The Plan

There is a plan that - someday - there will be a train from Panorama City to Westwood/UCLA and points south. From LA Metro:

The Sepulveda Transit Corridor is a proposed high-capacity rail line that will provide a crucial north-south transit connection between the San Fernando Valley, the Westside and eventually Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) to address one of the most heavily traveled and congested corridors in Los Angeles County.

In January 2026, the Metro Board of Directors selected a Locally Preferred Alternative (LPA) for the project consisting of underground heavy-rail transit between the Van Nuys Metrolink Station and the Metro E Line Expo/Sepulveda Station with a connection to the Metro G Line and the East San Fernando Valley Light Rail Transit Line at Van Nuys Boulevard. The Metro Board also identified an Initial Operating Segment (IOS) alternative, extending approximately 8.4 miles between the Wilshire/Westwood Station and the G Line/Van Nuys Station. The project would require construction of a maintenance and storage facility for rail vehicles, with several potential location options to be evaluated. 

The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) and Metro are now holding a scoping period before the formal preparation of an environmental document under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and a Recirculated Draft Environmental Impact Report (RDEIR) under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).  

Stakeholders are invited to comment on the project's purpose and need; project elements, including station and maintenance/storage facility locations; and potential environmental impacts. Learn more at the Project Hub.

Comments may be provided at the scoping meetings, online, via email, via phone at 213.922.7375, or by mail to Peter Carter, Project Manager, Metro, One Gateway Plaza, Mail Stop 99-22-6, Los Angeles, CA 90012.

Comments are due November 18, 2026

Scoping Meeting Details 

Wednesday, November 4, 12-1pm.
Zoom Link: https://bit.ly/STC-Nov4
Call-in Number: 213.338.8477
Webinar ID: 822 7276 3299

Saturday, November 7, 3-5pm
Culver City Veterans Memorial
Building Multipurpose Room
4117 Overland Av
Culver City, CA 90230

Tuesday, November 10, 5:30pm- 7:30pm
Westwood United Methodist Church
10497 Wilshire Bl
Los Angeles, CA 90024

Saturday, November 14, 10am- 12pm
Marvin Braude Constituent Center
6262 Van Nuys Bl
Los Angeles, CA 91401

Monday, November 16, 5:30pm- 7:30pm
Sherman Oaks East Valley Adult Center
5056 Van Nuys Bl, Building B
Sherman Oaks, CA 91403

Source: https://www.metro.net/projects/sepulvedacorridor/. 

Straws in the Wind - Part 510 (Les Jeux Sont Fait)

From Inside Higher Ed: One of the country’s leading prediction markets is planning to get into the business of college admissions. Kalshi could soon add what it calls “event contracts” regarding admission rates at 22 selective institutions, including Johns Hopkins University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago, according to notices filed this week with its federal regulator. Users will be able to wager whether a college’s admission rate will be less than, equal to or greater than a certain value, such as 10 percent. Kalshi plans to verify admission rates for first-time, first-year undergraduates using the Common Data Set.

...Kalshi plans to allow bets for admissions rates at the following universities: Brown University; the California Institute of Technology; Carnegie Mellon University; Columbia University; Cornell University; Dartmouth College; Duke University; Harvard University; Johns Hopkins University; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Northwestern University; Princeton University; Rice University; Stanford University; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of Chicago; the University of Notre Dame; the University of Pennsylvania; Vanderbilt University; Washington University in St. Louis; and Yale University.

Employees and others in the admission and financial aid offices of the universities won’t be able to wager on their university’s rates. Others barred from trading include employees in the university’s communications office and other departments who might have advance knowledge of the rate. “Employees and contractors of any application platform or vendor that hosts, operates, or processes data for UCLA’s first-year applications or admissions records” also can’t trade, according to the notice for the UCLA contract... 

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2026/10/23/kalshi-could-let-you-wager-admission-rates-22-colleges.

The $90 Zero

Received in the mail this past Monday from Navitus, the formulary that provides drug benefits for retirees. What a difference a zero can make!

Out

From Inside Higher Ed: Dartmouth University Provost Santiago Schnell resigned Wednesday after a faculty-led review committee concluded that he “used AI to meaningfully alter his writing” and “fell short” of the university’s academic integrity standards. “I expect our senior leaders to hold themselves to the highest standards,” Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock, who has called for “more AI” at the university, wrote in a memo to students, faculty and staff. “Out of respect for his colleagues and the institution, Santiago has resigned as provost and is leaving the university."

...The controversy surrounding Schnell’s AI use started in August when Semafor published an investigation showing that the AI detector Pangram flagged an editorial he wrote for The Washington Post as at least 80 percent AI generated. A few weeks later, The Dartmouth followed up with its own investigation into more of Schnell’s published writings, also using Pangram to detect the extent of AI use. According to the student newspaper, Pangram determined that Schnell’s work was 96 percent “AI-written” across the nine professional articles he published this year, including the Post essay and two academic papers about mathematics. 

