeant in charge of doing chest XRAYs stamping my papers with a Normal X Ray stamp. I asked him how can you do that?, the film has not been processed yet. The Sargeant answered: Doc, if you can breathe and you can walk, you are in.. Keep this in mind for your induction physical, if and when it comes. Again, I pray it does not happen.