I think that if you had read the order, you'd have seen that the operations can't target anything domestic or owned/controlled by American citizens or organizations. That it is entirely targeted at foreign groups. That if any participating company finds that it has unintentionally hit anything domestic or American controlled, they have to stop immediately and notify the DoJ.

Trump doesn't need to spend anything to stay resident, he already owns multiple homes and hotels.

To answer what you meant, no, I don't. He can't be, there's no way around that.

Did you forget that expansion and growth are synonyms? Rapid military expansion is a growth-phase event, not decline-phase. Remember Rome, which went into decline as it ceased expanding, and slipped into decadence before being overwhelmed by a flood of migrants who killed it.

"A big player does this stupid thing, so it must be good"?

Isn't this really just another approach to grade inflation? And these are the core classes (the ones everyone has to take), not the major classes. And how you perform in each class does count.

You think that the stress every incoming college student has faced for centuries was forgotten by the time they graduated? It wasn't swept under the rug, it was experienced and overcome by every student that graduated.

So why do we call it a crisis now when it was only a hurdle for every other generation of students?

That already exists. You don't have to declare a major on your first day. You can change majors at any time. And the first semester or two are mostly general courses everyone is supposed to pass.

And why the hell shouldn't poor performance be a drag? The stakes are high, don't lie to them.

Why shouldn't they be penalized for not having learned what they needed to? That it was the high school's fault doesn't mean the college should help cover it up. IF every student from a high school fails to get into college or past the first semester, that should prompt changes to the high school. Covering up the failure just lets things get worse.

Well, if you measure college administrators by the number of students who make it past the first semester, this starts to make sense. If you measure them by the number of graduates, this makes sense. If you measure them by how well students are educated, it makes no sense at all.

Guess what metrics we use to judge college administrators.

It's a State school, so it probably isn't about tuitions. More likely it's about student count. Non-profit metrics are different, and in this case, we let them play around with the metrics by which we measure their success. Like student count, the number of retained freshmen, and the number of graduates.

This is one of the ways we are destroying the universities.

The rankings are not arbitrary; they are based on merit.

No, that was all supposed to have happened already. They were supposed to be working summer jobs to learn responsibility and to socialize outside their peer group. College is too expensive to waste on people who aren't ready for it, so fix the primary and secondary education systems that are failing to produce college and career ready students. Don't weaken the rest of the system to match.

There has been no disinvestment in education (that spending only ever increases), there have been a series of failed experiments that ruined the system. Why do we graduate students who can't read at grade level? Why are we sending kids who are in no way ready or qualified for college to college, where they take on debt while taking remedial classes?

Well, I agree about the failure of the primary and secondary systems, but all you're doing is using the university to cover up that failure. Worse, by taking the same approach that caused the rest of the system to fail and applying it to the university.

No, I say a hard landing to weed out the people who shouldn't be there makes more sense. Otherwise, this will just keep getting pushed into the next semester, until we start graduating MDs who can't save patients.

No, that can and does happen without universities. Books are cheap. What isn't cheap is a university education, and if you're going to mortgage your future or spend tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars of your parent's money, it should be to build something more valuable.