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Free Tuition for Math, Science, and Engineering?
Gibbs-Duhem writes "Montana Democratic Senator Max Baucus wants free college tuition for US math, science, and engineering majors conditional upon working or teaching in the field for at least four years. From the article: 'The goal, he said in an interview last week, is to better prepare children for school and get more of them into college to make the United States more globally competitive, particularly with countries like China and India. "I think the challenge is fierce, and I think we have a real obligation to go the extra mile and redo things a bit differently, so we leave this place in better shape than we found it," Baucus said.' Do you think this would help with the US's lackluster performance in these fields?"
It allows poor people to get a university degree, which is really expensive in America, and so build a better future for themselves and their children.
Also, it should be good for the country as a whole, having more scientists and engineers. Those extra beakers and hammers are really valuable!
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
As long as it's retroactive for graduates in the past 5 years who now work in the field, fine by me. :)
But seriously, forgiving the debt of recent graduates who are now working in engineering fields will pump a shit-load of money into the economy.
Look how well it's done with the US Government giving free educations to the Indians and Chinese; imagine if we gave it to Americans!
~Rebecca
Because anything that makes the least bit of sense never does, in America.
Cynicism aside, this is a much needed proposal for the future of America. We are being left behind in so many markets due to increased global competition, but we are also lagging far behind in quality accessible education (meanwhile, tuition rates continue to rise).
I wish Senator Baucus the best of luck with this. He deserves our support.
Does this mean if I move there, can I finish my degree for free?
~
Cutting tuition will always improve the talent pool, because it removes an arbitrary obstacle. That's why the University of Georgia System has improved so dramatically in the last 10 years. The HOPE Scholarship made college so cheap that anybody can go, so the schools can all be a lot more selective.
"Tuition at no direct expense to the recipient."
the benefit to society if that extended that to people get business degrees and law degrees? I don't think our country has a large enough per-capita rate of lawyers or salesman, so we could really benefit by offering them free tuition too. Oh and also history majors, because that is a useful major too. :D
"Thank you for using Stop-n-Drop, America's favorite suicide booth since 2008"
In a given field, will not increase the amount of jobs in a given field. Actually it probably will, a little bit, as it'll probably be combined with severe reduction in work visas given for those fields. But not enough. Especially not enough for the expected glut of talent that will take advantage of such an offer.
So what you'll end up with is a bunch of people with math, science and engineering degrees asking "Do you want fries with that?", which actually isn't bad. At least they're educated.
I haven't run the numbers myself, but my intuition is that Montana is very high in per capita graduates, especially in the sciences.
Lovely state, mostly.
Some states (like TN) already do such programs for prospective teachers. They're usually listed under "loan forgiveness" programs.
Do we plant the money tree now or later? There is no such thing as free. SOMEONE is paying that tuition, and it sure as hell won't be me. I've got my own kid and retirement to worry about. I didn't get to go to college because my divorced parents wouldn't help and they made too much money combined for me to get any type of assistance. Plus I had no where to live after high school and had to work full time. I tried going on my own later in my 20's, but it was just too difficult to work full time paying bills and go to school. Now I'm in IT and I make as much or more than co-workers with heavy student loan debt. Luckily, I married up - to a woman with a graduate degree, so I can be a stay-at-home dad if the sector tanks again.
2 dem senators and a dem governor (who BTW speaks fluent arabic)
While I'm sure the senator has good intentions, I don't think this idea is scalable. If Montana has an extra chunk of change to spend on their own education, I'm sure they'll spend it on education, and that's wonderful. But, where is he going to find $25bn to completely fund certain college tuitions?
And, how will this be implemented? Socializing the education system tends to decrease the overall quality of teaching because lower salaries and less grant money cause more people to work in industry rather than in education. So, how does a program like this keep the quality of education high while still providing for the financial needs of students? More to the point, if a student eligible for this program is accepted to, say, Carnegie Mellon and also to some school nobody knows, will the government only be willing to fund the education if the student moves to Podunk because it's cheaper to live and learn there than in Pittsburgh?
If this went through you'd see a huge surge of unemployed or underemployed engineers. How many engineers have had to move into sales or marketing positions because that's all that's available? What exactly will more engineers do?
I don't see where it says it's limited to residents of Montana. I like Montana - the western portion of it, anyway - but I know what you mean. I don't know why we couldn't have let the Indians keep it. Every time I've driven through it, it seems like we're not using it.
Truth, Justice. Or the American Way.
Otherwise it wouldn't be worth it. The NEA is a big part of the educational problem to begin with.
There are free eduactions in america. I joined the USMC back in 1995 I got 80,000 for college. So the "poor" like me can get a degree if they truely want one. Oh and dont play that "you can die" card. There are plenty of non-infantry jobs in the US military that are no more risky than underage drinking and driving most college students experince on a monthly basis
I've already got my math degree and have taught for four year... and I've got some loans that need paying off. Does it matter that I live in Illinois, not Montana?
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
No, it's a bad idea. All this plan would do is suck a bunch of people into those majors who want the free lunch but don't have the motivation to really pursue the subjects. Much like what happens every few years when Computer Science goes from bust to boom and all sorts of people take it because they think they will make a shitload of money in the field. They make lousy IT people and switch careers as soon as the industry cycles back to bust again.
And the 'Free money!' (of course TANSTAAFL) mentality would totally distort the education establishment even more than the transition of Athletics from a sideline into a major cash cow did.
Democrat delenda est
-b.
So if you participate in this program and then lose your job, or become disabled, and are unable to work in the field for 4 years, not only do you have the regular problems of unemployment but you also have the sudden obligation to re-pay all that tuition? From the student's point of view, it seems like quite a gamble that the job market will be favorable 4 years down the road.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
If there is any sort of cap, the "free" tuition will just go to the people who would have paid anyways. If you assume that people who are engineering students are so because they like the field, they are probably the best qualified to be in the field. So if these scholarships are at all merit-based, chances are the same kids would get them. If they are not merit based, then you'll get poorly-qualified people signing up just to take advantage, crowding out the few who are qualified but are too poor.
So either the scholarships need to be available to anyone who meets the simple criteria of graduating and working in the field, or they probably won't have the intended effect of increasing the quantity and maintaining or improving the quality of engineering graduates. They'll just end up being a hand-out to the people who don't need handouts.
Honestly, I think the USA's best bet is brain-drain. We need to tear-down a lot of the post 9/11 every-foreign-student-is-a-potential-terrorist rules, and kill H1B, replacing it with a fast-track to citizen-ship visa (I say go so far as to make citizen-ship a requirement after 3 years on this theoretical visa) so that we attract and then keep all the smart people from the rest of the world.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
In this day and age of Political Correctness, and reactionary populous politics where most Americans get their political education from comedy-based talk shows, I think free tuition in Political Science (and the social sciences in general), will go a long way into educating people about the world around them. Learning, for example, to make better weapons is one thing. Learning how not to use them is another.
However, at least engineering disciplines are already highly paid and have excellent benefits at almost any business. While it may help many new people into the door as the entrance bar is sometimes out of reach to many without the financial means to pay for college, it will not fix the problem that the students entering into the college level have a, how can I put this, "lack of good fundamentals" in these areas, and thus need many classes just to reach the level they should already possess before reaching college. As I said, this will help many people and families who are struggling to financially to go through four years of college. But we are just starting to see some of the problems of the current school systems, and this problem started many years ago, and will take many more years to correct. We are dealing with students how have had potentially 12 years of "pass the problem up", or flat out failure of the system and of the students themselves. It would take years to correct the problems for many of these people, and some may not even be able to be corrected due to other life issues. For the people the system has failed, it fails tremendously, with life affecting results. Simply offering free tuition to Math, Science, and Engineering majors will not help the people who do not know how to deal with fractions, or percentages, when you need them to be able to understand Fourier Transforms and Differential Calculus.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
More likely, what this will do is make more students choose these majors simply for financial reasons. Do we really want students who have absolutely no interest in these fields that would be successful in others:
Now, personally, I'd enjoy this seeing as how I'm a CompE student, but it just doesn't seem to me like it's been thought through very well.
Also, it seems similar to the case a while back where a university wanted to charge students more if they were majoring in Science/Engineering, based on the argument that it cost the university more to teach them. However, IIRC, a major argument against it was that choosing a major shouldn't be influenced by finances, but rather by genuine interest in the subject.
My sister received free tuition for agreeing to teach "special education" for five years after college in Illinois. Now her tuition is free but her room and board is not.
Public or university teaching requires that you either get a Masters in Education or a PhD in your field.
So, teaching right out of undergrad is a non-starter, unless you teach at private schools.
This is along the lines of graduate school, where science and engineering students recieve more funding (generally).
Who pays in this case? The federal government, through grants. Someone always pays.
Does this lead to more people getting graduate degrees in science? Definitely, although financial reasons are also a big part of many people leaving grad school without the degree they went in for.
Does this lead to more jobs in science? Yeah, kind-of. More federal funding for science grad students encourages Universities to hire more grad student managers (faculty), but this doesn't create nearly as many jobs as it does qualified applicants.
And how will he enforce the rule? By making the non-complying graduates pay back — no other way, really, as there is no slavery here.
Which means, people, who find better jobs than teaching, will just pay off (as they do now) with the losers sticking to become teachers. Could find better use for that money...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Any law student that changes major to engineering gets twice the tuition.
Well, we've (ab)used parts of it, anyway. I think that "using" the rest more would sort of limit the charm, unfortunately.
-b.
maybe we stretch it to 6 years indebture, and give them a cell phone and a laptop too....
There seems to be a fallacy that people believe where pumping out more college graduates somehow equals to more jobs being created and also helps create a better economy. This is just not true.
e _overselling_of_higher_education_report.pdf
/.'s take a read.
You have countries like Canada and Egypt where the government spends a lot of money on education but have a higher unemployment rate than the U.S.
The notion that pumping more money into a system ( especially when the government is involved) will fix any problem is just bad economics
Here is a paper that argues that what we need is to let the free market work, to get the government out of the education biz and NOT subsidize more college graduates.
The paper is called "The overselling of higher education"
http://www.johnlocke.org/acrobat/pope_articles/th
I suggest all
They have spent soooo much time getting Darwin out of some of the school systems in the .us,
;).
Wont they all be upset at the offer of more tuition in science based subjects. ??
If young minds go through school, learning that the world is flat, and gravity / evolution are unproven theories, the extra tuition will be needed just to get them up to par with China/India students who didnt learn that people and dinosaurs co-existed only several thousand years ago
Being more selective doesn't mean the school is any better. It means that the students are better. Bragging about how selective you are is really just an appeal to popularity. "All these smart people must be coming here for a reason. Rather than do my own homework, I will assume that these people have done theres and that it must be a really good school". Crappy reasoning for an institution that is supposed to train people to think.
Mod on crack. This can't be redundant as it
is Informative and had not been posted above.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
There's a lot of speculation that this may cause the applicant pool to increase, and schools forced to become more selective. Interestingly though, after the first four years, there's going to be a large pool of teachers able to teach the new freshman (or at least a large pool of TAs for the large lecture hall classes so students can get individualized instruction). Thinking about it this way, the only cost the students accrue (net) to the system is their room and board, plus the time of the professors who teach higher level classes. Granted, the higher level classes are more expensive, but many of them are under-filled anyway as so many students are culled during freshman/sophomore year (at least, in engineering I've noticed).
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Christ people, he's from Montana, but federal senators don't make individual STATE laws. HE'S A US SENATOR. Stop asking about Montana. It's funny how an article about education comes up, and half of you seem to have failed a required high school course.
A) Redirect all subsidies paid to student loan lenders into the gratis tuition program.
B) Bring our fucking troops home, save $billions of dollars a day, which would then be used to educate instead of Maim and kill.
To take math, science and engineering students from their career path right out of school is a realy dumb idea. For students who go straight to work in their chosen field, it takes many years before their education jells into usable skill sets.
For example, I have an electrical engineer working for me who hsa four years of experience. Based on the quality of his work (which is good for four years out) he will need at least four more years before he has enough experience to function without someone looking over his shoulder. Furthermore, he has already started to forget many of the things he learned in school because he hasn't used them. We can't afford to divert our core math, science and engineering students from the entry level math, science and engineering jobs they need to complete their education.
On the other hand, this idea is a good one if we apply it to math and science teachers.
I have a second cousin who graduated from high school, first in her class. She took physics and calculus in high school. She is going to be a history teacher, not math. She would be a good canidate for this type of educational incentive.
I DNRTFA but I can tell you that free tuition isn't necessarily the obstacle. I'm an EE, and tuition at my alma mater is $1,417 per semester. Of course it will help if they waive that but that won't touch the $8,600 in fees (annual).
So, we'll have more very well educated idiots who go on to manage a Denny's?
As long as I'm included in the science majors that get free tuition, I say go for it. I do so enjoy having my grades shot through the roof after professors curve to the mean level of stupidity to prevent nearly the whole class from failing. After all, if too many of the students fail their classes it starts to make the professors' teaching styles (ha!) look bad.
Plus, you know, better to spend money on education than weapons which go missing in the war effort. But given that I'm a student I realize my view is probably quite bias.
Replying to myself..... When slagging someone else's idea I try to propose a better one and posted before doing so.
If the problem is a lack of labor with certain skills, simply seed more scholarships. Best if done in a industry/government partnership since industry is best positioned to know what sorts of skills they are hankering to hire more of. But if you they ain't willing to pony up a part of the money they aren't REALLY interested in solving the problem they just want a handout from the taxpayer and we already have enough welfare of both the individual and corporate sort.
I'd say totally merit based but if some sort of means test was the price to get the Dems on board I could live with it. Score X on the portion of whatever standardized test everyone agreed on and you get a substantial (but except for very rare cases NOT a full free ride. rare being a very poor person taking a highly desired major at an unexpensive school) part of the first year's college paid. Make B+ or better and get the next year, etc.
Rig things where supply and demand set the size of the scholarship based on industry need (their willingness to kick money toward majors), political goals (government willingness to do likewise), etc.
We already have ways to get 'free money for college' in the general case after all. First off is military service. So the only reason for a new program is to encourage people to take particular majors over others.
If we really need more teachers it would be far cheaper in the long run to simply pay more for teachers of subjects suffering from a shortage and allow the market to sort it out. Because once a big shiny new federal government program starts it NEVER ends, decades after whatever problem it was 'urgently' trying to solve has solved itself on it's own or it has become clear to all rational people that the program isn't helping and in fact actually making the problem worse. Nothing matters, the program continues and gets ever increasing budgets.
Democrat delenda est
That sounds an awful lot like the service academies (West Point, Naval Academy, Air Force Academy, etc) which offer a top-notch education for free in return for 6 years as an officer in you respective branch.
Have a squat over at the hobo house.
Education is the red herring the globalization crowd trots out when globalization is criticized. After another round of offshoring and outsourcing, the newly-unemployed are told that they "just need some training/a degree/to take some classes".
"Their people will be paid a third, a quarter of what our people are paid. And it's unreasonable to think you can educate our people so well that they can produce four times as much in the United States."
Although, a case might be made that this is their country too, since they've already sucked away a large chunk of our STEM professional jobs, or work from home overseas.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I know there are a lot of people saying it's a dumb idea, but... yes. Please. I would actually be able to afford my degree. Teaching for 4 years afterwards? Hell, I -like- teaching.
And there isn't a finite number of them, ready to "run out" if there are too many applicants. In science and engineering fields, in particular, where continued progress is always "standing on the shoulders of giants", each new discovery or new invention always seems to open up the opportunity to make several further discoveries or inventions.
Perhaps we ought to start subsidizing economics majors as well...
Of course, some of those economics majors will tell you that there are more efficient ways to accomplish such a subsidy. Instead of convoluted schemes to get a certain demographic of would-be science/math/engineering students to become teachers, why not just raise pay for teachers with those degrees? Would it be so horrible if our schools got applicants who have already graduated instead of having to wait for applicants who haven't entered college yet? Would college loans be too hard to get for would-be teachers who knew they had higher paying jobs to look forward to?
Don't pick on the Berkeley Pit. A lot of copper came out of there that went to build the infrastructure you now enjoy.
There was a young lady at a party who was lecturing me on how evil I was to work in the mining industry. She kept waving her hand (with its gold ring) and tossing her head (gold earrings) and she had a gold necklace too. And she drove to the party in a SUV (a ton and half of steel, a hundred pounds of copper, 60 lbs of lead, several hundred pounds of aluminum, and all the plastics from the oil wells she was also against.)
Please don't be like her.
It's not going to do crap until engineers, physicists, chemists, and the people who actually do the grunt work are paid what they're worth. Why should extremely intelligent people who've worked 30 years advancing the frontiers of knowledge and technology be paid *MAYBE* 200k/yr when they can get an MBA or JD, learn some buzzwords, and become CEO in twenty years, then be given a 200M golden parachute for driving their corporation into bankruptcy?
I suspect that one of these choices is incorrect. Correct.
(not a very good try at sarcasm, but trying) Science?! Darwin. Need I say more? Darwin was an idiot, global warming is false, none of you understand how we have to save the Iraqi's and 9/11, Just because the repubs have pooped on themselves the last 7 years and have crap on their face doesnt mean the Dems are any better. Im a free-thinking guy and part of my free-thinking tells me that the Bible is correct, that doubters are just trying to be cool with that rock-and-roll-its-cool-to-question-authority. Well, Im not a SHEEP, I think FOR MYSLF, i just happen to not question authority. God, you guys are such sheep. Questioning authority, pushing "science" down everyone's throat. Bring back the middle-eastern nomadic culture and my three sons to help me raise the sheep and a wife in the kitchen. Stupid treehuggers with that free math and science bullshit.
That would take some doing.
In any case I think this is just another attempt to fix the math and science teacher problem, by again end running the unions and dropping a bunch of credentialed but much smarter people into educational institutions. Not the worst idea around.
Wounder what the rules would be like for those that started out wanting to teach, but decide to 'work in their field' after seeing the mess the schools are?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"Cut other programs (like the war in Iraq) that are sucking money to no good end."
No good end? I know slashdotters live a sheltered existence, but...
Didn't Ted Kazinski (sp) hole up in Montana while he was mailing those bombs? He was supposedly a pretty decent mathematician too.
I'm trying to avoid making stereotypes here, but maybe the Unabomber could teach PDEs, while Brad Pitt delivers instruction in trout fishing.
- Paying for math, science and engineering degrees will help little. First, you need to find some way to motivate the students, both in high school then college to work hard. Unfortunately, math, science and engineering degrees are HARD work! The vast majority of kids are taught by schools and parents, that life is easy and they will be taken care of. This is very bad for math, science and engineering students. The "easy life" students have a rude awakening when they get into difficult classes. Colleges will then be forced to either move such students to easier majors, turn them away or dumb down math, science and engineering. Colleges need to keep the bodies and their funds. Neither you or I want dumbed down mathematicians, scientists and engineers designing airliners, industrial facilities, military hardware, nuclear/conventional weapons or even cars.
- The fundamental problem is that children are instilled with idea that they are ENTITLED to a comfortable, wealthy and easy life. Until this entitlement issue is fixed, hard college majors will be unpopular and have few graduates.
- Put simply LIFE=WORK. So few believe it though.
I keep thinking about the federal government paying farmers not to grow certain crops.
This seems like a bad idea. We could create a glut of students in a particular field, and that isn't necessarily the best for society. It may not be horrible, but it may not be optimal.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
I am a CS/EE professor at at UC university, and student cost is a big burden. Every year I see
good students applications that I need to reject because of student cost.
For UC (similar to other universities), each student costs over $65K/year (with overheads).
Keeping a 6 student group requires close to $400k/year NSF/DARPA/NASA/whatever grants.
Not need to say that this is a though amount of money to request that requires lots of
work writing grants.
Currently, I have 4 fully funded students. If students were free, I could manage 10. For faculty
that wants to do research (there are always some lazy faculty) this would be a big difference.
Even ignoring the increase on interest/applications due to tuition cost reduction, I can
easily see a 20% to 50% graduate student increase on the CS fields.
Hope that it gets popular on the 2008 election,
I'm not denying the utility of mining, I'm saying the Berkeley Pit is a mess, but a lot of Montana is beautiful and I'd hate to see the whole state exploited.
-b.
They need to do it soon, might save me some 60ish grand...
Anyone say fanboy yet?
How about the government just gives everyone who graduates highschool on time $1000 cash, no questions asked? To use for college tuition, buying a car, a year of free cheeseburgers, or anything else they want, no strings attached.
It costs the government something like $30K a year to keep a person in jail. Not to mention how much it costs to run the rest of the judicial system, to build the jails, the damage caused by their crimes, or the taxes they could have paid if they were free to work. By the time we're done with the difference between a free person and a jailed person, it's probably over $50K a year. The average Federal jailtime is over 5 years per sentence, or well over $250K per prisoner (many get multiple sentences per lifetime).
People graduating HS on time are less likely to commit crimes and go to jail. So every person who the bonus spares from jail is worth over 250 people who get it, but still go to jail. In other words, if the increased on-time graduations reduce the crime rate even as little as 0.25%, they're worth it. It's probably closer to needing only 0.1% or less to "break even". And that's not counting other benefits, like increased productivity, reduced teen pregnancy, and all the other benefits of on-time graduation.
We can afford a lot more investment in Americans' education. Some targeting high performers who need more money for even higher performance. Some targeting low performers at risk of creating more damage than it costs to prevent. Education is always the investment with the best return. Investing more will pay off quickly, creating more money to invest, and improving the country across the board as a "byproduct".
--
make install -not war
I work with a lot of women, so I don't hear as much of the sports babble. Instead, all day long I hear about dating problems, "emotional roller coasters", psychotherapy sessions, desserts, and reality television. But, like your place of work, my coworkers' eyes glaze over if I comment about the space shuttle or some neat open source project. Sometimes I just want to whip my cock out and fuck every one of those bitches until they don't have anything to complain about.
If the IRS considers this to be income and taxes you for it.
What?
Outside of Engineering and Science; other learning has suffered as well such as the Arts. I know this is Slashdot but you guys should be smart enough to know that society isn't balanced just by technology. People such as Artists, Musicians, Dancers, Philosophers, Actors, and Writers contribute to society in ways that a Scientist or Mathematician can't. Great society's are not just defined by logic but by uniqueness and eccentricites combined with scientific breakthrough's. I'm afraid you're all focusing on a small aspect of education. Not everyone is destined to be an Einstein nor to do most aspire to be a Forrest Gump. If your going to give Engineers a break then other disciplines should give given leniency as well!
yea
It's not part of 'Homeland Security' so Republicans will scream about "tax and spend" liberals.
It'll never happen.
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
At least there are SOME positive replies, when I suggested this here http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=257293&cid=200 34035 I only got negative replies...
When I attended school the masters at my English grammar school were people who had gone into professions following WWII. They had reached a point in their lives where going into teaching was a welcome lifestyle change after successful careers. This generation of teachers were the best there ever was. They were replaced by a generation of teachers which went to teaching colleges and then straight back into teaching - and were a disaster. I believe a similar thing happened in the US following the GI Bill. My English teacher studied under J.R.R.Tolkien, my Math teacher worked on the British equivalent of the Titan missile program, my Physics teacher worked on the world's first commercial nuclear reactor at Windscale. Don't make the same mistake. It would be far better to give free education and then encourage older professionals to switch to teaching.
Many scientists earn less than truck drivers. Where's the motivation?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
to encourage this in preschool. Prenatal if possible. Tap out the numbers on her stomach.
What?
Where I live there is an extreme shortage of Math and Science teachers. The state has set standards (mandatory 4 years of math and science in high school to graduate) that put a strain on the teaching pool. Add to that the fact that all teachers must be certified to teach in that area in order to be in compliance with NCLB and other various mandates and you get an even more extreme shortage.
Given the cost of obtaining a math / engineering / science degree just to teach, this is something that could possibly encourage more people to go into those areas of teaching.
I might even consider going back for a teaching degree if I could do so without incurring additional debt.
There is no FREE college tuition anywhere at any school. You and I and every other taxpayer will pay for it directly or parents will pay extra tuition to cover the lost "free" tuition dollars. If you think it is such a great idea, then pony up your own money in the form of a scholarship or donation and get all the others who believe this is so amazing to do the same. Oh, you don't want to do that, eh? I didn't think so. Leave me out of this scam, then, too please!
So how did the Senator's proposal go when he pitched it to the Regents at the universities in his home state? Those results would be very useful when trying to persuade a US Senate committee...
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Not sure whether this has been considered, but taking away the cost of tuition will not make college significantly more affordable for most people.
I went to a state university. Tuition as an in-state student was ~$2k. I had this waived due to high performance on the statewide testing. Too bad the other costs for the school (residence and various other mandatory expenses) tallied up to over $20k. And I already had health care coverage.
Typical politician's idea. What a putz.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
People who get into fields for the money rarely make it, especially in engineering where the money simply isn't very good (we work harder and make less than other notoriously fiscally wealthy career paths: law, medicine -- they do work harder, but there's a lot more money -- politics.
.com bubble flooded "computer science" with idiots.
Besides this issue. Engineering fields are dependent on intelligence and creativity. Hard work won't carry you far.
This will simply flood the fields like the
Not to mention it pisses off those of us who paid to get into these fields who will now, probably, take a slight pay cut because of the mass availability of semi-qualified applicants.
If we want more people in engineering and science we need better high schools. Plain and simple. Let them find their geek(adj.) before college.
Let's see. We offer education in English, Algebra, Geometry, History, Calculus, and even Civics. It's free. In fact, it's even mandatory. It's called High school. Do the students take much advantage of it?
Now we have a proposal to make engineering and science educations free too. I know many students think they're smart. But do they feel smart enough to stay ahead of a field of applicants guaranteed to lower engineering and science salaries for decades to come? Do you really love the field of study that much?
Supply and demand, folks.
Frankly, not many in the field of engineering or science are financially motivated. Though they live comfortably, most will never afford the memberships in the really posh country clubs where the MBA crowd congregate. The high for us is putting together something big and seeing it work, or discovering something new that nobody has ever seen before. Golf is just a game by comparison.
Nah. We need better PR for engineers. I can't recall a single realistic TV show about engineers besides Dilbert. And it didn't last long, did it?
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
Why not free tuition for everyone, regardless of their field of study?
Why would any sane person want to restrict education (or health care for that matter) to those wealthy enough to afford it?
What about the people like me who made a early career change? I got my B.S. in computer science, but there is no secondary education certification for it in Pennsylvania. Now, in order to teach computer science I must pay for business classes out of my own pocket in order to teach computer science because computer science is grouped with business in the state (other states are similar, while others group with math and others do have separate programs).
What can be done to financially aid aspiring second-career teachers?
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Actually, I disagree. If we keep them, they take a job from an American.
In fact, historically, immigrants in the high-tech industry have created far more jobs than they have taken; a big part of the US computer industry, as well as a big part of US science and technology in general was built by foreigners.
If we send them home, they compete with us from abroad, and make money for India/China instead of for the US.
You're quite right about that. Where you're wrong is that you think you can stop it by denying them education. If the US doesn't train these people, other nations will.
Even if denying them education would work, it would be short-sighted: these countries need to develop in order to buy US products. Furthermore, the greater the disparity between the US and those other countries, the more likely the US will be attacked.
instead of giving it to an American, who will also perform the same work, for what is likely a longer period of time?
Those Americans that are capable of doing this work generally aren't interested in it.
Furthermore, you make it sound like the US government can control this; it cannot. University decides who they admit, and companies decide where and who they hire. If the US government tries to interfere with this, the research, students, and jobs will simply leave the country.
I would be interested in seeing how the service academies would respond to this plan. I'm guessing that a lot of high school grads are attracted to the academies or ROTC because their educations are paid for. If one can get a tech degree for free as a civilian, there's a lot less motivation to take on obligatory service while going to school.
A lot of countries are obsessed with spectator sports, only maybe it's soccer, cricket, and cycling instead of baseball and American football.
Spectator sports have their uses. I think it's a model of how organizations behave when the general public is paying rapt attention to what is going on, and what results are being achieved in among competitors with similar resources (yes, the Yankees have more money to spend than their opponents, but they aren't monopolists like Microsoft). So while cronyism, racism, grudges, and other ills certainly do exist in pro sports, they are less pronounced than in the corporate world because a year or two of poor performance very often results in the ouster of management and the coaching staff. And that performance is easy for everyone to measure.
Start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_system/
Sometimes I just want to whip my cock out and fuck every one of those bitches until they don't have anything to complain about.
Dad?
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
But when you have too much religion, whose purpose right now seems to be to undermine science, that forces some kids to looks away from science & mathematics.
Give H1-Bs to 100,000 Indian Graduates and let them do the teaching. Much cheaper and they will be more grateful.
Does Max ever tell us where the money for this proposal is going to come from? Tech degrees aren't free; the money to pay the professors, buy lab supplies, etc., etc. has to come from somewhere... us taxpayers, probably.
Like you said, Americans are spoiled. There are billions in the world who would love to live in American "poverty."
To use a sports phrase
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
The US has been falling behind in these areas for some time. It sounds good but will it be funded? No Child Left Behind wasn't. I wonder if the political will is there to fund it or why it would be any diffrent now.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
I'm all for getting more teachers educated in the more technical arts but what about the rest of the educators? You can't discount the essentials taught to us by all good teachers whether they are band teachers, english teachers, wood shop teachers, art teachers or the more technical teachers. All teachers contribute to the education of their students, not just those who teach us the sciences. I say this as the son of a teacher, grandson of a teacher, nephew of a multiple teachers, and cousin of a teacher. I even taught summer school a few times.
Obviously, degree X is important too, so we must fund that as well. Oh look, the program is more expensive now and isn't anything special. Cut it.
You'll see "X" being everything, especially the cultural and political stuff:
women's studies, latino studies, whatever-they-call-it-today (black) studies, gay studies...
art history, music history, Islam, hippie culture...
modern dance, photography, sculpture, trombone, kazoo, body painting...
socialogy, marketing, counseling, political science, criminal justice...
One major issue in my own undergraduate education (in mathematics and computer science) was the gulf between those who were comtemplating a future academic career in the subject, and those who merely wanted a credential to progress on to industry.
Yes, there are some students who straddle the fence — in a way, I was one myself — but for the most part the undergraduate student population is rather sharply divided between the research-directed and the credential-directed. The fact that programs have to accomodate both lead to conflicts — the research-directed students complain bitterly about dumbing-down of material and excessive commercial influence on the curriculum, while the credential-directed complain about having to learn a ton of useless theory which will be irrelevant to their future.
I mention this because I speculate that Max Baucus' proposal would certainly change the current equilibrium between these two camps, particularly if free tuition is only for science/engineering students. True, there would be a lot more research-directed types who can't get into university now for lack of funds, but I imagine most of the people who'd come who aren't there now would be credential-directed.
There's also another reason they'd be credential-directed, which is the tone set by the policy itself. There's something a little disturbingly utilitarian about the proposal of granting free tuition only to those people. This sort of philosophy makes me wonder whether the line would be drawn around science/engineering as a whole, or around only those science/engineering programs that have a utilitarian (read: "commercial") appeal. I would think it would be hard for the government to argue that engineering and category theory are "useful" but that philosophy and rhetoric are not.
If, however, research-directed programs are ruled out, the result would likely be a forcible segragation of research-directed and credential-directed students, even more than there is now. Maybe this is where we're headed anyway, but it would be regrettable as the forced mingling of the two has been hugely productive for both in the past.
"Even if denying them education would work, it would be short-sighted: these countries need to develop in order to buy US products."
Would that be US products (made in China) or US products (Made in USA)?
Mod on crack. This can't be redundant
/.!
You must be new here, welcome to
(I always metamod 'redundant' as unfair. The mods simply get it wrong too often. Too often 'redundant' means "yeah, you said it first, but this other guy replied to an earlier post so I saw his comment first. So I'll just *&$% up your karma a little here.")
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
I think the program worked very well but had some unintended consequences that any freshman econ major could have predicted. The program injected a huge amount of money earmarked for the purchase of higher education with the supply remaining relatively static. The predictable result - tuition escalated to the insane levels we have today at many times the rate of inflation.
Then there's the individuals: anyone ever remember "Northern Exposure"? Just how did NYC goy Fleishman end up in Cicily, AK against his will? Looks a lot like indentured servitude to me. What arrangements could be made that would have a pretense of fairness? I suspect the service would be required in undesireable areas.
>>They avoid math and science because its HARD and not cool.
Also, because the same work can be done in India, or China, for $10/hour. Wouldn't you have to be stupid, to want to compete with that?
As a high school math and computer teacher, I think that we could see a bigger gain by creating a bigger demand for actual math & science teachers. Better salary would encourage more talented people to become teachers and raise the level of education in the country... ideally.
Forcing these graduates into teaching after their undergraduate degree reduces their competetiveness for graduate school and industry, which is where new talent needs to be. The government shouldn't be mucking around with these things.
I'm not trying to say this is a bad idea, but I feel this is the wrong way to go about it. Not everyone makes a good teacher just because they know the material. The problem here is that while there would me more teachers, there would be more teachers who don't want or care to teach, they're just doing it for the free ride on tuition. And I know from personal experience that bad teachers certainly don't inspire their students to peruse the fields they teach. On a different note, being a music major I feel slightly insulted, as if ideas such as this are saying that the sciences are more valuable than the arts. I believe that both science and arts are vital for a society progressing.
Sure senator, i'd like some diamonds and a free ride to happy-land along with it. Is that ok ? What's that? It's out of everyone's else's pockets!? Why sure, hand it over !
I'm a science oriented person (a chemist actually), but this reeks of the many tax and spend programs we could do without in this country. The kind that make my taxes, even as a grad student, absolutely ridiculous. This is shameless vote whoring. It's real easy to be a big "giver" when you're not giving out of your own pocket. I don't particularly like him giving out of mine, and neither should anyone else.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Where's the money coming from? There's only one places it can be coming from, which is taxpayers. And since we know that's not going to happen, who's paying for their education? I don't really care who pays, but what I think is going to happen is the professors are going to be underpayed. That will result in large numbers of students passing classes they shouldn't have passed. The cycle will continue and spread, and you will have a loss (or at least a major degradation) of our higher education system. This is not going to fix our problem. Let's think about this for a second. Where does all of our money go? Bills: House, Utilities, TV, Internet, Car, etc... We all know this, so let's face the facts. Now, where does that money go? I'll tell you where, to the *wrong* people. Physicist, engineers, mathematicians, are the ones that make all of those things possible, so why aren't they getting paid for it? Because they're too nice, and the rest are just in it for immediate gains. Most item should cost 100 times what they do, but the scientists just sit back and watch that money go to other people. Why? Because some sell their soles, figuratively speaking. They sell the rights for profit, eventually, to somebody else for immediate profit, since *their* life is only so long they don't really care what happens to the rest of the money. What *should* happen is that the rights be slowly transferred to younger generations of physicists, engineers, and mathematicians, so that people that have EARNED the right, through years of hard work and study, can "stand on the shoulders of giants" and be rewarded for it. Don't get me wrong. Capitalism in America works *perfectly*. What doesn't work is our *government*. They fear a revolt if there are too many smart people other than them. So, what better to do then keep everybody dumb by not fixing the system? This "fix" in Montana is not going to work, and will just degrade the system even more. There will be an even larger influx of people that don't care about what they are studying, and are only there to graduate. Schools will admit more people, because they are a business, and that's what businesses do. The quality of education will decrease as a result (I know, personally, as I have attended some of the fastest growing universities in the U.S. and *watched* the quality of education decline). It's a great attempt, but it's not fixing the problem. I give the Senator an A for effort, but that was curved from a D+. (See the problem?) We can do a lot better, but perhaps by implementing this system people will see that. Sometime change in the *wrong* direction is needed to create a potential for change in the *right* direction.
You are exactly right. As a domestic PhD student in a top engineering school I am in the minority. It isn't because foreign students are so much better and they are preventing domestic students from getting admitted. I know for a fact that my public school goes out of its way to accept domestic students whenever it can. The problem is that most Americans want to start work as quickly as possible. There are so many technical degrees now that teach a single skill rather than teaching how to learn. Students see their peers getting into jobs with reasonable starting salaries that don't require a lot of education, and living lifestyles far beyond their means (thanks to easy credit), and think why bother with school. The problem is an attitude problem with learning more than anything else.
:)
However, your nerds bias against sports really shows. As the social chair of my research group (all foreign students except for me) I can say that we get in to some pretty serious sports activities and interesting discussions over cricket
You forgot the tag.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
The US doesn't need more engineers. If it did, salaries would be higher. In 1970, engineering and law salaries were about equal, or so says the IEEE. That's certainly changed.
The US doesn't need more engineers because high-tech manufacturing has gone offshore. Where the manufacturing goes, the production engineering must go, and the design engineering follows. Then the brands go. Then top management. Then the financing.
Read the Lenovo story. They're not a spinoff of IBM. They're a successful Chinese PC company that bought IBM's PC business to expand. IBM is just the company to which Lenovo outsources US warranty service.
The reason science and engineering enrollment has fallen off is lack of demand for US citizens in these fields. We're hemorrhaging manufacturing and engineering jobs. The remaining jobs are filled by foreigners on work visas. The US is not using all the science and engineering graduates it has already produced. Adding to their number will not improve the situation.
Engineering and science curricula are difficult and demanding. With diminished prospects for a lucrative career, fewer US citizens are inclined to toil 4-5 years to get these degrees. Corporate lobbyists have the ear of the politicians who are proposing such remedies. Hence, their efforts focus on increasing the supply of labor in the face of diminished demand and reduced price (flat wage growth).
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
I'd be much more interested if this idea was extended to people who already have degrees in another field and want to return to school.
