Exactly what Global Warming needs.

The $5K a year just gives you a $300 per person per visit discount. So pays itself back in 15 visits or so.

Did somebody place a melon on this robot and call it 'human'?

Plenty of us nerds can afford this and want to see news about this.

No, the title of the post *I replied to* was "half the country voted for this".

"Oh god, we're not making enough money. Quick, fire the people making us the most profit!"

..in the fired.

"Most of the non-voters I've actually interacted with couldn't stand the idea of voting for either candidate."

Well, as long as you've carefully surveyed the situation...

" The assumption that a non-vote was a vote for Trump is just that, an assumption. And a bad one at that."

I'm not making that assumption. I'm just not making the assumption that a non-vote was a vote *against* Trump, which, without evidence (and no, "I talked with some of my non-voting friends" is not evidence) is an equally bad assumption.

...people rolling on the ground from amusement.

Yes, it would be nice if the article drilled into whether the declines were in certain degree programs or broadly spread across all fields.

TFA does mention this was a survey of "research institutions" and has a picture of MIT's Great Dome so we're intended to think this is STEM programs. OTOH, Harvard is a quite respectable research institute which also has Graduate School of Education.

Not entirely. Some people go to college to goof off for a few years. I have a number of nieces and nephews who aren't using their college degrees for anything. Granted they were not in PhD programs but still, learning is not necessarily the primary reason some people attend college.

In addition, not all learning is equally valuable. I just saw some stats about what degree programs produce what lifetime earnings, the most objective way we have to measure educational value. Engineering degrees were on the top, education was on the bottom.

But let's assume the article is talking about PhDs in STEM degree programs. Perhaps this is a good time to consider whether we want to depend so much on federal funding. Perhaps STEM schools need to make a case to private donors that, since their degrees are so valuable, the donors ought to fund them directly. Not only would this get politics out of education, it would reduce the number of strings a nefarious administration can pull.

Your analysis assumes that people who didn't vote would not have voted for Trump if they had voted. Trump doesn't have the support of half the nation now, with his approval rating in the dumpster, but I'm not convinced that was the case during the election.

No way.

Stupid locals stay.