Chai tea

Perhaps that's a better idea moving forward. Because frankly, the way you're choosing to handle the situation seems (to me at least) rather immature, and even churlish. And, it's detracting from the purpose of this forum.

If you don't mind my asking, are you in at MIT, or just questioning the legitimacy of the MIT posts? If it's the former, congratulations!

Most of what you say above is incorrect; here is some information that might be helpful. New legislation from the Obama Administration on student loan debt has been widely reported in the news in the last few years. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/06/10/obama-expands-income-based-repayment-older-borrowers-pushes-democrats’-student-loan

Okay, granted, it's incomplete, but I don't think you're accurately capturing what Ian was trying to convey. Forgive me if I misread your original post, but this problem with incompleteness didn't seem to be your concern when you asked to have the CSU's included in the discussion on placement and ranking. If your argument has always been that we ought to "stop arbitrarily numbering the MA programs" why would you be concerned with making sure the placement of the CSU's were also represented in this discussion? Especially a discussion you seem so strongly against now. Why not say then that we ought to stop arbitrarily ranking programs rather than lobbying for a particular program's placement record to be included in such a discussion?

But weren't you arguing against your point below very recently? Even for the inclusion of certain schools that were left out when ranking and placement were topics of discussion? Updated MA program placement records. Each placement indicates one student. So, e.g., "Yale, Northwestern, Duke Law, shut-out" would indicate four students' placements. Brandeis's final confirmed placement record: Michigan, UNC, Cornell, WUSTL, Riverside, UCLA Politics, and an Ivy League law school. 43% success among applicants to T20 programs! Tufts's placement record last I heard: Duke, Duke, Brown, UT Austin, Indiana Bloomington, Johns Hopkins, Western Ontario. Georgia State's record not final: Indiana University, UC Irvine, University of Pennsylvania, Boston University, Florida State University, University of Missouri, and Western Ontario. UW Milwaukee's last I heard: Pitt HPS, Wisconsin, T20 w/ wait-list at T10, Northwestern, UC Riverside, Notre Dame w/ wait-list at USC, Florida State w/ wait-list at UC Riverside, UNC, T21-30 w/ similar wait-lists, Northwestern w/ T10 waitlist, and several shut-outs. Depending on what happened with UW Milwaukee, I think Brandeis will have the top placement record this year. Three of seven were admitted to T20s. Placement records shouldn't be evaluated strictly by how many were admitted to top programs; they should be evaluated by the share of applicants who were admitted to top programs. To have nearly half admitted to T20s is excellent, on par with Tufts's records in recent years. Tufts, on the other hand, will have the third-best record, behind UW Milwaukee and Brandeis. What does this mean? I think Brandeis and UW Milwaukee have become solid top-three schools. Neither can share the status of Tufts quite yet. And probably Brandeis is solidly better than UW Milwaukee, only because Brandeis's record has been better for several years in a row. Georgia State's placement record isn't as strong as those of these top three MA programs. Having said that, I'm convinced that Georgia State is the right choice for a lot of people pursing the MA. What I'd like to do next is to break down the placement records according to areas of interest. E.g Brandeis's record is consistently better for those in metaphysics and epistemology than it is for those in, e.g., ethics or political philosophy. Who knows what to make of that!

Nice...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapegoating