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How Colleges Are Pushing Out the Poor To Court the Rich
An anonymous reader writes "A change from 'need' based financial aid to a 'merit' based system coupled with a 'high tuition, high aid,' model is making it harder for poor students to afford college. According to The Atlantic: 'Sometimes, colleges (and states) really are just competing to outbid each other on star students. But there are also economic incentives at play, particularly for small, endowment-poor institutions. "After all," Burd writes, "it's more profitable for schools to provide four scholarships of $5,000 each to induce affluent students who will be able to pay the balance than it is to provide a single $20,000 grant to one low-income student." The study notes that, according to the Department of Education's most recent study, 19 percent of undergrads at four-year colleges received merit aid despite scoring under 700 on the SAT. Their only merit, in some cases, might well have been mom and dad's bank account.'"
Social mobility. Welcome Feudalism 2.0
Tomorrow is another day...
Are they calculating that by dividing the score based on 2400 by 3?
How Colleges Are Pushing Out the Poor To Court the Rich
It might have something to do with making it too expensive for the poor. Just a thought...
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For instance, if your parents make less than $65k/year (approx. 150% median U.S. household income, or 300% the cutoff for "poverty level") you can attend Harvard for free. Assuming you can get in. Which, in the grand scheme of things, sort of makes it a "merit based" scholarship after all.
Why is it that schools are grouped into either the comparatively prestigious category of 4 year academic B.S. degrees, or the lowly 2 year trade school degree?
If you want to learn theory and go on to do basic research or become a professor, then the B.S. degree is ideal. But if you want to get a really good education of the type that would prepare you to work a skilled job, where is there to turn to? A trade school is geared towards career training, but these are not prestigious and are considered lowly and are typically just 2 year programs. Why can't there be a four year program from a high quality school that has the emphasis on teaching the skills you need for a career in industry? People complain that college is useless, and maybe it is in practice, but couldn't college be very useful if it taught the right things? Why not teach what students need to know to succeed?
Hamsters are at least as feathery as penguins. HamLix
College used to be a place for the rich to put there kids whiles others went to the trades / tech schools or just had on the job training (the rich part dates back to middle ages).
Also some people went to college mainly for sports and not so much to learn.
We need to stop this idea of college for all and give trades / tech schools more respect and / or cut them out of the collgle time frames / credits systems.
Some colleges over the years have dumbed down and stated to let anyone as long as they can pay or get a high cost loan that is very hard to get rid of. I say if they made it easier to get rid of collgle loans prices will come down and some of the junk / fully majors will go a way.
You have to be seriously deluded to believe the problem with American Universities is too many merit scholarships. I normally like the Atlantic but this is easily the dumbest thing I've read in print this year.
My high school graduation had 2 national merit scholarships awarded to "Home Economics"-grade Valedictorians. The remainder of the graduating class was divided in to two groups of people: the kids with poor or divorced parents that could manipulate their FAFSA to look shit poor, and everyone with an EFC higher than the families take home pay after groceries and gasoline.
The kids lucky enough to be born to crack head parents got free rides. The kids from the middle class got yoked with private student loans or didn't get to go to school at all. Grades had NOTHING to do with it.
-If you had a pulse and your mom was a pack of cigarettes from turning tricks: Harvard.
-If you could program an FPGA to run the Attitude Control System on a pico-satellite, you may get a $1000 check if you wrote a 20 page essay on why GWB was the best president in history.
I delayed my Freshman year until I was 22 just so I could get my parents off my FAFSA only to have those pig fuckers raise the age to 24 on my 21st birthday.
Fuck FAFSA, fuck The Atlantic for publishing this drivel, and fuck Slashdot for legitimizing it.
That's where the money is.
Wealth and Power are compounding, always siphoning to the top. Unless you place restrictions, i.e. socialist policy, it's only a matter of time before serfdom ensues, It's no coincidence that 80% of the wealth created over the past two decades have gone to the top 1% of the population. Remember the dream of being millionaires in the 90s? Nowadays, billion is the dream. Yes, inflation over time is real, however it doesn't warrant an increase of 10^3 magnitude.
Maybe it's the community college I'm at, but I've only had one teacher I thought was trying to indoctrinate me: Nutrition
Colleges and universities, as places of higher learning, are gradually being replaced as information becomes ever more widely available through the internet. Certainly these institutions are valuable as places of hands-on research in physics, biology, and other fields. However, the dissemination of information, and the learning of it, do not ultimately require classrooms and libraries if that information is available through online resources.
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Perhaps these trends toward elitism are related.
It's always been thus, only bit more so recently.
UC (California) schools are recruiting more out-of-state and international students who pay higher tuition. Other state schools are probably doing similar.
Ivy League schools have always done so giving preference to legacy and wealthy applicants (on the hush). Other private schools are the same.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
The study doesn't actually say that, at least not according to the chart on page 4. It says that 18.8% of the students in college who had scores of 0-699 got merit aid. Not that 18.8% of all the students in college received aid with such low scores.
