They wouldn't be some patsy that is around just to take blame, but the actual responsible party for the issue.

If they want to make some principled stand against toxic social media, then have at it. This is pure pandering to a very specific group.

This is completely performative, and I personally don't think it's the best move.

I had to look it up because of the now multiple Detroit apologists who are acting like Brentwood is on the moon and Pasadena is on Mars to make sure I wasn't completely losing my mind. UM is 43 miles from downtown Detroit, and there isn't some sort of express route guaranteed to be traffic-free that you can take to get there. Like I said before, that's about the same distance from Philly to Princeton, and no one is talking about how essential Princeton is to the city of Philadelphia. I get that it's somewhat different, but it's also not that different.

Detroit lags behind most major US cities (including many that are smaller) when it comes to higher education. I'm not bashing the city when I say that, it's just a fact.

DC, Baltimore, Boston, and Atlanta are all around the same size and blow Detroit out of the water. Not to mention the metro areas that are around the same size, which you have to include to count UM.

You can continue to lie to yourself all you want, but Detroit is not attracting many people to the city with its higher education opportunities.

You're the one trying to poke random holes in my claim in what appears to be an attempt to defend Detroit (there are none, because it's based in the objective fact that Detroit has less to offer than many, if not most, other large cities in that area by any metric), and now are saying I'm moving the goalposts when I address your generally inaccurate statements.

To be clear, both the city of Detroit and its metro area offer less access to quality higher education than many other major cities in the US. It is limited in that regard, especially since this program isn't trying to entice people to move to the general metro area. It wants people to move to the city.

LA has USC, CalTech, and UCLA within a closer distance than UM, and SF has Cal nearby and Stanford further out. If you want to count UM for Detroit, you have to count all of those schools for their respective cities.

Detroit is not as strong as any of these cities or metro areas with regard to higher education. You can get as defensive and incredulous as you want, but no reasonable person is going to argue otherwise. The fact that UM is 45 miles away isn't going to make a lot of people choose to live in Detroit proper.

And that's one world class university in the entire region. Compare that to Boston, SF, LA, DC, Chicago, Pittsburgh and others.

They'd need to add at least 2 zeroes to the end of that number to have any impact.

We don't agree here. I see no evidence that the average humanities major is better at writing unambiguous natural language, nor that it will be a partcularly valuable skill. Most people are incapable of understanding and describing a complex series of steps, including their side effects and tradeoffs regardless of the language used to describe them.

> I'm trying very hard not to make this into a "who's smarter?" question. That's a well-trodden and pointless argument, particularly if money is going to be the measuring stick. Besides, if that's where we're going, the finance bros and C-suite win, and do either of us think they're the geniuses in the room?

That's my point, there's no avoiding this. Standardized test scores used as part of college admissions are intelligence tests and income is highly correlated with intelligence. We have all these proxies that are providing the answer to this question.

And the hedge fund managers and CEOs of large companies are very intelligent on average (I'm sure some aren't but they are the outliers, not the other way around). Just like there are some very intelligent social workers, artists, and unemployed people, but the averages are what they are for various fields for a reason.

I guess you're surprised that empathy is not more important than intelligence? My thought there is that perceptiveness is a large part of intelligence, and if you lack that, you won't recognize the signs of intelligence no matter how empathetic you are.