Periodic Reminder About Email Scams

From time to time, UCLA folks will get emails such as the one below.  They are all phony and may damage your computer if you click on the links provided. 

You can usually see, if you check, that the message doesn't come from a UCLA address.  But sometimes it might seem to be from UCLA.  So just delete.
----------------------------------------
From: Nicole Jones
Sent: Tuesday, August 12, 2014 10:08 AM
To: Nicole Jones
Subject: Email Confirmation

Dear mailbox user,

 

We currently upgraded to 4GB space. Please log-in to your account in order to validate E-space. Your emails won't be delivered by our server, unless email account is confirmed. 

Click on faculty and staff email confirmation to confirm details of your email account. Note that failure to confirm your email with this notification, would lead to dismissal of your user account. Protecting your email account is our our primary concern.This has become necessary to serve you better.

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Shocked at the thought

Who me?

From Inside Higher Ed:

Over much of the past half-century, state governors have helped keep public college tuition artificially low during gubernatorial election years, according to a new peer-reviewed article. But the study suggests more is at play than a governor's own career.

The study, published in the June issue of Empirical Economics by Kent State University Professor C. Lockwood Reynolds, found inflation-adjusted tuition is 1.5 percent lower in gubernatorial election years than in other years...

Lockwood found evidence that governors were trying to help lawmakers in their political party rather than their own careers.

“It’s exactly when you know you’re going to win that governors seem to be doing this, which tends to flip around the traditional story that would be told about these things,” Reynolds said.  He concluded governors might be trying to pass political goodwill to state legislative candidates in an effort to expand party control of the state legislature...

Full story with link at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/12/election-year-politics-seem-suppress-tuition-prices.

Economists!  Academics!  What could they be thinking?

More on the crack in the dam from the NCAA O'Bannon case

The LA Times has an editorial: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-ncaa-ruling-20140812-story.html.  It tries to cut a middle path:

In ruling that the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. illegally restrained competition for top student football and basketball players, U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken could have obliterated the last remnants of amateurism in major college sports. Happily, she didn't. Instead, her ruling Friday upheld the association's ability to limit the compensation paid to students during their collegiate years while also allowing athletes to benefit more from the fruit of their labors — for starters, by obtaining enough aid from schools to cover all the costs of going to college. It's a better balance. Now it's up to the colleges covered by the decision to return more of the money to the students who generate it.

The lawsuit, brought by former UCLA basketball player Ed O'Bannon, challenged the NCAA rule requiring student athletes to give up any claim to the revenue from television broadcasts, replays, highlight reels, videogames and any other use of their names, images or likenesses. Broadcasts in particular have been a cash cow for about 350 colleges and universities in the NCAA's top tier, generating billions of dollars in fees.

Wilken found that the association violated antitrust law by effectively fixing the price student athletes could command from the most desirable schools. She rightly dismissed the NCAA's spurious arguments that its limits on compensation promoted competitive balance, attracted more fans or helped integrate athletes into the student body. Those are all legitimate aims, but they're not served by barring students from receiving any of the licensing revenue...


An interesting question - despite the LA Times' attempt to find one - is whether there is a middle path in what has become a quasi-commercial activity, as any perusal of top coaching salaries will suggest.

It may not be possible to hold back the coming flood, now that a hole has developed:


In any event, you can expect more legal maneuvering:
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2014/08/12/ncaa-seeks-clarification-antitrust-ruling

State Cash

Although one month's results hardly count as a prediction of budget trends, the state controller is reporting that July tax revenues were above projections in the recently-enacted state budget.  Governor Brown has tended to favor "conservative" revenue projections in budget making in an effort to hold back expenditures.  So maybe the extra revenue is a reflection of that tendency.

In any event, the fact that there is more than projected could enhance the attempt by some in the legislature to provide additional funding for UC.  Prior postings have noted that some additional funding was made conditional on local property tax receipts and those receipts were not sufficient to trigger the added funds.  That result led to pressures in the legislature to give UC and CSU the funds anyway.  Whether the governor will go along, even if such a bill were to be passed, remains uncertain.

You can find the cash statement for July at http://www.sco.ca.gov/Files-ARD/CASH/fy1415_august.pdf.

Despite the uncertainty, you can try to be optimistic:

Middle East spills over into Westwood

Google Maps must have taken this photo of the Federal Building in Westwood on Wilshire Blvd. at 5 am in the morning, since there is no traffic visible.

In any event, the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict has produced demonstrations on both sides at that building with occasional incidents as recently as yesterday.  See http://dailybruin.com/2014/08/11/protest-at-federal-building-leads-to-confrontation-between-crowds/

There doesn't seem to be any traffic alert system before the fact in place although this is a major route for commuting to and from UCLA.  Only when something happens is there an alert.  Be advised.

Marching towards Michigan

The Sacramento Bee carries an article about UC's move toward recruiting out-of-state and out-of-country students because they pay higher tuition than in-state students, a plan sometimes referred to as the "Michigan Model" after the U of Michigan's earlier shift in that direction.

Photo caption: Pushed to look for alternative sources of revenue amid the deep budget cuts of the economic recession, schools in the UC system increasingly are recruiting nonresident applicants, who likely will make up a fifth of all freshman for fall 2014. Even as state funding has begun to recover, campuses rely on substantial additional fees paid by out-of-state and international students who have brought in hundreds of millions of dollars for the university system in recent years. 

Full story at http://www.sacbee.com/2014/08/11/6618782/university-of-california-steps.html

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2014/08/11/6618782/university-of-california-steps.html#storylink=cpy

Moneyball

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a series of articles as to whether the recent antitrust court O'Bannon* ruling against the NCAA is a Big Deal (or not).  You can find it at

http://chronicle.com/article/How-the-OBannon-Ruling-Could/148339/

chronicle.com/article/An-Opportunity-to-Redefine/148347/

http://chronicle.com/article/Breaking-Down-the-Ruling-3/148343/

http://chronicle.com/article/Amateurism-May-Be-Dead-but-a/148345/

http://chronicle.com/article/What-People-Are-Saying-About/148341/

*Ed O'Bannon, former UCLA basketball player.

Yours truly offers the non-expert opinion/picture below: