Notes From All Over, Early Afternoon Edition -- June 21, 2020

Is this the sweet spot for the Williston Basin?

• WTI: $50
• active rig count: 40
• frack spreads: 10
• daily crude oil production: 1 million bopd

Covid-19 vaccine: an ethical path to a Covid vaccine. It appears this is not yet behind a paywall.

Author of essay: Carl Elliott. The New York Review of Books. I sped-read the essay. It seems well-balanced, considering the source and the author. There's a bit of anti-American sentiment in the article, but that's to be expected. Too much time spent on the past injustices. Okay, we get it. We're as bad as the Germans in the 1940s. Move on.

The big question: would I volunteer to a) be given an experimental Covid vaccine rushed into production for human testing; and, b) then be given an infectious dose of Covid-19 virus? Sure, why not? What could possibly go wrong?

This is referred to as a "challenge study." It's called a "challenge" study because researchers will be challenged to find any rational being willing to take this risk. LOL.

Covid-19: what is college worth? Jonathan Zimmerman in The New Review of Books. It begins:

Every fall I begin my freshman seminar on higher education by asking students to guess how many colleges in the United States admit fewer than 20 percent of their applicants. Estimates range from several hundred to a thousand.

The correct answer is forty-six.

[Turn that around: if you are a "legitimate/qualified college applicant, how many colleges in the entire US might be competitive for you? Forty-six.]

These schools represent between 1 and 2 percent of the roughly three thousand four-year higher-education institutions in the country. [At this point, I would like to know the number of four-year higher-education institutions the author would consider worthy of attending. Exhibit A: Auburn? It has a great name; a great football team. But is it a great school? If so, for what?]

But they include the colleges that I attended, as did my parents and my children; I imagine that many readers of these pages attended them as well. I would also wager that many of us went to college when we were around eighteen, lived on campus, majored in the arts and sciences rather than in preprofessional fields, and received our degrees in four years.

We’re the exception, not the rule. Of the roughly 70 percent of American high school graduates who enroll in college, 40 percent attend community college, which is almost never residential; more than a quarter of undergraduates are twenty-five or older; most major in business, the health sciences, or other preprofessional subjects; and they take an average of six years to complete college, if they finish it at all. Indeed, as David Kirp shows in The College Dropout Scandal, nearly 40 percent of undergraduates leave without a degree. Thirty-four million Americans—over a tenth of the nation’s population—have some college credits but dropped out before graduating. They are nearly twice as likely as college graduates to be unemployed and four times more likely to default on student loans.

That’s a scandal for the nation, not just for higher education. We like to imagine college as an egalitarian force, which reduces the gap between rich and poor. But over the past four decades it has mostly served to reinforce or even to widen that gap. During these years—and for the first time in American history—a college degree became the sine qua non of middle-class stability and self-sufficiency. Yet rising tuition and declining government assistance has put the degree out of reach for many Americans; others have had to borrow huge sums, saddling their families and futures with crippling debt.