I live on the Gulf Coast, and there are tax-funded training programs for construction-related jobs at community and technical colleges. Those are awfully tempting, not because they pay more than my current job, but because they're absolutely free - no merit, no need, no questions asked, and you get real skills to fall back on when/if your job market goes south.
I know there are a ton of liberal arts, education, and even law and medicine who are interested in going back for degrees out of or loosely related to their flagging job fields. But most federal, state and university aid that isn't need based is reserved for high school graduates - specifically, it's based on Pell Grant eligibility, and having a bachelor's degree violates that eligibility. Even most subsidized student loans get denied if you've already finished college.
But who do you trust more with thousands of dollars in free tuition - an untested high-school grad who might blow all the money they get on keggers and/or World of Warcraft gold and flunk out, or someone who's already shown that they can finish a college degree, who has real-world experience and responsibility they can bring to the classroom, and who needs to change jobs to stay out of unemployment or poverty? Wouldn't it be just as good to help them get into and through college as quickly as possible?
The only thing that will make the US more competitve with China is for American workers to suddenly work for 1/10 their current wage.
As an engineer myself I think this idea has little chance of working as intended. Consider the following: If someone is smart enough to get into and make it out of engineering school with a degree then this person is probably smart enough to figure out how to pay for an education. I would be wary of the person who gets into a college or university with the vision of a "free education". This stinks of welfare and will attract those who flock to it as well. What of the people who take this opportunity but lack the ability to stick it out? I remember the first day of my Eng 101 class. The prof said to look to your left and right then told us one of those people will not be here next year. Cruel maybe, but the truth nonetheless. It could be poor study habits, unreasonable expectations or those just not cut out for the field. What happens when they drop out? Do they get charged tuition is arrears somehow? Can they repay what is owed? We all know that teachers are (generally) not that well paid. When I graduated college the last thing I would have done is go teach, my degree was worth much more than a teaching job could have paid. Engineering school is not easy and if you had the ability to do well, then good jobs were there for the taking. So let's say this program goes forward. There are some who make it through to a degree and then what do we have? I see a glut of teachers who are there because they got a "free education". These teachers are not necessarily the best in their field and may not even WANT to teach. Heck, some might not even be suitable for teaching jobs. The better solution is to take whatever money that could be spent on this ill fated proposal and use it for incentive to hire qualified, proven professionals who have a desire to teach. Make the teaching jobs remotely competitive on salary with jobs in the private sector and then perhaps good people will step forward to fill the need.
After reading the Dem Senator's comments and some of the discussion, my question is, "Why?"
First off, the engineering JOBS are going to China, India, etc. because the engineers there do a competitive job at a lower price. This won't change just because we graduate more Engineers (although it will drive the price for domestic Engineers down due to increase in supply). While there will always be a requirement for some local manufacturing and research, most of it will re-locate where it can be done most efficiently. In the near future this probably means China, India, Vietnam and the Philippines.
The government strongly subsidizes the teaching profession, and look what happened; we got lots of under-qualified teachers who are little more than prison wardens. (Parents should sue the Public School System for fraud.) http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/
In Soviet Russia the government tells you what to learn.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
Problems over here in Europe are similar.
But, instead of another "let's give certain groups something special" program, how about raising the general level of education in such fields as math?
Many scams and doubtful business methods (including, btw. many insurances) only work because the general public is frighteningly uneducated in math, for example, and can't do even simple statistics.
One of the reasons this is so is that there is no education science of mathematics. There are special branches of education science for almost every other field, be it art, languages or health. But no one seems to care about how to teach math. So it's taught by people who know general pedagogics and try to apply that to math as best as they can - but we all know that math skills and people skills do not very often go together, so you are really lucky if your math teacher is good at both math and teaching.
And that's not his fault, but a failure of the system, which instead of thinking about why so many people fail in math in school, and improve the teaching techniques, dumbs down the curriculum or makes math optional instead of mandatory.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Waiving tuition is one way ... or you could just pay competitive salaries to attract more and better teachers in math/engineering/science. Not that there is anything wrong or bad about hiring students fresh out of college to teach, but there may be a benefit to hiring a mathmatician/engineer/scientist who has spent some time in the filed/industry to teach children because they may not only have a better grasp of the subject matter but also interesting and illustrative experiences that will draw students in and engage them.
-- James
...even more colleagues that aren't passionate about their work.
The future certainly is bright.
1) This would perhaps reduce stigma of scientists as geeks and dweebs and elevate the status of such training in our society.
2) This assumes there's enough jobs, or would be enough job creation, to place all of these people.
3) It would certainly increase the number of people in science majors who don't have any interest or passion for sciences, but are there for the free ride.
4) Let's face it, these programs are hard. What do you do about people who made it into an engineering program, couldn't hack it or really really hated it, and wanted to change majors. Do they cough up the back tuition for their freshman and sophomore years? Do you kick them out with no degree?
5) Given the stories of test scores fewer and fewer kids are prepared for college level math and science. If you want more scientists, improve the grade school and high school curriculums and you'll get more people going into those fields out of real interest and passion for the subjects.
6) The teaching option is difficult too. Where the best teachers are really needed are not where people with freshly minted, high-salary gaining engineering degrees are going to end up. Few in their right mind are going to want to move to an inner city for 4 years where teachers are getting beat up (and does this program pay for their teaching credential too?
The government really needs to stop trying to shape what people study based on perceived notions of where we're lacking. These are students, people, making choices about their careers and their lives (at age 17/18 no-less) and shouldn't be treated as some commodity whose growth you can control with subsidies and tax breaks. To do so is to apply a model for the military to the US scientific future.
My first problem with this proposal is that it would be extremely expensive to pay the college tuition for all of the millions of people that would jump on this.
If the program covered room and board at the school, then all kinds of people would sign up for this who just wanted to mooch off of the government for four years. If you were a bad enough student, you could live free for five or six years. In fact, you could stay there until the school, which would be getting paid for your presence, kicked you out.From TFA:
My second problem is that the education offered by this program would become worthless in four years when all of the teachers were fresh out of college with no teacher training. It would be even worse when the graduates who were compelled to be teachers started teaching in high schools and elementary schools. If most of the teachers in primary and secondary schools were unequipped to teach, a lot of kids would graduate totally unprepared for college, which would keep them from taking advantage of the free education offered by this program, not to mention prevent them from becoming the kind of scientists, mathematicians, and engineers that would keep America competitive in the global economy.
This space reserved for administrative use.
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s109 -3902
Introduced 9/14/2006, no action since. This isn't news. This is History.
This is a very insightful point. I've definitely observed this divide within physics. The research-directed types (of which I would consider myself one) are willing to pursue careers (probably in academia) regardless of the financial benefit, assuming of course that it provides enough to subsist on.
The main draw of the credential directed outlook is financial, and I don't think it's schooling expenses, but rather long-term earning potential, and thus a sense of security, which is the main incentives. More research money makes a career in the field more appealing. No one wants to spend their entire life squabbling over a handful of $10k grants, but if you know your field is going to be well-funded, even if your salary is less, you gain a much greater sense of stability. (I think more people who have the inclination to do research would choose to be 'poor' and stably funded than either slightly wealthier and poorly funded or 'poor' and poorly funded.)
Thus, if one really wants to increase US science and engineering power, the first thing that needs to be done is to provide more federal funding of research. The private sector isn't going to fund pure research because of the long timescales on which it pays off. Long term investments are ideal roles for the government. Educational incentives are great, but it doesn't do any good if they're not given the resources to make use of their education.
I've had some pretty awful teachers in my day that were there for various reasons. I have to wonder if someone is forced to teach for X years, will they really care? Will they actually offer a quality education to people or just kind of slide by until their debt is forgiven. If they had to keep up with some kind of quality standards, would they simply teach the test just to keep their scores up? Maybe it'll work, I'm just a little skeptical.
Doing the needful.
I couldn't disagree more. I've moved around enough to know that various places have their own cultures, and I've lived in places that overwhelmingly have exactly the sort of attitude you're talking about, so I don't fault you for it.
However, I can anecdotally provide myself -- and a number of my close friends -- as examples of people that would have loved to have pursued a college degree, and didn't. For the majority of us, the primary reason was cost, with arrogant disgust at the overall poor quality of community college education as a close second.
I think this sounds like a fantastic program that would increase the overall education of the average American (there'd be no excuse for not having at least some secondary education), which in turn would lead to more innovation in science and industry, which in turn would help the economy, which in turn would lead to better education.
I also don't expect to see it happen in this country in my lifetime.
When the Government says they are going to give you something for free put one hand over your wallet and the other over your privates and run like hell. There is nothing that is free in this life and if you wonder who is going to end up paying for this? Just look in the mirror.
ditto.
sometimes, nothing.
I totally agree that education at all levels should be free. Obtaining a PhD should cost nothing at all.
Why limit the program to engineering and the hard sciences? Are artists, medical professionals and linguistics experts not equally needed?
Also, before even beginning to talk about making secondary education free, we need to take the time to un-fuck our primary schools. That's a bigger priority.
Message contains 1 attachment: spam.gif
How many of you changed your major in college? Are you glad you were able to do so? Would you have done so if it cost you a full scholarship?
If you give science and engineering educations away for free, you aren't going to increase the number of people who recieve science and engineering educations. You are going to allocate the existing science/engineering slots in a slightly different way. If a university has the capacity to educate 100 graduates a year, that capacity is not going to increase because those students had their tuition paid by the government.
Perhaps if they had some sort of program for actually increasing the capacity of universities to churn out science/engineering graduates, it might make a difference... but you would do that with subsidies directly to the university itself, not by writing checks out to students.
It is going to make even less of a difference, because pretty much everyone going into a university science or engineering program is eligible for a subsidized loan. No one is forgoing an engineering or science degree because of the costs of tuition as it is.
will this be carried over retroactively? i'd like a 25K refund for my edumacation.
I've done really well out of being an Engineer, but if I had my time again, knowing what I do now, and looking back on my career, they'd need wild horses to pull me into Engineering.
Look, any of you youngsters out there with a liking for computers etc. become accountants or lawyers: loads more money, lots less stress, career length much longer, almost impossible for them to bring boat loads of people into your profession and cut the bottom out of the renumeration package. AND you get free time! As a lawyer or accountant you get loads of free time to do stuff that you like to do, like play with computers etc.
threadeds blog
Great - just what America needs - more overqualified people working in the fast food industry...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
People look at you funny if you want to talk about the space program or something crazy like that.
I never have that problem.
Of course, I work at a company that makes spacecraft.
Just explain me how the fact that they are democrat and one of them speaks Arabic is relevant to the discussion?
You seem to regard "democrat" and "speaks fluent Arabic" as flaws of character, which they are not.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Companies don't offshore so much because of education or degree. They offshore because people in other countries are willing and able to work for a much lower salary. Their cost of living is less than a tenth where they live, and they can support their family on the equivalent of fifty cents an hour. Companies need a lot of incentive to hire someone at fifty times the salary when they don't have to. Even when people in another country make more relative to their own economy compared to the US, they won't ask for as much because their lifestyle in that other country costs less and they live better with cheaper currency. Not even regulations (such as on environment, safety, security) will be enough to overcome that. Something drastic will have to happen to overcome the difference in cost of living, like maybe a Global Minimum Wage, something which would be fought by global companies. Until then, companies will just go where the costs are lower for the same educational level person.
Why is a university education not a free option for everybody? When my parents were young, sending children to University didn't bankrupt families. In Scotland all Scottish students can go to any university for free. All costs covered. Housing, books, lab fees, and other aspects of college life are expensive are all expensive -- don't just cover tuition. Cover everything required to go to university. Each year (or every few years), university gets more expensive, making it harder for middle class and poor families to afford. In a country that (purportedly) aspires to be a meritocracy, the playing field should be leveled for everybody -- meaning equal access to education, among other things. If it can't/won't level it, then the claims of getting ahead based on merit are so much hot air. When I was at Uni, I knew hundreds of students who thought the way I do. Equality was the watchword of the 60s and 70s. Where is that equality now that the young adults of the 60s and 70s are running the country? Where have their convictions gone?
It's not true - because it presupposed a mythical golden era where American kids didn't prefer other [era and socioeconomic level appropriate] activities and fields of study to math, science, and engineering.
There never was such a golden age.
This could actually work if kept in-state. It's pretty rare that anyone interested in subjects other than killing animals actually stays around. I can't recall the last time I talked to anyone who even accepts evolution in Montana, let alone has any interest in science. And, I hate to say it, but it's hitting the state pretty hard. A pretty large percentage of the deaths here occur because there's just not enough educated people here to maintain the infrastructures that people elsewhere in the US take for granted. And of those with a sold knowledge base, we're usually employed elsewhere and just surfing off the cheap price of land here.
How many companies are really driven by passion? Yes there are some but they are very rare. Most live quarter-by-quarter trying to pump up their share price. They do this by following the latest Wall St fashions. Right-sizing, diversifying, refocussing, out sourcing... In that context, passion is a meaningless emotion.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
You might declare it as defense research, but... the US constitution doesn't permit such subsidies.
"What gives you the idea the job market has 'no need' for those people?"
What gives me that idea are the hundreds of thousands of bright, well-educated science and tech workers who are under-employed and unemployed.
It would be far better to implement tax breaks to employers who invest in bringing in US citizens for interviews, in relocating US citizens, and in education and training US citizens... and to adjust such tax breaks that already exist in line with the inflation in costs of travel, education and training in the last 20 years.
They're doing far too little in the way of background investigations of visa applicants. Instead of these stupid instant data-base look-ups, they should be interviewing every applicant, their employers, co-workers, teachers, professors, family members, landlords, class-mates, etc. In a time when it can take a US citizen with ancestors going back to the 1700s 4 years to get a passport, all this whining from visa applicants because the current rubber-stamp process takes a few months is outrageous.
Ok, this guy is a genius!
1) we don't secure our border. Illegal immigrants all over the place.
2) Next we are required to educate their children in public schools - I just got my tax bill - including government school tax - I'm pissed. I don't have kids, why, exactly am I paying over 1,000 yr?
3) Next, when these illegal alien kids want to go to college, this genius wants it to be free? Screw that.
Has anyone ever heard that if you have to work for it, then it is worth more to you? I don't need my engineering degree worth lowered after working 8 years to save money so I could go to The University - while working 30+ hours a weeek in food service - just to have it given away.
Loans for citizens - yes. Free, no. Oh, the law on citizens needs to be changed. Being born on USA soil shouldn't make you a citizen unless both your parents were here legally.
years ago. Charlie came up with it, as I recall. But it was for ALL subjects.
Your college tuition is paid for, if you teach where the government sends you, for a few years.
Can someone refund my tuition???
People no longer go into the sciences because the career is simply not very enticing. I have an engineering degree from a very well-known and prestigous school. I even renewed my State engineering license on-line last night which is a note on the bottom of my resume. I have a Masters in computer science and teach part-time at a local college at night. My day job? I work for a Mortgage company and make way more than I did as an engineer. Of course, I may be changing careers again the way things are going with subprimes. I work back-office operations not sales. Two of my closest friends from my college days just attained their law degrees and are both working at law firms near their homes. There you have it. The value of a technical degree. As long as there is "free trade" between India and China with respect to labor we have no shot. I submit very few engineers remain in their field. Mine was robotics. With foreign buy-outs and bankruptcy I was happy to leave the field. I guess I made some poor employment choices. Who knows.
I thought all education in the US was intended to raise the failures up to lower mediocrity? C'mon, how the hell are we going to prance about congratulating ourselves on the multicultural victory over some such bullshit if we can't dismember education for smart hardworking people and spend all our time wringing our hands over pregnant teens, gangbangers and crackheads?
College is expensive. I'm all in favor of ways to allow everyone who wants to to be able to go to college without having to worry about the costs. Don't know how it would be funded but it would be great.
I'd be even MORE in favor if everyone graduating from High School had even basic skills such as reading. Perhaps if we focused more on making sure that students were actually functional with what they needed to know before passing them on to the next grade where it will be even harder for them to catch up we might not have to worry quite so much about this "skills" and "intelligence" gap from other countries.
We allow children to pass from grade to grade without them being ready whether to pass the problem to someone else or because the parents don't want them to be held back. Is it any wonder why they "can't" compete well when they get out of school?
Our schools do produce many brilliant students in probably every field imaginable every year. The problem is not that we don't have the capability to do it but that we are so concerned about pushing all students to be brilliant all the time that we quickly marginalize those students who don't measure up. As they continue to be pushed some students are able to catch up, many others aren't. If we really want to "improve" our showing in these fields when compared to other countries we need to do more than just provide the opportunity for the higher education. Let's not forget that the student has to understand the basics before they can go beyond that.
FDR didn't destroy America, he renewed our country by investing in common people (not big business).
"Montana Democratic Senator Max Baucus wants free college tuition for US math, science, and engineering majors conditional upon working or teaching in the field for at least four years.
Suppose through no fault of their own they aren't able to find employment in their field of study. Do they have to pay back the tuition?
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Free tuition isn't a new idea. I'm a student at Berea College in Ky and everybody has free tuition because we all meet one requirement. Being poor. Everybody is required to do a work study program and work 10 hours a week. Not a bad trade off. Alice Lloyd college also has a similar program.
Did i complain about that? Hell yes i did. Was it "too hard"? Not really. My problem was that the guy next door to me had a full ride because he played the flute, while on the other side i had an education major who's best friend (a senior at the time in college) had the extremely difficult senior project of making a paper mache dinosaur to prove that he could come up with with fun stuff for 2nd graders to do ... He didn't even need to PAINT it!
I support the music scene full heartedly... don't misunderstand me... but at my second university, i lived on the engineer floor and only 2 people had scholarships, everyone else was raking up huge debt bills or spending a bunch of time outside of classes working to try and pay for school/food/clothing... or was really lucky with rich parents. One of the two kids never left his room except to go to class, and then came right back to his room. He literally just sat in front of books for about 5-7 hours a day (that's not including class time). The other kid was a black jew. Apparently he found some black jew scholarship in the area, so it wasn't even an engineering scholarship, or a good grade scholarship, it was simply 1000$ because he was a black jew.
Do i think this will help? I think it would be PHENOMENAL for our country. To date, the #1 reason that my friends who dropped out of engineering college dropped out, is because of the effort needed (working, and schooling) wasn't worth the outcome. Why be a computer engineer (having to work outside of class just to pay bills), when i get an IT (information Technologies) degree, where the classes are easier, the degree on the wall will still says BS, more scholarships due to better grades, and a better looking resume when you can claim you had a 3.5+ GPA because you actually had time to study (not having to work outside of school) on TOP of it being easier. In the past 7 years working in the computer industry, the engineers were NOT making that much more (if they were making any more at ALL) than a bunch of guys without any degrees =/
I personally at least, would have studied my butt off and finished school at the FIRST school if i actually had the time to dedicate to studying, knew that i would graduate with no bills AND that i would have the prestige of calling my self an engineer. 4 year commitment after? Garunteed job? (i'd assume the school would help you look for a job to fulfill the commitment)? I'm not seeing a downfall to this....
"American society cares more about athletic ability than anything else." That's one of the things I liked best about the college I went to. MTU (Michigan Tech) completely axed the football program when government funding was reduced. The Football Program. It made my whole damn year that year, when I found out that my school cared more about education than sports. (the alumni coughed up extra to save the program, which I guess proves your point, but still, the School didn't cut funding elsewhere to save it) However, I'm pretty sure MTU is the exception that proves the rule, it might not be the only one, but it's the only one that I'm aware of.
Instead of offering a free education (scholarship) outright, make it free if they succeed in getting a certain GPA or final grades for particular classes. Perhaps some type of a deferred loan that they have to submit, agreeing to the notion that if they achieve a certain GPA in one of the approved majors of study (math, science, engineering, etc) they will receive a waiver for their loan, meaning they do not have to repay it. Otherwise they will be obligated to pay it back, probably with financing.
If we give high school graduates a free education with no strings attached, some of them might feel that they have nothing to lose if they decide to screw up. Speaking from direct experience, as well as several of my friends, I know I would have worked much harder if I had known I would have to pay back the loan if I didn't get a particular GPA or certain grades in certain subjects. As it was I finally finished school free of charge, but only because I got a job at the University where I attended, and they offered free tuition for employees.
Make it free if they prove themselves, otherwise there will be at least some students who just take advantage of it. Perhaps this provision was already made, but I didn't see any reference to it in TFA.
And they said zombies weren't real!
Whether a person is credential motivated or not, they will still learn the material, and I expect that either the material itself or the side benefits (logical thinking, problem solving) will benefit society. Also, people that start out with a credential motivation may come to love the subject.
There's something a little disturbingly utilitarian about the proposal of granting free tuition only to those people. This sort of philosophy makes me wonder whether the line would be drawn around science/engineering as a whole, or around only those science/engineering programs that have a utilitarian (read: "commercial") appeal. I would think it would be hard for the government to argue that engineering and category theory are "useful" but that philosophy and rhetoric are not. I would think it would be easy to argue that engineering, science, and mathematics majors are more useful to society than philosophy and rhetoric majors. It seems reasonable to assume that the "usefulness" of a person to a company is very strongly correlated to his or her pay. (Not that I dislike philosophy majors. I would have loved to have been a philosophy major, but I restricted myself to 3 courses in that area because it seemed impractical.) If, however, research-directed programs are ruled out, the result would likely be a forcible segragation of research-directed and credential-directed students, even more than there is now. Maybe this is where we're headed anyway, but it would be regrettable as the forced mingling of the two has been hugely productive for both in the past. Agreed.(PS: The phrase "a little disturbingly utilitarian" seems like an oxymoron to me.)
I hope none of you suckers hooting for this have deluded yourselves into thinking for a minute that this is going to pass? This guy's a diversion for something.
It won't matter. The first thing to do is get some politicians in place that are willing to actually try to minimize outsourcing and H1-B Visas. Or at least put policies in place that make it less attractive. It doesn't matter how many qualified college graduates we have stateside if companies refuse to look at them.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
Why not use this money to fund existing science programs and basic research? We seem to do less and less of that as time goes on. If students know they can find decent pay and interesting work in science, more will choose it as a career.
...and in keeping with current policies, this should be a faith-based initiative.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
I think this may slightly increase the enrollments in such program, but I think more than anything, it'd just make for some very happy students who were already planning on math/science as a career.
However, if it were not limited to the 18-year old high-school grads, this would be a HUGE program for those of us who might be looking to get out of their first careers and back into something new - I would love to move into something like High School programming teacher after I burn out with my 20+ years here as a programmer. And I would do it in a heartbeat if such a deal would pay for my continued education!
So what is science? If it's a Bachelors of Science, do you qualify, regardless of major? With college prices already skyrocketing due to artificial demand created by government subsidies, what will the government do when college prices increase at an even faster pace than they do now, and everyone starts demanding "free" tuition? The "free" tuition for the sciences will just keep becoming a larger and larger expense in the meantime. Your tax dollars at work.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
I grew up in WV, and they had a state grant (forget the name) but basically paid for tuition if you were eligible, which sounds great. But the stipulation was that you had to remain in the state at least 5 years after graduating. As you can guess WV has a hard time keeping people there, so here's the rub. There's NO JOBS. That's the reason people aren't staying, I even left and found a job making 4x what (if at all) I could have made back home with the same cost of living.
So while a free ride to college sounds nice, make sure to read the fine print. Anything that forces you into a specific job market (especially one that sucks) could hurts you in the long term.
What are you talking about?
Former IT guru, up to 100k/yr within 5 years of graduating. Learned more about mainframes than any of the offshore people, and good enough at design and implementation to lead a group.
Engineers are paid highly right after graduation, and even more if/when they recieve their P.E. license.
You sir, have NO idea what you're talking about. Those are well paid professions which is the reason the people in those fields do not become teachers. What you are obviously attempting to achieve is ludicrous salaries, which, BTW, a large majority of high-level company executives have B.S. in Science and Engineering. You can do ANYTHING with a B.S. in Engineering.
it sounds like a calculated risk.
"free college tuition" -- I think that it would be better stated as a taxpayer-supported scholarship program.
If we really did tax everyone -- and that IS where the money to fund this should come from, I don't favor borrowing it from the Chinese and thus shifting the payment burden to subsequent generations -- to pay for this, I would think that we at least want to ensure that we are not funding a bumper crop of math, engineering and science doofuses. The Slashdot audience is big enough as it is.
Some level of demonstrated ability should be a requirement to qualify for such a scholarship.
I'm waiting for Senator Baucus to be trumped by some other senatorial bozo with a "free beer" program.
"Free" has always been a touchstone word with our elected bozos. They should be horsewhipped every time they use the word.
Just like increasng financial aid is directly responsible for increasing university tuition costs (hey! more money, so why not charge more? otherwise, we the university will lose it!), a plan of subsidizing math, science and engineering tuition will raise the costs of every other majors. Suddenly, those majors are paid for by the government, i.e. your taxes, so now there's all this money to charge for the other majors. End result: maybe you have more engineers/scientists, but at a significant cost to everything else.
Not to mention this is going to cost a crap load of money. Where is that going to come from? Sure, you might think that money invested will return itself in societal benefits, but truth be told, it will be a very poor return. A private investment would not only keep costs low, but would better adjust to the job market (less people will invest in degrees that have less job possiblity and vice versa).
Boycott Sony
There is a world wide shortage of nurses. Why not include Nurses and give an even bigger bonus to Nurses who go back to school and become instructors in Nursing Programs. In the USA many colleges have to turn away qualified applicants for Nursing Programs because they don't have enough staff to handle more students and places for Nurses to get quality training (i.e. teaching hospitals). There are plenty of people with degrees in technology programs in USA that can't find jobs. Since the demand in Nursing extends to multiple countries if the USA student can't find a job in USA they can move to another country for a job in the field.
I also heard of a demand for highly qualified mechanics that understand the electronics in the vehicle and the mechanical end, also. The demand isn't as strong in multiple countries, but just as high in USA as generic demand for BS degrees in Science and Engineering.
If it increases the pool of qualified manufacturing / shop / tv repair men teachers, it is -- and right now, there is a real shortage of manufacturing teachers who know manufacturing and tv repair, even leaving aside the issue of their teaching skills.
All kidding aside, teaching is not the end-all-be-all. If the U.S. job market is destroyed by cheap foreign labor, then it matters not what people are teaching -- there is an obvious limit on the amount of teachers needed -- are you going to have an entire country of teachers?
The problem is the progressive "hollowing" out of the middle. It will get to the point where either you are a super-star in Math or Science or you are nothing as your job can be done cheaper by someone else overseas. You cannot solely concern yourself with the super-stars but the average person. We've seen what happens when you don't.
Here is the larger pattern:
People used to farm until a number of factors came into play, then they were told to "learn a trade". They learned a trade and now manufacturing, etc. is done overseas, so they were told to "get a degree", "move up". Now they have a degree and we are exporting degreed jobs. So how exactly is getting a degree going to help when it is not valued in the market?
I disagree on the grounds that it's setting a bad economic precedent if our political leaders start awarding subsidies (income redistribution by another name) to students based on degree. Instead, they're free to encourage (via the media, their blog site, etc) education in science & people are free to act in their own rational self-interest based on that knowledge. We don't need the Visible Hand of government to bureaucratically manage this for us, nor would such subsidies necessarily even accomplish their intended effect. One possible negative side effect is that: many more students would go for a degree in a science/engineering degree only to drop out after a year or change majors. That would not necessarily be for our aggregate good, nor would that necessarily lead to an increase in science/engineering students, nor would that necessarily lead to an overall increase in the quality of education of our science/eng students.
Rather than tax cuts for businesses, why not apply additional taxes to businesses that hire foreign workers over equally qualified Americans, which would help pay for the education of American workers?
Check out my sysadmin blog!
I have been doing some real research into China. I don't think there is much risk there.
A) A large population doesn't matter if they have no money. Most of China has no money. Otside of hong kong or Beijing.
b) There schools teach by strict memorization. no questions. Plagerism is rampant, and all student pretty much bribe someone to get their PhD. Creativity is not welcome.
c) My experience with India was pretty much the same way, except a little more money per person.
Last I heard, it is already possible to get a free college education by fulfilling a 4 year employment mandate.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think the important effect is that more people will chose to major in these fields just because it is cheaper even if they could afford the degree without the grant.
Well, that's a given.
Whether a person is credential motivated or not, they will still learn the material, and I expect that either the material itself or the side benefits (logical thinking, problem solving) will benefit society. Also, people that start out with a credential motivation may come to love the subject.
There will be societal benefits in any case: there are always societal benefits when you encourage more people to become educated. And you're quite right that credential-directed types may be drawn into research; I probably would not have studied pure mathematics had it not been in the same faculty as my credential-directed computer science program.
That said, my last point (the segregation of credential-directed and research-directed students) means that it will be harder for credential-directed types to discover the world of research.
I would think it would be easy to argue that engineering, science, and mathematics majors are more useful to society than philosophy and rhetoric majors. It seems reasonable to assume that the "usefulness" of a person to a company is very strongly correlated to his or her pay. (Not that I dislike philosophy majors. I would have loved to have been a philosophy major, but I restricted myself to 3 courses in that area because it seemed impractical.)
Easy for you, maybe. I was talking about "usefulness" to society, and it's telling that you interpret that to be usefulness to a company. And if you think mathematicians are all well-paid, well, you probably don't know many mathematicians!
(PS: The phrase "a little disturbingly utilitarian" seems like an oxymoron to me.)
Yes, given everything else you write, that makes sense. But the word "utilitarian" has a negative side: a "utilitarian" word is one concerned with practicality, with the immediate and quantifiable usefulness of an idea. A utilitarian world is not a world for time-wasters or daydreamers.
It's this which is really the problem. A huge part of the past achievements of our species would have been difficult or impossible to justify on utilitarian grounds. Much of pure mathematics, not to mention the arts and the humanities. It won't make anyone a lot of money, at least not in the short term, but it's worth doing anyway.
A policy like this, ruling out free tuition for arts and humanities students, would be tantamount to a government statement that the usefulness of a student is correlated to their expected later pay. They already do this in a number of ways, but this would be an extra reinforcement of that. I have a hard time believing that such a policy would fund blue-sky pure mathematicians to the same degree.
A friend of mine is somewhere around $120,000 in debt from his student loans for an undergraduate degree. He was able to acquire that much debt easily over the 5 years it took him to graduate. Don't think that because you briefly looked into student loans that you know what you're talking about.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Perhaps Slashdot isn't the best place to ask this, but are the arts and humanities degrees now considered a second class education?
While I can appreciate the need for increasing the number of science-related students, it seems absurd to give them free tuition while leaving the arts and humanities majors to pick up their tab.
I, myself, am an English major working toward a Ph.D. I'm looking at paying a minimum of $20,000 just to get a 4-year bachelor's degree -- not to mention the cost of books, lab fees, or anything else that might come up. Now, if I were to look at Scotty the Engineer sitting in the desk next to me -- who's paying $0 for his own degree -- I think I should be rightfully ticked off.
Don't forget just how valuable we humanities majors are, even in the education of a science majoring student. Without English, you would be unable to write a comprehensible thesis paper. Without Ethics and Philosophy, you would have no appreciation for human life. And without History, you might find yourself on the modern-day Manhattan Project.
I'm a compsci major, give me free tuition.
as far as any other majors are concerned, they're not as important as science, math or engineering.
These three fields are what keeps the population safe and alive.
They're using their grammar skills there.
it won't make a damn bit of difference... so long as you can get a coder from some country for only $500/month... the american programmer will not get the job. i don't approve of this mindset, just stating the facts. (and yes, i have had people working for me offshore for $500/month doing 60 hrs/week)
oh sure, there will be those jobs that are more difficult and the employer wants to insure quality, but the vast majority of software work doesn't fit into that category. only so many people are needed for high end development. the other work will just get shipped offshore for $10k/yr (excluding those companies that do not trust work done outside their field of view)
personally, while shopping for project funding, i was hit numerous times with the question "what's your Indian solution?"... meaning, do you have your offshore operations already lined up.
i refuse to ship development offshore... which is one of the reasons i found no funding.
Tuition is not a problem. There are plenty of foreign students at US universities that are not paying tuition. I think the underling problem is US education from the 1st grade on. They have been trying to fix US educational system forever and noting is working, which leads me to believe that nobody wants to fix the system they just want us to believe that they want to fix the system. So reduced tuition will not fix a problem you need to educate people from early on so they are capable and willing to learn.
Funny, with all of the offshoring and H1-Bs visas (to bring down salaries) there is a glut of people with engineering, math, and science degrees that are currently underemployed. I don't see how more degrees in engineering, math, and science is going to fix it.
More degrees has never equated to more jobs. Corporate America believes that American Engineers and Scientists are too expensive. Period.
One reason the United States is competitive on a global scale (there's a shrinking list of reasons, which is why the United States is increasingly less competitive) is that getting a job in the United States is like the all-star game. The best people from all around the world work here, as a general rule. (There are exceptions both ways, generalities are rarely universally true, assorted other disclaimers), At the same time, the American education system is becoming increasingly worse. So increasing numbers of Americans are no longer competitive individuals in the world market, even though they're more than competitive on a national level. In some respect, we're stuck between employing more and more foreigners and falling behind as a country even more than we are now.
Educating not more, but better scientists, engineers, and other professionals is the way to employ more Americans. Growing industry beyond the point of the competitive worldwide labor market is the other way. Embracing protectionism will just sink the country entirely. I'm not saying American engineers are necessarily dead weight, just that if you're the typical large American business building an all-star team out of workers from all around the world, you might not pick an otherwise very qualified American, and that the slight advantages from employing an international all-star team is one of the few things helping American businesses to compete.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
GOD YES!
I would LOVE to go on and work on a Master's or PhD.
But, I like to eat, see. . .
(to be honest, I'm probably not one that's actually "cut out" for that sort of thing, though I'd like to think of myself that way - and I'd sure like to give it a try. But then there's that whole mortgage and car-payment thing. . . )
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I graduated in 1998 with a degree in Chemical Engineering and a second in Material Science. Upon graduation the company I interned with went on a 2 year hiring freeze. The job market was greatly depressed. So I did contract work which didn't pay that well and was very unsteady. I did that for about two years. Right now I make a dollar an hour less than I did as a contract worker but the work is very steady. I work as a security guard which only needs a GED!! I paid for my education out of pocket - so when do I get to work in the field for four years?
My experience is the opposite: that it is very hard to find qualified people. However, your sentiments are expressed here on slashdot again and again. What is going on? Am I just not in the right area, or the right business to experience what you are experiencing? (I live in San Diego and make visualization software for automakers). Can you give me examples of companies that are underpaying for tech jobs and hiring lots of foreigners? Also I've heard (again, on slashdot) of tech "sweatshops" where foreign workers are employed for brief stints before returning home. Can anyone name such a company?
Thanks.
Jamie
Where the hell do you work?
Where I work, no one talks about sports, except one guy who coaches a high school Lacrosse team (no football, baseball, or basketball is ever discussed here). Conversations about space exploration, future technologies, sci-fi novels, etc. are common. Everyone here is an engineer.
Unfortunately, the other highly common conversation topic is how incompetent company management is. (It's unfortunate because it's true, and we have to suffer with the effects of their dumb-ass decisions.) Oh well; I guess you can't have everything.
Orbital?
best
1. of the highest quality, excellence, or standing: the best work; the best students.
2. most advantageous, suitable, or desirable: the best way.
everyone
every person
"A friend of mine is somewhere around $120,000 in debt from his student loans for an undergraduate degree. He was able to acquire that much debt easily over the 5 years it took him to graduate."
You didn't read the part about "Stafford" loans did you? Did you see that? Did you see how I qualified it? Did you see that I explained that Stafford loans are the very easily acquired loans, and the other loans are a different matter?
"Don't think that because you briefly looked into student loans that you know what you're talking about."
I have them. I paid for college with them. I did enough research that I could tell you the ins and outs of every type before you could do a Google search for them.
Now on to the last part, in order to get as much money as your "friend" did, he'd have to venture outside the type of loans that are usually vilified into normal, collateral based loans.
So your "friend" chose to exceed the limits imposed by the government to prevent him from over burdening himslef without sufficient possibility of return.
If your friend has 120,000 in debt, it didn't all come from student loans, OR it wasn't just for an undergrad degree, OR you're a liar.
I know which one my money is on.
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
"Montana Democratic Senator Max Baucus wants free college tuition for US math, science, and engineering majors conditional upon [snip] teaching in the field for at least four years." (There, fixed it for you, Sen Max).
When you think about college graduates, who tend to be the students with the highest incomes out of college, and through their careers? Business, Law, Medical, Engineering, Science, I believe. Math majors can probably find jobs in almost any of those fields, as all those fields rely on math. Try being an English or History major. I do not believe that Science and Engineering students should get a free ride through college, for *working* high-payed jobs in Science and Engineering (Ok, not all of them are high payed (researchers and teachers in academia come to mind), but we have to look at the big picture on this). Not unless we are going to move to free tuition for all students.
What this Senator seems to be proposing, it seems to me, is that we give some of the students with the best job prospects, and good average salaries, free rides, while allowing students in other academic disciplines which may not be as lucrative to still have to pay their own way. That doesn't make much sense to me. Now, if someone is going to teach. . . that could be a different story. But, isn't there already a Dept. of Ed. program to pay back the student loans of teachers? As long as their are enough good-paying jobs out there for scientists, engineers, and mathemeticians, they can pay back their own student loans. The best students can already get scholarships and fellowships to pay for part of their education, if not all of it.
It's all well and good to offer free tuition but from my own experience, most people who excel at science, math, and engineering do not have the right personality, mindset, whatever you want to call it, to be teachers.
As a science teacher (7 years of teaching high school chemistry, physics, and earth science, now I'm trying to get into community college teaching), I have experienced the problem first hand.
IMHO, a few major changes would help out the whole education system, not just science/math.
1) Increase teachers' pay to more closely match that of similarly educated workers. Teaching (k-12) has historically been a "woman's job" and as we all know, historically women have been paid less for doing the same job as a man. I'm not condoning it, in fact, I think it's awful! I have a B.A. in Chem and an M.S. in Geosciences and I was making $65k my last year of teaching. A decent wage but compared to someone with my same level of experience and education it's about $20k too low. And don't give me that horseshit about "but teachers get so much vacation time", most every teacher I know used their "summer vacation" to do required professional development, take more classes, or many had a job just to make ends meet.
2) Reduce class size. The reason that so many kids slip through the cracks is that they are in a room with 35+ other students. One teacher can only help so many students at one time. Once you throw in all the time a teacher spends in a period just "riding herd" on the students, a student is lucky if they get one minute of time from the teacher. Get class size down to about 20-24 students per teacher and then you'll see some improvements.
3) Allocate more money for the classroom/allocate more money per student. California allocates about $6000/student/year. Out of that comes all the administration costs, teacher's salaries, maintenance of facilities, books, electricity, water, etc. Not a whole lot makes it to the classroom. I was lucky if I had $300/year to spend on supplies for the classroom. I had to replace broken lab equipment, buy videos, etc out of that every year. I was doing much the same labs that I had done when I was in high school 20 years ago.
4) Finally, give the teachers back some of the power that has been taken away. At every school I taught at, if there was a dispute between a teacher and student, all a parent had to do was threaten to sue and the administration would bend over and grab their ankles. Never once did anyone ask the question, "Who's the professional in this dispute?" "Who has the most to gain from filing this complaint?" Teachers should have to option to PERMANENTLY boot a disruptive student from their classroom. What do we do with the chronic miscreants you ask? FINE THE PARENTS! I've found that if you inconvenience the parent, the parent will crack down on their kid.
Now before you all start to cry about "teacher-tenure" and that it's so hard to get rid of a bad teacher, true tenure (you can't be fired, except in the MOST extreme cases) for k-12 teachers does not exist. As a teacher I had "permanent status", this is the same level of protection as any other contract employee. To fire a teacher you need to document the problem, attempt to help the employee(teacher) correct the problem through counseling, education, whatever. Then if the problem persists you can fire then with cause. The problem is that most administrators are not willing to follow the procedure to get rid of a bad teacher. I admit that the process does take a bit longer in education, on the scale of a year to two, but it's not impossible to fire a teacher because they have some special protections that other workers don't have. The only real protection a teacher has anymore is the union, and that's not saying much.
Judging by your sig, you work at a law firm (or with lawyers). Thus, I'm deducing that lawyers tend to talk incessantly about sports.
I am a law student, and judging by the only fucking thing my classmates talk about, my experiences support your assertion.
This program might help provide a better pool of educated teachers and US scientists, but what really sets countries like China, India and Japan apart is their work ethic.
Kids over there are driven to extreme amounts of education and training (probably too much so, creating an imbalance in family life) but because their parents train them to work hard and apply themselves fully, they get done what kids playing Playstation all the time in the comfy USA will likely never accomplish.
I think a better solution would be some incentives to parents (tax credit, or something else creative) to raise children better. This could be measured by the childrens' exam scores or GPA, for example.
You can't bribe someone to be a nerd.
Either you are interested in learning about the world or they aren't.
American kids aren't avoiding math and science for lack of funds.
American society cares more about athletic ability than anything else.
We act like sports is life-and-death.
Play in a company softball game and see how people act.
All anybody ever wants to talk about is sports.
People look at you funny if you want to talk about the space program or something crazy like that.
But if you want to talk about how Johnny Random hit a ball with a bat, that's fuckin fascinating..
Maybe its just where I work or something?
Maybe if the most able/interested, instead of stupid rich kids, were the ones getting degrees this would be less of a problem in the US. Kinda like other countries.
Much like you I can't compare Tech's priorities to many other institutions, but during my four years there I was impressed with the focus strong focus on academics.
Americans don't even care about sports. Until I can turn on the NFL and see large crowds of people standing up and singing throughout the whole game, I have to say Americans are just apathetic and spoiled compared to, for instance, Europeans or Latin Americans.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Before we subsidize the science/engineering market for Big Business, why don't we remove the previous subsidy, the H1B visas? Otherwise we are just following the usual government template, which is to interfere in a market, and then try to fix the fallout from that interference (H1B to keep supply costs down) by interfering in the market some more (free degrees to Americans to compete against the low-cost H1B). Nah. This makes too much sense and cuts out the government middle-man. Congress will never go for that.
B5 71 ED FB 55 D6 4E 68 07 25 E2 FA CA 93 F0 2F, is mine! All mine!
There was a post up above that said something similar. It depends on what you want to reward. This is a new type of thinking reward someone for something they are going to do and hold them accountable.
Merit based rewards someone for something they have done.
Need based is helping people who have a financial need.
I dont think the latter applies this isnt necessarily about need (ie without this they couldnt go to school, there are loan, etc as you pointed out). It about lower the barriers to everyone (including the rich).
B5 71 ED FB 55 D6 4E 68 07 25 E2 FA CA 93 F0 2F, is mine! All mine!
I don't have much to say about math or science, but I do know how engineering works. You spend four years at a big state college and then find yourself making $50k. Very few other majors offer that. I don't think there's a problem with the financial incentives.
But in high school, a very small group of people went off to engineering school. Most people said, "I hate math and science. I can't do that." Even in college, people switched from engineering to other majors for various reasons (nobody seemed to switch to engineering). I doubt most were financial.
This suggests that the reason we don't have more engineers is that engineering is hard. I suspect this problem lies more in the teaching than in the students. I remember having a friend who was really smart, but for some reason he just didn't understand multivariable calculus. He couldn't do partial derivatives. This confused me, because if you really understand how single-variable derivatives work, partial derivatives are a straightforward extension. So maybe nobody ever taught him how derivatives actually work. I don't think it has anything to do with the level of abstraction or inherent brain wiring issues.
To graduate, engineering students have to apply all the math, chemistry, and physics knowledge they ever learned, so missing a crucial piece of understanding early on due to poor instruction makes it difficult to proceed.
If the problem is so obvious, you might wonder, why don't schools do anything about it? The fact is, they do. Tutoring services are almost always available. Some departments try to put their best instructors in the introductory classes. Most high schools do their part to make sure students actually understand stuff too (though universities have accepted their position filling in gaps in this understanding). It's difficult to catch everyone who needs help, but they certainly try to.
So even with high starting salaries and people trying to make sure students understand the basics pretty well, it's still difficult to get more engineering majors. And this leads to the more fundamental cause. The fact is, we live such comfortable lives that making more money isn't that enticing. As a kid, you see many successful adults who don't have engineering degrees, so you assume that there are many paths to financial stability, and engineering seems like one of the more difficult ones. So there's no reason to work that hard.
In societies where life sucks for normal people, engineering and science are paths up. But in our society, they're just two paths of many (you don't see many engineering students from inner cities because the kids there don't have any successful engineers around as role models).
Anyway, all of this is to say that getting more scientists and engineers is going to require more than free tuition (at that point, it's too late anyway). It's going to require people to see engineers and scientists as people to be like, and from an early age.
I don't have much to say about math or science, but I do know how engineering works. You spend four years at a big state college and then find yourself making $50k. Very few other majors offer that. I don't think there's a problem with the financial incentives.
But in high school, a very small group of people went off to engineering school. Most people said, "I hate math and science. I can't do that." Even in college, people switched from engineering to other majors for various reasons (nobody seemed to switch to engineering). I doubt most were financial.
This suggests that the reason we don't have more engineers is that engineering is hard. I suspect this problem lies more in the teaching than in the students. I remember having a friend who was really smart, but for some reason he just didn't understand multivariable calculus. He couldn't do partial derivatives. This confused me, because if you really understand how single-variable derivatives work, partial derivatives are a straightforward extension. So maybe nobody ever taught him how derivatives actually work. I don't think it has anything to do with the level of abstraction or inherent brain wiring issues.
To graduate, engineering students have to apply all the math, chemistry, and physics knowledge they ever learned, so missing a crucial piece of understanding early on due to poor instruction makes it difficult to proceed.
If the problem is so obvious, you might wonder, why don't schools do anything about it? The fact is, they do. Tutoring services are almost always available. Some departments try to put their best instructors in the introductory classes. Most high schools do their part to make sure students actually understand stuff too (though universities have accepted their position filling in gaps in this understanding). It's difficult to catch everyone who needs help, but they certainly try to.
So even with high starting salaries and people trying to make sure students understand the basics pretty well, it's still difficult to get more engineering majors. And this leads to the more fundamental cause. The fact is, we live such comfortable lives that making more money isn't that enticing. As a kid, you see many successful adults who don't have engineering degrees, so you assume that there are many paths to financial stability, and engineering seems like one of the more difficult ones. So there's no reason to work that hard.
In societies where life sucks for normal people, engineering and science are paths up. But in our society, they're just two paths of many (you don't see many engineering students from inner cities because the kids there don't have any successful engineers around as role models).
Anyway, all of this is to say that getting more scientists and engineers is going to require more than free tuition (at that point, it's too late anyway). It's going to require people to see engineers and scientists as people to be like, and from an early age.
Is this better? Free education means poorer quality education. Money doesn't grow on trees. Think that needs a <rant> tag?
Many student loans out there agree to forgive your debt should you complete some number of years in a teaching position. In other cases, companies will either help you pay off your debt, OR pay for you to go to graduate school, in which case you can earn enough to pay off your debts.
So, regarding this guy's proposal -- I have not RTA, but I can guess just by his being a politician:
First, do you really want to pay off the education BEFORE they've completed their degree? What if they complete three and a half years of school, before they quit? Also, how do you know who these students are? I suppose you just need a giant database of students, with access to their financial and school situations in order the make payments. Finally, where will the money come from?
Just hire those with the degrees who are not presently working in these fields because companies aren't hiring us. They'd rather pay contractors from other countries.
"You can't bribe someone to be a nerd. Either you are interested in learning about the world or they aren't." Maybe just interest alone is a sufficient condition to create a nerd. It won't create an engineer or a physicist. At some point along the line, you have to sit down and do problems which are either right or wrong according to the laws of nature, and often demonstrably so in a lab by anyone. Most people don't have that sort of ability.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
What happens to the hapless college students when, four years after this is implemented, there are no more domestic jobs in those fields?
"I can't find any jobs in my field."
"Sorry, you didn't fulfill the requirements of the program, please fork up $100K."
"How am I going to do that without a job?"
"Sir, are you refusing to pay?"
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
I've long advocated a similar plan. I especially think it'd be great to offer to pay people through medical school if they'd work every nth year at a cost of living wage while they either taught or offered affordable healthcare. More people could afford to become doctors and to offer their services at a lower cost if not paying back substantial student loans.
Free education would be one step towards low cost, or possibly socialized, medicine. Of course you'd also want to create incentives to drive healthcare related research (free education in bioscience, shorter patents on drugs and medical related IP, etc), cut red tape, decrease absurd litigation and the related insurance needed by doctors, and bring healthcare insurance under control.
Free education and healthcare are two staples of a civilized society IMHO. Educated, healthy citizens are going to be more productive than uneducated, sickly citizens. Limited natural resources is not much of an issue for our society but limited, properly trained, human resources is a major issue. We need to stop being penny wise and pound stupid and do what it takes to make every citizen as useful as possible. We might make lower wages but things will get cheaper and better so we'll all end up better off. Rather than creating wealth at the top of our society and letting it trickle down I think it makes more sense to raise the average quality of life and pull our entire society up by it's bootstraps.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
No. Actually, the reason they do it is because
they disagree and/or don't want others to learn something.
They try to bury the post. It's not likely the mod
was on crack, just a stupid wingnut that could not
stand anything written that messed with their head.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Unfortunately at this point, there's not many places that coincide with long-term IT that those in Ohio could currently afford (along with moving over there). That was the 1990's - if you moved from Ohio in any reason at that time, you were more than likely to be on the high-end. Otherwise, you probably moved towards Ohio due to its cost. Now, those whom are left are those either unable to move
IT in Ohio isnt like oranges in Alaska - and it'd be quite better off to not only drop the funding, but to additionally require it offered on a non-selective basis for citizens.
Conditions like these do require these kind of measures, as tuition will either be raised, or if we take the better of the two roads, paid by immigrants and trimming of existing funding.
It's EXTREMELY hard in this country to become a college educated man if you're not on scholarship, parent's money or a minority.
But, it's worth more than you think. Even with help from the state (I mean state, not fed, I'm in Colorado, a great state to live in if you're educating yourself) and a little from the 'rents, I'm still working full time on top of a full time credit load. The advantage? I'm making about %50 more than the heavy majority of others my age.
Here soon, I'll be making $50k+/yr. I'm 21. I'm about to finish up an AS to transfer to UCD for a double major--ME/EE. I've been working full time since I was 18, in a field relative to my major. I'm a machinist, although I've just recently lost my job, there's no shortage of demand for people with my qualifications anywhere in all of the industries an ME or an EE may find himself in. Hence why I'll soon be making 50k. There is one major advantage to working like a dog for your education, it often entails industry experience. If you take a year longer to get your degree because you have to work full time, but you make sure it's work applicable to your major, you have 5 years of experience when you walk into that interview for an extremely well paying job. Plain and simple. In the interim, when you're waiting to finish up that BS, an AS with 2 years of experience in a technical field in and of itself is worth at least $35k/yr. Good enough to pay for school and live on your own if you're not a parent yet.
As someone who can appreciate just how hard it is, or at least how much hard work and stress it takes, I say keep it the way it is. The instant education isn't something you have to work your ass off for, the instant all MY hard work goes out the window and I'm a dime a dozen. Fuck that. I've worked way too fucking hard, planning my life out for years to be a well paid professional making more than anyone else my age in a field that I love; just to have it thrown out the window in the name of solving a nonexistent problem.
Someone wants to be educated, they'll be educated. Don't make all my hard work mean nothing because lazy fucks think its too hard to go to class and work in the same week.
Of all the Universal Constants, here's one I know: Nice guys finish last
Yes, and possibly lunar soon. I know lots of folks pooh pooh aerospace, but it has its moments. And I get to play with the niftiest toys. :)
From someone that has an engineering degree and lived in China for the past six years, I think it is wonderful idea that is past due. We are getting our butts handed to us by China and India with no end in site. The only way we are going have an edge in the intellectual property race is to start cranking out more intellectuals that are made in the USA. Obviously, citizenship would be a requirement in my mind for a free education.
It is bad policy for government to fund one college major but not another.
Ok, I guess the answer was "no". Orbital is a company that makes spacecraft. I guess you must work for Lockheed Martin.
Have you ever been anywhere else in the world? You can start a conversation in all of Europe, Africa, and South America about soccer with 90% of the populations there (at least the males). People talk about sports because the real world and jobs can be difficult and not fun. Competition is a (hopefully positive) release for many people - whether it's talking about or taking part in competition. I'm a system admin and what do I talk to my coworkers about when we've got downtime? Football.
"Maybe its just where I work or something?"
No, it isn't just where you work. I've lived in five out of 50 United States in several jobs, and it's like that everywhere. Except you forgot gambling.
These days, I took my skills online into the global freelancer market where it is appreciated.
But I've learned that saying "I work in computers." to a fellow American neighbor is the equal of saying "I'm a witch doctor. I dance around a pentagram drawn in goat's blood while biting the heads off chickens and shaking some maracas."
Briefly looking at Wikipedia tells me that private loans designed for students are still considered student loans. Obviously he didn't get into that much debt from just Stafford loans. Clearly the great-great-grandparent isn't talking about government loans, since he advocates the government doing more loaning out itself and less relying on private firms to loan money to students. The problem here is that you aren't using 'student loans' the way everyone else in this thread is using them. Admittedly, I mistook your confusion about what we were talking about for ignorance, when you are just talking about something else entirely. The original point of this thread was that it might be cheaper for the government to do all the loaning itself, instead of subsidizing private loans. You responded "No one can get deep into dept off government loans". Your point may be correct, but it's irrelevant to this thread, because it's not what we were talking about.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
If I invent the transistor and then go to work for the railroad, does that make me a semi-conductor?
But no one seems to care about how to teach math.
In my experience, that is because no one knows how to teach math.
In many ways, math is like another language. Imagine if everyone in school, for some reason, needed to learn Malagasy. Now, there aren't too many translators around between Malagasy and English, so most of the people who would be teaching it are going to have to learn it on their own, in one way or another. Some will learn it from books, some might listen to tapes, etc. The fact is, that most of these teachers will not learn it very well. The ones who do learn it well will be those rare souls who could have been explorers in an earlier age, who have a talent for picking up a new language even without a translator. It would be an even rarer soul who would be able to then teach the language successfully - most of the ones who learned it well, learned it as if by an innate gift, and they will think that only those with a rare innate gift could learn it as they did.
That is the situation that Math is in. It is not so much that it is hard to learn, as that few who know it well know how to teach it, because they too had to figure it out for themselves instead of being taught. So unlike most fields, you cannot just teach it the way you were taught, because for most of the students, that doesn't work. And then only those who idiosyncratically figure it out for themselves will understand it, perpetuating the cycle.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to pretend that we're at the top of the heap. But an amazing number of engineering jobs are moving overseas not because of quality, but simply because of salary. It's a looooot cheaper to hire ten Chinese engineers than ten engineers in the USA. And if your product is being manufactured in China (which is, again, quite likely because of cost), there are other benefits in communication between engineering and manufacturing, etc..
That being said, I think there's already enough of an economic stimulous to get motivated people into engineering. The MEs and EEs that I went to school with are, without exception, making very good money. One guy, who had very good grades, started out just shy of $100k per year with just a bachelors degree. Two of my other friends, one an EE, and one an ME, ended up getting married, so they found jobs at the same plant. Between the two, they were pulling in over $200k before long.
The reason why there are such good paying jobs is because ME and EE are *hard*. At least being a good one, anyway. We do *not* need to lead people into the field who just want free tuition, as opposed to people who are actually capable of the career. It would be like all of the schools who lured unsuspecting people into paying lots of money for intensive courses to get their MCSE, on the lure of high salaries afterwards... only to find out that not only were they not prepared for the real world, there were a hundred thousand other schmucks just like them fighting for the same low-paying jobs.
Now, there is a different class of engineer with which I am familiar... the civil engineer. *Most* of the CEs that I know have boring jobs that they don't like, and don't make that good of money. There's an interesting correlation... those who are in that position went into civil because it sounded easier than ME or EE. They're just the sort of people you don't really want to shovel into the engineering program. (For the record, the civies that I know who are truly interested and qualified do pretty well, although not as well as the ME or EEs.)
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
"You can't bribe someone to be a nerd."
You can, just not a very good one. I know a couple of guys who went into engineering for the wrong reasons. One was because he realized that architects don't make much, and the other because he wanted a job in an office. Neither of them turned out very good. One makes a decent living simply because he works 60-70 hours per week, the other has 6 or 7 years experience, and still makes less than $60k.
"They avoid math and science because its HARD and not cool."
Amen. In my ME degree, you took enough math that by taking just *one* extra course, you got a minor in math as well. Ask 100 high school kids, ready to go into college, if they're willing to take that much math... you won't have many takers. Then tell them that the requirements for the ME program (at least at my univeristy) also had more courses and credit hours than any other program in the university. See how many of them still want to sign up.
I think that the greatest strength of many of the European education systems is not that tuition is free or cheap, it's that they try to steer someone into something that they like, and something of which they're capable. They don't tell people that you're not worth anything if you're not a doctor or lawyer, they tell them "Hey, if you're not good at math, but you like working on cars, terrific! You'll make a great mechanic, you'll be a valuable part of society, and we'd love to help you out with that."
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Your point is correct, but it's irrelevant. Forgive me for assuming that you were trying to post on topic.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
The great-great-grandparent was discussing students saddled with debt. Your response (paraphrased): "40k is the most students can take in government loans. Other loans are hard to get. 40k is not an insane amount of debt. "
My response (paraphrased): "You can get $120k in debt easily, I have a friend who did just that". Note how my example contradicts your assumption that other loans are hard to get, and is therefore an accurate and relevant response as a result.
My college actively helped him get more loans so that he could finish school, so there was little work on his part (from what I could tell as a third party). To the best of my knowledge this is very common, even if it wasn't common at your school. Your response was to suggest I'm a liar, the very height of internet debating tactics.
Now, I did insult you with my 'briefly looking at student loans' statement, but that's only because it's fun to be rude to rude people. You were rude to the great-great-grandparent, so I was rude back. Besides, look up "students loans" on Google, and you will see 30,700,000 results, with places like Bank of America saying: "Borrow up to $40,000 a year for student loans. Apply Now!" I had companies going out of their way to try to get me to take student loans when I was in college. And you're saying that it's hard to get Student loans? That acquiring $120,000 in debt is tricky? I'll need some actual evidence for that, not just your own experience. It sounds to me like you know all about the government loans- the ones that you actually want to take, because they are so much better than the private ones. But all my experience tells me that your original post was wrong, that it's easy to get deep in debt, and lots of Americans do. (Note that 'lots' is not the majority of college students- we're talking about 10-20%, depending on what you call 'significant' debt). Now if you want to show me that it's hard to get private loans, and not many people do, then I can change my stance. Calling me a liar and an idiot just amuses me, and increases my confidence that you don't really know what you are talking about.
P.S. What you should be arguing is that people who get into that much debt are stupid, not that getting into that much debt is hard. Ever since bankruptcy protection for student borrowers was taken away in 1997, it's become easier and easier for students to borrow; There's very little risk anymore for the banking companies.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Over the last 6 years, the US has CUT tuition and loan aid to the population.
I'm not sure if this is because cynical turncoats wanted Congress to do this, because they've ALREADY invested in China and Korea... or if they wanted Congress to do this because school expenses are the #1 recruiting tool of the US Military.
I'm inclined to believe the former, because you hear a lot of right wing complaining about "human cloning" (stem cell research)... but you don't hear those same people complaining that their 401K is fueling such development overseas. Why fuel it with money if you find it so immoral?
That's easy to answer... it's about controlling trends... bankrupt your country, as long as you can preload your investments to whatever direction you nudged them to.
We shall go on our merry ways, then, continuing to think the other person's an idiot who can't follow a simple line of reasoning. Perhaps we will have another pointless flame war some other time.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Your talent for debate amazes me. With that witty retort, I clearly see the error of my ways.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
I would LOVE to go on and work on a Master's or PhD.
.
But, I like to eat, see. .
At the graduate level, provided you're pursuing a "research" degree, most North American university departments provide standard entrance packages (departmental scholarships plus teaching-assistant duties) which cover fees plkus living expenses. However if you rely on those you will not live luxuriously.
My department has a package of approx. $20k/year for PhD students; while this isn't a lot to live off, it is effectively tax-free and thus is equivalent to a slightly higher working salary.
Steve
For the record, I would say that state tax dollars should be used to benefit a state's citizens- so I would not only disagree with the state of Montana paying all of an Indian student's tuition, I would disagree with them paying all of of an Indiana student's tuition.
The rest of your comment, though, is flawed on many levels. You remind me of a question I heard once in Macro Economics: "Which is better for the U.S:
1. The U.S. GDP grows 12% and Japan's grows 20%, or
2. the U.S. GDP grows 4% and Japan's grows 2%"? Since the majority of people are clueless, they picked option #2. They forgot that Economics is not Zero-Sum, and that everyone can grow richer at no one's expense.
By your logic, every non-American who gets an education anywhere hurts the United States- clearly they are going to make some other country money, OR they're going to take a job from an American.
Some things to think about:
Imagine that a stoner in Florida decides to give up pot and become an engineer instead. Does this hurt all other engineers in Florida? Is it good for Florida as a whole?
Imagine that the same stoner goes to school in Georgia. Is it logical for the Georgians to deny him schooling because he's out of state? (It is, of course, logical for Georgian taxpayers not to foot the bill). Does the stoner getting a degree hurt all engineers in Georgia? (it does increase their competition). Is it good for the country as a whole?
Imagine, now, that instead of being a Floridian the stoner is an Indian. Should Georgia treat the Indian any differently than a Floridian? (Obviously Georgia taxpayers still shouldn't foot his bill.)
By the way, the correct answer is that the additional competition might slightly hurts the engineers in Florida/Georgia/America/the World, but it's good for everyone else. So having more Indian Engineers slightly hurts American Engineers, but benefits all other Americans (including, say, American Doctors, who use technology Indians develop). Likewise, having more Indian Doctors may hurt American Doctors, but benefits everyone else (including American Engineers who may need a novel heart transplant, or American Engineers being hired to design a new hospital in Delhi). Of course, sometimes Engineers and Scientists will even design something that increases the demand for all engineers, so it's a net gain for everyone, including the Engineers. (A recent example would be computers- sure, it decreased the demand for some mathematicians, but the gain in GDP and the net demand for skilled workers increased enormously thanks to them). The more skilled workers you have, the better and cheaper goods and services will be, and the better off everyone is.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.