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Tuition Should Be Lower For Science Majors, Says Florida Task Force
Hugh Pickens writes "Jordan Weissmann writes that a task force commissioned by Florida Governor Rick Scott is putting the finishing touches on a proposal that would allow the state's public universities to charge lower tuition for studying topics thought to be in high demand among Florida employers including science, technology, engineering, and math. The hope is that by keeping certain degrees cheaper than others, Florida can encourage students into fields where it needs more talent. For some, it might seem inherently unfair to send dance majors deeper into debt just to keep tuition low for engineers, who are already poised to earn more once they graduate, but task force chair Dale Brill says tax dollars are scarce, and the public deserves the best possible return from its investment in education and that means spending more generously on the students who are most likely to help grow Florida's economy once they graduate. Brill also argues that too few young people consider their career prospects carefully when picking a major. 'We're trying to introduce some semblance of a market dynamic information in an environment where there is none,' Brill says. 'Most students couldn't tell you what they pay in tuition. In economics, pricing is all we have to determine and work out supply and demand. So, when the consumer is completely separated from the cost of a product, then the cost rises.'"
Remember when everyone was supposed to become an aerospace engineer and then the industry collapsed in the early 90s?
[looking around nervously] Hush! No one tell him that the college biology departments are still teaching evolution.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
I know this is a huge shock, but if you made higher education more reasonably priced, maybe we would have more reasonably priced services in fields where you have to pay 10+ years of schooling.
You'd be surprised how many Republican-leaning voters are not social conservatives at all...I'd say 1/3rd of the total...hence the mediocre showing for deeply religious candidates :D
That being said, I paid my blood and my first born, thank you very much, and I don't support the next generation getting the free ride, particularly for students who are the most likely to have no trouble paying their loans back! This is silly popularism striking again.
The real path to male liberation
...and this was the first URL that showed up.
I do not know enough about this, but still found this curious.
Changing the cost of tuition is going to lead to some really nasty battles in the school and political systems. Easy solution: make the grants available for STEM students. My out of pocket tuition was zero because I had scholarships and grants and worked hard.
I have the hiccups.
If you trained as a mechanical engineer, and then did a AE masters - you'd have no problem finding any number of alternative things to do.
The problem is of course, math is hard, and kids are brainwashed. Math is actually very easy. Unfortunately you need to work at it. Every day.
The real debate should be about offering cheap standardized exams and agreeing how that can be done to legitimize mass online education techniques. School can be essentially free now. The model needs to change.
Liberal arts were meant for those already elite to learn how to become better rulers for the proles.
should be glad. Strong STEM education is the foundation for a robust economy, which gives people the extra money to go see their dance performances. Would they rather be debtless and unemployed?
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Shouldn't schools charge more for degrees that cost more? Science requires expensive labs.
Now if institutions, both public and private, want to subsidize those costs, that would seem to be a more economics-based approach.
Great idea. Wrong implementation. There are many pitfalls with making science degrees cheaper, like for example what happens when you switch majors?
The best implementation for this is to leave tuition prices alone and reward students who graduate with a degree in a preferred field and who then go on to work in that field with loan forgiveness. So for instance, if you get a CS degree from the University of Central Florida (like I did in '91), every year you work in the CS field you would fill out a form and the government would pay off a certain dollar amount of your student loans, up to a prescribed maximum. Say for instance they pay off $2500 a year in loans for 10 years.
Who says dancers make less money? Mosdancers I come across make lots of money.
Just in small denominations.
There's a difference between a free ride and a less expensive ride. Most people don't have the luxury of having their parents helping to pay, and just saying " take a loan " is what caused prices to rise as much as they have : Schools know the gov't is giving out the loans, so they raise prices without fear. Pretty much handing money over to the schools. It's hard for prices to stabilize if the consumers are given infinite buying power.
Also supporting picking winners (or at least winning industries). A foolish consistency is, after all, the hobgoblin of small minds...
If you want Americans to study STEM, you need to provide jobs for them. Why get a degree in engineering just to train to your H1B replacement, or to have you job offshored.
Did he just say they were trying to introduce "market dynamics" by artificially tinkering with tuitions?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I agree. What we should do instead is make college educations affordable for all.
There should be no government funding in education that's how the prices would fall, once every Jim, Tom and Sally can no longer afford going to college for a sociology major, because no bank would give them a loan to go for such a useless degree. All of a sudden without government guaranteed loans there are only people going to college that can afford it and tuitions fall in price.
As tuitions fall in price, people once again can afford college by working summer jobs as they have done for decades before government screwed it up. OTOH the banks could provide credit to people who would qualify without government guarantees. This would mean that the student would have to pay at least a portion of tuition out of pocket (like a mortgage downpayment), would have to show that he is going to be able to repay the loan with interest (by explaining why the major he is taking will allow him to do so) and banks would be interested in knowing about the progress (reassessing whether the investment is still worth it) by looking at grades and such.
The tuitions for all education would fall (especially for all the humanitarian major, because who is going to pay out of pocket or go for a non-government loan to take sociology?)
Remember, people like Carnegie, (who started working at the age of 13 for 1.25 per week and became pretty much the wealthiest human in history of this planet, with an equivalent of over 300 billion USD) huge number of people who made it big and really big didn't have higher education or even secondary education in many cases.
It's not about education anyway, your college degree will not make you Carnegie, that's not how it is done.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
Here 'they' stands for those with the money and power both private and public as the case may be.
'They' are going to devalue your education one way or another - this is because they don't want to pay you what you're worth or give you the respect you deserve. They would rather pay 10 of you to sit on your thumbs and push paper to bring 'their' ill concieved ideas to fruition than put you in charge and pay you enough to care. The problem is, there aren't enough of you to do that. Since each of the ten of you they wish to employ would not really be critical, they want to be able to pay the lowly wage to each of you that your producivity warrants in such a situation.
So either 'they' are going to H1B your value away, or 'they' will pay to educate locals. At least with the second way of doing things, your kids don't have to pay as much of their blood and their first born, and you support the local education industry.
'We're trying to introduce some semblance of a market dynamic information in an environment where there is none,' Brill says.
Really? Well, in high school I took AP Calculus, AP Music Theory and AP Computer Science. My freshman year in college, I took 20-24 credits each semester to continue on the paths to majoring in those fields. In fact, I took two more semesters of music theory. But then came the time when many of my general requirements were completed and I needed to specialize in one of these majors. I loved them all with a passion but realized I didn't have the time or money to do all three. So, being from an below poverty line family, I simply went to each college at the university and asked to see their most recent data on job placement after college. And they actually retain quite a bit of data on this. Computer Science was the clear winner. On top of that, as I looked at the positions, computer science had the most diverse placement in the workforce (another thing I valued at the time).
Could it be that the flooding of the market with computer science majors reduces the pay to nothing by the time I graduate? Sure. But to say there's no information on this sort of erroneous.
'In economics, pricing is all we have to determine and work out supply and demand.
Er, that's not entirely true, I think sometimes supply is governed by capacity and resources. Look at Harley Davidson and Rickenbacker guitars. They have a wait list to buy the damn things yet the companies can only produce so many each year.
So, when the consumer is completely separated from the cost of a product, then the cost rises.'
I think you're confusing "is less productive than" with "costs society more." The former must be left to be our freedom of choice while the latter is a problem that needs to be addressed (as he is trying to do). I can twist this supply versus demand logic around too: Computer Science majors make more than English majors therefore computer science degrees should cost more since they are getting more for the same money than an English major. Price the product based on what it provides the consumer! Ultimately, you're selling credit hours which (aside from lab fees and the like) often cost the university about the same amount of money which they then charge the students.
While this may be an endeavor in the right spirit of producing STEM degrees, it is fruitless and restrictive of your populace's freedom and must be ignored.
My work here is dung.
The problem is that in courses like math and science (and pretty much everything else), the useful graduates are those who are into the stuff. Measures like this are just cranking up the number of people with a degree in math and science, but not the numbers of mathematicians and scientists.
Of course, this is good for employment numbers since employers now need to sift through more chaff until finding actually usable workers.
Remember when everyone was supposed to become an aerospace engineer and then the industry collapsed in the early 90s?
No, but I remember being an employed aerospace engineer in the late 90s and seeing all the comp-sci and IT folks desperate for jobs during the dotcom collapse. [captcha = trimming]
Hint: science majors are overwhelmingly white and Asian. It's not a secret why such a man would support this. What have science majors ever done for the African-American community?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
By that logic you are going to find the most well-educated, hardest-working scientists in states that have been dominated by conservatives. I guess that would explain why Alabama is such a scientific powerhouse.
like for example what happens when you switch majors?
Good point. I bet everyone will be a science major for their first few semesters of gen ed stuff. Not a freshman to be seen in other majors. Of course, there will also be a lot of people suddenly switching majors after their first 2-3 semesters of cheap tuition...
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
By that logic you are going to find the most well-educated, hardest-working scientists in states that have been dominated by conservatives. I guess that would explain why Alabama is such a scientific powerhouse.
Whelp now you've done it, out come the statistical cherry pickers for Huntsville.
I don't support the next generation getting the free ride, particularly for students who are the most likely to have no trouble paying their loans back! This is silly popularism striking again.
The only solution I see that satisfies this belief, is a two-fold change:
1) Gov't backs loans up to different amounts based on the undergrad degree or area of study. Just pulling some numbers out of the air, say you major in liberal arts, max student loan is $40K. major in STEM, max student loan in $60K. major in something that feeds into business/law/medicine, max student loan is $80K. Grad degrees will work similarly.
People will moan and groan, but the bottom line is corporations already set the value of various degrees - it's called the average starting salaries they pay. If students on permanently on-hook for their loans (can't be shed in bankruptcy proceedings, etc.) then the natural response is to limit the loan amount based on the field of study.
2) Universities will also moan and groan, but fundamentally they aren't pricing their products fairly. Not throwing liberal arts under the bus, but every college I've heard of charges the same per credit hour, no matter what the class. Yes there are different fees for private vs public, in-state vs out-of-state, but a 3 credit history class costs the same as a 3 credit science class. Ergo, a natural change, reflecting the actual value on the degree (which is again as stated in #1, what corporations actually pay for holders of those degrees), is to charge different amount for courses. Pulling numbers out of the air again, liberal arts classes will cost $500 per credit hour, stem classes cost $800 per credit hour, whatever it works out to.
As for your attitude towards the next generation - honestly ask if your attitude scales up to serve the entire nation.
I agree with this move in general. If we think this will help people get jobs then great... HOWEVER,
The best developer in my department of my fortune 100 company is a Theatre major. I'm a Philosophy Major and have seen several business and science majors let go over the years to similar analyst positions to mine. Obviously it would be a bit of a stretch if I was to try to become a mechanical engineer, but arts degrees are very cognitively taxing and make you fantastic learners of ANYTHING. I've been learning programming for a couple years and am more capable than several comp sci majors I know.
However most managers I've talked to literally laugh at me when I claim that I can do anything technical/mathematical. This mentality needs to change.
STEM degrees, as well as law and medical doctorals help people from low-income backgrounds and families have rich and successful lives.
I've seen and worked with many people who came from humble beginnings growing up and putting themselves through college for that engineering degree or medical degree has surely helped them have the rich life they now have.
By rich I don't mean just money, but stability, low stress, etc. - it sure makes life easier.
I'm also one of them. Partially put my self through school with the help of student loans and small pell grants while I worked part-time. My parents didn't make enough to pay for school. Now I'm in a secure job, going back to school to get my masters (paid by employer), live in a decent neighborhood, drive a new car and overall am happy with my accomplishments.
But that's just my 2 cents.
Giving more kids the chance to make it out in the real world by getting a skill-degree is worth trying.
Historically, people pursuing art degrees, obscure sociology degrees and the like usually were from affluent families and were likely to inherent a bustling company left by their parents.
Previewing comments are for sissies!
WHAAAA.. WHAAAA I paid a lot so everyone else should WHAAAA.
You should have needed to pay that much, and neither should any generation.
You're argument overlooks all the people who couldn't become engineers and scientist due to cost.
The future will be built on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Everything will be based on that, it's critical for global competition.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
what about cutting the # of filler / required class for all Major's to cut costs???
I think lot's stuff can be slimmed down to 2-3 years. As well added more trades / tech school based planes to the schooling.
IT / Tech can use less classroom time (at least in the up front) part and more apprenticeships and on going classes (not tied down to the college time table)
I think this would work great if the STEM shortage wasn't a complete myth. Go chat with people with bachelors in STEM subjects as they're putting foam in your latte and get their perspective. Or with STEM post-docs on year 10 of making 30k a year.
Modern medicine?
This isn't pick wining industry, it makes the foundation for ALL industries easier to get into.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Good question!
Well, let's see... what have science majors (ie. science) done for black people? Hmmm... there's medicine (vaccinations, ER, GPs, surgery, pallative, rehabilitative, etc), agriculture (cheaper food, better selection, more nutritious produce), public infrastructure (transport, power, utilities), high tech industry supported by secondary industry supported by service industries, then there's the internet (publically accessible via libraries if not in homes), access to education (via the internet), access to a more diverse job market (via education).
Oh wait, I see now - because science and technology is developed by science majors, that means that nobody but science majors can enjoy the benefits. No... wait... actually, that's complete bullshit. Black people have benefited as much as the rest of us.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
If you want Americans to study STEM, you need to provide jobs for them. Why get a degree in engineering just to train to your H1B replacement, or to have you job offshored.
As somebody who was once an H1B (or the way I like to think of myself: a human being making his living), I noticed how recently there is a lot of anti-immigration sentiment on Slashdot. Referring to somebody by their immigration status is just not nice. It seems H1B is the new buzzword here spoken with attitude described for "Okies" in The Grapes of Wrath.
College educated people who come to USA to work really don't deserve that kind of attitude. They go there either because they like America enough or because they can't make decent living elsewhere and both causes are respectable.
I respect that you may think immigrant engineers are lowering your hourly rate and robbing you of the job you were entitled to, but please keep in mind that it's a sign of proper upbringing to value all people equally regardless of where they were born.
You just had your elections and neither one of two major presidential candidates talked in support of labor rights and collective bargaining. If these issues are not important enough for Americans, then it would be nice to refrain from bashing "H1Bs" whenever they get a chance.
It's not about political correctness, it's about politeness and respect of other human beings who want the same thing as you do: to work and be respected for who they are, regardless of where they were born. I wish all slashdotters to never be in a situation where they have to choose between their work being valued appropriately (i.e. working in a foreign country) or not being referred to by their visa code.
P.S. I apologize for using your post for this rant.
We aren't using the technical people we have. Why subsidize the production of more? It just gives employers more candidates to reject.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Great idea. Wrong implementation. There are many pitfalls with making science degrees cheaper, like for example what happens when you switch majors?
The best implementation for this is to leave tuition prices alone and reward students who graduate with a degree in a preferred field and who then go on to work in that field with loan forgiveness. So for instance, if you get a CS degree from the University of Central Florida (like I did in '91), every year you work in the CS field you would fill out a form and the government would pay off a certain dollar amount of your student loans, up to a prescribed maximum. Say for instance they pay off $2500 a year in loans for 10 years.
But then, thanks to this implementation, after a few years there are more than enough CS graduates. Our CS degree bearing employee meanwhile got bored with CS and would like to switch to another profession for which he happens to be sufficiently qualified, and which happens to be in need of good people just at that time. So everyone would profit from him changing: He for getting a job he'd enjoy more, the company he'd change to for getting a competent employee, and some of the now-abundant CS majors would get a job. A clear win-win-win situation - except for one thing: Since he'd no longer be working in CS, he'd no longer get the money from the government. Which might keep him in his current job, cancelling all the advantages. And even if the government eventually reacts to the new situation e.g. by continuing payments when switching to that other profession, it takes some time.
The problem is that when someone decides to foot part of the bill, the industry will charge more. In this case, the education industry charges what the student will pay plus what the government will pay. As grants and scholarships go up, so does tuition. The same thing happens in the insurance industry. They are for profit industries so they charge what the market will bear.
Lower cost for students in certain disciplines is fine, but be careful how you do it. Sometimes trying to lower costs ends up costing more money for everyone in the long run than if we would have left it alone in the first place.
And this is another way the middle-class gets fucked -- I've seen it happen again and again. Poor students get help because their parents make less than a magic number of income. Richer kids don't have to worry about money cuz parents rich. But the middle-class students who are college material but unable to secure scholarships are either stuck getting loans or becoming a significant burden on their parents(who aren't doing as well as you'd think, especially in this economy of layoffs).
And yeah, perhaps a student could work a full-time shit-job while putting themselves through school and graduate late and scraping by with rote memorization and a lackluster GPA instead of really learning, burned out, and missing out on what should have been one of the fondest personal and professional experience of their lives.
-- Ethanol-fueled
Great idea. Wrong implementation. There are many pitfalls with making science degrees cheaper, like for example what happens when you switch majors?
After you have a couple of semesters of credits in science and math? Mission accomplished.
Do you want to lower costs, or do you want your tax dollars going to tuition for interpretive dance majors?
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
If Florida employers are demanding these degrees, they can pay more for holders of those degrees. Instead, this proposal allows employers to justify lower pay for holders of those subsidized degrees.
Yet another "free market" proposal from a Tea Party politician.
The economic incentive for a STEM major is STEM jobs. Full stop.
If those jobs aren't being filled, the jobs are paying too low of a rate for the market. This is a straight up manipulation of the labor supply in order to lower prices.
You've never been to Huntsville.
First of all, this isn't introducing "market forces," this is government trying to control the market. Government has proven that it is terrible at predicting the direction the market will be going in the future. It's one of the fundamental flaws of communism. Government is simply not nimble enough to respond to market forces that can easily change on a dime. Do you think that the people pushing this bill know that journalism degree holders between the age 22 and 26 have a lower unemployment rate then mechanical engineers in the same age group? It's 7.7% to 8.6%. But a law like this would attempt to steer students away from journalism and into the mechanical engineer profession without any idea of the data because a bill like this is all about encouraging the STEM fields. Whether they need it or not. The second thing is that government and elected officials, who would be making these decisions, are susceptible to "influence" by lobbying groups backed by companies who may not have the best interest of the upcoming student at heart. If you're a company that can convince schools to flood the market with engineers, for instance, then you are able to leverage lower wages for those engineers because their skill set becomes less unique in the marketplace. The net result being an influx of engineers who are more likely to be unemployed and who make less because companies can afford to pay them less.
I agree that the implementation is poor, but your proposal might not help much either. Imagine a student two years in who discovers he can't hack the chemistry major, but knows he can do well in business administration. If he was taking his loans out counting on the payback, he's stuck and doesn't want to risk changing majors, even though that would be the best outcome for everyone.
I think it's better to do nothing and let the market decide. Few people going into a dance program can realistically expect a six figure gig waiting for them as they leave, so demand naturally won't be attracting profit-driven people into that field. If Disney suddenly needs ten thousand dancers, however, they can pay for them.
John
So then gen-ed stuff should be at a lower cost... often times it is, and available thru community colleges (or renamed former community colleges).
$300 for ENC1101 at Santa Fe, vs. $600 at UF ...
Hrm...
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
A paper and pencil study, like education, math or sociology costs about € 3000 per year, while engineering and sciences with a lot of lab work go up to € 10000 or more. At least in Germany that is. If you stop having sociology, this would have no effect on the cost of all the other topics available at a university. However, you would not be able to study computer science and sociology together, because there wouldn't be any good sociology teacher left. Thanks god, we (in the upper mentioned country) do not have tuition fees for students, And even though a lot of people studying economics and other arts, we still have only 3% unemployment for academics, while the over all unemployment rate is 6.5%.
Here people select a topic, because they are interested in (beside the economics people, according to recent surveys they decide because they think there is money in it) this results in people who are good at that what they do, as they are motivated. A real good thing would be to add a year before they choose a topic, where they could look into different topics and make a better judgment on picking a topic.
Honestly, I believe if you stop financing the universities through taxes you will loose in the long run. A lesser educated society is definitely not the answer to all the upcoming problems we have.
A lot of engineering schools have a surcharge for engineering courses to cover higher costs.
The primary reason tuition keeps going up at the STATE university I work at is that fact that the state cuts its support for higher education every damn budget cycle. Add the ever dropping state subsidy to everything else that keeps going up, like heath care coverage for employees, physical plant maintenance...but is sure ain't going onto the salaries of anyone below vice-president level.
Nope, the availability of supposed " infinite buying power." has little to do with the cost of tuition.
It is a shame that those highly paid administrators outsourced so many core functions so now we are over a barrel when Blackboard, IBM, or Oracle jack their rates through the roof at renewal time.
If you think being poor and getting help is better than being middle-class and having loans, then you have never been poor before.
You also seem to have very little idea about how the financial aid system works. The poorer you are, the more help you get. There's no "magic number" of income below which you get a bunch of grants and above which you get none.
And yeah, perhaps a student could work a full-time shit-job while putting themselves through school and graduate late and scraping by with rote memorization and a lackluster GPA instead of really learning, burned out, and missing out on what should have been one of the fondest personal and professional experience of their lives.
Well, I guess you have to decide what's best for you. Four or five years of fun and a pile of debt, or a more stable future which is somewhat less fun and maybe took a bit longer.
There's no point in training people in STEM jobs when as a country we're actively killing the market for STEM in the US. Students from other countries come over here for best in world education, and then leave.
The reason behind all of this is that STEM jobs are outsourced and sent overseas. Worse yet is that companies can get tax breaks for doing so!
Why no party fission? Doesn't each side of the fundamentalism issue think their party would be better off without the other side?
Is it just a matter of each one thinking the other should have to give up the trademark, because they don't want to have to establish their own brand (which is very expensive)?
I wonder if Republicans could be persuaded to back election reform (e.g. approval voting) at their state and local levels, so that elections could support multiple parties. If they would be willing to work toward that, they could split up without feeling like they're giving easy victory to, say, Democrats.
I bet there are some people on the left who would support the same reforms.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Wait, I thought the GOP didn't like it when the government picked winners and losers?
I see a lot of arguments about the means, but what about the goal? Where did Scott & Brill get the idea that higher education's primary goal is to feed GDP or reduce unemployment? Certainly increasing employment opportunities makes sense, but what happened to the idea that a better educated citizenry has all sorts of benefits beyond increased economic activity?
This is primarily intended to lower the cost of employing STEMs by increasing the supply. But lower salaries will not encourage more students to study STEM fields.
> Remember when everyone was supposed to become an aerospace engineer and then the industry collapsed in the early 90s?
I read that and my first thought was: oh there's a typo, the collapse happened in the early 70s. But apparently it's collapsed more than once.
I would buy that except that tuition has been rising faster than inflation in higher education since the late 60s/early 70s. In addition, most colleges and universities have continued to increase the number of administrative positions relative to the number of students even as budgets get tight.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
And yeah, perhaps a student could work a full-time shit-job while putting themselves through school... missing out on what should have been one of the fondest personal and professional experience of their lives.
Why should college necessarily be a "fond personal experience"? You're there to learn, are you not?
There's radio ads here in California targeted at families making $75K a year or more to help their kids get onto colleges of their choice by... doing something. Not sure what. It almost sounds like PR consulting for kids so they have the right array of trendy things in high school. That actually bothers me more than tuition. With such an emphasis on extracurricular activities many universities seem to be hell bent on filtering out certain personality types when they have no damned business giving a flying fuck what I do with my own time. It's one of the few things that makes me glad *not* to be young and dealing with that bullshit.
Your labor will be devalued anyway. There will be plenty of people with your level of education throughout the world. Even if your country implements protectionist measures, it's still easier to export goods from those other countries than from yours and your labor still drops in value.
And there's inflation. I doubt aside from exceptionally skilled or lucky employees that most peoples' wages and benefits will keep up with inflation. That's the usual trick by which such things are done.
This is only going to go back to rising wages in the developed world when that massive pool of labor starts to dry up.
You want vocational ed., go to a tech school. You want a college degree, you go to college. Part of having a bachelor's degree is a body of knowledge that you were supposed to have learned regardless of your major...if you were paying attention.
Not fair, it benefits from a Federal money machine program called NASA. If the NASA labs weren't their then it would be just like the rest of Alabama.
Allowing student loans to be dischargeable in bankruptcy is a good first step. The end result will be that the possibility of bankruptcy will mean that loans will be less available for useless degrees and more available for useful ones.
I'd rather see no government loan backing at all. Loans would only end up going to people that banks actually thought would be willing an able to pay back the loan. If the government is involved at all, I'd rather see pure scholarships, under the hope that they end up paying it back by joining a higher income tax bracket. The current bankruptcy law may prevent people from getting medical degress, declaring bankruptcy, and then seeking a job, but I question how much of a problem that would ever actually be.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
In Finland, tuition is free for all majors, including foreigners.You can study in English and get an internationally acknowledged degree. The universities are eager to increase the number of foreign students. The only catch is that you have to pass the entrance exam. You will also have to demonstrate that you can support yourself during the studies without employment (I think).
Welcome! It's all on us.
Right. Some of us consider learning a fond personal experience. It is also difficult to go beyond the bare minimum of education if you are working a ton of hours at some unrelated job.
The solution is already in process.
The answer is greater diversity of tuition options, and a professional qualification examining organization.
Tuition options are already happening, e.g.udacity.com
Of course if you want to attend MIT for your tuition, feel free. But the final requirement to work as an engineer and sign off on those suspended concrete slabs or elevator certificates or for an electrician's license is the certificate from the examining organization.
There will still be graduates who pay for university training. And perhaps they will find preference among some employers for their provenance. But some employers will have employees coming up through the ranks, or spot likely talent in interview.
I suspect that the time to choose a career as staff at a university has probably passed.
There's a shortage of MBA's, lawyers, and doctors? ORLY?
Having that diversity where we CAN fund the arts is really important to my enjoyment of life, although I am employed in a math/science field. A lot of cool things happen because artists think of and create new and wonderful things, and part of developing more artists is funding a formal education for them.
Also, I think in a lot of cases, any college education at all is really helpful to people and to society, even if they don't end up making interpretive dance as their career. In any case, it's not like there are all that many interpretive dance majors to fund. How much money are you saving by selectively lowering tuitions, at the cost of further discouraging those few who do go into the major?
Science majors in high-demand fields should be given subsidized loads because they are likely to get good paying jobs and will be able to pay off the loans. What the science majors are doing is going to directly benefit themselves the most.
What we should be doing is given lower tuition to liberal arts majors that are unlikely to get good paying jobs. Their degrees benefit society (by way of having an educated, informed electorate) more than the degree holder.
Before you mod me down, realize that this is the position of (conservative/libertarian and award-winning economist) Milton Friedman.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
Obviously the ads are exploiting a problem in the system (mainly that you can taylor your kid to be what the universities want to see if you have money), but I think the Universities have the right idea.
A junior level engineer might be a fine engineer even if he/she doesn't nothing but engineering, but sooner or later, he/she become more important and has to manage people and big projects and make these big, broad decisions, and at that point, you really want him to be open-minded and to have a breadth of experiences and knowledge. Extracurriculars is one of the main ways growing kids become more "worldly."
Well that's not terribly insightful, kind of like saying if it were not for silicon valley, California would just be migrant strawberry pickers. Or if you exclude NYC, new york state isn't much more than Pennsylvania.
I lived in Huntsville in the early 90s, it was quite the scene. Pity about all the security clearances.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
2) A core principle of economics is that people value more expensive things higher. Sell the same wine in two different bottles, one at $10 and the other at $50 and people will tell you that the $50 one tastes better. Another good example is that if a state school raises the 'minimum' sat score to get in, they get more people applying to get in. If you lower the standards, you get lower quality people. Expect the same with this idea.
3) No person getting a dance or similar degree expects to get a job from their degree. If you are concerned about money, then you are already getting a science degree. Or at least a 'hospitality degree'. So it won't do what you want it to do.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Cars? Computers? Telephones?
The math and science liberal arts majors are prepared for don't count towards STEM degrees.
Simple solution. They don't get the low rate until they are ready to start Calculus.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
that the richest nation on earth can't afford to pay for the education of its young, but have no problem spending more than half a trillion dollar a year shipping them all over the world to fight b.s. wars.
When you think about it, the ridiculous plot of The Hunger Game doesn't seem that ridiculous anymore.
This guy is wrong. The "return" owed to tax payers is called interest, paid on the loan. That's the only social obligation required of someone who gets a degree using state funds. To suggest some broader social obligation overrides individual preferences, is nonsense. Put that in your promissory note. It will never get signed. Chances are those scientists are going into private sector, whose work could really be anything, and patentend, and not of any necessary impact on the taxpayer. Did you know there are scientists figuring out how to put different flavors into frozen yogurt? Moving humanity forward! Funds based on discrimination is becoming a huge burden. My local college allows 30% of its students a free ride based on sports scholarships. 30% for free. Is it fair for 70% to have a higher tuition, and therefore higher debt, so others can play games?
I disagree.
We need to shape up highschool so that it does what college does now (job training), and let college return to being a luxury for the wealthy and exceptionally capable, that has very little bearing on employ-ability.
You'd be surprised how many Republican-leaning voters are not social conservatives at all ...I'd say 1/3rd of the total...
No, I'm just surprised at how little influence they seem to have over the party. Fiscal conservatism, that makes plenty of sense to me. Social conservatism makes absolutely no sense to me. But it's all the republicans seem to be serious about on at the national level, gay marriage and abortion. I thought after W that "Cut taxes, worry about cutting spending when it's someone else's problem" would have run it's full course. Yet even with the debt ceiling and other issues, the party wasted it in favor of attacking democrats, and the balanced budget amendment went nowhere with the GOP.
Remember when everyone was supposed to become an aerospace engineer and then the industry collapsed in the early 90s?
Yes, I do, and maybe you should have included that there was a reason for it. The collapse of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent "Peace Dividend". There was a significant reduction in military spending, and thus reduction of funding in Aerospace development.
Just another day in Paradise
Spinners?
If you think being poor and getting help is better than being middle-class and having loans, then you have never been poor before.
No, but not having the incorrect ancestry and/or not having been born a male certainly doesn't hurt.
Apparently two wrongs do make a right.
STEM degrees, as well as law and medical doctorals help people from low-income backgrounds and families have rich and successful lives
Don't we have a political system where the two major parties are strongly in opposition to that goal?
The govt or buying mass marketed products from megacorps are supposed to provide all the warm and fuzzies, not education.
Don't get me wrong, I say good for you. Just saying the powers that be hate what you did, so you can expect opposition from them, active or passive. You're supposed to join their constituency as a victim, not stand on your own two feet.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Sorry Hugh, it's just you, me, and six other guys who remember the 90's. The rest of /. was still in diapers then.
-JS
PS I finished my Bachelors degree [in physics] in 1993, it was pretty grim days in all the fields. Funny how some myths never die - even then, everyone was screaming about how we needed millions of students to go into the sciences because the baby boomers were about to retire and the jobs would go empty. Now I'm old enough to have grown kids of my own, and I'm still waiting for those baby boomers to retire and create millions of unfilled jobs.
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity...
Both parties have a lunatic fringe. I suspect if you opened you mind and learned what most Republicans support instead of listening to what Democrats say about Republicans you would be pleasantly surprised.
That parents are not paying for college is really wrong.
In various studies have shown that around 50% of all students have tuition, housing and books covered by parents.
Less than 33% receive little or no support from parents, and this could include student who had everything paid for by other means.
So yes most people have the luxury of having their parents help with paying and the majority have everything paid for.
This does change after the initial degree when parents feel that is the right time to stop paying.
Given how much of a disadvantage not being white and male start of as, I think, at the macro level, it evens out.. .maybe....
Well, in theory, if we get a lot more scientists and engineers in the work force the wages will go down.
No reason. It's illogical. One should study at maximum efficiency for 20 hours a day, meditate for the other 4, graduate, find a productive career, a suitable mate with complimentary qualities, and endure the Pon Farr every seven years.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I see that as the problem with the 'get a job' solution. If one is working while going to school, they are not able to utilize the educational experience as well as someone who can dedicate full time to it... which means one does not get as good of an education. One can make all sorts of individual oriented arguments about why this is 'ok', but at the macro level it means that we are not maximizing our industrial capability.. it means fewer skilled workers, and workers who are less skilled then they could have been, as well as workers with higher starting skills who are not as bright (and thus worse long term employees) but could afford to focus more.... thus people with more ability end up in lower positions, and that is bad for the company.
Reward them by paying them a salary that justifies their efforts.
People flee from these majors not because they are expensive (the loans cover that), but because the long-term career prospects are dismal. Other options pay more, so that is where people go.
Allow supply and demand to drive salaries for these positions up, and the problem will resolve itself.
Doesn't higher pay already pretty much serve that function?
Referring to my earlier comment, giving up my first born, was actually quite literal. Luckily my significant other came to the same conclusion...Some of those decisions can be very hard, but they're really worth making.
:D
Hence my disdain for bleeding-heart conservatism...that move really saved my butt. Now that I have a career in place I can afford many more than one, and more than make up for the loss
The real path to male liberation
If I wanted to skip the "filler" classes, I would have gone to a tech college, got done in 1/2 the time for 1/4 the cost. Those filler classes taught me to appreciate other aspects of society and made me a more well rounded person.
The quality of one's work isn't the only measurement of their contribution to society.
What you'll see is a whole lot of "science majors" for the first two years, "taking care of electives" and only taking a few low level math and science courses (their real electives). When the jig is up, they'll switch majors and pay the higher tuition then (unless there's a penalty for switching).
That being said, I paid my blood and my first born, thank you very much, and I don't support the next generation getting the free ride, particularly for students who are the most likely to have no trouble paying their loans back! This is silly popularism striking again.
In other words "I had it bad, so by golly, all future generations should have it just as bad."
In most EU countries, higher education is either free or cheap. That makes it available to practically everyone, which makes the EU countries the true lands of equal opportunity.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Are there actually STEM spaces going unfilled that could be filled with lower tuition? I paid higher tuition in engineering than programs considered non-professional but there were more applicants for engineering positions than spots available. Lowering my tuition instead of raising it wouldn't have created 1 more grad from the program. Actually, the labs & class space for new engineering programs came partly out of the additional tuition. Raising tuition didn't discourage students from applying and there are if anything more applicants for newer cost-recovery programs, though that might be due to PR & flashy names.
Gay marriage is a non-issue. It's fluff to make gays feel like they aren't being oppressed and are just like everyone else. I think it's a waste of time, but I am not going to cry over it one way or another
Abortion, however, is about killing humans. You may or may not feel a woman's right to choose overrides the situation, but it's a very real issue. I don't understand anyone with half a brain not being able to at least understand that you don't have to "hate women" to think that you might want to think of a better way of providing for the health and safety of the mother that doesn't require killing viable humans. The reality that unintended pregnancy does disproportionately affect women does not mean that the human produced is any less genuine. In no other situation do we accept that someone else's death is acceptable as a solution for anything other than self-defense, including severe economic or mental distress.
Colleges were not originally intended to provide one with skills to get a career. Not directly at least.
You can search around, but the idea is that it would make someone a better person, and thus, a credit to society. This is why we still have general education requirements, due to the belief that in order to be a useful person, you need to be a "well rounded individual". In fact, most college goal statements go out of their way to say this, especially when you get to the LAS department pages, that their purpose is to increase the potential of a student, not to train them.
Somewhere in the last 60 years, we've turned away from that. In the US, you'll be hard pressed to find someone who won't claim that college is where you go to train for a career, and frankly, that's fine.
The problem then is simply this:
- Certain degrees are meant to provide career skills and can be seen as a financial investment with reasonable expectation of high ROI.
- Other degrees are not meant to provide career skills, and can be seen as a luxury purchase, with no reasonable return.
and ...
- People who couldn't afford a luxury, and had no reasonable guarantee of future income took out loans and purchased a luxury degree anyway.
Some of the "I have a 200k student loan debt" english majors in the OWS movement exemplified this; they purchased luxury goods which they did not have the money for on credit. The fact that their purchase was a type of education doesn't exempt them from this simple, obvious economic fact. That one would actually have to deliberately ignore those facts and then blame others for it is frankly insulting then.
If we were to fix anything, I'd say that we make the new separation more explicit. LAS schools for luxury degrees, STEM schools for careers requiring advanced white collar education, vocational schools for careers requiring skilled labor, etc.
Baby steps though - charging less for the degrees that objectively provide more value to society is a good tiny step forward.
You're a freakin' idiot. Just goes to show that it doesn't matter what a Republican does in the name of "science" (OMG!), you'll still fault them because, well, that's what you do.
This legislation is ridiculous. Forcing people into science (OMG! I nearly orgasm just mentioning the word) majors by making them cheaper when artists (of all stripes really) can barely find a job. Perhaps this is the inevitable result of Skepdicks getting a foothold in politics - "Real" majors, those in the sciences (OMG!), obviously trump those other majors that don't deal with the hard facts of reality!
And this why credit can good for commercial activity (covering short term slumps in revenue) but bad for the economy in general once it runs more on credit than pay checks. All financial bubbles have their origins in credit being approved for any random suit that wants to by papers on Wall Street. At some point, that credit needs to be paid back, end when that does not happen the bubble bursts and the economy winds down compared to the bubble period.
When I was in college, I worked and paid for most of my expenses but lived at home rent free. My parents had to take some of the loans out in their names but now that I have graduated, I have been reimbursing the payments they make to those loans. While it is would be nice if they paid for my college, I would not expect them to do so and I do not think they were in the wrong for not doing so. They have their own finances to worry about.
That's just so, so, un-Republican.
All I see in the news are technology companies dumping employees. Will tuition be keyed to layoffs? Where is this demand coming from?
If you think being poor and getting help is better than being middle-class and having loans, then you have never been poor before.
No, but not having the incorrect ancestry and/or not having been born a male certainly doesn't hurt.
Apparently two wrongs do make a right.
For getting into college, not for getting financial aid from the government to pay for said college, which happens to be what we're talking about
Spread the costs around evenly. Dance majors might not make as much as engineers, but they are likely to be working more, and so it all comes up even. What I'm talking about is outsourcing. You can't really outsource a dancer. An engineer is highly outsourceable. When they are working, they make more. When they aren't they make none. I'm was a science major. I earned a BSc. at a liberal arts university. Did you know that calculus is the same at a liberal arts university as it is at a non-liberal arts university? In any event, I'm not willing to supplement the education of a dancer or a poet, but I don't expect them to make the burden easier for me either. As the saying goes "Pay your money, take your chances".
He's told that on every topic that even approaches education. He doesn't get it. I've stopped trying.
But apart from medicine, agriculture, public infrastructure, high tech industry supported by secondary industry supported by service industries, the internet, access to education and access to a more diverse job market, what have science majors ever done for black people?
You're getting charged more for tuition/fees, you're expected to have more access to technology which might not be satisfied by on-campus labs, you're probably going to need to have some technical knowledge going in that only kids growing up with access will have, and since the classes are harder you're far less likely to be able to work your way through college (meaning your education has to be sponsored).
It would be GREAT if there was better subsidies for kids working through these programs. As it is, technical degree programs are treated like cash cows by colleges.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I am so sick of this kind of patronizing of minorities. If a black man can be President, then I am quite sure he can handle a science major. Perhaps the African-American community needs to have some African-American men of science step out and act as role models rather than those basketball stars and rap stars with the trashy lifestyles who are continually foisted on them (and all of us) by the popular media.
While I agree, one of the issues with this is the lag period in between when certain fields/jobs are in high demand and when enough people are trained in that field to provide what is necessary.
The problem is that there is no basis for prioritization of budget items. The state keeps expanding "entitlements" to the point that there is no budget left for things the state ought to be paying for. And as those entitlements increase naturally (slowing economy) it eats into the remaining budget to the point that there is no money left for things like Education, Police, Fire etc.
The problem with entitlements is that people feel "entitled" to them even when they no longer make sense, and we cannot afford them. Try cutting them as a politician and you won't have a career for very long. You want to fix education spending, fix entitlements. We cannot tax ourselves out of this mess.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
No, I'm just surprised at how little influence they seem to have over the party.
Parties don't care about their core supporters: who else are they going to vote for? Democrats?
Of course that probably backfired this time, as, from the numbers I've seen, Republican voters seem to have stayed home in droves rather than vote for Romney.
There isn't a STEM labor shortage, there's a cheap STEM labor shortage. I bet H1B visa allocations would change drastically if that weren't the case.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I really don't understand why this isn't the norm. With any other loan, your loan and interest rate are based on your ability to pay it back, or for the bank to repossess collateral to cover the loan. The same should be true for student loans. Choose a degree with low chances of finding a job, your loan amount goes down, and your interest rate goes up. Choose a degree in a lucrative field, and your access to money goes up, and your interest rate goes down accordingly. Receive good marks in your classes, you interest rate should go down accordingly. Get some real world work experience through internships or co-op programme, and your interest rate should drop as well. The government shouldn't be spending money on loans that have 0% chance of being paid back. The people who are good achievers shouldn't be burdened by the interest rates of those who treat college as a 4 year party.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I worked my way through school (busboy, day labor, construction etc). I wasn't poor enough for any sort of help. I graduated without a loan, and without any grants. It wasn't easy, but I'm ahead of my peers today because of it. They are buried in houses they cannot afford, credit cards debt, paying for a lifestyle that is unreasonable all because they never learned what things really cost (effort). That, and their Liberal Arts Degree doesn't qualify them to do anything.
What pisses me off, is that many of these people have declared bankruptcy and are on the path to do it all over again. Lets reward bad choices and punish success. What could possibly go wrong?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
There is a reason that the image macro of the highly demanding Asian father says "Can choose any career you want - engineer OR doctor!" However much the elites of society disdain more technical fields, they offer a very clear path for people to turn raw intelligence into a stable, successful life. Sure, there are a lot of people younger than me who have a lot more financial success than I do, but I didnt have anything to fall back on if I screwed up and it was worth it to me to do something secure. My children or grandchildren can go try to become the world-changing entrepreneurs.
If you think being poor and getting help is better than being middle-class and having loans, then you have never been poor before.
No, but not having the incorrect ancestry and/or not having been born a male certainly doesn't hurt.
Apparently two wrongs do make a right.
Would you prefer to have different ancestry and a different gender, just to get a break on a few things?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The (R)s should drop all "social" issues all together. They should run on Fiscal responsibility only. When they open their mouths about social anything, they end up looking stupid. Instead of opposing Gay Marriage, they should oppose government defining what marriage is, and isn't. Instead of banning abortion, they should be working towards getting rid of abortion as birth control. Etc and so on.
If they ran (Fed level) on strictly economic / fiscal platform, they would win, and big.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Everyone does not become a manager. Your blinkered view is part of the problem, thinking that everyone is an alpha looking to manage and control others. I've been an engineer for 25 years and the bulk of the engineers do *not* become managers.
Sounds like short sighted bad parenting, if in fact, that is that case that the majority of kids don't have parents to help if not outright pay for college.
The parents should have been ready to sacrifice as required to not only feed and clothe the kids they produced, but to also SAVE for their education, or make damned sure the kids worked and studied hard enough in HS to get grades good enough for scholarships and grants....
Sorry...but college is not a right, it is a privilege that someone has to pay for....and it should be parents for most kids.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
There's no "magic number" of income below which you get a bunch of grants and above which you get none.
It's not a number, it's a formula. And if your parents aren't giving you money, you're better off having them be poor, because based only on a college student's income, you WILL be poor.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
In this day in age of reverse discrimination in high gear..t.hat is simply a fallacy.
Most every grant or opportunity offered by the govt (especially the Feds) is geared to minorities and women (if you are a minority woman, you are a goldmine).
Take a look at Federal Contracting. About the only way to land one, is to be a minority or female.
That's why so many bigger companies, in order to land Federal contracts, will "partner" with a minority woman, or even white women owned company, to apply for the contracts.
Usually the winning minority/female owned company, is merely a front for the deal, but these days, if you are a white male owned company, you stand virtually NO chance of landing a Federal contract.
And as far as just being male....have you seen the scary number of just how badly graduation rates for males in the US has become?
We've spent so much time and effort promoting women through the school systems, that we've gone overboard, and abandoned our young men....look at the college graduating stats.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
1) I openly defy you to name another nation that is more tollerant towards immigrants than the USA.
2) Are H!Bs "immigrants" H1B advocates tend to flip-flop on this depending on what supports their argument at the time.
3) You completely ignored the actual argument, and instead created a straw man argument. Why should Americans train for STEM, only to train their H1B replacements, or have their jobs offshored? Being accepting of "immigrants" is one thing, stupid public policy is another.
It's not just a simple case of consumers spending more because of infinite buying power. If you want to have a decent job and be part of the middle class (or better) these days college is not optional. Sure there will be the oddball who got lucky in some situation or another and pulled it off without college. I don't believe most people do. So, students (and parents) do whatever they have to do to get a college education. The government could regulate tuition rates at state universities... If they simply limited loan amounts to levels lower than what is required for tuition then we'd have fewer students and suffer as a country as there really would be a reason to offshore jobs.
I was fortunate, my parents paid for my education. I've prepaid for 4 years each at a state university for both of my children. Not everyone is so lucky, and as a country I don't think we can afford to ignore those people.
In no other situation do we accept that someone else's death is acceptable as a solution for anything other than self-defense, including severe economic or mental distress.
Except useless wars and capital punishment. Just saying. Pro-life across the board or go home. I've heard that the GOP Right to Life starts at conception and ends at birth.
"That which does not kill us makes us stranger." -Trevor Goodchild
Well, that's because doing the student loans differently gets VOTES....apparently you've been missing some of the exalted leader...er...Obama's rhetoric these past couple years...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
> it's a sign of proper upbringing to value all people equally regardless of where they were born.
Oh come on now, this is not a nationality issue. It's a matter of sound economic policy. BTW: the major H1B importers certainly do not allow other nations to to flood the markets in *their* coutries.
That being said, I paid my blood and my first born, thank you very much, and I don't support the next generation getting the free ride
So, essentially, "since I went through a shitty system, I want everyone else to have to go through that shitty system."
Going through college and working your ass off to get a degree in one of the hard sciences is hardly a "free ride."
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
1) H1Bs are not legally allowed to create start ups.
2) Many of the start-ups created by foreign workers are staffing companies designed to replace even more US workers.
I paid my way too, and I have my MS in EE, but if we are going to collectively give money away to educate people, why spend it on a BA in south american basket weaving which will be unproductive to our society and economy just because that poor basket weaving graduate will have hard time getting a job afterwards. That sounds like a lost cause to me.
Even if everyone switches majors after a year or two of STEM majors, that might not be such a bad thing. After all, they would be learning about science and technology during that time. For example, would it hurt to have MBA's that actually knew how to program? Or politicians that had some understanding of biology?
Let me help you, some of us have no problem killing anything that is not and never was sentient. It's a very short and slippery slope from opposing abortion to opposing contraception.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Financial aid is "need-based" If you can't pay the tuition, they kick in to help you. This is NOT a factor of just household income - more of disposable income.
Point and case, I attended the 10 year reunion at my alma matter. The chancellor had a slide in his presentation showing the total $ of financial aid (vertical) by reported income (typically parents, on the horizontal). I was flabbergasted to see families making $300k+ annually getting aid, but .... if they are sending 5 kids to college and have a mortgage that breaks them, then yeah, they have "need" too. Doesn't mean the rich get a free ride, but not everyone needs to be dirt poor to need a helping hand.
Pass Calculus I first
This is kind of how we do it in North Dakota.
They pay 1500 bucks a year towards your student loans for up to four years. Engineers and scientists qualify, as do teachers and a couple of other occupations I believe.
But most jobs that ask for a degree already don't actually require it in practice. It's a way for HR to measure your dedication, and personally I suspect, level of financial independence (saddled with student debt = reliable employee).
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
This sort of incentive should be introduced through loan programs rather than direct subsidy. The government should not be tinkering with tuition prices directly as that should be decided by cost and demand. Rather, the government should look at its loan programs as an investment. The types of degree programs that the Florida government wants to push are a good investment so they should work to make it easier to get loans for those, at the expense of loans provided to students that are less likely to help the economy and may also have difficulty paying their loans back later.
What have science majors ever done for the African-American community?
Science does things differently for people of different races? O_o
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
This. I don't know why they even bother saying, "minorities or women," when it's just as easy to say, "everyone but white males."
And I find this idea that, "I got completely fucked, so you should be fucked as well" to be absolutely retarded. Doing what would be better for the country and the economy should take precedence over some dick measuring contest over who paid more that you seem to be obsessed with.
Yes, this makes perfect sense. My wife is a teacher. However, her undergrad wasn't in teaching, she just went back for a teaching certificate. If she had gone for teaching to begin with, she would have received a government paid full ride, but switching after the fact means she doesn't qualify. It makes a lot more sense to give out nothing upfront and forgive portions of loans for each year of service.
Sounds like short sighted bad parenting
Or a case of not having piles of money sitting around.
And no, college should not be a "privilege". Unless you want to remove any kind of competitive advantage this country has.
There is a shortage of (some) doctors and some nurses (who increasingly need a 4 year BA to get into nursing school).
Lawyers and MBA's - not so much.
You could target these professions with preferential treatment except that in the 6-12 year time frame between high school and and MD / RN degree the job market can flip pretty hard.
Nobody said it would be easy or fair.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Abortion, however, is about killing humans.
So says you. I'll go with the definition found in the Bible, where life begins at first breath.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Wait a minute, so you say you got viscously mauled by the school loan system. And now, at a time when we desperately need more engineers and scientists, you're saying you're good with letting the next generation get mauled to death (and make no mistake, between the banks, the fact you can't default on an educational loan, and the fact that Universities have turned getting a degree into a very lucrative business... at least for the regents)... you're saying we should just cannibalize the entire next generations middle class and sell them into indentured servitude for the duration of their entire working lives.
Bravo, well done. the fact that you sold your first born seems to indicate you're intent to sell everyone elses as well. Hey we gotta get past this "Got mine, 'F' the rest of y'all" mentality. Besides being just creepy, when things get really bad here (and we are running this train off the rails as we speak), the rest of the world is just gonna point and shake their heads as we lay here and bleed. Growing a conscience, might not be such a bad idea, eh?
I'd rather see no government loan backing at all.
I'm sure you would. I'm sure your fantasy world also has banks not fucking students over. But here in reality, stuff like this is necessary to allow lower income students to go to school without working themselves to death while doing it, allowing them to actually do some LEARNING while in school, and pull themselves up compared to how they grew up.
Loans would only end up going to people that banks actually thought would be willing an able to pay back the loan.
So not a single poor person would get one. I can't see any way that would be bad /s.
I bet you'll want us to get off your lawn next? You suffered...therefore everyone else should?
Most students do have trouble paying off their loans, and when they're saddled with $100K to $200K in debt at 22 yrs old with an engineering job paying $60K/yr if they're lucky it can be pretty debilitating. But these are perhaps the lucky ones...the real tragedy is all the students that don't enter school to begin with for financial reasons.
Georgia, California, and Texas offer completely free college/university. If Florida doesn't have the funds to do this (which I think is the best option) then allocating the money it has based on needs makes sense.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
If they ran (Fed level) on strictly economic / fiscal platform, they would win, and big.
Possibly, unless their big idea for fiscal responsibility is cutting funding for public television and giving trillions of dollars to already obscenely rich people.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Republicans who are against abortion are almost always also against any kind of welfare or assistance program that would help the mother actually raise the child in something other than complete and abject poverty.
Except reality doesn't allow that to happen. Social issues still come up, and they are still going to have to have a stance on them.
Not so...
If you're poor and get medicare, you're far better off than a middle class person who can't afford $10K/yr in health insurance or is being refused by insurers. It's a life and death matter. I'd rather be alive and poor than middle class and dead.
We need universal healthcare for all.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
They could simply price the credit hours differently based on what type of class it is. Gen ed credits are a base price, STEM credits are a discount of that, and some other stuff will be at a premium.
I think it's better to do nothing and let the market decide.
Quite possibly the worst possible idea.
They kinda do, because in most companies, the engineering track dries up after a few years.
Fun? Fun?!? Learning is hard work. Maybe business majors can party most of the time. Engineering majors can't.
As if that isn't enough, there are always a few bad professors who discard their professionalism to flunk students they take a dislike to. I had it even worse. The department I was in was used by other departments as a dumping ground for their worst professors. Instead of one bad teacher, the whole department was bad. The rest of the College of Engineering was graduating 20%, that department was graduating only 5%. The dean finally told them to quit flunking all the students, or he'd eliminate the department. Had I known, I would most certainly have attended a different school. As it was, I managed to graduate in spite of them. You put up with a dysfunctional department and see how much fun you have.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I'm sorry but the problem you're describing is a cultural one and not the problem with schools affirmative action. The public schools are failing everyone almost equally. Sadly, our media has made our young men great consumers, pandering to what tickles their ADHD fancies, but its not saying stay in school, get a good education, become a scientist or and engineer. Look at "Jersey Shores" the message is clear, be a big stupid mook, listen to hip hop, party and get drunk all night every night, and score as many dumb chicks as you can bag and make millions of dollars.
Don't blame girls for being more mature and responsible (its that whole parenting thing...) women know that whatever happens, when the babies come, they will be holding the bag, and so we are wired to take care of business. The only thing tying men down is culture, and our culture has gotten messed up by appealing to their bassist instincts to sell them products.
Helping the underdog isn't and will never be a bad thing. You just have to make sure that as the underdog changes, the new guy on the bottom gets a fair shot as well.
that means spending more generously on the students who are most likely to help grow Florida's economy once they graduate
As if I'd stick around in a backwater hellhole like Florida, especially after getting a degree that would let me move anywhere in the country.
Even if everyone switches majors after a year or two of STEM majors, that might not be such a bad thing. After all, they would be learning about science and technology during that time. For example, would it hurt to have MBA's that actually knew how to program? Or politicians that had some understanding of biology?
Except for the fact that you don't 'learn to program' in two years and at least in biology / chemistry the majors intro courses are not designed as an overview, they're designed as an introduction with the idea that you'll learn more in the next couple of years. If you're just trying to get a feel for how modern biology works you're better off taking an overview course (which is likely easier). If you're going to be a biologist, you might have to actually learn systematics and embryology and other tougher courses since you will need that detailed knowledge in order to deal with more advanced subjects.
At least that's how it worked in Ye Olden Days.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Neil deGrasse Tyson likely is a role model for African-Americans in areas of science.
Yeah, but if you have to hold down a full time job, then your school is hurting. Worse, if you have to commute, have a relationship... you're just doomed. You should go to school when you're going to school and if you're trying to feed yourself, cloth yourself and keep a roof over your head at the same time, I can imagine the vast majority of people failing out very early in the game. This is particularly so with the insane tuitions now being charges and I don't see them going down any time in the foreseeable future.
"In economics, pricing is all we have to determine and work out supply and demand."
There's this little thing called 'word of mouth' and 'incoming inquiries about a product' that does a bit better to show the supply and demand.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I'd have to agree. I'd rather see the 'state' fund interpretive basket weaving and make higher education open to as many people as can hack it. Yes, there will be waste - English PhD's waiting on tables and whatnot. That's OK, there is more to life than the paycheck.
If nearly universal post secondary education does absolutely nothing other than improve the general political discourse in this country, it will be absolutely worth it (and I think there are several other important advantages). You cannot help steer this society through the 21st Century with a 14th Century mindset.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
And often against providing contraception that would prevent the unwanted pregnancy in the first place.
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Gee. Could it be that there already are those sorts of folks? That isn't the issue. The problem for the African American (and Latino and Native American) communities is that there is not the underlying ethos for delayed gratification. Hard to do when your on the edge of economic disaster (although there are lots of exceptional people who do exactly that).
Don't know how you kick start that (or if you indeed can). Probably takes generations. Much easier to look up to a basketball star who makes a 7 figure salary than some scientist who sits in a lab for weeks on end. And even in the minority communities that do historically foster education as a worthy goal (cf, the stereotypical Asian), there are lots of members of that ethnic group who have no plans or aspirations or inclinations to obtain more education.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Supposing a fellow starts in one of the blessed majors and ends up getting a philosophy degree at the end? Are they going to whack him for the difference in tuition, or will he have made an end run around it?
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
Republicans and Democrats are about equally dysfunctional when it comes to science, and in roughly the same areas: social science, psychology, biology, and those scientific issues closest to their big corporate donors and buddies in industry.
From personal experience, I can say this isn't true of all students. I worked nearly a full time job ~30 hours a week, commuted 1 hour each way to school, and still graduated with three degrees in four years. I can't be the only one who can do that; it's just that most people really don't begin tapping their potential.
A relative of mine who is a Mexican-American female is now a science major at [big expensive school] which encouraged her to go there and assured her that, being hispanic and female, she would be able to get financial aid.
After she got there, it turned out they didn't have any aid at all. It's now a real financial problem and she may not be able to afford next year.
Please tell me exactly where females and hispanics studying science can get financial aid.
No vague generalities, please. We've looked. What did we miss?
That's a load of BS. Companies that represent the bulk of US contracting dollars are overwhelmingly run by white males: Boeing, Lockheed, Haliburton, General Dynamics, GE, Cisco, Mircosoft, GM... Which large government contracts are being awarded to minority/female run companies?
I used to work at a University and I would say it has more to do with the Administration's boner for new multimillion dollar construction projects. Does your campus really need a $50 million dollar rec center or a $150 million student union?
One problem is that job opportunities in engineering fluctuate so widely. One year, the aerospace companies are paying top dollar for aerospace engineers, the next year, aerospace engineers are driving cabs.
One of the benefits of liberal arts degrees is that they give you a general knowledge that you can apply to a lot of fields. I knew lots of people with undergrad or even PhD degrees in history, philosophy, math, sociology, etc. who became computer programmers.
Up until pretty recently, a college graduate with any major could get a job teaching elementary or high school. It was a pretty good job, good salary, job security, etc. Now that's gone.
(I'm not any of the other anonymous cowards posted in this story so far.)
Here's my take...
Past injustices still have a lingering affect many years later as one's family may be financially poor. But that's just it, it's about poverty. Poverty affects everyone, even white males. So we should be focusing on making sure that anyone who has the merit to get in to college, can afford to get in to college.
War and "defense" spending is too much, so I say cut them some. How about making the first two year's of college tuition free (based on the state's average tuition rate for public colleges)? Limited to being in good standing in one's classes, of course. Tuition means tuition, which is a part of the cost of attendance. Next, triple the maximums people can borrow for Direct student loans, subbed and unsubbed alike. Some say private loans are poison. And the 10 year repayment plan? Simple: how about a 0% interest rate if you are on-time with all your payments? A two year grace period before having to start payments post-graduation would be nice. It'd give you time to really get on your feet in a poor economy at the least.
We need to find out why tuition rates are rising. Is it because the state governments aren't subsidizing it to the extent as they did before? Or is there another reason behind it skyrocketing?
A final thought: if we leave education up to which majors make the most money or which are most in demand, what kind of society will we end up becoming?
Liberal arts have already been thrown under the bus at most schools. A 700 person humanities or communications class costs far less to teach than the students are paying in tuition, which helps offset STEM classes that cost far more than what students are paying. Why do you think schools have gen-ed requirements? They are there to subsidizes higher level classes that would be too expensive to teach on their own.
And some of the best people didn't become scientists and engineers because of how much it would pay. They did it because they wanted to do cool things.
Look at Ayn Rand's hero and model, Nikolai Tesla. He died broke.
Look at Akira Endo. He wanted to be like Alexander Fleming. He never made any money out of statins.
Or look at Alexander Fleming. He refused to patent penicillin.
Germany used to have free university education and liberal financial aid, but that was back when only a few percent of Germans went to university. Back then, your primary school teachers effectively decided whether you'd be able to go to university a decade later.
Today, many German universities do charge tuition. Furthermore, most Germans don't get financial aid for living expenses. There is a student loan program, loans are partially subsidized, and many Germans are left with student loan debt.
Does the system work? A much smaller percentage of Germans are university graduates, and a much smaller percentage of secondary students enroll in college or university. And Germans adults are less educated on average than Americans.
The German system isn't bad, but I don't see any objective sense in which it is better than the US system.
Well, apparently Affirmative Action is a myth; there are many who believe in equality for all who'll be glad to hear that. :)
Except that CS degree does not need help paying off that loan
You can also look at prison population and the violent deaths in the U.S, both of which feature a larger proportion of men. I'm certainly not opposed to programs to support women or minority groups. But where is the outcry for programs to help men graduate from school, stay out of prison, and avoid violent death?
In most EU countries, higher education is either free or cheap. That makes it available to practically everyone, which makes the EU countries the true lands of equal opportunity.
Spoken like someone who doesn't live there and is speaking from the outside. Education is not free, it's paid for by taxes - which Europe has no lack of and are far from cheap. If you think Europe is a bastion of opportunity and equality you're sorely mistaken. Racism and Nationalism are alive and well, if you're an outsider you will forever be a foreigner there. Look at France, Germany, Norway.
All countries have their faults, this isn't some broad claim that Europe should be avoided, far from it. This is like someone misunderstanding the difference between the letter of the law and the spirit.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
Yes, we do need Philosophy majors, Artists, thinkers, and just a generally more educated populace. I wish people would stop thinking so much about their own wallet and how much money they can have in 5 years, and think more about us as a society and a single people who benefit greatly from further education
Yes, Tyson is the model minority. But there are dismally few black scientists and engineers. And it's not because they're not smart or don't work hard. http://www.ronsuskind.com/articles/cat_wall_street_journal.html
It's because we've had 100 years of slavery and 100 years of a continuation of slavery in the form of Jim Crow. We still haven't recovered from that history and we have huge segregated neighborhoods where the black schools get fewer resources than white schools.
Now the Republicans are making it worse by cutting funding for elementary and high schools, cutting teacher salaries and taking away their job security. (And yes, the "moderate" Democrats, including Obama, have done the same.)
Hey...the world needs ditchdiggers too.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
And yet women are still paid less and are poorly represented in most high paying field.
And the idea that you stand almost no chance of landing a federal contract if you are a white male owned company is pure BS. It is often touted as an excuse if someone who isn't white and male gets it, but the bulk of government money still does to companies owned by dumpy white guys.
Not sure where you are getting the idea that male graduation rates are going 'badly', unless you are specifically looking at black male graduation rates which are kinda in the crapper right now. White male ones are still pretty good. Even if they are a little higher, oh no, white males are not on top, the horror!
Actually...a lot of them, BIG ones....are targeted often as "small business" projects. If a 'small business' gets it...the project is so large that it automatically negates their eligibility for renewal when it comes around again.
So, what happens is...and minority/female owned small business 'partners' with a Lockheed or others that you mentioned, and basically is a front to apply for the contract.
The contract is won, the small minority/female business sits for the duration of the work as a figurehead, making a decent bit of money, while the bulk goes to the established behemoth company.
At the completion of the contract, the small business is brushed aside,and the cycle continues.
This type thing also happens with contracts not specifically targeted at 'small business'....they put out or partner with a small set up company that is female/minority "owned"....and get the contracts.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
That was my thought.
I started off being declared as a business major, but after sophomore year, I had stopped taking business courses altogether and in Junior year I started my college's BA/MA mathematics program where students earn their MA as part of a four year program.
Technically, I never declared myself a mathematics major, but the school automatically declared me one when I was sent my graduation audit halfway through my last semester.
South Carolina already does this. It's a "Science Enhancement" that's part of two scholarships (LIFE and Palmetto). You get an extra $2500 a year scholarship for your Sophomore, Junior, and Senior years if you are a declared science major and you take 14+ credits of math and science during your freshman year. Good program, but should be expanded. Problem isn't lack of smart students. It's lack of motivated students. It's hard to watch your roommates and friends who are psych majors go out every night and still get A's and B's while you work your ass off to get A's and B's in the sciences. An extra $5000 or so a year would go a long way to helping those students stick with it.
So government picks winner and loser majors? "Free market" FAIL!
some of us have no problem killing anything that is not and never was sentient.
Yeah, but they keep coming back each election cycle.
Thank you, remember to tip your waitress!
I don't think a candidate that your base likes and a candidate that other people can get behind are mutually exclusive things. It just requires someone to have political positions which are based on reasons they can effectively communicate.
The problem is that so many primary voters want a candidate who is telling them what they already want to hear, and the media isn't helping them listen to candidates who are telling them what they NEED to hear.
Precalc will stop the underwater basket weavers from gaming the system. The should have to pass that (or AP calc in HS) to get the discount.
Grade inflation in precalc will be attempted by teachers who think this is somehow 'unjust'. We will have to count on Math departments to hold the line.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I don't support the next generation getting the free ride, particularly for students who are the most likely to have no trouble paying their loans back!
And how do you determine who is "most likely to have no trouble paying their loans back"? Do you have a crystal ball that can predict each individuals past, present, and future to accurately asses whether they are able/unable to do so? This is idealistic nonsense, and needs to stop.
The important question is not whether anyone gets a free ride, the important question is whether giving lower-cost (or even free) education will end up gaining more than it costs. You know, the same as any other investment.
That said, your post does demonstrate the cancer of modern politics: people are more interested in making sure no one gets anything they haven't earned than whether they, themselves, are getting something. They aren't even selfish, but actively malicious. In other words, people behave like scorpions and then complain that the country is drowning.
No, silly popularism would be to decide that since you had to pay your blood and first born, everyone else should too. In fact, caring at all about what you had to pay for education when deciding its future price (if any) could only possibly have any relevance if one was trying to appeal to your sense of envy. Which is popularity at its worst.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
There's no "magic number" of income below which you get a bunch of grants and above which you get none.
Agreed. There is not a magic number, but there are general guidelines for family income, especially for Pell Grants.
- Under 30k, almost a certainty.
- 30k-60k, maybe.
- 60k+, probably not
Also, "poor" is a relative term when it comes to student loans. If you are a dependent student, and have no income from your parents, you are eligible for 40% less in total federal loans per year than an "independent" student. For most public universities, that amount ($5,500 - $7,500) isn't enough to cut it per semester. Borrowing privately is not easy at age 18 when you have no credit to speak of.
Note: AC is not disagreeing with your previous comments, only highlighting being "poor", "middle-class", or "rich" are relative terms when it comes to being able to afford higher education.
+1 funny
Yes, but the degree is just part of it. The other part is learning to be a functional adult independent of your parents and whatever bullshit they fed you when you were a kid. Skip that part, and you'll get one hell of a middle-age crisis when the issue is forced by your own mortality, with all the problems that entails.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
That's why I follow it to the logical conclusion and equate cockblocking with murder.
That's one of the problems with a system that teaches everyone that if they want something enough there's no such thing as failure, and that credit solves everything.
If people want subsidized education, they should be expected to contribute financially to maintain that system. If they want education which cannot help repay the subsidy, they should pay for it themselves.
I came here expecting howls of how this would be unfair to liberal arts majors, and was not disappointed. Education for education's sake is great, but if that's why you're there you should pay for it yourself just like any other hobby. If you're going to have others pay for it, you should expect there to be strings attached.
It's always nice to hear a story of someone who made hard choices with the long term in mind. Too many people today believe that something being unpleasant or difficult equates to it not being possible.
If you think being poor and getting help is better than being middle-class and having loans, then you have never been poor before.
You also seem to have very little idea about how the financial aid system works. The poorer you are, the more help you get. There's no "magic number" of income below which you get a bunch of grants and above which you get none.
My roommate in college had a full ride from grants due to financial need. I had none. Yet he had the latest computer, a $1000 bike, while I was stuck with a mediocre machine and a $100 bike because I couldn't afford more. Maybe his life before sucked, but in college, at least financially, he was better off than me, a middle class kid.
"that we've gone overboard, and abandoned our young men....look at the college graduating stats."
I agree up until that line. (My buds who sell to DoD have women-owned businesses for your listed reasons.)
US males have a CULTURAL problem with education, and this combines with being sold bullshit lines of study (if you are poor and go to college for anything other than marketable skills you fucked up, the few "unique snowflakes" excepted) to produce a generation of football-worshipping dumbfucks. The idealisation of the "common man" is to blame for the common man is a slug who doesn't seek to improve HIMSELF as opposed to his material condition. The result is he isn't good at improving his material condition!
This carries over into schooling. I'm taking CNC machine shop courses at my local community college. (I encourage everyone who likes to Make Stuff to do so.) The underperforming students spend much of their time bullshitting about football (and don't think my comments about the latent homosexuality of jock worship are funny...) so their performance suffers. The serious students come in early for extra lab time and excel as a result. If I come in early I don't have to wait on a mill or a lathe, but male students who really NEED the money they'd earn as machinists or operators can be found smoking and joking in the parking lot.
At least their tuition funds classes we wouldn't have otherwise. A welding instructor I worked with believed in the "ten percent rule". Ten percent of his students had the motivation and determination to excel. The rest had pulse and respiration.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
That would make them Libertarians, and if you listen to a lot of people on Slashdot, Libertarians are even crazier than Republicans.
After all, it's not that the Federal government shouldn't be able to control social behavior, it's that it should control it the right (Left?) way. Neither side of the major party objects to the power, just to how it's used when their side isn't in control. Anyone who objects to the power itself is The Enemy, and obviously crazy.
"Dale Brill says tax dollars are scarce, and the public deserves the best possible return from its investment in education and that means spending more generously on the students who are most likely to help grow Florida's economy once they graduate."
Right, because the only possible return on investment comes in the form of short-term economic growth.
*sigh*
Texas, for one place. They've finally figured out that throwing a large proportion of the male population in jail isn't a great plan in the long term. There's some interesting articles on the organized plan to reduce the use of heavy jail time for a wide range of - usually male - offenders. Read up.
On the violent deaths point; you might want to check the gender of the _assailant_ as well as the _victim_ in all those cases. But there are certainly lots of government dollars for anti-gang programs, tough-on-crime programs and so on.
The stance that makes the most sense to me, given their claims of not liking big government, is to let people do what they want as long as it doesn't impact others. I realize they'd argue abortion falls into this, but contraception and gay marriage do not. Forcing morals on the nation is not small government. Social issues, their position should be "sort it out for yourself."
That being said, I paid my blood and my first born, thank you very much, and I don't support the next generation getting the free ride, particularly for students who are the most likely to have no trouble paying their loans back! This is silly popularism striking again.
I'm thinking the same because I paid a ton of money for an education, but that's not the point and not in the spirit of positive change/reform. Education is way too expensive. I'm not sure, but I have a feeling the cost of an education is exceeding the cost-of-living index and the yearly inflation rate. Why can't people pay tuition based on their income? If you can pay back your loans at a rate commensurate with your yearly earnings, why not get an education at a cost relative to your (or parents') income? To me, that would seem fair, but to others it may seem 'socialist'.
No sig for you! Come back one year!
This is a classic red herring. Yes, some entitlements on the backs of a middle class in decline need to be revisited and some are just silly. The problem is that the most egregious entitlements are going to administrators, people who already have retirements in hundreds of thousands of dollars (some even in the millions... see UC Regents.) Mostly, people in the public sector have basic pensions. This only an affront now because American Corporations disappeared the existence of pensions in the private sector in the 80s. Up until then it was normal for a person to spend 20-30 years working with the same company, and for that company by giving that employee a reasonable retirement.
In the 80s corporations gave up any idea of loyalty or obligation to their workers and turned them into a simple resource like any other raw material to used and discarded at will. So now workers are saying "Why should these people get pensions when I don't have one?" Its a good question. The answer is that that wealthy people at the top of the financial pyramid are enjoying your pension. The some of several thousand of those pensions bought one person a lovely home in the Hamptons and another a 120 foot yacht. So by all means push that government worker over the edge and illiminate their pensions. It will allow the Republicans to cut taxes and ultimately feed that saving to the same wealthy folks who are now enjoying your pensions, why shouldn't they have them all.
Or maybe instead, its time to demand your pension back. Demand that corporations treat their employees like human beings who might have some additional life worth living after they retire.
So essentially you don't agree because what you would expect to happen if the the parent is telling the truth is happening?
Not having the means to pay for your kids to go to college isn't short sighted and bad parenting - sometimes it's just your income. I don't disagree that parents need to be involved, there are all sorts of middle class kids going to school on grants and scholarships that they don't need. Unfortunately, there are also all sorts of kids who don't have those middle class parents but still have the drive to succeed in life. You don't want a society that condemns a kid to be stuck in the lower class just because they have poor (or simply bad) parents.
+1 Disagree
Apparently your studying wasn't efficient enough.
Please?
Sure, it is difficult to some degree and sure, there are professors who can make it a bit less pleasant. But I see you made your college experience unusually hard by making a poor choice and staying with it.
At University of Washington, they are investigating differential tuition, and charging more for degrees in which it costs more to attract faculty, i.e, Computer Science.
And it explains why liberal California is such an Engineering desert.....
You can't know a choice is poor if you are kept in the dark. It's not like the department was bragging about their professors' origins or accomplishments. None of us undergrad students knew what had been done to the department. And why should we suspect it? It should go without saying that we students were hardly in a position to judge the technical competence of an entire department! We didn't know enough to make such a judgment. More, it should be safe to assume that a major school is going to do a competent job of running a degree program, so there is no need to ask questions intended to discover if that is in fact the case. Sadly in this case that assumption didn't hold. I asked around for opinions on the professors, and didn't hear much that was worthwhile. Even if the professors weren't flunk happy, many students would not have made it through the program, which skews their opinions to the point of worthlessness. What to them is a "hard" teacher who should be avoided I often found was a good teacher who made you learn. Hard and fair is good.
It's the unfair treatment that makes it rough. We had professors who were pretty bitter about being cast off by their chosen discipline, but still held to the idea that their chosen field was worth learning, while the field they were pushed into teaching was not, and only attracted inferior students. They took this attitude out on us, sort of "proving" their prejudice, but not so blatantly that it was obvious after the first 2 weeks of class. We had another professor who I heard was decent. Was. Unfortunately, he was old and his last years there were marked by gradually increasing senility. He would go into a berserk rage over and flunk any student who he thought was showing him up in the slightest, and it was too easy to set him off without meaning to. He was also very rigid. If he decided you were a B or a C student, that was the highest grade he would give you, no matter how well you actually performed. But the department could not retire him because he had tons of tenure, and they were short of professors as it was. By the time I figured out what the department was like, I had already earned many hours of credit. I would have lost half those credits if I had left before finishing my degree. Schools make transferring very harsh once they have you.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
When are American Slashdoters going to learn and really understand what the word FREE means. When are they going to learn that the American education system is 10yrs behind the mud hut schools in Africa, When are they going to learn that America is NOT the land of opportunity they have been conditioned to think it is, The only opportunity there is in America today is DEBT and more DEBT. Work part time hours in service jobs for low pay. Being controlled every minute of their lives by evil corrupt corporates
Americans run away like wiped dogs with their tails between their legs from the word Free (OSS), they don't understand that their everyday lives depend on Free (OSS), Americas worlds greatest achievement in August was made possible through Free (OSS), The universe is being explored using FREE (OSS), Americas worlds fastest computers are using Free (OSS), The Internet is run on Free (OSS),
American universities are turning to Free (OSS). Every child from 3yrs through to university can have a Free education using FOSS. Taxation could be cut by 65% if Florida Education and Government departments used Free Open Source Software. Gov Scott knows all about FOSS but won't promote it in Florida
Last but not least Free Open Source Software is developed by Americas top information technology corporate's.
It should go without saying that we students were hardly in a position to judge the technical competence of an entire department!
It should go without saying that you were in a unique position to determine how good a fit that department was for you. Nobody else could do that for you. Plus, if they were graduating only 5% of the students majoring in that field of study, that would have come up from talking with students.
Oh well, that's water under the bridge. From my limited experience, there's a number of things I'd consider truly hard, such as raising kids well (that doesn't last just four years!), starting a profitable business which employs people, or recovering from a crippling injury.
"Why should college necessarily be a "fond personal experience"? You're there to learn, are you not?" You're there to do a lot of things. Learn is one of them. But get real for a moment, nearly everything one learns in a college classroom one forgets within weeks, months, and certainly years. This is not cynicism, this is fact. If you take an Econ course or a Psychology course, months or years later former students can't recite lots of facts learned. College is about learning facts, learning discipline, learning teamwork, learning about other people, broadening your mind, transitioning to being an adult. All the goals are important. For some certain goals will be more important than for others. For some, the stuff one learns will be highly aligned with the work they do in the workplace in 2, 5, and 20 years, for others the stuff they learn will have little to do with future work, and that's ok. Anyway, with a broader view of what one could and should get from college, I think college can and should be a fond personal experience. --JSt
One reason I've heard cited that makes sense to me is that education, whether 2nd grade or second year of med school, is one of those human endeavors that requires person-to-person interactions that resists the general industrialization that occurs in so many other fields of work. You can't outsource classroom teaching. You can't replace a teacher the way you can replace secretaries with word processors and calendar apps and automated phone answering systems. I don't know whether this idea stands up to scrutiny, tho'... --JSt
That makes no sense whatsoever. Wages have only risen at the rate of inflation (or less, depending on how one calculates it). With that in mind, how does the fact that it still takes one on one interaction explain how the cost of college has risen much faster than inflation?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Rick Scot is a kind of mental basket case. The idea of lower tuition for science and math types being good for Florida is a no brainer at best. Take a look at recent graduates who have degrees in science and math and you quickly realize that young people know better then to work in Florida. Large cities, especially in colder states, offer far better pay and career paths. Even young people with a regular high school diploma get out of Florida to get ahead. This is not new. It was the same 60 years ago. Tourism and orange groves employ people here. Scientists are not good with tourists and generally can't pick oranges as well as migrants. Big industry is not allowed in this state.
I'll confirm that this does happen in US government contracts, and is fairly accurate, but don't take out your frustrations on education and money geared toward helping groups that historically face additional obstacles getting into college when compared with the average. The sins of a (somewhat corrupt) military-industrial complex do not transfer over to the students and administration of higher education.
And I would argue that even though it feels very unfair to see someone receive money or other help simply because of how they were born, it's important to keep in mind that for historic and cultural reasons that still have effect today, they really don't have the same advantages as a white or a male in the US does.
I also want to add that the prison population also tends to be largely poor male minorities of black or latino ancestry, and this fact has been noticed and people have tried to target those populations in their efforts to reduce the prison population.
Also don't forget that the German tax rate is ~67%.
48% Income tax.
19% VAT(Sales tax)
I know that it is really popular right now for those that don;t actually earn anything to treat taxes like a good thing that everybody else should pay more of, but I'd really rather not give up 67% of my earnings for the benefit of those douches.
Have you gone through the financial aid process? If your parents aren't helping you pay, you can note that you aren't a dependant and their income doesn't count toward you financial aid (and you don't count toward their taxes).
There may be flaws and cracks here and there in the financial aid system (and not enough money to go around), but people need to stop thinking there are these giant holes you can drive a truck through. Yes, financial aid is applied considering your income from your family (or lack thereof), your depedents, number of siblings, local costs of living, costs of living at home vs at school vs off campus, the amount of property you own, etc. And yes, if you lie enough, you can trick the system, but for the most part they try to keep everyone honest.
