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Obamacare versus the Faculty

I don't know how widespread this phenomenon is, but I thought I would share an email I received this morning:

I have been teaching multiple sections of economics for four years now at several Colleges and Universities in the State of Indiana. I have also been a frequent user of your texts in the classes that I teach.

With the implementation of the ACA (Affordable Care Act) these institutions are giving notification to their part-time faulty that their individual teaching schedules will now be limited to three sections. At the college this will likely result in the cancellation of 20-25% of the class sections in economics, and I would assume other areas will have a similar result. The students are not fully aware of the situation and many will be surprised that their desire to get a college education is now being impacted by the need to avoid the full implementation of the ACA.

Regardless if you are a Republican or a Democrat I would hope full-time faculty would voice their concern regarding the impact the implementation of the ACA could have on the attainment of higher education for the current student population and upon the lives of the dedicated part-time faculty that have been devoted to serving this student population.

My hope is that if faculty across the nation brought this to the public attention that we as a nation could have a more open and complete dialogue regarding the course we wish to set as a nation.

Update: Another example.

Ec 10 Bleg

As part of our "marketing" effort to get freshmen into ec 10, Harvard's introductory economics course, the ec 10 staff and I are trying to construct a list of famous alums of the course. Here is the list we have put together so far:

Steve Ballmer
Ben Bernanke
Lloyd Blankfein
Ryan Fitzpatrick
Jeremy Lin
Sheryl Sandberg
Eduardo Saverin
Chuck Schumer
Cameron Winklevoss
Tyler Winklevoss
Mark Zuckerberg

If you attended Harvard and have a famous classmate who you are sure took ec 10 (or its predecessor ec 1), please email me the information.

Vote!

If you are a member of the American Economic Association, you probably received an email this morning about the election of AEA officers. Please vote. It is your patriotic duty, or something like that.

Information about the candidates is available here.