<p>[Yale</a> Budget Update](<a href=“http://opa.yale.edu/president/message.aspx?id=85]Yale”>http://opa.yale.edu/president/message.aspx?id=85)</p>
<p>One must assume that Pres. Levin means the expansion of the 13th and 14th Residential colleges and perhaps the readying of the newly acquired West Campus as well.</p>
<p>Is it possible financial aid could be affected?</p>
<p>Yale released an earlier statement that FA would not changed this year.</p>
<p>[Yale</a> Daily News - ENDOWMENT FALLS 25 PERCENT](<a href=“http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/26942]Yale”>http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/26942)</p>
<p>Tough choices in tough times… :(</p>
<p>^ This is when I wish we could just cut all funding to NASA and spend it on education.</p>
<p>How much did that rocket/satellite cost? (the one that landed in the ocean.) 320 million apparently.</p>
<p>I guess collegehopefull won’t be a science major or study public policy in college! LOL</p>
<p>^ Actually, I was considering a Physics major, but I think I’m going to go for Mathematics instead. (coupled with Linguistics…I guess that humanities bit may be where my discontent with NASA comes from…)</p>
<p>But seriously, military satellites aren’t launched by NASA - the DoD has the Air Force do that. The telecomms industry is moving towards increasing the number of towers that route existing satellite signals rather than pay massive sums to launch a satellite…</p>
<p>Very OT but wasn’t the recent crashed satellite an atomospheric monitor, dealing w/CO2 concentrations?</p>
<p>My point is that one person’s view of “wasteful spending” is another’s life work. If we start throwing out pricetags on supposedly superfluous projects (the $320M on this last rocket) and declare that they should go to a private institution (such as mother Yale), we better have some good policy analysis behind us if we’re to be taken even half-seriously.</p>
<p>A household can adjust its budget (cancel cable TV and restuarant eating to better make mortgage payment) but to randomly find lines in the federal budget and say money from project X should be spent on Y is another matter altogether.</p>
<p>^ Some households can’t pay for their kids, (and their kids can’t pay for school/fin aid/scholarships considered), no matter what they do…</p>
<p>And a lot of those houses didn’t have cable TV/nights out in restaurants in the first place.</p>
<p>Also…(I’m not trying to be contrary just for the sake of being so, please know - your posts have helped me a lot this app round)…</p>
<p>Why can’t we invest public money in a private institution?
The GSEs that we’re (as taxpayers) currently bailing the ever loving crap out of ARE private entities, and SUPPOSEDLY private entities that (will/and have) work (ed) to ensure a higher quality of life for private citizens. (because apparently home = awesome life)</p>
<p>I’d argue that our current housing failure is nothing but a market correction - acting now to save the people that invested heavily in tulips, uh, I mean, houses has a MUCH lower return on investment than say, investing heavily in the education of the nation’s future.</p>
<p>I think Y would be laughed out of existence if the world’s 2nd largest college endowment asks for relief funds. The nation’s priorities wouldn’t be to prop Ivy colleges at this moment, IMHO</p>
<p>The local college in my town is the same size as Yale in terms of enrollment. If they can make do with $250 million without asking for public support, then I don’t think Yale has a good case for asking for federal funding, as much as I hate to say it.</p>
<p>T26E4- I agree. There’s a lot of “wasteful spending” that actually ends up being useful. The volcano monitoring part of the stimulus has been heavily contested, but to be honest, do we really want to be unprepared? The U. S. tsunami detection system was expensive, but it gives great advance warning.</p>
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<p>Really? I believe we’re not spending enough. Maybe I’m too idealistic, but I believe that the future of humanity rests on space travel. Not with the stupid oxygen box space “shuttle”, but faster than light travel. There’s real potential in the galaxy and we can be a little too short sighted.</p>
<p>Are you for real, T26E4?..IMHO, I think it’s laughable that trying to re inflate a burst bubble is our ‘nation’s’ priority right now. I wasn’t proposing that Yale alone, or Ivy schools alone get dedicated financial aid funds. (I’d like to see all schools be able to extend much greater financial aid to many more qualified students…It seems highly unlikely to me that admissions to a school where you pay to learn is truly ‘need’ blind.)</p>
<p>I’m saying that stupidly made home loans from the GSEs to people with subprime value as money borrowers is the very thing that enticed people like countrywide/wa-mu to make loans out to people with zero equity, and once everyone defaulted Fanny and Freddy, all of those other schmucks were then saddled with negative equity (because home prices fell like so many bricks)…</p>
<p>The answer now…In my humble opinion isn’t to try and prop up the notional wealth that no one believes in at this point…and it isn’t to try and “absorb” bad assets - Look at what happened to Bank of America! </p>
<p>The answer, IMHO is to let the market correct itself, cut our losses, and invest in something that WILL produce better leaders, better workers who can compete in a global market - the undergraduate and graduate education of Americans.</p>
<p>@ Gryffon: I’m glad you didn’t respond sarcastically, immediately.
I agree that the exploration and hegemony of space is going to be a large priority for the United States…but now? I mean, it’s good to plan in advance, certainly, but how feasible is faster than light travel?</p>
<p>Especially if the organization that supposedly deals with the advancement of such technology just sent 320 million in the Arctic Ocean?
There’s too much bloat at NASA…</p>
<p>Well, to be honest, space travel has always been risky. It’s not like private space companies don’t have plenty of failures. Other public space agencies like the ESA lose satellites occasionally (some of those satellites were worth even more than $320 mil).</p>
<p>^ And to be honest,given that, I don’t see why we’re still using taxpayer money (well, as much as we do right now) for high risk LOW return investments.</p>
<p>Education is a low risk, HIGH return investment, and it’s the only thing that can claim that status.</p>
<p>^ lol… in my school, its a low risk, low return money sinkhole… :)</p>
<p>Because a lot of things wouldn’t get done in the private sector. A private company is not going to launch a satellite to study global warming or ocean currents or some other scientific experiment. They’re going to be launching stuff that makes monetary profit, like communications satellites.</p>
<p>Gryff, your school is probably, (like mine) a crappy public school, as opposed to a four year college…</p>
<p>They are not so much money sink holes as they are money black holes - they take EVERYTHING.</p>
<p>@kROCK91: I think NASA could accomplish much, much more if there was more oversight of its operations coupled with a bias for talent in its hiring.
How many NASA personnel are engineers, physicists and roboticists, and how many are administrators?
Also, private companies DO commit massive sums of money to science research. I would say ExxonValdez/Mobil, and Chevron have contributed far more to our understanding of geology and the feasibility of alternative fossil fuels than the USGS and Department of Energy. In fact, both NASA and the Department of Energy have large amounts of cooperation with corporations precisely because that’s where a lot of innovation comes from. (In the same way that the DoD has Raytheon, Colt and FN Herstal do almost all of its technological/materiel procurement and development)</p>
<p>I ask you - What has NASA achieved in the last 60 years?</p>
<p>The moon landings? ok…the Voyager Missions? ok…The Hubble?(I hear its lens is in great shape) fine, ok…but…</p>
<p>How’s that international space station coming along, eh?</p>
<p>We need taxpayer dollars to be spent carefully.</p>
<p>The thing is…companies only do scientific research that directly benefits them. Hubble would never have gone up if private companies were in charge. You don’t make that much money staring at stars. They are not going to launch a satellite to detect near-earth asteroids. Of course they have their place in space research. They DO do stuff much more efficiently in many cases, but for the stuff they won’t touch, NASA is needed. </p>
<p>The Voyager missions could be considered a very good success, actually, since they outlasted their mission lives. They continued to be useful for years after- I’d say that’s a pretty good use of money.</p>
<p>Granted, NASA does need change. It’s very inefficient, asnd I wouldn’t mind getting rid of a lot of the excess stuff.</p>
<p>""Granted, NASA does need change. It’s very inefficient, asnd I wouldn’t mind getting rid of a lot of the excess stuff. “”</p>
<p>That’s my entire gripe with them.</p>