I can't comment on specific cases, but I feel like I need to point out that the type of financial aid you get also favors the poor a little more in college because of what happens AFTER college. Often the poor are expected to help support the family once they get out of school, so if they know they're going to come out of college and have a bunch of loans, they're far more inclined to not go to school in the first place.
I don't know what happened with your roommate, but I received what I would consider a generous amount in grants, went to a public school, cooked most meals, had a $100 used bike (which really isn't that bad; you don't need a $1000 bike to get around college), and had a computer that I had to run with case open and my roommate's fan blowing into it. Care to share any more details about where you went/your roommate's situation?
I'm sorry, but I believe we have reached the day in age, when that kind of special privilege has passed us.
We need to get rid of the quotas, and the affirmative action, and other things that are now, rather than being helpful, are just plain discriminatory.
In the US, the whites aren't going to be the majority very soon...I think we can now stand to tank the "special privs" for minorities now, as that there is enough parity.
Those programs now, are being used as a crutch, the time for victimhood is over.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Well, everyone is dealt a different 'starting hand'...that's just a fact of life.
It is up to the individual (and family) to go from there and do the best with what they're dealt.
It isn't up to the rest of society to make up for that, or pay for it...
There are grants and all out there...those students just need to work harder, value and education more and compete for them a little better than those other kids that were born to a bit more privilege.
| The opportunities are out there....but equal access to opportunities doesn't mean equal outcomes at all.
Everyone is equally free to pursue these things...but you can't and shouldn't legislate moving people around because of where they were born in life...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Well, they DO seem to be committing most of the crimes...especially the violent ones...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
One small change they could make (and this could take the form of copyright reform also) is to do something about the cost of books in sciences. Anyone that takes both arts and sciences know there is a HUGE differance. Arts books typically were numerous, but very low cost, and also available used most of the the time, and I never thought they were a big cost. Science books are big, single, and typically NOT available used, usually by some BS scheme, and cost a ton of money. If you are taking all science course, simply buying all the books is a pretty big burden by themselves. I recall one year at college (quite a few years ago mind you) where a semester cost me 900$ tutition, and 1200$ on books alone. My books were MORE expensive than all the classes I was taking. Typically each book would be between 100-200$, and sometimes more, and sometimes there were multiples.
So if you are looking to so something subtle, yet meaningful to *promote* science, particulary in an education setting, do something about the cost of the science books students need to buy. Either subsidize those rather than tutition, or better yet rather than just throwing money at a broken system, fix the system by introducing copyright reform preventing companies from taking advantage of students.
Anyway not having studied the issue, this seems like a small but obvious thing to do that would likely help a great deal.
Have you gone through the financial aid process? If your parents aren't helping you pay, you can note that you aren't a dependant and their income doesn't count toward you financial aid (and you don't count toward their taxes).
Yes, and that trick didn't work
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You'd be surprised by how many social conservatives don't have a problem with evolution at all.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Perhaps a more reasonable approach, and one that is tied to market forces is to provide reduced interest on student loans for students that are studying topics in high demand. The advantage of this approach is that changes to the program could be made in response to demand for graduates more quickly and independently of the different institutions of higher learning. A program such as this would also need to incorporate quarterly re-evaluations of the progress of students to ensure that they are actually making progress towards graduation and performing well in their classes. Drop below a certain GPA, increase the interest rate as a penalty.
As a faculty member at a Big 10 university with 15 yrs of experience in industry, I am surprised at the number of students who cut class and fail to perform. Most of those students wouldn't last a week in the real world. Where the universities have an incentive to hold onto these students for as long as possible (they are a great source of revenue), many will never be employed in their field of study.
I think this is an excellent alternative that doesn't require significant change to implemehnt. I have often thought that the ammount of student loans a person can recieve should be based upon earning potential. Really - why should the public be funding a lot of liberal arts bachelor degrees when a minimum of a masters is required to get low end employment. I know most of these majors never work in a career oriented to what they have a degree in - so why did we subsidize it?? Makes no sense. At least this will incent people to follow majors that can lead to good jobs. The future employment an dtax benefits will more than offset the cost.
That said - they will have to leave Florida to find employment.
ummm... We totally need more viable humans in the already grossly overpopulated world...
The stance that makes the most sense to me, given their claims of not liking big government, is to let people do what they want as long as it doesn't impact others.
For many of those issues, this would be a perfectly acceptable stance.
Social issues, their position should be "sort it out for yourself."
That's not an acceptable stance for a couple of the issues you mentioned. They would still be required to vote on these issues, unless they all planned on abstaining from the vote, which isn't a good idea either.
There are grants and all out there...those students just need to work harder, value and education more and compete for them a little better than those other kids that were born to a bit more privilege.
I'm not sure if I'm interpreting this quite right... A person who was born without the privilege of well-off parents should *not* have to to work harder than one who was for access to grants and scholarships. I'm assuming you meant they would need to work harder for a college education itself which is certainly true. I think a point where a lot of middle and high schools are failing is showing children of lower income (or simply bad) parents a path to improve their lives through education. Middle class kids generally learn this at home from their educated parents and then it's up to them to apply themselves. Many lower class kids don't have somebody there to show what they can do with their lives and a path to get there.
+1 Disagree
My daughter is majoring in biology at Bryn Mawr, and the College has been quite generous to us. That seems true for many private institutions with reasonably-sized endowments. I'm surprised that [big expensive school] wasn't more generous. Is it all women? Single-sex womens' colleges are always on the lookout for talented young ladies.
Yeah.... only people who can afford it should get educated, all because you had to pay; and that's "fair"; lets keep our society uneducated, so the fear mongers can continue to maintain control; all because you had to pay. Never mind that the rest of had to pay too, and yet still don't think so narrowly; lets stick with what's "fair" for you. Sounds like a great plan.
That's right, Bryn Mawr has a good biology program.
But what is it, $55,000 a year? http://www.brynmawr.edu/sfs/cost/cost_index.html That's more than my relative is paying at her big expensive school. They'd have to be very generous to make it affordable.
She has a lot of good science courses in their standard concentration, including biology and chemistry. The tragedy is that I saw a list of unemployment rates of college graduates with different majors, and biology majors weren't doing too well. There was a time when a biology major would be welcome to teach in high school or even elementary school, and those who wanted to could go into health care, agriculture, etc. or even research. The economy is failing. We're in the middle of a biotechnology revolution, we're finding new drugs to treat major diseases, we need to understand science just to be functioning citizens, and biology majors can't get jobs.
Do you know that tuition in Quebec is $2,200? http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2012/09/20/its-official-quebec-tuition-hikes-are-history/ I wonder how much it is for foreign (American) students. As a bonus, you learn French. The French-speaking students killed a tuition hike because they demonstrated against it. The English-speaking students got a tuition hike. I heard a Canadian say that the English-speaking students pay high tuition, and say, "Compared to the US, this is pretty good." The French-speaking speaking students pay high tuition, and say, "Compared to France, this sucks." I wish our students were demonstrating in the streets, although I have to give them credit for Occupy Wall Street. Which the Canadians helped us organize.
appealing to their bassist instincts...
I've always said that drummers are more trustworthy. *rimshot*
Bryn Mawr have been very generous with us. It's worth a shot.
My daughter wants to go to med school and maybe transition to public health later in her career. I'm not worried about her employment prospects. Bryn Mawr also does very well with students who intend to go for a Ph.D in the sciences. A few months back the Washington Monthly published a set of college ratings that use different criteria than USA Today does. Bryn Mawr turns out to be their top-ranked liberal arts college because of things like the generosity of its aid packages, the percentage of students going on for doctorates, and other measures like community service. I thought it might have scored in the top twenty or thirty schools, but I never expected to find it at the top of the list. Washington Monthly reported an average "net price" for Bryn Mawr of $19,316 after financial aid is factored in.
I also have a niece at McGill. Tuition for foreigners is a lot more than that $2,200 figure, but much less than tuition at an American private institution. The drawback is that foreign students don't receive financial aid. So it could be more expensive than an American school with an aid package, or less depending on what is offered.
Would you kill a dog?
Killed them, claiming eugenics. Science is racist and must be stopped; or at least four semesters of Minority Studies should be required for any undergraduate degree.
It is one of the most indisputable facts of the historical record that crime is massively more strongly linked with economic factors than with anything else. In other words, more poor people are caught for crimes. This isn't because they're more evil than rich people; it's because they have more need to commit crimes (as a philosopher once pointed out, the law forbids rich and poor alike to steal bread or sleep under bridges), they are less likely to be able to get off when charged with a crime (they can't afford good legal representation), and as the rich are usually in positions of political power, the crimes typically committed by poor people - burglary, shoplifting etc - are treated as far higher priorities by the authorities than the crimes typically committed by rich people - white collar fraud, for instance. (Other forms of criminal behaviour committed by the richer classes have been outsourced to corporations; you can bet your bottom dollar that if the Exxon Valdez oil spill had somehow been caused by poor people, it would've been a crime. But as it was caused by rich people, it's just corporate malfeasance. Convenient, no?)
This is almost completely untrue. It's just myth and wives tales that disgruntled white people tell each other. I know; I used to be one of them. Like many, I figured you could game the system by using a shill minority or female. And instead of just talking about it, I pursued it.
Turns out those affirmative action contracts are few and far between. (Basically non-existent for your average person, no matter how dark or how many vaginas they have.) And it's impossible to get any government aid, in terms of contracts or guarantees, without already having significant assets.
I know, I know. You've undoubtedly heard many anecdotes. Well, next time you hear one, track down the source and get the facts. Please. And don't just post internet links. There's a million miles between those offers governments and banks advertise, and the goal line of getting cash into your account. It's the actual journey through the system that belies the myths.
US colleges beat down fees in drive towards $10,000 degree
Casteism
Is there any shortage of biology major graduates there? Around here, it's getting tough for biology grads to find hamburger flipper jobs. There's almost no physics majors, math majors or chemistry majors. One can now get emergency teaching credentials in high schools for these because there are almost no majors teaching for these. Of course there are too many teaching these subjects with biology degrees or worse.
Dogs are sentient and I don't eat them...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The economics of college degrees has always been suspect--charging the same tuition for degrees which are valued differently in the marketplace.
OF course, subsidizing the degrees which bring in the most money to the student--science--is exactly backward but that's what you get from folks who don't understand economics (which seems to be most voters and thus most politicians).
What a minute, isn't this backwards? shouldn't we be offering the higher grant/loan packages (because that is what is offered is a package of grants and loans) to the people who will be making LESS money when they graduate. The ones making more will be able to pay down their loans faster, so they will be a drag on the economy for a short period of time. If we are pretending to talk in economic terms then lets keep it in reality. The students who will come out of uni with a contract for 40,000 US a year need to have the best loan/grant package so that they can get out of debt and into a position where they are an economically positive factor, not a 20 year drag on the economy.
My oldest daughter paid her own way through university, finished at a very private and expensive university and immediately went to work at an excellent salary, paid her loans back in 2 years, started on an MBA, finished it, works part-time now, owns two houses, has a high level admin job and raises two kids all at the same time. She didn't get or need much help, life is good for her. But that is not the same for many students who come out of their BA/BS education and crash into a job scene that doesn't really have a lot of room for them, no scarcity of resource, no big paycheck. They need our help.
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If they had good grades and test scores and were choosing a lucrative degree, then yes, the banks would be happy to lend to them. If they weren't going to be able to graduate in a degree that would let them pay back a loan, I don't see opting not to burden them with debt that they'll never get rid of as a bad thing.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari