stevenkesslar

It's funny to think about "The Men Who Got Away." This is probably different for every escort - especially ones who have partners - but the same thing happens the other way around, at least for me. There was a client years ago who hired me several times that would meet every standard on the Gay Mr. Manners checklist. Mature. Intelligent. Thoughtful. Same age. Handsome. Successful. Muscular. Loaded with talents. Sexually exciting. Single. At the end of our first overnight, I asked him something like this .... "If you don't mind me asking, why aren't you out, and why aren't you dating?" He really didn't know how to answer the question. I think by the time I flew home I had a long email from him answering it, and saying nobody had ever asked the question. He hired me several more times. We never had the kind of relationship you describe, Jawja. But at least on a superficial level, I thought if there was ever a client to jump at, this is the one Central Casting would chose. I didn't jump, and within a year or so he was in love and married with another guy. Chalk up another one for the Steven Kesslar School Of Sexual Finishing - even if I am actually still very much a work in progress. I have no regrets. I haven't kept in touch, but I suspect he doesn't regret his choices either. We all make our own beds, and sleep in them. Together, alone, or some of both.

Jesus Christ, jawjateck. Once and for all, would you learn how to spell? You really like helping young men who have a lot of perspiration. http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lrlef4KW0X1qgpotro1_500.png

There's probably as many different models as there are people. The better question is, what's your stereotype? My stereotype is of a "kept man" who relies on one person for primary support, whether that's money, housing, food, helping them get through school or start a business, or some combination of the above. "Kept" does not necessarily mean "exclusive" as opposed to "primary." It doesn't necessarily include sex, as opposed to companionship, but it probably does. Those are my stereotypes, at least.

Boy, it's nice to be able to agree with the Baron for a change. I can't comment on "Sugar Daddy" per se, but I can comment on "Sugar Friend." Another word that I don't like that hits the same idea is "polyamory." Or arguably, another word that describes the same thing is dysfunction, but if so I have set up some pretty enduring dysfunctional relationships with clients. I've had and have a number of clients that I've known for, in a number of cases, over a decade. The boundaries between "client" and "friend" and "on the clock" and "off the clock" are fluid in that all of them at one point or another have crossed the line, all in different ways. It sounds like self-serving bullshit, but I can say some of my best friends are clients, just like I know teachers and business people and other professionals who can say some of their best friends are colleagues. In some cases the paid relationship morphed into simply friendships, in other cases it endures as "paid" relatioships with dollars and strings attached, at least most of the time. The "Sugar Daddy" model is tried and true throughout the ages and the downsides are the ones Baron points to. In particular, it is likely to have a relatively short shelf life. "Sugar Friend" is a different thing, and I think one main difference is that it allows both parties way more psychological (not to mention physical) space in the context of a sort of committed relationship, although the commitment is never formalized in any way. That's actually probably a good thing too, because the commitment to continue being "friends with benefits" is basically as good as the relationship itself, which I think is as it should be. It also probably helps that I'm a bit over the hill and my clients are even more mature than I am. Yeah, it sucks to get older. But guess what? In youth and beauty, wisdom is rare.

Yes. I saw it years ago. It wasn't memorable, either. Now we get two movies made about us, neither of which are all that good. I think I'll stick with the revamped and 3D version of "The Wizard Of Oz." A friend of mine treated me to that recently, and it was really enjoyable. Just hearing Judy sing "Over The Rainbow" gives me a good dose of gay, whether she actually caused Stonewall or not. Here's another pretty balanced article I just found that quotes several people that actually were present at the original: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/sep/25/stonewall-film-gay-rights-activists-give-their-verdict There's lots of grounds for irony and compassion in this, I think. First, Stonewall wasn't Stonewall. As was mentioned above, it was one of a series of bar closings. Perhaps it lit a fire in a way others didn't, but the whole idea that Stonewall is somehow THAT BIG and all these other events mean nothing and are long forgotten is drama. It's all part of our history. Second, the director, Roland Emmerich, is probably proving he's a better filmmaker than most gay activists are. Here's one quote from the article above by a former Gay street youth: "This story really needs a series, because each character needs to be developed more." Really? Somehow, I feel like Roland Emmerich might have judged correctly that most Americans who spend at most 2 hours watching the destruction of the planet by a new Ice Age or aliens probably won't go spend 6 hours watching a series of tender portraits of Gay street youth. The film sounds deeply flawed, which is what I would have expected from a Director of disaster flicks, but it doesn't really turn history on its head. Third, the reaction to the film says everything about where we are at today, and very little about where we are at in 1969, when anybody and everybody in the LGBTQ rainbow was mostly considered a pervert and criminal. Here's a quote from the article above that I think really nails that point: "While Stonewall wasn’t as gut-wrenchingly terrible as I expected, it was a disappointment in many ways, mostly because Emmerich felt he had to have a generic, “straight-acting” white dude from Indiana as the protagonist so straight people could “feel for him.” But thanks to the Stonewall Riots, most straight people know a gay person and can sympathise with a gay character. As the movie’s production values painfully make clear, this isn’t 1969 – mainstream audiences can (and should) deal with the kind of complex, diverse LGBT characters television has been churning out for the past few years." Fourth, to sum it up, the main criticism of the movie is it focuses on a pretty white twentysomething, to the exclusion of everybody else. Hmmm. Didn't we have a debate earlier this year about something like that? You guys probably learned your lesson and are way into the diversity thing now. Good for deej and me, since we get the pretty twentysomething boy all to ourselves. We'll let you know how it goes. http://33.media.tumblr.com/fa265a36425e13682317666c2d8a66ff/tumblr_nn2a86lg8y1st09qzo2_r1_250.gif http://33.media.tumblr.com/c4522dd9312d54a1eb9fd1376f03f328/tumblr_nn2a86lg8y1st09qzo3_r1_400.gif http://38.media.tumblr.com/41f07cd57f8aefbd532e6568f6a06c7f/tumblr_nn2a86lg8y1st09qzo1_r1_400.gif Seriously, the reaction to the film is causing a reaction in me. This is arguably really apples and oranges, but it reminds me of the ton of abuse that was directed at leaders of the LGBTQ community in California back in 2008, when we lost the state vote on same sex marriage. While it may be true that a bunch of really good people whose strong suit was practicing law were in fact a little out of their league when it came to running a statewide issue campaign, it floored me how harsh our own community was to its leaders, simply because they had the audacity to try and fail. It doesn't surprise me that Emmerich would be out of his league telling a story like this, and might have failed, but ironically the way he chose to tell it led to a debate that will likely raise more awareness than the movie itself will. Good for him!

Here's another possible gay myth that I love: http://clatl.com/atlanta/did-judy-garland-start-a-riot/Content?oid=9463581 I actually remember the day Judy Garland died. I was a kid, and it was after Mass, and my Dad always got the paper, and I was reading a story about her under the headline "Judy's Borrowed Time Ran Out," if I recall right. I have no idea why I remember that particular story. I had no clue I was Gay, nor did I know Garland was a Gay icon, nor did I know anything about the Stonewall Inn. But somehow that particular moment is particularly memorable to me. This is actually partly what I love about being Gay. At the risk of sounding maudlin, we go for irony, and satire, and tragedy, and the underdog, whether it is Judy Garland or a sad looking drag queen. Which is not to say Garland wasn't a tough woman, or all drag queens are sad cases. But we are definitely not like the Tea Party crowd that likes to wear the funny White Founding Father hats and act all principled and moral. We embrace life as it is. I actually wonder whether that will be true in a century, if LGBTQ life continues to "normalize." Some of the appeal of Garland and "Over the Rainbow" could be that we had to hide who we were. But if that's some part of LGBTQ culture that goes away or is diminished, it's not a great loss. And whether it's fiction or not, our history can uplift the myths about the Judy Garlands and the transgendered warriors. Does it really matter whether myths are true?

Hate to be a dick about this guys, but let's have a big dose of historical reality. It's all very nice that right now, before the movie has opened, there's 25,000 people that have signed a petition to boycott it, because it does not do an accurate job of representing the history of Stonewall. The very fact that there can be a movie, and that it can be that controversial, and that people can be upset that drag queens and lesbians are not being given the respect they deserve, is itself a huge sign of progress. If you go back to the year Stonewall happened, let's remember that there was only one word to accurately describe the people the movie does not portray adequately: criminals. They were all criminals, and as criminals they all deserved to have their asses thrown in jail. Period. That was what the law said, and that was the law the cops were enforcing. The Stonewall Inn was breaking the law because it did not have a state liquor license. Same sex sexual activity was not legal in New York until 1980. Same sex marriage became legal in New York in 2011. At the time the Stonewall riots actually occurred, it was a small thing, that did not get much press coverage, at least according to Wikipedia. My guess is it likely got way less coverage than the Rentboy.com bust. Speaking of which: https://www.change.org/p/new-us-attorney-general-stop-the-anti-gay-prosecution-of-rentboy-com https://life.indiegogo.com/fundraisers/daddysreviews-clients-help-rentboy-staff Challenge me if you think I'm wrong, but nobody alive in 1969 could have predicted that Stonewall would become the symbol for LGBTQ rights and for resistance that it is today. What was known at the time was that a bunch of criminals got busted, and my guess is most people thought they deserved to get busted, because they were worse than criminal. They were sick perverts. That's what a majority of Americans thought in 1969 about nice White homosexuals, not to mention Black drag queens. From that perspective, we're way ahead of ourselves on the Rentboy.com bust. Nobody is saying rentboys or the people who hire them are sick perverts. But its a measure of reality to me, and the way history works, that 25,000 people will sign a petition to boycott a flawed movie made by a Gay Director about Stonewall, and meanwhile a petition that involves a Gay escort website and 7 people arrested for creating a "global criminal enterprise," whose lives are left dangling in the wind, including gay activists like Hawk, is having a hard time. A lot of people don't necessarily want to be on the cutting edge of history when it actually involves taking a risk. Half a century later, when it's as safe as deciding whether you want to go see the Hollywood version of it, and whether you want salt on your popcorn, it's a bit easier. I'm saying this partly to put a crappy movie in perspective, and partly to refocus on Rentboy, and also actually as a way to pat us all on the back. I have no idea how this Rentboy thing is gonna play out, any more than anyone in 1969 really knew that a shitty little bar in New York would become an eternal symbol for LGBTQ rights and lifestyles. But like it or not, we have a front seat view to a little piece of history with Rentboy. To muddy the waters between Hollywood and reality even more, a few year's ago I read a really gripping profile of the SEAL that actually killed Bin Laden: http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a26351/man-who-shot-osama-bin-laden-0313/ The title itself says it all: "The Man Who Killed Bin Laden.....Is Screwed." Hollywood and history are not the same thing, are they? This is a sad and fascinating article, but here's perhaps the most poignant part of it, to me, delivered with a perfect sense of historical irony: "The Shooter is sitting next to me at a local movie theater in January, watching Zero Dark Thirty for the first time. He laughs at the beginning of the film about the bin Laden hunt when the screen reads, "Based on firsthand accounts of actual events." His uncle, who is also with us, along with the mentor and the Shooter's wife, had asked him earlier whether he'd seen the film already. "I saw the original," the Shooter said. The original we are watching is neither as noble nor as dangerous as what was portrayed in Zero Dark Thirty. I'll argue Rentboy is like Stonewall, in that what we have is a bunch of people accused of being criminals, who we actually believe did no harm, and no wrong. Anyways, hope you guys enjoy the movie. You get to see the original.

I'm really belaboring my point, and I basically agree with Mike. If the target audience for this movie is heterosexual people, or even young gay kids who don't remember Stonewall, I can see how Hollywood would calculate that they would build it around an eye candy character that would be "an easy in" for straight people. Just like a movie that was hard to get made like Dallas Buyer's Club could rewrite history and create the needed bad guy by turning the FDA into the villain. Perhaps the troubling thing about this is not that it shows how far we've come, but how far we have yet to go, that they couldn't simply calculate that they could make a good movie based on the actual characters who drove the story - lesbians, drag queens, and transgendered, most of whom were not white. If they couldn't figure out how to do that, maybe the best conclusion is what you came to, Mike: they should have just not made the movie, period. With a bunch of crappy reviews, the movie is probably gonna bomb anyway. It sort of figures that this would be made by somebody with the best of intentions, who understands how to make big budget disaster movies. I like scripts and character development, and what always amazes me is that Hollywood figures out how to spend enormous amounts of money on special effects, and then forgets about the script. There are plenty of "blockbusters" that failed because they failed to tell a good story, although at least in a disaster movie, you can hide behind the special effects. I've seen several of Emmerich's disaster movies, and they were not noteworthy for character development, or accuracy of course. In this case there were no special effects to hide behind. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3248048/Stonewall-director-Roland-Emmerich-addresses-claims-whitewashed-historic-civil-rights-riot-film-tanks-critics-LGBT-advocates-endorse-boycott.html

I'll go with your first instinct on this one, BVB. The caveats are I haven't seen the movie, and it sounds like just as a piece of film it sucks - so far it has a 35 score on Metacritic. Assuming what even a harsh critic points to - that the gay Director self-financed, it is a labor of love, and in the end it is a sympathetic portrayal of the plight of Gay youth, plus there's nice eye candy along the way, I wouldn't be too harsh. In some ways, we can be happy that LGBTQ is mainstream enough that we now even get to have shitty movies made about us. And if they focus too much on the pretty but fictional White eye candy, and the eye candy boy turns out to have a sexual preference for other eye candy, is that really a shocker, especially if you assume the Gay guy who made the film might want it to at least break even? One of my favorite picky bitch things to do after I see a "historical"movie is to research whether what it portrays actually happened. The amazing thing about "McFarland USA" is it was almost 100 % accurate, and the details it left out didn't change the narrative, and so can be easily explained away. I didn't like the fact that they fictionalized the white coach's history to make him look like a loser who had no choice but to take a job in a dump hole, when in fact he came to McFarland fresh out of Pepperdine when it was mostly white. It changed around him, and he obviously went with the flow to help young Mexican American kids achieve the American dream - what's wrong with that? "Selma" was tougher, in that a lot of people felt it completely misrepresented both LBJ, and the politics of inside/outside collaboration that made the civil rights movement so effective. In that regard, the LGBTQ movie that really bothered me, and still does, is Dallas Buyer's Club. Here's why: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2013/12/10/what-dallas-buyers-club-got-wrong-about-the-aids-crisis/ I get the fact that Hollywood ought to be able to change facts for dramatic effect. So I'll go with the way they turned a Gay protagonist into a straight homophobe who ended up simply be sympathetic to Gay people. And the movie gets credit for humanizing the character Jared Leno won an Oscar for. And I'm all for the fact that Matthew McConaughey viewed it as great Oscar bait. The bridge too far for me is that it turned the FDA into a villain, and that happened to occur right in the middle of the Obamacare debate, when there was a concerted national attempt by the entire Republican Party to convince people that government involvement in health care sucks. Obamacare and AIDS are apples and oranges, but coming from liberal Hollywood, I thought the message sucked. As the Post article above documents, the actual history is that the FDA went after Ron Woodruff because he sold dying people mostly useless crap. Meanwhile, while they were far from perfect, to me the FDA's efforts to fight a deadly plague that came out of nowhere were in large part commendable. The bizarre thing is that the whole movie demonized the FDA and AZT, and then in the closing credits, like an afterthought, it mentioned - oh, guess what? - AZT in an improved form ended up saving millions of lives. Never mind. Unlike the Dallas Buyer's Club, Stonewall won't win Oscars. Hopefully both will open some minds. For me, given the choice between turning Jeremy Irvine into a young God boy, or turning the FDA into a villain, I'll take Jeremy Irvine in a heartbeat, wearing anything - or even nothing at all.

http://33.media.tumblr.com/fa265a36425e13682317666c2d8a66ff/tumblr_nn2a86lg8y1st09qzo2_r1_250.gif http://33.media.tumblr.com/c4522dd9312d54a1eb9fd1376f03f328/tumblr_nn2a86lg8y1st09qzo3_r1_400.gif Obviously a bad casting choice. No fucking way I'm sitting through a few hours of a movie with this guy in it. Magic Mike, anyone?

This is a no brainer. "Love Will Keep Us Together." Captain and Tennille. It's not just that the song is trash. It's that President Ford, at the behest of his daughter, invited them to perform at the White House during a state visit by Queen Elizabeth. C & T performed "Muskrat Love," and good old Jerry learned it is un-Queenlike to perform a song about muskrats fucking in front of royalty. It is a wonderful metaphor. If we had gotten this gay discrimination thing out of the way back in the 70's we could have brought so much joy and grace and dignity and good taste to Queens and everyone across the world so much earlier. Besides, it is always natural and important for Americans to try to insult Europeans. Some things are truly timeless.

... Masturbate They cum just by knowing you guys worship them like this.

I dunno, Mr. Hart. She seems to want to be everything you can be, one at a time. If she goes for Fag Hag next, I think she'd be fabulous.

http://news.yahoo.com/rachel-dolezal-resigns-as-leader-from-naacp-spokane-chapter--160937684.html Like I said, can I just go for "all of the above" when it comes to having sex?

Read this report and weep about the huge increases in college costs, and the shift in who pays from taxpayers to students. http://trends.collegeboard.org/sites/default/files/college-pricing-2012-full-report_0.pdf Page 14 gives a breakdown of price. As described in the report: • Over the 30 years from 1982-83 to 2012-13, average published tuition and fees at private nonprofit four-year institutions rose by 167%, from $10,901 (in 2012 dollars) to $29,056. The average published price at public two-year colleges rose by 182%, from $1,111 (in 2012 dollars) to $3,131, while the increase for in-state students at public four-year institutions was 257%, from $2,423 to $8,655. Epigonos is right. While the Ivy Leagues have higher price tags than this, they all have huge per-student endowments. They can afford to basically give anyone who meets the extremely high admission standards a free or heavily discounted ride if they don't come from a well-off family. I think the real problem is the costs incurred by "everybody else," meaning most of us, as documented above. Page 35 and 36 provide lots of interesting and, to me, surprising data on what kind of staff college tuition pays for. The most interesting fact is that the percentage of FTE staff that are faculty is stable and surprisingly small: between 32 % and 36 % between 1976 and 2011, depending on whether it is public or private institutions. Executive and management staff has grown, moreso at privates than publics, e.g. from 5 % of FTE staff in 1976 to 6 % of FTE staff in 2011 at publics. As Charlie states there are some ripe targets here to gripe about, like presidents and deans - the high hanging fruit - but as a percentage of the overall budget it is small and not growing by much. The huge shift has been from "non-professional, non-instructional staff" to "other professionals," which grew from 11 % of FTE in 1976 to 25 % of FTE staff in 2011 at public institutions. As described in the report: • The growing “other professionals” category includes student, academic, and institutional support functions that require a bachelor’s degree or comparable experience. Examples of the many job titles in this category include human resources specialists, accountants and auditors, computer specialists, counselors, librarians, and coaches. I would argue there is a lot of low hanging fruit to go after as well, if the real goal is to make tuition as affordable as possible for students, and to help taxpayers feel like they are getting their money's worth if we try to shift some of the burden from students back to taxpayers.

+1. That's why I think the best political solution is tie more taxpayer support - meaning reducing the amount of debt students have to take on - to some kind of pay freeze, especially at the top end. They are essentially in the same boat as the CEO's across corporate America who think they can't possibly be paid what they are worth, even as they bemoan how increasing the minimum wage makes no sense.

You make excellent points: - Some people are better off in a 2 year program - The track record is that if you just throw money at colleges, they will figure out how to spend it. - New online apps that allow students to make wise and affordable choices are becoming increasingly available, and are awesome. An example: https://www.collegeraptor.com/ The only thing I'd dispute is the wording of what you say about government spending. I think the Tea Party strategy has been to defund colleges in hopes that eventually they will be able to force colleges to cut professor pay, make professors work harder, or whatever else it is they think they want to do. Ask my brother and his wife, who are both university professors in schools that have been Ground Zero for the Tea Partyers, and they will tell you that very little has changed in terms of professor pay. He has been nicked, not cut. The bottom line formula goes like this: less federal and state funding for education = more student debt The idea that if we just spend less money, good things will happen is just wrong, and we should admit it. It is fucking up the economy by crippling even successful, bright students with too much debt. I would argue it undercuts the very ideal of an educated, meritocratic democracy built on capitalism. That does not mean we should spend more money. I would love to see proposals that accomplish some form of funding freeze, on a per student basis, and simply reverse the process of transferring costs from taxpayers to students. I don't think it's about giving colleges more money, it's about who foots the bill. The idea used to be that taxpayers footed the bill, students studied and graduated and got jobs, and then paid it forward for the next generation in taxes. We need to get back to that.

Maybe, maybe not. My original reason for being for Hillary in 2008 was that I thought Barack should run once he learned how to get bills passed. I actually think that given his lack of administrative experience, he has done a really good job. If he had learned what LBJ learned before being elected, I think he could have done better. Or maybe his problem is he is too nice a guy, and LBJ was better at getting laws passed because he was a total prick. Life is strange, and politics is not always a sport in which nice guys win. I am glad Elizabeth Warren is not running. Regardless of who wins in 2016, I hope she plays a huge role in the Senate. Like Paul Wellstone, the danger is she will only be viewed as a ranter and raver. Wellstone figured that out, and we'll never known what he might have done had he lived. With luck, we'll learn what Elizabeth Warren is capable of. I actually hope I will get to vote for her for President some day, when she is an older and wiser whore. Oh, forgive me. I mean leader.

One other comment on the role of big business. As a liberal Democrat, I don't view the US Chamber of Commerce as my natural ally. But I like the fact that in the 2014 midterms, they had the effect of taking Tea Partyish wingnuts out of the political process. Whether this means we really get a more moderate and bipartisan Conress that gets things done remains to be seen. Maybe it just got us a Republican Congress that will give us more gridlock. But I think the Chamber and I are mostly of one voice: we need to work toward bipartisan and pragmatic solutions. I think the same thing applies to the growing chorus of businesses that are saying there are serious skills gaps for good paying jobs. As I've said on other posts, this is a great problem to have, compared to the idea during the Great Recession that all the good jobs are gone, or at least gone to China. All my political experience suggests that the Chamber will feel that big business is, in effect, being victimized, and that the problem is that all the taxes they already pay are being misspent by the government, and they should be spent differently so that the government somehow produces more skilled workers using the tax dollars they already have. To me, this is an opportunity for compromise, because it means they are going to be willing to come to the table and figure out something that will help create a better educated and better skilled work force. They clearly are starting to speak about the need for it. Final point: Pew surveys have documented that the Millenials are both the most liberal generation alive today, and the most pro-corporate generation. This makes perfect sense to me. All my nieces and nephews that are financially successful work for multi-national corporations: hospitality, drugs, accounting. They get the picture that their fate is tied to the fate of global capitalism. To me the political emphasis is obvious, and I wish the Millenials would wake up and drive it: we need the best education system that feeds workers into the global capitalistist work force but still tries to balance that goal with traditional liberal arts, and we need to figure out 1000 creative ways to demand that, as part of the deal, businesses at every level help these young people keep learning and developing skills after they graduate and get jobs. Starbucks is one interesting model of how business can do that. Easy to say, hard to do, but I think survey says it is what the young people most effected want.

Speaking of having a debate about our investment priorities: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/06/11/elizabeth-warren-outlines-debt-free-college-plan-calls-more-funding-higher-ed When it comes to this issue, Elizabeth Warren is my gal! I love her. What do you folks think of these ideas? To quote her, on a political level, this is what it boils down to to me: Making college more affordable, she said, would require a boost in federal spending but also greater accountability for how colleges and states use that money -- a “one-two punch” that she said should have bipartisan appeal. “We can do it if Republicans admit that we will never have affordable college without investing more resources in education,” she said. “And if Democrats admit that we will never have affordable college without demanding real accountability in exchange for those investments.”

Your comments hit on so many of the key points as I see them that I separated them and will just do a +1 by way of asking questions I think we all ought to be thinking about, if the goal is to get to effective and pragmatic solutions: Absolutely. I was just with a client who is a retired professor and administrator who proudly helped guide his college into a health care curriculum that was clearly needed and clearly helped lots of people get jobs. He is also proudly a historian. As we discussed this issue he was passionate about the fact that even if you are choosing a field of study that is likely to guide you to financial success, you should also be required to get a well-rounded education. So the question is, what are the best ways to make this both/and, rather than either/or? Absolutely. Any effective proposals to throw more money at education are going to have to include standards and accountability. And in some ways it's not about spending more money on education. What we basically did is shifted costs from taxpayers to students, who had to accept skyrocketing tuition and debt. In my mind as a taxpayer it is perfectly reasonable to say I'll pay more taxes to help pay for your education, so you can have less debt, but I expect accountability in return. So the question is, what are the best standards and ways to hold colleges and students accountable? Absolutely. As I said above, I am a poster child for getting a liberal arts education, and I went out of my way to avoid the things that looked like the sure path to financial success. Fortunately, my Mom and Dad made enough to pay for most of my education, and I got Summer jobs, so I had no debt. And ha ha, I'm a smart enough guy with a good enough education that I succeeded financially anyway. But I think it really is a myth to say there used to be some golden day when everybody got this great liberal arts education we don't get today. To overstate the point, that world mainly benefited middle-class and upper-class white men, like me, it was an elitist model, and it all was based on the idea that only 10 % or so of the population goes to college, and they are the best and the brightest, and their degree will end up being a ticket to affluence, regardless of what they study. That world still exists at places like Harvard and Yale. College has always been about jobs as well as well-rounded education. So the question is, what are the best models today, in a more diverse country where more kids of more races and more skill levels are going to college than ever before? Absolutely. One of my clients thinks that any student who gets federal help should be required to complete college at a 4 year institution in 4 years. I think that's a nice ideal, especially if the deal includes taxpayers paying for all or most of the ride, but it has to deal with the financial reality that people have to pay their bills, and not everyone comes from a middle-class family. And the other reason that some students take longer is they take "unnecessary" classes. But in a world where it's more likely than ever that you will bounce between different careers, either within one field or across fields, is it bad to, in effect, be "overeducated?" I would argue you can't be "overeducated" in today's job market. So the question is, if taxpayers are footing some or all of the bill, what is a reasonable set of expectations of students in terms of how much education they get? Absolutely. If there is one simple, one-size-fits-all solution, I think it would be to ban for-profit education, period. Unfortunately, that would throw a lot of good babies out with the bad bathwater. The Obama administration has made some reasonable attempts to crack down on the worst offenders with the highest drop-out rates where students with inadequate skills were more or less doomed to fail. The other point to remember is Elizabeth Warren is right: the federal loan program is a profit center. The question is, how much sense does it make to weaken our economy long-term by forcing students who do graduate and got jobs to carry heavy debt loads, just so we can have a federal student loan program that in the short-term makes money? I have a personal way of thinking about this. The government, who greatly fear the older voters who AARP organizes so well, is willing to dump limitless amounts of money through Medicare and Medicaid on my 93 year old Mom who has dementia and who bluntly has not future but to slowly waste away and die. I am very grateful for those programs. But why in God's name would the same government say that my Mom, if she were 18, can't go get the kind of education that would make her and her family prosper, unless she is willing to go into massive debt? As long as we stay out of more stupid wars, I don't think these are either/or choices. We can "take care" of both my Mom and her granddaughters. I hope we have a serious debate in this election about our investment priorities.

Yes, and no, I think. Bad news. When I was in college, I was a Wellstone groupie (the guy who tried to stop the Iraq War) and campus crusader who didn't want to major in Political Science because it was too practical, so I majored in Religion instead, and I wrote my senior thesis on the one religion the Dept. didn't offer courses in - Islam - and its struggle with modernization. 100 % liberal arts. Nothing even remotely relevant to today, huh? And my first 16 years employed was with local, state, and national non-profits because I wanted to make the world a better place. Despite every effort on my part to avoid financial success, I credit what I learned in college for my financial success. That's the way I'd like it to work for everyone, and you're right, Charlie, the idea that you go to school solely to focus on STEM and get a job at Google falls short of that. Good news: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2013/08/SDT-racial-relations-08-2013-03-06.png As you can see, college entrance and completion rates have gone way up since I went to school, like double for blacks in particular, and they've gone up even more since you did, I suspect. This chart doesn't show it, but in the last few years for the first time we have gender parity between men and women who are college graduates. So the reality is that while we can idealize the great education we had, most people didn't get it. Today way more people do. That's why despite recent bumps, we have a much higher percentage of the population that is affluent or middle class, and it's more diverse, than when we went to school. I feel the same way you do, but my hope is it's not either/or, it's both/and. It's probably the case that the lower we go down the student test score or GPA rankings, the more likely college is to be a challenge to complete, which is why I think only about 60 % of young people who enter college graduate. To me the ideal of a liberal arts education for all stands somewhere between an elitist myth that never really existed, and a practical goal that we should strive towards. My guess is part of the reason that parents are losing faith in degrees is that they are at risk of concluding that the connection between degrees and jobs is weakening. Whether we knew it or not at the time, or cared about it, when we went to college a college degree pretty much was a ticket to financial success.

Huh? I thought we did sleep together. Wasn't that what we were doing while you were possibly sucking my dick while I was asleep? Oh, I get it. You were asleep too!

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/06/09/national-poll-finds-overall-dissatisfaction-college-selection-process-while-parents Key finding: Sixty-eight percent of surveyed parents said they viewed undergraduate degrees in a positive light 10 years ago but only 44.6 percent saw the degrees favorably now, and there was a similar drop from 73.2 percent to 57.9 percent for graduate degrees. Only 49.2 percent believed the institutions were paying attention to current labor needs and trends, and 54.8 percent said there was enough of an emphasis on job placement after graduation. Those are interesting numbers, and possibly scary ones. I think the big danger is that people are going to overreact, and throw the baby out with the bathwater. The survey results above do not say "parents are deciding college educations don't matter" but you could say it suggests they are moving in that direction. Almost every study on college and income I've seen lead to one huge and obvious conclusion: the better the education, the better the job and income, especially if you go into STEM fields. I also think the media is doing as much harm as good on all this "middle class is dying" crap. The data basically suggest is that in the 1960's, when about 1 in 10 Americans had a college education, going to college was pretty much a sure way to become affluent. Now about 1 in 3 Americans are college educated. Most of the affluent are college educated, but increasingly, a college education may only be a sure way to become middle class, as opposed to affluent. But if the lesson people take away is that somehow college isn't the point any more, THAT is a sure way to doom kids who don't even try to the lower class. I don't like the idea of ever flat out saying "liberal arts suck, forget about history and philosophy." But I do like the idea of really putting the megaphone on the fact that college has always been first and foremost about preparing kids for work and careers, and now we have to up our game in that area like never before.