...In response to the outcry, Beilock convened an independent advisory committee composed of faculty and alumni to review how Schnell used AI in his writing and determine if he met publishers’ AI-disclosure requirements, if he was honest about his AI use and if that use constituted a violation of Dartmouth policy... The committee noted that Schnell didn’t fully cooperate with their investigation...

Full story a https://www.insidehighered.com/news/governance/executive-leadership/2026/10/28/dartmouth-provost-resigns-over-ai-use.

Market Opportunity

The lack of SAT scores for UCLA and Berkeley admissions seems to have created a market opportunity. The Facebook ad above reads:

A 1550 SAT won’t help your child get into UCLA or UC Berkeley.

Both schools stopped looking at test scores. For strong students at schools like Harker, Harvard-Westlake, and Bishop’s, that changes everything.

Without scores, grades, essays, and what your child does outside class decide who gets in. Many families are still planning for an application that no longer exists...

And, of course, after a free introductory program in how to cope with the non-use of the SAT, the service above - for a fee - will tell anxious and affluent parents how to cook up the right sort of application.

Straws in the Wind - Part 509

From Inside Higher Ed: The Ohio State University College of Medicine discriminated in its admissions process, giving preference to Black and Hispanic applicants over white and Asian applicants, the Justice Department announced Wednesday. It's the 10th time this year the administration has found that a medical or law school discriminated, while 20 such investigations remain open... The DOJ letter... says OSU used a socioeconomic scale developed at UC Davis’s medical school, which the department considers a “race proxy.” The DOJ claims that UC Davis had discriminated in its medical school admissions, citing the same scale. According to the DOJ’s letter to Davis, that scale includes metrics like parental education level and coming from an “underserved area.”

The department also noted disparities in MCAT scores between admitted Black and Hispanic students and admitted Asian students: In 2025, the median MCAT score for admitted Black students was 514 (83rd percentile) and 515 (88th percentile) for admitted Hispanic applicants, while admitted Asian students had a median score of 517 (94th percentile)... Critics... argued that the findings often misinterpret the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ban, which allowed for the use of socioeconomic factors in admissions...

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2026/10/22/osu-college-medicine-discriminated-doj-claims.

Expansion

You may have seen the front-page item in last Sunday's LA Times about the expansion of the UCLA Health System:

University officials say its expansion to five hospitals and 300 clinics — up from 150 locations a decade ago — has given more Southern Californians access to its academic medicine... Nurses at the university’s flagship hospital Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Westwood say the expansion has created crowding that has caused what they describe as an ongoing, daily crisis in the emergency room.

Patients coming from the 300 clinics for hip replacements, heart surgeries and other procedures at Ronald Reagan often wait one or two days in the emergency department until beds become available upstairs in the hospital, according to UCLA officials. To accommodate those patients who’ve been admitted but don’t have a room, the hospital has installed dozens of beds in what was once the emergency department’s waiting room and in adjacent spaces. That has forced people waiting for emergency care into a large white tent outside, which was put up during the COVID-19 pandemic...

At the September Regents committee meeting, Spisso, UCLA Health’s president, told board members that the system needs to add as many as another 400 hospital beds so that newly admitted patients no longer have to wait. For months, rumors have circulated that UCLA will soon buy Providence St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, which would make the university the only hospital operator in that city. UCLA bought the city’s other hospital in 1995...

UCLA’s expansion strategy has been financially successful, according to the health system’s annual report... The university is now spending nearly $300 million to renovate a 170,000-square-foot building that sits on nine acres near Los Angeles International Airport. Purchased in 2024, the campus’ many offerings will include a sports medicine institute with physical therapy and advanced imaging, as well as an ambulatory surgery center with 10 operating rooms... The university also plans to soon open a new 119-bed psychiatric hospital in L.A.’s Mid-Wilshire neighborhood. The facility was once the 204-bed Olympia Medical Center, where most patients were Black, Latino and underinsured. Olympia shut down after the university purchased it in December 2020. The renovated hospital allows UCLA to relocate and expand the 74-bed Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital, which is currently on the fourth floor of Ronald Reagan Medical Center...

Full story at https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-10-25/ucla-health-expansion-raises-costs-concerns.

One thing that is underplayed in the story is an explanation of why the expansion is occurring. If you look at the other side of the market, you have health insurers, public and private. There are now only a handful of major insurance players in the LA area. So you have a handful of players in any negotiation on reimbursement for medical procedures. Being large - lots of beds, lots of docs, etc. - improves the negotiating position of providers such as UCLA when they negotiate with carriers.