What a mess. Try as it may, after six months of deliberation Williamsburg’s Focus Group on the three-person rule has so far failed to find any real middle ground between student-renters and homeowners. While two proposals rest on the table as the group’s final meeting draws near, legitimate questions of legality in one instance, and political viability in the other, keep expectations for implementation of either low. While we still hope for the best, more and more it looks as if the myopia of entrenchment has produced nothing more than embarrassment and frustration.

All commendably agree that the three-person rule should be changed — but how? On one side, homeowners tend to argue that the College of William and Mary should create a new office responsible for monitoring off-campus occupancy and conduct violations. The idea is that, through the use of the judicial or honor systems, this office might have success in incentivizing actual compliance with the law.

The second plan places the duty of enforcement with the city through a new system of revokable high-occupancy permits that would supplement the default three-person rule and other ordinances already on the books. In this arrangement, both renters who are interested in not being evicted and landlords who have an eye on their bottom line will be motivated to proactively prevent complaints and ordinance violations, which could lead to the revocation of the permit.

Both plans have strengths and critical failings. Where to begin? While there may be a way to make the College-focused plan work, it has so far eluded this focus group. If the College is expected to keep an eye on students off campus, it would need to create an up-to-date registry of students’ addresses. But a federal law prevents requiring students to provide this information. Addresses could be volunteered, but an opt-in program is obviously lacking.

The proponents of this plan petulantly blame the College and students for this crippling legal flaw. But, these arguments are nothing if not a waste of time, preventing productive discussion about ways to work around this problem and frustrating all involved. We implore the focus group to work together to find another way to make this otherwise-acceptable plan work.

The permit system, although better than the status quo, has its own problems. Because proving off-the-lease residency is so difficult, many homeowners believe that this system lacks an essential mechanism of enforcement, leaving them with nothing to show in return for their concession. If there is hope for this plan, we think it lies in ameliorating these concerns by pressuring landlords to keep an eye on who is living on their properties. Problematic as this may be, if somehow renter’s privacy rights could be negotiated, landlords would be uniquely positioned to actually monitor occupancy levels.

Also, students should not support a plan that allows permit revocations based on neighbors’ complaints. Laws already on the books, if enforced, should be sufficient to keep renters’ behavior in check. Using zoning putatively is not only misbegotten, it’s likely ineffective and may only punish future residents. On this point, the College-focused plan gets it right. Occupancy limits should be based on how many people a house can safely and comfortably hold.

This is a difficult situation. Over the long term, rezoning residential areas as exclusively single-family and building more dorms may help to relieve pressure and consolidate renters to areas where they do not threaten homeowners’ single-family neighborhoods and property values. But now, we need to play the cards in hand. The Focus Group must overcome the many problems found in these proposals to submit something that is viable to the council as soon as possible.

Editor’s note: Managing Editor Sam Sutton did not participate in this issue’s editorial.

What a mess. Try as it may, after six months of deliberation Williamsburg’s Focus Group on the three-person rule has so far failed to find any real middle ground between student-renters and homeowners. While two proposals rest on the table as the group’s final meeting draws near, legitimate questions of legality in one instance, and political viability in the other, keep expectations for implementation of either low. While we still hope for the best, more and more it looks as if the myopia of entrenchment has produced nothing more than embarrassment and frustration.

All commendably agree that the three-person rule should be changed — but how? On one side, homeowners tend to argue that the College of William and Mary should create a new office responsible for monitoring off-campus occupancy and conduct violations. The idea is that, through the use of the judicial or honor systems, this office might have success in incentivizing actual compliance with the law.

The second plan places the duty of enforcement with the city through a new system of revokable high-occupancy permits that would supplement the default three-person rule and other ordinances already on the books. In this arrangement, both renters who are interested in not being evicted and landlords who have an eye on their bottom line will be motivated to proactively prevent complaints and ordinance violations, which could lead to the revocation of the permit.

Both plans have strengths and critical failings. Where to begin? While there may be a way to make the College-focused plan work, it has so far eluded this focus group. If the College is expected to keep an eye on students off campus, it would need to create an up-to-date registry of students’ addresses. But a federal law prevents requiring students to provide this information. Addresses could be volunteered, but an opt-in program is obviously lacking.

The proponents of this plan petulantly blame the College and students for this crippling legal flaw. But, these arguments are nothing if not a waste of time, preventing productive discussion about ways to work around this problem and frustrating all involved. We implore the focus group to work together to find another way to make this otherwise-acceptable plan work.

The permit system, although better than the status quo, has its own problems. Because proving off-the-lease residency is so difficult, many homeowners believe that this system lacks an essential mechanism of enforcement, leaving them with nothing to show in return for their concession. If there is hope for this plan, we think it lies in ameliorating these concerns by pressuring landlords to keep an eye on who is living on their properties. Problematic as this may be, if somehow renter’s privacy rights could be negotiated, landlords would be uniquely positioned to actually monitor occupancy levels.

Also, students should not support a plan that allows permit revocations based on neighbors’ complaints. Laws already on the books, if enforced, should be sufficient to keep renters’ behavior in check. Using zoning putatively is not only misbegotten, it’s likely ineffective and may only punish future residents. On this point, the College-focused plan gets it right. Occupancy limits should be based on how many people a house can safely and comfortably hold.

This is a difficult situation. Over the long term, rezoning residential areas as exclusively single-family and building more dorms may help to relieve pressure and consolidate renters to areas where they do not threaten homeowners’ single-family neighborhoods and property values. But now, we need to play the cards in hand. The Focus Group must overcome the many problems found in these proposals to submit something that is viable to the council as soon as possible.

Editor’s note: Managing Editor Sam Sutton did not participate in this issue’s editorial.

Did you know that of American college students who enter four-year institutions, only a little more than half will emerge with a diploma six years later?

That fact took me, and perhaps more than a few others, by surprise. President Barack Obama has recently drawn attention to this situation and promised to do something about it. He vows that the United States, currently 15th worldwide in college graduation rates, will be first in the world by the year 2020. How this will be accomplished still remains unclear.

Other industrialized nations which have lower dropout rates than the United States may serve as good models for understanding what changes may be beneficial to our own education system. Three good examples are the countries of Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. All of these countries have higher college graduation rates than the United States. Another commonality among these countries is a very large system of vocational education.

Vocational education is an option for students in these countries as they enter their secondary level of education, equivalent to our high school. This program trains students in specific skills that will have a direct relevance to the current workforce. Many schools and programs have direct connections to certain industries; their curriculums are flexible and change based on the skills demanded by the labor force at the time. Vocational education in these countries also includes many chances to obtain real work experience before leaving high school though various apprenticeship programs. Though this track of education allows students to develop the skills to become productive members of society without college educations, it does not preclude students from obtaining higher education. Many programs have links to polytechnic institutes and other such institutions. In these countries, many students choose avocational education instead of an academic one. In Ireland, 33 percent of students attend vocational secondary education.

Conversely, the majority of United States high schools are geared toward more general and academic curricula, with a heavy emphasis on continuing on to higher education. Vocational education used to be more prevalent, but in recent decades it has all but disappeared. Though some vocational courses are still offered at high schools, they do not come close to providing students with the important skills necessary to succeed in an ever-changing job market, at least in my experience. Furthermore, society places the focus of high school on academic subjects, with college as the ultimate goal. The students in American high schools are rarely taught marketable skills and are thus funneled into colleges to obtain the skills needed to support themselves. This is why the income gap between American college graduates and non-graduates is high when compared to other industrial nations, and Americans with no tertiary education are less likely to be employed as their counterparts in countries with more developed vocational education systems, like Finland, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland.

I believe the lack of secondary vocational education programs contributes to the United States’s relatively lower rates of college graduation. Ironically, pushing American students into college is likely the cause of our low graduation rates. Perhaps not all students should be lead to believe that college is the optimal path towards success. Many students, either due to lack of motivation or less academc interests, find it hard to graduate and many drop out — 28 percent of dropouts are due to academic disqualification. Would it not be better for everyone if these students were given the option of using their high school years to develop marketable skills?

In Finland, students are tested to determine whether they should continue to higher education or if they should be sent into the vocational system. This, of course, would be a radical step, but it seems to be working well for Finland: Despite low levels of college attendance, Finland has a per capita output equal to the European powerhouses (France, Germany and the U.K.) and relatively low levels of unemployment.

E-mail Ed Innace at einnace@wm.edu.

As one of the main organizers of the Colonial Area Tea Party for America, I was deeply troubled by the comments made by Associate Opinions Editor Alexa McClanahan ’11 about our rally and the movement as a whole in the April 14 Flat Hat column “Tea Party for America needs to cool off.” I deem many of the characterizations that McClanahan made of our rally unfair and the product of ignorance concerning what the rally was really all about.

First of all, she claims that our message against taxation without representation “twists the Jeffersonian principles that the College Republicans claim to protect.” Thomas Jefferson himself wrote that “loading up the nation with debt and leaving it for the following generations to pay is morally irresponsible.” Our message is against our leaders in Washington for forcing our nation’s children to pay for the debts of today. How can one say that arguing against leaving debt to our children is a misuse of Jeffersonian principles when the man himself wrote on several occasions against it?

It concerns me that McClanahan believes economic stewardship to ensure that our children are not in massive amounts of debt is not a priority.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has predicted this year’s budget deficit to be $2.3 trillion, a figure that could precipitate the national debt rising to over $20 trillion in the next decade. The CBO has called the current level of spending “unsustainable.”

Today lawmakers are borrowing massive amounts of money to achieve a little financial prosperity now, while subjecting their children and grandchildren to utter financial ruin with out of control debt. Ramping up massive national debts is the same as levying a tax on future generations of Americans without their consent.

McClanahan claimed that the bailout aims to provide “boosts to education and healthcare programs.” The bailouts have never been used to boost healthcare and education: They have been used to keep banks, financial institutions and auto manufacturers — private companies — from going bankrupt.
I believe she is referring to the government stimulus plans, but certainly not the bailout. Her lack of knowledge of the proper terminology is another sign of a lack of background research.
She attacks Stephen Murray J.D. ’11 for putting “words into Abraham Lincoln’s mouth.” If she was at the rally, or if she had researched it, she would have known that Murray said this with no intention of putting words in Lincoln’s mouth: He used it as a figure of speech to transition to his discussion on how the government is listening to its bureaucracy instead of its people.

Murray argued that many of our leaders trusted bureaucrats to make good policy by signing off on these massive spending bills without even reading them. McClanahan takes Murray’s criticism of the over-trusting of the bloated bureaucracy to assume that the rally advocated what she described to be an almost anarchist message that government should not exist.

Had she been there, McClanahan would have known that no speaker made any remark about ending government programs such as Amtrak or the U.S. Postal Service. The rally and the movement is not about the removal of government entirely — it is about making our government work in an efficient and fiscally responsible manner.

I was proud to lead this event, and I think standing up against wasteful government spending of our and our children’s money is a worthy cause. It is unfortunate that liberal columnists feel a desire to lash out at everything that is put on by conservatives here on campus without thorough research. The two quotes McClanahan cited in her article were directly lifted from that issues news article on the demonstration.
Most of our events, including the Tea Party, are free of charge, and all of them are open to everyone. I ask that the next time McClanahan uses her pulpit at The Flat Hat to attack something, she attends the event, or at least researches beyond the front page of her own newspaper.

E-mail Thomas Chappell at wtchappell@wm.edu.

Every year at around this time, the admissions numbers for the incoming freshman class are released and we give our thumbs up or thumbs down, as appropriate. Last year, we ran this opinion under the headline, “Admit rate disappoints,” arguing that although the admitted pool of students had the potential to become the most talented and diverse the College of William and Mary had yet seen, it also left much room for improvement in other areas. We are disappointed to have to echo this sentiment now. We have again admitted an excellent group of students with great potential and strengths, but the College continues to give ground in key areas.

First, the good. The Class of 2013 could continue the College’s trend toward promoting diversity by becoming the most diverse entering class in the College’s history. This year, 26 percent of accepted students are minorities, and while that rate is lower than last year’s, in absolute statistical terms more students of color have been accepted this year than ever before. Accepted students attended high school in as many as 30 countries, and we are sure that they will bring interesting viewpoints, experiences and backgrounds to the College.

After two years of stagnating SAT scores, this accepted pool shows a small but significant increase, from 1310-1470 to 1330-1480 in its mid-fiftieth percentile averages. High numbers like these are of course nothing to sneeze at, and they do place us in the top tier of American universities. When the students who make up this stronger range matriculate, we look forward to seeing the bright class they will form.
Additionally, 86 percent of students are from the top 10 percent of graduating classes of schools that rank students.

But then, there’s the bad. Over the last two years alone, the College has seen an 11 percent rise in applications with no corresponding decrease in the acceptance rate. This rate is currently pegged at 33 percent and will likely drift to 35 percent by the time waitlisted students are admitted. This means that although the College has been becoming more selective up until a few years ago, this trend appears to have ended. Again this year the Admissions Department is betting against the College, admitting more students for the same spaces in order to prepare for fewer matriculations.

This is a problem, and to be fair, the cards are stacked against the College. Our already-meager endowment took a significant hit this year, meaning that we lag behind our peers in our ability to provide the merit-based financial aid that will attract more competitive applicants. We renew our obligatory call for the College to patch our wounded endowment. Reversing this trend is essential and is only possible with ample funding.

For a registered Democrat, the College of William and Mary Republicans’ recent “Tea Party for America” is a fascinating anomaly after a year at the College of William and Mary that was marked by President Barack Obama support T-shirts and posters taped to dorm-room windows. The event, held Sunday in the Crim Dell meadow, attracted around 500 people and featured addresses by U.S. Rep. Rob Wittman (VA-1) and Virginia Delegates Brenda Pogge (R-James City) and Bill Janis (R-Glen Allen), among others.

The College Republicans’ efforts are laudable. Staging an event that draws almost 500 people and appeals equally to students and residents is no small task, regardless of the cause. Despite this, the location and message of the event are inescapably incongruous — a protest against government spending, on the grounds of a public college campus desperately in need of a handout.

Those gathered attempted to evoke the Boston Tea Party as an analogy for taxation without representation. Participants in the 1773 protest opposed the actions of a distant colonial power. In contrast, College Republicans Chairman Thomas Chapell ’11 argued that unborn citizens will suffer from taxation without representation, a position that twists the Jeffersonian principles the College Republicans claim to protect. Prioritizing people yet to be born above the millions saving for retirement or in need of health insurance is irresponsible and dangerous. Without the boosts to education and healthcare programs the bailout aims to provide, our children will be worse off anyway.

In addition to abusing the spirit of the Boston Tea Party, the event inappropriately invoked the Gettysburg Address. Active duty Naval Officer Stephen Murray J.D. ’11 claimed that Abraham Lincoln’s famous words in the Gettysburg Address have mutated into a “government of the bureaucrats, by the bureaucrats, for the bureaucrats.” This statement merely puts words into Lincoln’s mouth and mischaracterizes how our government actually works. Not all citizens can come to Washington to express their views on education, Social Security, Medicare or other important issues, nor could any one person possess the knowledge to make decisions on these issues for an entire country. Our bureaucracy serves this purpose.

Criticizing the bureaucracy becomes a crutch for Republicans, or anyone else, that allows them to deny that someone else could be more knowledgable about a specific subject. In reality, policy areas such as healthcare and environmental policy are dependent upon the research and opinion of experts. By consenting to participate in a representative democracy, we concede our right to directly make or undo policy and place our faith in the ability of elected officials and the experts they employ. While I would argue that it is a citizen’s duty to criticize the specific decisions of bureaucracy, getting the government out of the way completely would also mean ignoring the education and research of people who dedicate their lives to public service.

If we are returning to the principles of free enterprise, should we abolish government programs like the postal service or Amtrak while we’re at it? Making hundreds of College students trekk down Route 64 to get home is probably not what the speakers of this event have in mind. Any idea, whether from a Democrat or Republican, must be tempered with a dose of realism. Realistically, the changes the College Republicans advocate to improve government ignore the people, for whom government was formed.

E-mail Alexa McClanahan at ajmcclanahan@wm.edu.

The men and women in the purple shirts are not happy.

The Senior Gift Committee is struggling: The initial goal was for 80 percent of the senior class to donate to the gift, but the current level of participation is sitting at just over 40 percent. Pledges to the committee — which can be donated to a variety of sub-institutions at the College of William and Mary, on behalf of faculty members or administrators as well as students — are due by Blowout at the latest. The possibility of catching the previous two graduating classes, who each boasted 60 percent participation, now seems elusive.

What’s wrong here? I’ve heard some complaints about the color selection that the committee made last fall, but I think that anyone who would withhold funding because of their passionate hatred for the color purple should probably save their money for mental institutions or barbiturates.

The biggest problem, as members of the committee will tell you, is timing. It’s already a tough job to convince seniors uncertain of their futures to open their wallets before they have even graduated. It becomes considerably more difficult when nobody has jobs or future plans.

Another issue is the relatively low level of giving among Greeks, who are typically some of the biggest donors and represent approximately 30 percent of the senior class. Of the class of 2009, only a third of them have pledged. It’s even uglier when you restrict those numbers to the fraternities residing in the Units. Among the chapters who will no longer be on campus next year, the average percentage of giving among each fraternity’s senior class is 25 percent. Of those that are staying, it’s 23. I’m not going to get into why this is the case because it’s about as universally known as the location of the Sadler Center.

One major problem that often goes unmentioned in the discourse is the unfortunate fact that the Senior Gift, by emphasizing different “levels of leadership” — i.e. giving a certain amount of money to become members of this circle or that circle — creates a sort of hierarchy where those who can afford to give more have access to additional benefits, while those who cannot are shut out from certain events.

For instance, seniors who have pledged at “leadership levels” of 109 dollars or more per year for two years are invited to a year-end champagne reception where the president traditionally gives a toast. The Senior Class Gift Program’s website offers the following explanation: “If you have pledged, but at a lower level, consider increasing your pledge to the leadership level so you can attend this important event and make a difference for your class gift.”

I understand the principle behind creating different leadership levels and having events for only certain members during the years following graduation. But for the remainder of this year, it makes little sense to me to restrict these events to those who have pledged a certain amount.

Particularly in light of the economy, those without secure jobs or those who may not be entering especially lucrative industries should not feel that they are somehow not making a difference for the class gift and the College because of their inability to pledge what they see as large sums of money. The committee should abandon this policy and make all events open to seniors who have pledged, regardless of the sum.
It also disappoints and even angers me that people, especially Greeks, would withhold pledging simply because they are upset with certain aspects of College policy. Even the harshest critic of one policy or the other should recognize that there is a lot to give back to this place. If Greeks are frustrated with anti-Greek policies, they should give to the College of Arts and Sciences, the Mason School of Business or to an academic department where the money will be put to better use.

There is still time left, and I’m optimistic that a minimum of 60 percent participation will be reached. Committee members and others should work rigorously over the coming weeks to make sure that friends pledge, even if it just a small donation. Ties to freshmen halls, which are one of the few things that bind students to another group of students for four full years, should be fully integrated into the committee’s strategy. The committee members should visit student organizations, send out extra e-mails, host even more events with free alcohol, and emphasize the variety of places where gifts can contribute to the well-being of the campus in the future.

It might help if angry frat boys could give directly to their organizations like others can, but I don’t have much faith in the flexibility of the College’s bureaucracy in order for that loophole to be closed.

E-mail Alexander Ely at anelyx@wm.edu.