This post has a lot of words and a lot of numbers. Long-form story short: a college education is still worth a lot, but how you buy it now matters as much as the education itself. A minority of enlightened individuals can still escape the gravity of salary securitization. What's that, you ask? Well, I just can't say in short-form.

* * *

Meet Emily. Just born. Imagine her 30-year-old parents holding her in their arms for the first time in the delivery room. They look at a clock on the wall and make note of the time of birth.

Amid the emotions in that moment, another clock starts running. Emily's first tuition payment is due.

If Emily's parents want to fully fund the cost of a basic four-year in-state college education out of pocket, they will need to save over $531 per month—every month—from the instant Emily is born until the final year of her college experience. That's 21 total years of making a $531 monthly payment, every month, for 252 months straight.

If college tuition and related costs maintain their current trajectory, the full cost of Emily’s four-year college experience 18 years from now will be over $217,000.1 Emily’s parents aren’t an investment bank or an institutional investor. They can’t raise capital on a whim or engage in sophisticated asset-liability matching strategies to hedge the future cost of college.

If Emily's parents want to pay for her college education, they have but one option: slash their monthly take-home pay early and often.

But Emily's parents face other recurring expenses—some new, some old. They probably have a mortgage. They may be paying on decade-old student loans or credit cards. If Emily attends a child care facility, the monthly cost of that could easily exceed $531. Emily's parents are also about to experience the receipt-shock of buying impossibly numerous and expensive things for the baby that they never knew existed. And if coming into parenthood, Emily's parents are above-average savers, they are putting away at least $531 for their own retirement.

The chances that Emily's parents are even aware of the cost of college at her birth are slim. The chances that they are thinking about how much to save or actually doing it from Emily's birth are even smaller.

But the implicit decision not to begin pre-funding Emily's college education immediately will have a profound impact on Emily's life. Guaranteeing that Emily will go to college won't be enough to give her freedom. How college is paid for may matter more.

College is still worth it

A few timestamps back I made a post that asked a rather rhetorical question:

What net value are universities adding to society if middle class graduates face an adult life enslaved to lenders?

That was the wrong question. A little too loaded. There are two opposing, gargantuan dynamics at play inside that question: the benefits of college versus the cost of college.

A better question to start with is: "what value does a college education add?" The answer to that question is undoubtedly "a lot."

A 2013 report released by the College Board indicates that overwhelmingly college graduates earn more than those with only a high school degree. I think it's fair to at least question whether an organization like the College Board would be biased in their reporting of such statistics, but the numbers are so lopsided in favor of getting a college education that I don't think it's worth coming up with conspiracy theories to counter the notion that a newborn like Emily—someone whose future ambitions can't possibly be known for many years—is statistically more likely to have a better future life with a college education. And that's whether you measure her betterment in terms of earnings, enlightenment, or social mobility.

I absolutely believe that with each passing year, it's possible to do anything with just an internet connection and a ton of ambition, but simply hoping a child will fall into that mold isn't a savings substitute. It's an avoidance strategy that will only increase the chances that someone else will have to front the cost of her education—someone the child will be shackled to for most, if not all, of her adult life.

For now, access to conventional college education still means going through conventional universities, whose costs, in my opinion, are getting crazier and crazier thanks in large part to runaway public funding and student loan credit. More on this in a moment.

As a parent, I have no ability to immediately reform university administration. I can't control Congress's appetite for extending student loan credit. You can't either. So I think we should take a practical approach.

Because of soaring college costs, it's absolutely critical to do long-term planning and establish habits very early to take control of how you pay for college.

As I'm about to demonstrate, saving for college, though a seemingly impossible moon shot, is by far the most financially rational way to pay for a child's future college education. And perhaps ironically, I also believe that saving for college is the best way to help a child realize her full entrepreneurial potential even if she ends up not needing her degree. That's because because every dollar of pre-funded college education is several dollars of student loan debt avoided. Saving for college is now a substantial form of early inheritance.

But before I show you some numbers, it's worth understanding how we got here.

A brief history of student loans

Federal student loans have gone through several incarnations since falling out of the National Defense Education Act of 1958, one of the most immediate American responses to the launch of Sputnik the year before. In 1957, the Soviet Union had beaten the U.S. to space, and America needed more scientists if it was going to catch up, much less win, the space race that would consume the country for the next two decades.

Because of the NDEA and other things, college attendance did indeed rise, and eleven years later the air around American living room TV sets vibrated with the words "that's one small step for man..."

While typical Americans eventually lost interest in the space program, they did not lose their appetite for student loans. Through several iterations and partnerships with banks in the decades the followed, the federal government directly and indirectly boosted student lending even more.

Today, the balance of student loans in the U.S. is an astronomical $1.2 trillion, nearly all of it federally backed. Student loans are now the second largest form of consumer debt behind mortgages.

From American dreams to monthly payments

It's impossible to escape the temptation to compare student loan payments to mortgage payments. Both are methods of post-funding "American dreams" using either direct federal funds or rely heavily on federal guarantees. Both are highly profitable and "too big to (let) fail". Both represent a de facto securitization of middle class salaries by a blend of federal agencies and Wall Street.

At least a mortgagor can sell their home in a healthy housing market to extinguish mortgage debt. The security backing student loans isn't so liquid: the salary of the college graduate. This asset, too, can be sold, but only in installments of time for decades.

Multi-trillion dollar Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae (federally backed mortgage agencies) are more profitable today than before the financial crisis when they were clinically dead and needed life support from the federal government.

When it comes to student loans, college graduates have proven to be a fantastic investment for the federal government—and I don't necessarily mean in a social sense. Student loans have relatively tiny default rates, and loan rates more than cover the federal government's cost of funds, allowing the government to debatably run the programs at a profit that rivals the Exxon Mobils and Apples of today.

College grads do indeed earn more statistically, but that's not enough. It's not even enough to make more than it costs to pay back student loans. People who post-fund college education will be pressured to maintain fixed salaries to align their income with the debt payment outflows they pledged to pay.

I'll say more about the social implications of this at the end. Let's look at some numbers now.

Post-funding vs. pre-funding

Back to Emily. Let's look at two extremes for funding her college education:

1. A pre-funding strategy: Her parents save and pay for 100% of her college
2. A post-funding strategy: Her parents save nothing and Emily borrows 100% of the cost

The pre-funding strategy

Saving for college has an opportunity cost. Every dollar saved for Emily's college education is a dollar not used for some other purpose. There are infinitely many actual "paths" those not-saved dollars could travel, but for the sake of quantifying the impact on long-term net worth, I think it makes sense to think about the cost of pre-funding college in terms of Emily's parents' lost retirement wealth.

If Emily's parents deposit $531 per month into a 529 plan that earns an average annual rate of 5% per year, it will fully fund the $217,000 total cost of Emily's four-year college education.

Emily’s parents’ retirement accounts (401(k)s, IRAs, etc.), by contrast, could earn something higher—something more like a long-term net stock return of 7%.2 This is because at age 30, Emily’s parents’ retirement is much farther off than Emily’s college education, so retirement savings can be exposed to more market risk.

  <img src="/img/img.png" alt=""/>

As the 529 plan balance grows, so too does Emily's parents' forgone retirement savings. If Emily's parents committed the same $531 per month to their retirement savings, the balance would be worth more than $317,000 at the time Emily graduates from college. From there (totally untouched), it would accrue to over $764,000 by the time Emily's parents turn 65.

This is the ultimate cost to Emily's parents for paying for Emily's college education in advance. Sacrificing $764,000 of future wealth is a lot, but as we will see, it could be much worse for their daughter.

(Keep in mind this is just for one child attending a 4-year in-state university. Multiply by two for two kids. As for grad school, that's beyond the moon.)

The post-funding strategy

Assuming Emily is able to borrow the full $217,000 through some combination of federal and private loans, she will also get a college degree, but bundled with it will be a coupon book obligating her to pay $1,167 per month for the next 30 years of her life.3 That’s $755 in today’s dollars.

What would it mean to have $755 of after-tax pay spoken for in 2015? Well, for one, $755 would be the mortgage payment on a fully-financed $158,000 home at a 4% mortgage rate in 2015.

But of course, Emily isn't buying a house with that payment. She's repaying her educational debt. And to do that, she has only one choice: She must put her education to work in the "real world" and begin generating cash flow to match her student loan liability. Culturally, college licenses Emily to be a "knowledge worker." Economically, it's made her a leveraged bond owned by the federal government.

Regardless of how much Emily makes per month, one certainty will persist for 30 years: she'll be required to pay $1,167 every month. As with the pre-funding scenario where her parents lost the opportunity to do other things with the amount they saved per month, Emily's debt payment represents money that won't be used for other purposes.

Forfeiting $1,167 per month of disposable income could lead to infinitely many outcomes. It may cause Emily to go deeper in debt than she would have otherwise. For example, it could increase the likelihood that she carries credit card debt. It may also delay the purchase of her first home, missing the opportunity to build home equity. It’s impossible to quantify every scenario, so let’s focus on what I believe is one of the least Draconian outcomes. I’ll just assume that she’ll be able to put $1,167 less into her own retirement savings per month.4

  <img src="/img/img.png" alt=""/>

This let's us compare the long-term effect of pre-funding versus post-funding on intergenerational wealth. When Emily finally pays off that student loan balance at age 52, she'll have nearly $1.4 million less saved for her retirement. Left untouched from age 52 on, the balance would have grown to more than $3.3 million by the time she turned 65.

Summary of results

Another way to think about the loss of future retirement savings is in terms of the annual income those savings could generate in retirement. This is the basic purpose of retirement savings, after all.

The $3.3 million Emily loses by borrowing is worth over $900,000 in today's dollars assuming a 2% annual inflation rate. In today's dollars, this amount of money could purchase a 30-year annuity at 3%, which would pay Emily over $45,000 per year for 30 years (age 65 to 95). Her parents' lost retirement income in today's dollars, by contrast, would only be about $19,000 per year.

Why are these outcomes so different?

The value of money doesn't stay "still" over time. The pre-funding and post-funding strategies are like two different universes for paying for college, and their respective values drift apart over time. There's a wide gulf between paying for something in advance (i.e. savings) versus paying for something in arrears (i.e. borrowing).

In the pre-funding scenario, Emily's parents own every penny of the investment gain, which is the shift in the time value of their savings. 100% of this gain goes to paying for college when those expenses come due. The reason that Emily is hurt so much more by borrowing is that a lot of the student loan payment is made up of interest. In other words, the lender owns the change in the time value of college education—long after the education actually occurs.

Think of it this way: By waiting to borrow, the actual cost will not only inflate for the next 18–21 years, it will continue to inflate for decades beyond that—like a growing snowball tumbling through the generations, smashing opportunities and freedoms in its path. If Emily borrows to pay for college, what hope do her kids have? Their kids?

Saving in advance stops the snowball. 5

The social impact

The 20th century is long gone. Today, it makes a lot less sense to say "college isn't for everyone." We're in a knowledge worker's world now. If college education becomes so costly that it suffocates all but the very wealthy with debt, I think it will have lasting harmful effects on American society. The two that concern me the most are:

1. People will increasingly make what they think are financially rational choices by selecting college programs that maximize earnings potential. College students pressured to do this will be more likely to neglect liberal arts education, and I think this is a massive cultural misstep that's not only bad for society as a whole but also individuals. Even though it seems like technological progress requires more and more technical skills, I think people who understand the nature of people by understanding history, art, and literature will have a tremendous advantage over their otherwise peers. No amount of math, scientific, or programming ability is a substitute for understanding human nature.
2. I think that if federal and state governments continue to tacitly encourage the bureaucratic expansion of university administrations through direct public funding and a limitless supply of student loan credit, it will produce a class of salaried workers with little opportunity to ever gain real financial independence.

Of these two, the second is the most disturbing.

Meet the pass-throughs

I cannot overstate how profoundly different the mindsets and perceived freedoms are between someone who owes a fixed payment indefinitely and someone who does not. More than ever, the former is what defines middle class America. The intestine of the financial system, if you will, the middle class's role is not accumulate the fat of money, but rather to consume an increasing salary base and pass it back out in the form of consumption and debt payments.

The American way of life is one of paying indefinitely for things that happened in the past.

Federally-backed mortgage giants like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are designed create "structured securities" using the cash flows that boil up from the eternal spring of mortgage payment cash flows that American "homeowners" make monthly. Some of the simplest of these securities are called mortgage pass-throughs, which basically pass the cash flow arising from a pool of mortgages to investors who buy up various tranches (like slices of pie).

Mortgage securitization is like a multi-trillion dollar water mill that sends yields to institutional investors at the top and then dumps credit back into the financial system for more lending. It was the financial invention that largely made the Reagan-era housing American Dream possible. Mega quasi-federal institutions like Freddie and Fannie make mass mortgage culture possible, but they also can't exist without the massive supply of mortgages they create. It's very circular. Without the underlying mortgage cash flows, the water mill goes dry.

And without a stable spring of American middle class paychecks, there are no mortgage cash flows. In other words, the true collateral underlying the trillion-dollar mortgage-backed security market isn't really mortgages—it's the paychecks of the middle class.

Though many people confuse one for the other, income and wealth are very different things. A dog with a tapeworm eats more and more, but he does not get fatter.

The necessity to borrow for college will ensure that the middle class will continue to evolve into a "pass-through" socioeconomic class.

Pass-throughs will be the tenant farmers of publicly leveraged capitalism. They will spend most of their adult lives working to pay for the right to live on land that is, in economic reality, owned by the federally-backed landlords of Wall Street. Pass-throughs will earn what appears to be an attractive salary only to cede much of it to profitable federal student loan programs. Pass-throughs will thrive as long as they never stop—the next jerk of the leash will never be more than 30 days away.

Most pass-throughs will spend their unpledged disposable income on basic necessities and luxury items that they perceive to be necessary to maintain their "high-earner" social status—a total delusion with little-to-no actual wealth backing it.

If student loan credit continues to approach to mortgage-like levels, who will the middle class really work for? Surely not themselves.

There are of course other ways to avoid borrowing for college—scholarships, etc. But on the time scale required to pre-fund college for a child today, that's like betting it all on black with the risk of a lifetime in the red. The only way to hedge the risk of having to borrow is to save. It's that easy. But it's also that hard—few government-backed mechanisms exist to encourage saving beyond tax-sheltered 529 plans. It's on the American individual to commit to saving and take the market risk necessary to reach a finish line that's running away nearly as fast as we can run toward it.

To leverage my own sense of determination, I will borrow heavily from John F. Kennedy's 1962 moon speech, made right about the time the student loan debt pendulum was set in motion:

I choose to save for my kids' college, not because it's easy, but because it's hard. The challenge of helping my kids avoid student loan debt is one that I am willing to accept, one that I am unwilling to postpone, and one I intend to win.

If that sentiment sent a man to the moon, maybe it can send a kid out into the world debt-free. Even better, maybe it can propel them beyond the bounds of our social gravities—out into a socioeconomic universe that isn't dimensioned in monthly paychecks.

Imagine going back in time just a few decades and trying to explain to someone that computers will eventually become so integrated in our lives that we'll be willing to pay for a device that simply reminds us to stand up every so often.

Only time will tell if I keep paying attention to the stand reminder on the Apple Watch, but so far I have. I'm finding that even when I have to tear myself away from something, just standing up for a few minutes has been worth it—not just for the self-gratification of completing the stand ring in the Activity app—but for the extra bit of focus I have when I sit back down.

Working in front of a screen all day is an extraordinarily different environment than that of our ancestors. The human body, with all of its complex physical and mental connections, did not evolve to sit for hours straight day after day after day. There is no sense of a sedentary "destiny" in our DNA.

We can believe that we're more advanced than our ancestors, but we still ship from birth with the same biological hardware and software. Hopefully the Apple Watch will end up being the first truly mobile device—a device designed not just to be mobile, but to make us more mobile.

Image credit

From the University of Missouri:

Researchers found companies that performed poorly yet blamed other parties -- such as the government, competitors, labor unions or the economy -- experienced a significant blow to their stock and had difficulty recovering. Companies that accepted blame and had a plan to address their problems stopped the decline in their share prices after their announcement, but those companies that blamed others continued to experience falling share prices for the entire year following their public explanation.

via ScienceDaily

David and Katie are generously matching donations to one of my favorite causes today: Jean MacDonald's App Camp for Girls. I happily made my donation today.

It is estimated that only 20% of software engineers are female; that percentage is even lower among mobile app developers.

The same is true of technology classes in schools. There are few opportunities for girls to explore high-tech fields that aren't already dominated by boys.

Apps are rapidly becoming an important part the world's economy and culture. If women are left on the sidelines of this phenomenon, everyone suffers.

Learn more about how the money is used, and donate directly here.

Kelly and Ben Decker writing for the HBR blog:

No one wants another checklist task that they have to complete. We want to be called to something greater. So instead of informing and directing your direct reports, aspire to inspire. When you focus on persuading them, you’ll be able to turn even a corporate initiative or new product launch into a cause that becomes their own. They’ll want to step up and own their results.

Just like the dog in the aptly selected stock photo atop this post, your employees will not only fetch those balls better and faster, they'll be happier doing it. And though the tennis balls all look alike, if you truly understand your employees' personalities, you'll be able to manipulate them into thinking that those balls do have meaning. Your employees will want to own the balls.

I took a look at Weather Nerd back when Gabe Weatherhead mentioned it, but I decided to pass since I already had a relative abundance of weather apps on my iPhone.

Weather Nerd does many notable things, but superficially it presents a line-based temperature forecast much like Weather Line and Dark Sky, two other apps I use a lot on my iPhone.

In the week or so that I've owned an Apple Watch, I've realized just how much I value this line-based presentation. Seeing forecast highs and lows along a forecast line is much more reliable for day planning. So far, Weather Nerd is the only weather app available for Apple Watch that gets it right, and I'm happy to pay its developer for the information-rich display it puts on my wrist.

For years, weather services typically only reported a high and low temperature for a single day. But this is very misleading on days when, say, a high of 50 occurs at daybreak and a low of, say, 30 will occur late afternoon. Such situations are not uncommon.

I hope that Dark Sky and other weather apps follow the path set by Weather Nerd and bring their lines to the Apple Watch, which to me is the most ideal platform yet for checking weather.

So far, my move from Aperture to Photos has been mostly good. The new Photos app is a good fit for me. I don't do much professional editing, and I like having all of my photos available everywhere.

The only bumps I've experienced so far were related to the initial import from Aperture to Photos and the initial upload to iCloud Photo Library. I'm posting these anecdotes here in case it helps someone else. . . because as of the time I'm writing this, I did not find a lot of insight elsewhere online.

The initial upload was confusing (to me at least)

I don't have nearly as big of a photo library as a lot of people. I only have just over 10,000 photos and a little over 100 videos in my current iCloud Photo Library. I have a reasonably fast upload speed though my cable ISP (over 4 Mbps up), and online backups like Backblaze and Dropbox have always performed faster than I expected.

Even though I paused or turned off other online backup services during the initial iCloud Photo Library upload, it took much longer than I expected—approximately one week.

In the final days, I was able to speed up things by leaving my MacBook Pro awake and open as much as possible and also making sure the Photos app was open. Just based on my observations of network traffic, the iCloud upload services seemed to run faster when I did this.

The biggest point of confusion for me, however, was the iCloud Photo Library sync behavior during the initial upload. Shortly after I initiated the upload on my Mac, I activated iCloud Photo Library on my iPhone as well. The iPhone upload time was negligible (presumably because those photos were already in the cloud), but it surprised me when I did not see recently taken iPhone photos on my Mac.

Photos taken on my iPhone did not sync to my Mac at all until the Mac's initial week-long upload finished. In the weeks since it has finished, however, everything has been syncing just fine, and I've had no syncing issues at all. None.

But as the heading above says, the initial part was just plain confusing and unexpected. The fact that the photos were not syncing days after my Mac and iPhone were both connected to iCloud Photo Library did not inspire confidence, but I'm good now.

Local photo library sizes don't make much sense to me anymore

At some point during the initial upload to iCloud Photo Library, my Mac decided that it no longer had enough disk space locally for my photos (even though my local disk was the original source of all these photos. Hmmm. Yeah.).

This optimization setting seems to work extremely well on my 64 GB iPhone. I was initially concerned that by activating iCloud Photo Library on my iPhone, it would gobble up storage, but that hasn't happened at all. I have tons of free space despite having access to all of my iCloud-based photos now.

Because this seemed to work so well on my iPhone, I didn't have a major problem allowing the same optimization black box to run wild and free on my MacBook Pro, where I'm constantly running out of disk space anyway.

And so everything finished, and everything seemed fine until. . .

I recently noticed that my local Pictures folder (home of the photo library files) had ballooned in size to over 85 GB, and I was once again running out of disk space. This made no sense to me because the space occupied by my photos and videos in iCloud was only about 55 GB.

And so—I'm guessing—not unlike ancient agriculturists at the mercy of the heavens, I raised a fist to the cloud, albeit while cursing about very different problems than they ever did.

   [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="361.0"]<img src="/img/img.png" alt="Local space taken up by Pictures folder on Mac"/> Local space taken up by Pictures folder on Mac[/caption] 
  


  
   [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="465.0"]<img src="/img/img.png" alt="Size of photos and videos stored on iCloud servers"/> Size of photos and videos stored on iCloud servers[/caption] 

Why were photos stored locally taking up 30 GB more disk space than the total size of the iCloud-based library, especially if my Mac was supposed to be optimizing for storage locally?

Well, I never got an answer to that question, but fortunately no data famine ensued, and after looking around online a bit, I decided I might as well try deleting my old Aperture and iPhoto library files. (I'm not sure why I had an iPhoto library since I had never used it.)

From my understanding, when you import to Photos from Aperture or iPhoto, it builds the new Photos library by making hard links to the source files in the older library files, but the import process does not actually delete the older library files. However, only one instance of your photos exists on your Mac; it's just that each library is pointing at that instance. Imagine that you have two shortcuts on your desktop, each pointing to the same 1 GB file. There's only one file, but it has more than one finger pointing at it. In theory, this should only take up 1 GB space on your disk, not 2 GB.

But anyway. . .

The key thing I realized is: Deleting the old library files should not actually delete any photos. (By the way, this is a great time for me to make it clear that it's not my fault if you wreck your own photo libraries.)

So I blew away the old migrated Aperture library and the iPhoto library that I never created in the first place even though Apple says I shouldn't have to do that. This immediately freed up an enormous amount of space on my local disk. I also noticed that Photos kicked into high gear downloading a bunch of photos.

Even though the photo count and iCloud library size did not change at all from the 55.65 GB pictured above (indicating that I most likely did not harm any of my actual data), I'm guessing that it needed to do some rebuilding locally using cloud data. Within an hour, the download had finished, and I had gained over 40 GB of disk space locally.

   [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="362.0"]<img src="/img/img.png" alt="Local Pictures folder after library deletions and iCloud download finished"/> Local Pictures folder after library deletions and iCloud download finished[/caption] 

Staying with the overall theme of this post, this disk space issue was confusing initially, but everything seems fine now. I'm alive and well and in search of another First World problem to solve—most likely while consuming some unhealthy product made possible and affordable by mass agriculture. Clouds of all forms, be damned.

Saving for college today feels like trying to land a bottle rocket on the moon. My kids, still fairly new members of this world, won't head off to college for more than a decade and a half, and most estimates I've seen say they'll need nearly $200,000 each to fully fund an in-state public university experience. This of course assumes that tuition inflation will continue at the breakneck speed it's sustained now for years.

The astronomical increase in college tuition over the last several decades doesn't make a lot of sense on the surface. Yes, we've become a more knowledge-based work force, and it seems reasonable to posit that the demand for education has increased. But the number of institutions has also risen greatly, and technology has greatly increased the accessibility of education.

In an Times opinion piece, Paul Campos essentially paints the modern university as a money-gobbling bureaucratic black hole. College tuition has increased sharply even despite increases in public funding:

In fact, public investment in higher education in America is vastly larger today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was during the supposed golden age of public funding in the 1960s. Such spending has increased at a much faster rate than government spending in general. For example, the military’s budget is about 1.8 times higher today than it was in 1960, while legislative appropriations to higher education are more than 10 times higher.

Even more disturbing:

Interestingly, increased spending has not been going into the pockets of the typical professor. Salaries of full-time faculty members are, on average, barely higher than they were in 1970. Moreover, while 45 years ago 78 percent of college and university professors were full time, today half of postsecondary faculty members are lower-paid part-time employees, meaning that the average salaries of the people who do the teaching in American higher education are actually quite a bit lower than they were in 1970.

By contrast, a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.

To me, this has all the markings of a bubble. As we barrel faster and faster through a technological era which tends to flatten bureaucracies, what role will these institutions really play in ten or fifteen years? Should the number of people earning seven-figure salaries in the administration of a university approach that of a corporate board? What product is the university customer receiving in 2015?

What net value are universities adding to society if middle class graduates face an adult life enslaved to lenders?

The older I get, the more I attribute much of my financial freedom to never having paid a cent on student loans, especially when I see people my age still making payments on student loan debt that they've carried for the better part of two decades.

I value financial independence as much as education, and I believe that both will continue to be attainable for decades to come. It's becoming less and less clear to me what practical role universities—as we know them today—will play in that, though.

I recently joined Joe Darnell and Joshua Peiffer on their TechTonic podcast to talk about my work in actuarial web-based education. We also talked about possible futures that might come out of "big data." It was a cocktail of optimism and dystopia, but it finished pretty easy. I enjoyed it.

Wonderful words by Gabe, who is "skeptical of big problems with small answers." I agree completely with him, especially when it comes to the modern era of quick-shot journalism based on cherry-picked chunks of "science" and crumbs of big data.

I'm not ready to condemn TED culture and pop science, though. I think emerging science-flavored forms of entertainment can serve a vital purpose in our society. If a kid in 2015 gets turned on to a story "without end," to borrow Gabe's words, by watching a TED video or the like, I'm good with that.

I think entertainment is a vital ingredient in sparking interest, but I agree it's not the final answer, and it's definitely not a substitute for requisite complexity.

If it's possible to describe the ideal purpose of any human action in a single sentence, I believe Einstein did it with:

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

I believe that when it comes to understanding the world, simplicity must precede complexity, and I think it's the fundamental duty of knowledgeable adults to provide simple foundations to those less knowledgeable. I think any means that accomplishes that goal is justified—provided that it's done to advance knowledge and not end it.

Computer problems make more sense when you realize that computers were made to retain abstractions that were blissfully ignored before computers.

A couple of times a year it seems, I rediscover some stock app that ships with my Mac. A few weeks ago, it was Stickies. No one seems to talk about Stickies much, but here's all you need or want to know.

Despite all the great note-taking and text-based apps I use on my Mac, there's been a void for the kind of text that seems more suited for a real world sticky note. That is, only-important-right-now text that doesn't need to be stored.

A typical use case for me: Capturing a few lines of an email where someone is asking me a question that requires me to dig into PDFs to answer. Before I rediscovered Stickies, I was constantly flipping between my email window and stacks of PDFs. With Stickies, I can capture the text with a quick ⌘⇧Y and make the resulting sticky note float over all other windows. It may seem like a trivial problem to solve, but when trivial problems occur a few hundred times a year (at least), they are not trivial in total.

Until computer screens are as big as physical desktops, there will be a constant need to have a tiny bit of text floating over other app windows. Stickies.app, which still comes with OS X as of Yosemite, does it perfectly.

A Penn State study suggests that when college students text in socially inappropriate situations, it's not necessarily because they think it's OK to do it:

Trained as an evolutionary psychologist, Harrison suggests that the forces of natural selection may play a part in creating [the urge to text]. The buzzes and flashing lights of texting devices may signal opportunities or threats that cause people to pay less attention to their present environment and consider the future.

College students aren't the only demographic of our species with an innate inability to ignore notifications. Look at any boardroom, PTA meeting, or interstate to find adults enslaved to their information inhalers in all the wrong places.

I think "innovations" in the speed of information delivery have peaked. There's just nothing practical to be gained by making more or faster notifications at this point.

It's time to work on forms of communication that satisfy the human need to connect without hacking us through our ancestral wiring. The design of future information systems should prioritize human psychology over technical specifications. It's a seemingly subtle but important distinction: a technologically advanced society is not necessarily a technologically enhanced society.

There are lots of reviews of the new Fantastical 2 for Mac, but Federico Viticci's and David Sparks's cover pretty much anything you need to know. The original Fantastical for Mac was "just" a menu bar app. Even so, it has easily been my most-used calendar interface the last two-plus years because it makes entering events and reminders so effortless. (Quick tip: Use ⌘K to toggle between events and reminders while in the event entry field.)

At first I was meh to the new full-window version of Fantastical 2. I mean, I already have that in Calendar.app, right? But in the short time I've had Fantastical 2 installed, I can say I really like the agenda/month combo in a single view. It's nice being able to visualize a full month or week for time-blocking purposes while still seeing a linear agenda on the left side. Having Fantastical's legendary natural language field right at hand in the same window is great, too.

I can see how any third-party calendar would be a tough sell for most people since the built in Mac Calendar is pretty good and familiar. But I really think calendars are the most important productivity tools there are. In fact, I would say knowing how to really use a calendar is more important than any task management system. I'm totally willing to buy anything that helps me understand and manage my time.

Right now I just can't think of a better way to make a desktop calendar app than Fantastical 2.

The Verge:

Among the locations, trademarks, overpriced cables, and other assets that RadioShack is selling off as part of its bankruptcy filing are tens of millions of email addresses, home addresses, and customer names, all of which could end up in the hands of another company.

All privacy policies have an expiration date. Your data doesn't.

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