Note to readers from Mark Glennon re: Ukraine
May 6, 2026
3 Comments
Everybody needs a side hustle these days, and mine is Ukraine, where I am now.
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If this bill passes, say goodbye to local control over all Illinois parks and expect to see open drug and alcohol use, needles, no sanitation and fire hazards, but no ordinary park users.
Tuition at UCLA is now $12,000 a year. UC has around $13 billion unfunded pensions on its balance sheet.
All Illinois citizens pay massively higher costs for virtually everything and anything that is associated with the State of Illinois government. IL Government exists to employ favored public sector union leeches at the expense of everyone and everything else. Period. Remember mid pandemic when the IL DMV employees were cashing a paycheck for sitting at home while the taxpayers were scratching to pay mortgages and unemployed? That is IL government in a nutshell. These union slime for decades have bribed politicians in exchange for grossly above market wages, gold plated pensions and health plans, no-show jobs and massively overstaffed offices.… Read more »
Every pension reform plan that I have seen you outline involves dramatically reducing the 3% automatic annual increases for tier 1 retirees. In an environment where the inflation rate is now 8.5%, these increases are already quite low. How do you propose cutting them without impoverishing retirees even more quickly than is happening now?
For the last dozen years, when people complained that 3% compounded AAI ran double the actual rate of inflation, pensioners said “Don’t judge it on that short timeframe, It’s supposed to be an average over an entire retirement.” Now after just one year of high inflation, after a decade of record AAI profits, pensioners are crying poor mouth even though they are way ahead of the game. Hypocrites.
You are responding to one guy here and trying to cast a wider net with your response. Believe it or not, some retirees think a 3% AAI is fair over the long term, and you’d find that’s about right if you go back roughly 30 years to make that judgment. That statistic over the more recent years fuel your argument, I admit. But, again, if you think LONG term IL public employee pensioners have been treated about right versus the compounded IL cost of living increases over that longer span of time. Who can say how long the current period… Read more »
Pensions cause financial challenges again and again throughout the State. But the central question to me is why Illinois’ public universities are so lowly regarded, and indeed, on a comparative basis, a poor value. Champaign is a obviously a good school, but it has fallen in almost all of the rankings in past years. Now one can quibble about rankings, but a school with some of the best computer science resources in the world should be advancing, not retreating. And the real problem occurs once you get beyond U of I. The public schools just are not very good, and… Read more »
I’m only responding to part of your remarks here—that related to schools. We are in the woke era of politics nationally and even more so in the continually blue states. Rankings that challenge one’s self esteem are passe in much of IL politics at this time. Like you, I suppose, I find that a bad trend and one that fails to recognize that our personal efforts when we are challenged by adversity are simply a part of life if one is to be successful. Failing to instill a set of personal responsibilities towards that end often leads to more woe… Read more »
I don’t understand wut any of this means
1) campuses/dorms are ugly
2) student academic standards are low
3) state provides little financial aid
4) universities are mostly located in rural, undesirable areas, have difficulties attracting students and professors
5) Intense competition for professional college-educated jobs in Chicago with most big 10 schools funneling graduates into the Lakeview Pipeline
6) Which leads to difficult time for lower tiered state schools to place grads in good professional jobs in Chicago
7) which leads to reduced economic opportunities outside of Chicago area.
8) which leads to fewer students …. and so on, and so on…
It’s a death spiral…..
Debtsor – I agree with your points but there is not a wholesale recognition of what has taken place at these schools. By way of example, if you asked me 40 years ago what public school in Illinois was positioned for growth in rankings, prestige and students it would have been Northern Illinois. Its proximity to Chicago and opportunities to build national class programs in fields like accounting were then existing, especially since most of the very top schools have dumped the major. Instead, what had happened? NIU is according to Niche the 34th – yes – the 34th ranked… Read more »
Willowglen, we really appreciate smart perspectives like that, especially about what’s going on in other states. Among other reasons why we write here is that Illinois is a laboratory of failure, and the lessons it provides must not be lost to those of you in other states.
Yes, I agree that Northern was positioned to become a great IL school but then Chicago had an urban renaissance and gentrification. DePaul, Loyola, UIC, Northwestern, UofC, Roosevelt, even Columbia and the Art Institute (along with Northeastern IL) sucked up a declining number of Gen X students at the expense of the ugly rural schools. A lot of gentrification of Chicago was the direct result of college students graduating and staying in Chicago – I personally lived in neighborhoods I helped gentrify, both as a college student and then as a grad. By the time the millennial demographic bump came… Read more »
Companies really no longer look at IT degrees as a determining factor. Most companies use developers in India, largely self taught. When we hire IT talent we look for go getters who honed their skills since the age of 12 coding in their parents basement. Those folks run rings around candidates who decided in college to go into IT. Also all colleges are way behind in their curriculums, not just Illinois colleges. IT is way different paradigm than other professions that require college.
Generally speaking, pensions are under no obligation to keep pace with inflation. Many private pensions do not adjust for inflation at all. A pension’s job is to keep cutting you a check until the day you (or your survivor) dies. That’s it. We can argue until the cows come home on whether 3% compounded COLA is fair, the true average over a retirement, or properly valued by the state to begin with (pension participants pay only 0.5% of their wages for AAI). But the question here is should we care that Andrew’s $60,000 SURS pension for a mere 11 years… Read more »
I agree with you and with your first sentence in particular. Its largess to think otherwise, or maybe its politics made by “large asses.”
Administrative bloat — having dozens of do-nothing deans — has raised college costs beyond all logic:
https://www.heritage.org/education/commentary/administrative-bloat-universities-raises-costs-without-helping-students#:~:text=The%20dramatic%20increase%20in%20noninstructional,raising%20costs%20without%20benefiting%20students.
This is why pensions are a cancer for these colleges