Get off my launchpad!
emphasis on teaching the skills you need for a career in industry does not need a full 4 years in the class room the 2 year programs are fine and can use some kind apprenticeship systems.
The older collgle system does not fit to well into teaching the skills you need for a career in industry and the tech schools are held down by being forced to be part of the collgle system.
I read somewhere...
We spend more per capita on prisons than we do on school. Something it really messed up with our priorities.
Community colleges are too busy trying to get kids educated to bother with indoctrination. Sniff around at a big-name or state uni, and things are a bit different.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
No, really.. Started the slide for UC from egalitarian master plan for California: top eighth of HS seniors can attend essentially for free to today's 30k/yr and up. (even as recently as the late 70s, the annual fees to attend UCLA were less than $1000, something that you could earn in 10 weeks of full time work at minimum wage)
Reagan, as California Governor, didn't like those radical students supported by public funds and started cutting budgets, a trend that continues to this day. Lots of other things that RR did to hurt California, but that's the one that probably has the most lasting effect.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-rosenfeld-uc-reagan-kerr-20130510,0,7344574.story
Perhaps, but not in my lifetime. Universities play a LOT of important roles which can't be replaced by online materials.
No credit for calling something correctly 80 years in advance.
In the 70's I was fairly happy with a 720. I was in the 99.9 percentile. Now it is not enough to be considered for a merit scholarship? (720 was math, I don't recall the verbal score, well below 700, but it was still in the 92 percentile).
At least I redeemed myself on the GRE where I got an 800 (logical reasoning, don't recall the other 2 scores).
Using one metric by itself is stupid. It should be a combination of their GPA, accomplishments and need. I think this is a reaction to all of the people highlighted in the media who got a free ride while VASTLY different GPA's and almost no accomplishments yet a another person with a higher GPA, and a long list of accomplishments couldn't get anything.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not talking teddy with a trust fund. I'm talking normal joe (or jill) from a medium income family who can't afford college for joe (jill), yet their combined income exceeds blind limits.
Just an observation.
I read somewhere...
We spend more per capita on prisons than we do on school. Something it really messed up with our priorities.
I hear this statistic a lot as some kind of indictment of our education system, but if you think about it, it makes sense. People are expected to pay for or at least contribute to their (post-secondary) education because the purpose of that education is to benefit them, at least in the sense of given them a better chance at a higher paying job. If money is spent to help increase someone's earning potential, it makes sense for that person to pay at least some of it back.
Prisons, however, decrease people's earning potential. You can't work or get job experience while in prison. (You might be able to take college courses in some prisons, but a criminal record may still make it difficult to be employed in a high income job.) Since people aren't employed while behind bars, it would be unreasonable to expect them to pay rent. This means the government has to foot the bill. So it actually makes sense that the government spends more on prisons than education. It would, in fact, be quite strange if it were the other way around.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
The article mentioned South Carolina as one of the states where public universities are affected. I have taught physics courses at a large SC school and at the end of the semester there is the usual rush of emails from your students telling you that they deserve a higher grade than they got, contrary to all the evidence of their lack of ability and effort. Well, maybe they should have thought about that earlier and actually cared about doing work for the class.
Among them there are also always some who say "If I don't get a B in this class, then I lose my scholarship" (sorry guys, grades are not given out according to personal need). Several such students every semester. And I wonder, how did these students ever get a scholarship in the first place given their highly mediocre academic ability?
Now it all makes sense.
Schools are a business that are in business to make money. That is their entire purpose and nothing more.
For anyone who believes the majority of colleges/universities in America are open to educate, give people a future, help us become a smarter country and so on then you are truly a complete and utter moron who has no idea how the real world works.
So yeah of course most schools want rich students instead of poor students. That's like saying "This just in! Most stores want rich shoppers instead of poor shopper! Stay tuned for our next story you wont believe, the sun will rise in the morning!"
Wait ... no, its not. Never in my life has college been anything other than a money grab. If you don't already know this, you're just living in the dark. The idea that its about education is perpetuated by the schools to stay in business, typical marketing.
Look at salaries versus time spent teaching and tell me how its about education.
Look at costs spent on administrative staff and compare those same salaries to other industries.
Nothing about college even indicates VIABLE businesses, they only continue to exist because people think its a good idea to indoctrinate their children into thinking college is about making a better life for yourself.
School is now about getting you to incur as much debt as possible in the time you are there.
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People are expected to pay for or at least contribute to their (post-secondary) education because the purpose of that education is to benefit them, at least in the sense of given them a better chance at a higher paying job.
Keep telling yourself that.
Not all universities are like this. My state engineering school was more of a diploma mill than a reeducation center.
