A viral post did the math on MIT’s admissions by sex and got it right. The trouble is what the math assumed. Who applies tells you who was interested, not who was qualified. The fair test is how a class was chosen.
“Only 5 percent” sounds like a small slice of a paycheck. Proposition 40 would take 5 percent of a fortune. Here is that bill in the units most of us use, what it would be paid with, and what it can and can’t fix.
At the first USAFacts debate, the moderator said kids born rich mostly stay there. The slide’s own numbers said the opposite. Six in ten children born into the top fifth fall out of it, and the pattern is close to what a fair race produces when runners start at different places on the track.
California’s taxes look nearly flat. Look inside the total and you find a steeply progressive income tax offset by a sales tax and a rent estimate that fall hardest on the poor. That changes one argument around the 2026 billionaire tax.
Michigan is one of the best universities in the country, and it answered a student distress problem by deciding to cover first-semester grades. The number I think its administrators were looking at is true, excellent, and aggregated at exactly the level where the actual problem disappears. This is how capable people miss a root cause, and it is the same error the college-ROI research made for twenty years.
Michigan’s College of LSA will stop putting first-semester letter grades on transcripts, to help students explore and to curb a mental health crisis. The pressure is real. The evidence on hiding grades mostly runs the other way, and the university kept the measure for itself.