2007, around $74 billion was spent on corrections. The total number of inmates in 2007 in federal, state, and local lockups was 2,419,241. That comes to around $30,600 per inmate. In 2005, it cost an average of $23,876 dollars per state prisoner. State prison spending varied widely, from $45,000 a year in Rhode Island to $13,000 in Louisiana. $4,020 is the basic cost of raising each child per year as estimated by the Department of Health and Human Services for 2013, whether there is one child or many children. The total basic cost of raising a child from birth to age 18 is by their estimates $389,670, based on the 30 year average inflation rate of 3% increasing the $4,020 annual cost every year. According to Globalissues.org, "Almost half the world — over three billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day." This statistic includes children. Using $2.50 a day, the cost is roughly US$900 for raising a child for a year, and US$16,500 for raising a child from birth to age 17 As per the cost of public education spending Colorado, for instance ranks ninth nationally in "quality" of education but spent an average of $9,155 per student in 2009, putting it among the 10 states spending the least per pupil. Wyoming though ranked 29th in quality spending the most averaging $18,068 per student. Alaska, ranked 41st for its education quality, spent an average of $16,174 per student. Overall, the U.S. spent an average of $11,665 per student. Prison stats Sources: http://bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p08.pdf http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/us/28cnd-prison.html?_r=0 http://www.pewstates.org/uploadedFiles/PCS_Assets/2008/one%20in%20100.pdf Education stats sources: http://www.nationaljournal.com/thenextamerica/education/analysis-how-much-states-spend-on-their-kids-really-does-matter-20121016
Our country is devolving into an oligarchy. If you're not upper crust, your opinion is irrelevant. Our politicians cater to the fat cats who write their campaign checks. Businesses are running on that statistical razor's edge where customers are maximally pissed off yet not quite enough to pack up and move to a new vendor. Petitions mean nothing. When I was in support, I talked with 2 financial institutions that admitted to me that unless some heavy roller asked for a new feature or a change to business practices, it never happened. One guy with $10M in accounts could come in and ask for change and make it happen.
Hell, even certain segments of the working class devalue themselves and the worth of their labor. They regularly vote to marginalize themselves and empower their bosses.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate from Sept. 24, 2009 to Feb. 4th, 2010. This includes such reliable Democratic votes as the Blue-Dog caucus and Joe "I want to be John McCain's Vice President" Lieberman. Also note that because Republicans filibuster everything it takes 60 votes for the Senate to do it's job.
IIRC, California passed the mark for spending more on prison then post-secondary education about 2 years ago – so I don’t think it’s true for America as a whole – but it is still a sad fact.
No, really.. Started the slide for UC from egalitarian master plan for California: top eighth of HS seniors can attend essentially for free to today's 30k/yr and up. (even as recently as the late 70s, the annual fees to attend UCLA were less than $1000, something that you could earn in 10 weeks of full time work at minimum wage)
Late 1970s is the middle of liberal Jerry Brown's two terms as governor. It seems to be a quite bipartisan effort to make students pay something.
The students are just being tapped to pay for the extravagant spending. Cut back on the extravagance and we can lower tuition with raising taxes.
As a graduate of the UC system I can certainly attest to the fact the UC system "gold plates" everything. They overspend on nearly every project. Every building seems to have to be an art project, not simply attractive. The equipment inside the labs often excessive, latest greatest and most expensive oscilloscopes in a freshman electronics lab where most of the students are non majors taking an intro EE class to satisfy their degree requirements (not because they have any interest). This sort of stuff repeats itself over and over at UC.
The problem is spending not funding. I've also attended classes at Cal State universities, same content at a fraction of the cost. Freshman labs with more modest equipment but far beyond what the students will need.
Hang on a second. Wasn't one of the matras "No Child Left Behind"? It'll be alright. Just have to print and borrow more money. It's a shame the freedom to compete, which makes it easier for those already well resourced, multinationals for instance, and therefore redistribute resources is being strangled. HHHHmmm to big to fail anyone? Can't have the innefficient going broke now can we? Think of the children? We really are screwd aren't we? What a load of crap modern "Leadership" is. Bunch of collectivist cronies!
Lost in all this is the fraud that a $50k/semester college is better than a $5k/semester college. Yes, if you're at the top of your class it will garner you more prestige and maybe a better shot at a higher paying job. But will you actually know any more or have any better skills than if you'd gone somewhere else? Not at all. If your goal is learning, then this is no barrier what-so-ever. If your goal is getting into this countries upper cast, then there's a lot easier ways than attending one of these schools.
When I graduated high school, I went strait to state college. No one in my family had ever attended college before so I didn't have anyone to ask about it ahead of time. At the time I looked down on technical college thinking it wasn't up to par. But the fact is, 66% of the people that attended by state college dropped out. At the local technical college the graduation rate was more than double. The classes were smaller, the teachers more hands on. Now that I have my own son, he'll get taught that technical schools are great and that's exactly where he should start his college years. If he gets to the point where he needs to go to a bigger school to learn the skills he wants to learn then fine. But technical schools are where everyone should start.
I hear this statistic a lot as some kind of indictment of our education system, but if you think about it, it makes sense.
Wow, that train of thought has completely blown me away. I am not even sure on where to start replying to you.
If you spend more on education, not just tertiary, but primary and secondary, it will nurture youth to have higher aspirations, it will teach them more. If you have someone leaving secondary school with a good understanding of basic subjects (math, English, at least one science and computers) as well as a rounded splash of some elective subjects such as history, economics, art, music, religion they are much more likely to either look for further education on their own (even if they have to pay as much for it as in the US) and move on to being a productive member of society rather than ending up in prison.
That's not to say that everyone with a good education will never do anything illegal or end up in jail, but the number of people in prison with a poor education should stand out above anything else that to keep people out of prison, give them an education. Give them the ability to actually join society as a peer rather than as the bottom of the ladder cleaning the bathrooms or working as a parking attendant.
This concept of paying more earlier also has the advantage saving more money in the long run. If you don't need to pay for putting someone in prison AND have the benefit of that person contributing to the society they live in, it clearly is a win-win scenario.
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He is gonna end up buried in 37k of debt without even a piece of paper, damned shame is what it is, poor kid worked his ass off and got screwed..
How did that happen? The average for 4 year public schools is $13,600 a year. A part time job and a summer job could put a pretty huge dent in $13,600 a year. Note this figure includes room and board.
http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=76
because it doesn't cost near what we pay to operate them. Stuff like this is what made me a socialist. The rich are going to find a way to use the government to their benefit and our detriment. I don't see any reason to pretend they'll not. So if we're going to have a powerful government that hands out socialism to the rich why not just get some of it for the rest of us? Start by making education in all forms free, and keep going from there.
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Nobody seems to focus on the real problem here, talent isn't genetically inherited.
.. he accomplishes amazing things and doesn't end up in jail. The end result is that society is less rich for not encouraging Terry's gifts. It's not that the rich are taking the education spots, it's that society doesn't recognise and encourage the gifts of individuals. Bill's son might be the greatest basket weaver in human history, he's just never going to weave a basket.
Let's take Bill Gates as an example. He's been incredibly successful. Will his son follow in his footsteps? That's unlikely. But his children end up getting the best support, the best education and the best opportunities. Meanwhile, Manny at the local grocery store has a son Terry whom is as talented as Bill Gates. Terry doesn't get the opportunities of Bill's son so winds up becoming a street corner entrepeneur. By the time he's 20, Terry owns 3 crack houses, 4 brothels, is driving massive demand for international trade, has a workforce of 300 people and is a multi-millionaire.
Terry is just using his gifts in the best way he can, and because he's so damned smart
The education system forces people into boxes and tries to shoe-horn them into positions which fit with our current identification of what society represents. What society should represent should be driven by the individual drives of the people expanding it's boundaries, not by limiting the range of education to fit into a social model which has never not been broken. It's not about the money, it's more fundamental than that.
That only makes sense when you take it for granted that it is normal to have a large prison population. The US is #1 in terms of prisoners per capita.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
The net has a lot of the answers but it sucks as providing the questions, unfortunately.
If you want the worst possible outcome then leverage yourself to the hilt with loans and get into a premium university only to be failed out in year three or four to maintain the university's aura of being challenging through the failout percentage. Now you've got no degree, no job, no way of paying back your student loans that amount to decades of your newfound gross income - and they can't even be forgiven in bankruptcy. You are well on your way to participating in the underground economy, living out your twenties under the roof of some charitable soul until you discover identity theft.
I would like to see an analysis of how many billions of dollars are burned each year in this way, how many young lives ruined. This has become an institutional process where premium schools compete to have the highest failout percentage and thus be the most premium school rather than raising entry requirements to ensure entrants can graduate if they apply themselves. If these halls of higher learning are the font of science and knowledge they claim to be they ought not ruin so many lives in the process of making more educated humans.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I like how you stopped after the first sentence.
Schools don't provide shelter, health care, or three meals a day. They are not required to maintain a secure facility both to keep people from getting in and to keep people from getting out. Nothing you said, literally not a single word of your reply, actually addresses whether it's more expensive to have someone in school or prison.
I think there are a couple issues as to why spending more on prison than schools is terrible.
1. Schools are preventive. Prison is reactive. So spending more on a reaction indicates lack of resources for prevention.
2. Why is prison expensive? It should be cheap. Expensive prisons mean that something is wrong. Also, a large number of prisoners indicates a sickness is society. Again, preventive solutions are merited.
3. Imprisoning people (as you mentioned) cuts off earnings potential, as well as tax potential. Another point where society shoots itself in the foot.
I'm sure many more points can be added here.
the hallmark of progressives progress. A focus on a better way of life for everyone. The second feature of progressivism is applying the scientific method to society and politics. Specifically observation and a willingness to change you're mind (See Tim Minchin's Storm for a better (and funnier) explanation of science, and apply that to politics and society.
What progressives have observed, time and again, is that power collects at the top. No matter what. People pass the advantages they have to their offspring, who use those advantages to increase their share of wealth and power at everyone else's expense. The American housing bust is a great example. Millions lost their homes and the equity in them. That wealth wasn't destroyed. It's was claimed by banks owned by the 1%.
So if power is going to gather at the top we're left with two choices. Either a strong central government that can stand up to that power, or hoping against hope that the money and wealth 'trickle's down'. We've also seen that money and wealth don't do that.
I'm open to alternatives (I'm a progressive after all). But I've never once heard one that doesn't boil down to some form of socialism, or that isn't just wishful thinking.
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most community colleges are too busy sucking in money for teenager babysitting services, this is why I just wasted a grand for a manditory course for my wife called "wellness" which was nothing more than a timesink tailored to 18 year old's
That only makes sense when you take it for granted that it is normal to have a large prison population. The US is #1 in terms of prisoners per capita.
Again, that's another statistic that people quote a lot, and just sort of leave it hanging, without explaining whether they think it's a good or bad thing. It could be either, depending on the reason. It could mean (a) the United States has more crime (which would be a bad thing), or (b) the United States is better at catching and prosecuting criminals which would be a good thing. The size of the prison population, in and of itself, is neither good nor bad: we could reduce our prison population to zero by letting everyone go and closing the prisons, but that might not be such a good thing!
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
If you spend more on education, not just tertiary, but primary and secondary, it will nurture youth to have higher aspirations, it will teach them more.
This turns out not to be the case. Look at what's happened to student achievement since the 1970s, during which time this country more than doubled spending per student.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Aid is market segmentation based on ability to pay. Basically, schools suck as much money as they can out of everyone. Much like medicine, there are no real prices.
It could mean (a) the United States has more crime (which would be a bad thing)
That's the impression I usually get from criticism of the number of prisoners per capita: the United States has declared too many victimless acts to be crimes.
Going to school to get a good job is not longer a reasonable expectation.
And it doesn't make sense. We are spending the money. If we could spend the same money to keep people out of prison, we would simply have a better life and culture here in the US. But as tone of your comment suggests, we will perpetuate this "every man for himself" mentality that got us where we are. Reality is far different from your notion of reality. Reality says that people give up on themselves long before the 12 years of public school are over. Their expectations of life have been defined for themselves already.
Prisons decrease earning potential even after getting out. That's another problem we are failing to face. Once a person has a prison record, they are black-balled for life. It's okay if prison were a deterrent to crime. For some people, it's a rite of passage.
Government doesn't "foot the bill." *WE* foot the bill. They just decide where the bills go. Once again, if the money that goes to prisons went to schools, even in part, it could make a huge difference in the long run. The problem is it wouldn't make a difference for several election cycles. And no way a republicrat will vote in money for schools instead of prisons when the opposing party would get the glory.
Once a person has gone to prison, they are no longer full citizens. They lose the right to vote and to bear arms.... legally. We have decided their career for them.
Education spending may have doubled, but spending on education didn't. The Anchorage school district is paying $250,000 a year on nurses for a single student because the disabled student happened to be born into a family of lawyers, while the amount spent in the classrooms isn't greatly changed. We've added regulations and cost, but not education. Unfunded mandates like NCLB require reduction of in-classroom spending to pay for compliance costs. The total cost of "education" goes up, but not on education-related expenses.
That's why so many "liberal" examinations of the issues have resulted to separating out "in-classroom" spending, but they are dismissed as inconvenient, and the numbers used by the school-haters are always total funding.
Learn to love Alaska
In reply to yourself and the AC above you, let me provide a decent snip of the conclusion of a rather detailed study from Berkley:
Full PDF link
There are many theoretical reasons to expect that education reduces crime. By raising earnings, education raises the opportunity cost of crime and the cost of time spent in prison. Education may also make individuals less impatient or more risk averse, further reducing the propensity to commit crimes. To empirically explore the importance of the relationship between schooling and criminal participation, this paper uses three data sources: individual-level data from the Census on incarceration, state-level data on arrests from the Uniform Crime Reports, and self-report data on crime and incarceration from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.
All three of these data sources produce similar conclusions: schooling significantly reduces crim- inal activity. This finding is robust to different identification strategies and measures of criminal activity. The estimated effect of schooling on imprisonment is consistent with its estimated effect on both arrests and self-reported crime. Both OLS and IV estimates produce similar conclusions about the quantitative impact of schooling on incarceration and arrest. The estimated impacts on incarceration and self-reports are unchanged even when rich measures of individual ability and family background are controlled for using NLSY data. Finally, we draw similar conclusions us- ing aggregated state-level UCR data as we do using individual-level data on incarceration and self-reported crime in the Census or NLSY.
Given the consistency of our findings, we conclude that the estimated effects of education on crime cannot be easily explained away by unobserved characteristics of criminals, unobserved state policies that affect both crime and schooling, or educational differences in the conditional probability of arrest and imprisonment given crime. Evidence from other studies regarding the elasticity of crime with respect to wage rates suggests that a significant part of the measured effect of education on crime can be attributed to the increase in wages associated with schooling. We further argue that the impact of education on crime implies that there are benefits to education not taken into account by individuals themselves, so the social return to schooling is larger than the private return. The estimated social externalities from reduced crime are sizeable. A 1% increase in the high school completion rate of all men ages 20-60 would save the United States as much as $1.4 billion per year in reduced costs from crime incurred by victims and society at large. Such externalities from education amount to $1,170-2,100 per additional high school graduate or 14-26% of the private return to schooling. It is diffcult to imagine a better reason to develop policies that prevent high school drop out.
Highlights are mine.
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Actually student achievement is much higher now than back then.
With No Child Left Behind enacted the average student is now 2 grade levels higher with reading, writing, and math. Still behind the other countries of course, but is a big improvement
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Are you really a conservative? or is it just a cartoonish parody of one?
Ummm, this only makes sense if you have the same number of people in prison as the number not in prison. You miss the point of the statement.
Most seem to be viewing this through the wrong grid.
College tuition is in bubble territory right now. That bubble is in the process of bursting. Kids with money are the way to prop things up for as long as possible. It's as simple as that.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Actually, I'm with you on most of that, except that prison should be less expensive.
Maintaining secured living quarters, with medical, dining, and other facilities is not cheap. And that's if we just left them there to rot. With other programs like GED programs, work release, and college classes, it's starting to look like about the only situation in America where you can stay with the same provider for your entire life without worrying about lacking food or medical care.
Mind you, I'm not suggesting those things make the place a vacation spot, but it certainly does not make it cheap.
Still, as for the rest, I have to agree, more educated people will not only cut down on crime, but it will cause people to maybe not do stupid shit like taking loans they can't afford, or gambling, or high risk behaviors in general.
For my new job, I'm now commuting by a "car title loan" place that offers quick cash, in return for your car title. It occurs to me that given the gigantic interest rates that places like that tend to charge, I wonder why anyone would actually take one of those loans. Even if faced with a serious immediate problem, if you don't have 10K saved up, you're not certain to have the income to pay off their extortionate rates either. And you certainly won't if they take your car. Some education might well give you the opportunity to see that scam for what it is: a dead end.
It is anecdotal evidence, but I am developing the impression that more and more business (in this case, higher education) is catering to the rich, because there is where is the actual money.
This is frightening, because it means that numbers are no more enough to offset poverty.
I believe this is the news article you're looking for.
USA has more of all crimes than almost any other first world country.
This. Exactly this.
Are they though? Or do they simply *test* as being two grades higher? The biggest complaint I've heard about the NCLB act is that it rather brutally encourages "teaching to the test", often to the detriment of imparting an actual education. When you get right down to it memorizing the proper process to solve a specific class of algebra problems (for example) will boost your test grade significantly, but be utterly useless in real life - the world very rarely packages problems in neat, clean, grade-appropriate form. Meanwhile the teacher that takes the time to teach general principles and strategies that are far more broadly applicable will have students that, for the most part, test more poorly because learning how to effectively use those underlying principles is a lot harder than memorizing useless routines.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
An over-educated workforce creates serious economic problems.
There are only so many jobs available that require higher education. When supply of educated workers is higher than the demand, a few bad things happen:
1) Lots of educated people simply cannot find work. The opportunities just aren't there. They wind up depressed, and working menial jobs that are below their skill sets and which do not pay them enough to make headway against their crushing student debt.
2) Salaries for the educated labor start coming down, since supply is so high. The people who manage to land the jobs must overwork themselves in order to hold them (since there is a line of people who would jump at the chance to replace them), and their low salaries means they can't pay off their student debts either (or if they do pay them off, it takes a very long time, which creates serious problems if they want to raise families).
3) Jobs that normally don't require an education start requiring one, since there are so many educated candidates (who cannot otherwise find work) applying. These jobs still don't pay enough for one to dig one's self out of debt, but now one must get an education and endure the mountain of crushing debt in order to get any job at all.
On the one hand, denying education opportunities to the poor is unfair. On the other hand, over-educating the population makes nearly everyone poor.
Yeah, it's not like it would be an investment in the future or anything.
I have an engineering degree (BS, AOE) from an in-state university. At this point, 20 years down the road, having lived frugally the whole time, I own a mobile home that is older than I am, on a rented lot, no retirement 401k, medical care plan is over 1/3 of my income, and no significant savings or money to send my 14 year old to college in 4 years. No land, either.
The companies that have used my skills have all profited heavily from them, but I have not. Nor is my anecdotal evidence far from the truth for most other college educated americans, recently.
Since the sole beneficiary of a college degree is the employers, I categorically refuse to send my kid to college, and have advised him not to waste his time on it, either.
Nor have colleges satisfied their charters, that I should support them.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Oh, Micklinux here again. I should also note that when I went to college, it was on a 4-year National Merit scholarship with a 5300 SAT, and a 57 PSAT, perfect math on PSAT, 790 onthe math SAT. I mention it, since it applies to the original article. As far as I am concerned, college is no longer a fit place for an education or for developing a career. It is only useful as a way to waste four years and a lot of money.
Cut us some slack, we're doing our best! We're already responsible for something like 25% of the worlds prison population despite being only 5% of the worlds population. And as of 2009 we were up to 0.74%, whereas those slackers in canada and China are barely in the neighborhood of 0.120%. Sure, we have a long way to go before we equalize the prison-versus-population ratios, but given the last few decades of convoluted law creation we're probably nearing the point of having a 100% criminal population, if we haven't already passed it. And at that point it just becomes a matter of enforcement and we can *really* show the world how it's done!
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
But even if college was FREE sending all to it is a bad idea when you do that can skip over the trades / tech schools.
I knew someone like you. He too worked his way out of poor slums and into a nice middle class life. He doesn't like to pay taxes to the government that didn't help him and support lazy people that did not work as hard as him.
What he doesn't like to admit (but is true) is that he lived in the projects -- government subsidized housing. He was on welfare, and back in the day when welfare actually would pay for you to have nice clothes to go on interviews, which he got, and allowed him to go on interviews. They sent him to community college for an education that was pretty much near damn free (yes he paid some, but practically nothing compared to today's standards), he got a good training to get a good job and moved up the totem pole. He had an opportunity because government programs gave him the support he needed to get thru the tough time (he had no family to fall back on, etc.), and now he likes to claim no one helped him and he did it alone. Except he didn't.
I do not know what your situation is. Maybe you are not like that, but maybe you are. The person I described had welfare in the 70s I believe it was (he's quite an old timer at this point), and it is important to point out welfare-type programs have really had the axe in the past few years with the conservative movements, and so it doesn't do near as much as it used to. Think very carefully. You worked hard to get where you are at, but how many lucky moments and sympathetic people did you run across to get the leg up to get where you are? Many of us do not like to think about it, and like to be independent, but we rely on each other much more than we admit.
In the Scandinaian country where I live, all secondary education is free. It doesnt matter whether you're studying medicine, an engineering degree or art, as long as your exam score is high enough to enter the particular school, you're in.
And the government provides you with a scholarship for studying. Everybody gets 800$ a month for studying, and can borrow an additional 800$ monthly on top of that.
Other Scandinavian countries have a similar system in place, and all European countries offer their citizens a secondary education at a fraction of the cost of an American education.
So why exactly is an affordable secondary education so hard to find in the US?!?
Citation needed.
The best data on educational achievement is from the NAEP.
http://nationsreportcard.gov/ltt_2008/
The NAEP shows a small but steady increase from 1971 to 2008 in math and reading scores. The major change over that period is that the hispanic students, and especially the black students, had a fairly significant increase. That's the result of ending the blatant discrimination that existed in 1971, and improving the schools in black neighborhoods where they couldn't overcome segregation.
Diane Ravitch was assistant secretary of education under both GHW Bush and Bill Clinton. At first she supported these reforms. Then when she looked at the data, she decided she was wrong. Here's what she thinks about NCLB.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/ravitch-no-child-left-behind-and-the-damage-done/2012/01/10/gIQAR4gxoP_blog.html
Ravitch said elsewhere that the most significant factor in student achievement is parent income. Raise the parent income and you raise the student achievement. Ravitch said that (based on an NAEP study) charter schools were worse overall than public schools, when you correct for parent income (although a few charter schools did well).
We spend more per capita on prisons than we do on school. Something it really messed up with our priorities.
We spend far more than any other country on both education and prisons. Some states spend far more than others on prisons, but the difference in crime rates is minimal. I think it is clear that we are spending far too much on prisons. Whether we are spending too little on education isn't so clear, since other countries get superior results for a small fraction of we spend.
These "progressives' are every inch as bad as the NeoCons in my book.
And frankly, I'd like nothing more than to see all them, Neocons, teabagger and progressives alike go fuck themselves and get the fuck out of this country and go build their dystopian hellhole on some island far from here.
I've seen the progressive propaganda flicks like "zeitgeist" and it's sequels.
What a load of crap.
These lefty ideologues who think they have the answer constantly overlook one "inconvenient truth":
HUMANITY IS CHAOTIC! WE ARE NOT UNIFORM, WE DO NOT LIVE BY SCIENTIFIC PRINCIPAL.
We are not orderly little ants needing their "scientific control" We do not want to live in orderly boring little societies where our daily lives are managed by a "scientific" elite.
We want chaos, we want spontaneity, we want to explore, take risks and die or thrive taking them.
We want to make our own decisions and create our own experiences.
So if you think these "progressives" have the answer I suggest you go get yourself put into some sort of institution.
There your life will be very well ordered. You will be told what and when to eat, when to sleep, what to do, what to wear. You will be given limited access to bad things such as TV and books. And all of this dictated by "scientific" principal and "resource management"
Heh, opposed to the teabaggers and the progressives. In that case, what direction should America go? How about the health care system? Should it be intellectually rationed, or should it be however much one pays? How good/expensive should the doctors be? How about city layout. There are only a few cities that have decently designed rail transportation systems. American cities do large public works projects poorly, and over budget. An intellectual elite would take care of that. I bet most Americans don't know which direction to drive the country, just like it was uncertain about Iraq, and yes, Iraq could have been less debt inducing to America, and Iraq could have been on a path to a stable, but bloody, Republic.
Not bad, and I agree that education is a key element to much.
But why does damn near every 'good' job these days require a fucking college degree? Many use little more than what can be gotten readily with a year or two of voc-ed, if that. (1986 want ad in local paper for a dish washer at country club ended with "Send resume [sic]..." Inflation indeed.)
Further, ask yourself why have we effectively demonized such activity as parking cars or cleaning? It's useful work which in some manner makes life better for others. Should this not be a source of pride? And a liveable income as well? Why do we continually stratify tasks such that we have people upon whom we look down our noses? Doesn't this say something a bit nasty about the fragility and skew of our own perceptions about self-worth? Why is someone who brings food to a table or washes the dishes that come back somehow a lesser being? Is it required to have a de facto caste system? Or is that just the way it is because that's just the way it is? Seems to me what humans make they can generally un-make, or make differently.
And, unfortunately, that entire quoted section is either weasel words or confuses correlation and causation. Educated people commit fewer crimes: I'll buy that. It's the education that makes them so: Not so much.
You left out c) there's a lot of shit laws on the books. And d) Prison is a big profit machine for a very few businesses. Go look up their connections for a real eye-opener. Also putting people in prison is great for the idiots running on law and order planks, never mind the real cost to the voters. Prisons are a basic suck to the economy. Stats are most crimes of violence are way down over the past forty years - and the correlation with prison population is weak at best. A low percentage of inmates are there for violent crimes. But don't believe me, go dig around a bit, all the info is there and fairly easily gotten.
I hear this statistic a lot as some kind of indictment of our education system, but if you think about it, it makes sense. People are expected to pay for or at least contribute to their (post-secondary) education because the purpose of that education is to benefit them, at least in the sense of given them a better chance at a higher paying job.
No, that's fucked up.
The purpose of education is to provide society with more productive members.
(Your comment epitomises one of the very worst problems with America and Americans, and one of the reasons that this American doesn't live there any longer--not only is it always All About Me And My Money, but it's automatically assumed that the rest of the world thinks this way, too.)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Prison food and medical care for all but the better Federal prisons are not things to be lusted for, or equate to that available in civilian life for all but the most poor, say around poverty level or below.
What, you went to U of Phoenix? That's one of the few that's not a non-profit.
Learn to love Alaska
To break up the wall of responses pointing out the moral and social quandaries of your post, here is some material about how you can, in fact, work while in prison. The rehabilitation of prisoners is not completely a dead concept in the United States, although it is severely weaker than it is in many other Western democracies.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Spot on.
My kingdom for a mod point.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Since the sole beneficiary of a college degree is the employers, I categorically refuse to send my kid to college, and have advised him not to waste his time on it,
Of course the employers benefit, but so does the person attending, and society as a whole. Everyone should benefit. But it also depends on how you use the education you received. Some use it more wisely than others.
College isn't for everyone. It is a place to learn and discourse. It is not a place to learn how to do a job, although you can learn skills that will be useful down the road. Should your child go to college? That depends. There are a lot of things to do in life that don't require college, and like I said it isn't for everyone. Some people are better at hands on learning than book learning.
But college is about broadening your horizons. It doesn't sound like you broadened yours very well. And make sure you give you child enough information so they can make a well informed decision. And not just based on your cynical views on life.
Class envy is like so, classless.
-- Jimtown Kelly
Both have a point, "in-classroom" spending is the spending that provides most benefit, the total funding is what it costs the taxpayer. Ideally the two should be quite close together but, not only are they very far apart, they are diverging over time.
Send your kid into the Armed Forces. He'll get a free(or heavily subsidized education), businesses will want to hire him(since they get incentives for hiring veterans), and he'll get plenty of ancillary benefits(VA loans, VA health care, hot chicks, etc)
Both have a point, "in-classroom" spending is the spending that provides most benefit, the total funding is what it costs the taxpayer. Ideally the two should be quite close together but, not only are they very far apart, they are diverging over time.
Yes, since I was a kid, the total amount acquired from taxpayers per student has grotesquely outpaced inflation, while the amount spent in the classroom has stayed flat or decreased. The school district I went to has maybe 20% more students than when I was a kid, but for some reason, has 20 or 30 times the number of administrative staff as when I went there.
As another point of reference, the other day I was on the highway and saw a bus go by for a nearby school district. Not a standard school bus, but a decked out tour bus. One of the ones that cost $250,000+. No wonder they can't afford to educate our students when they spend all this money on busybodies and luxury buses (probably for the football team).
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
If these colleges are forsaking the poor-but-smart for the rich-but-stupid, they're going to start turning out below-par graduates. At which point, they will no longer have the reputation as a top college. Is this not so?
I didn't go through the US educational system, but it seems to me that if the reputation of these colleges is based on actual results, then the problem is self-correcting. And if their reputation isn't based on actual results, then the poor not being able to join a glorified frat house is no bad thing.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
People are expected to pay for or at least contribute to their (post-secondary) education because the purpose of that education is to benefit them, at least in the sense of given them a better chance at a higher paying job. If money is spent to help increase someone's earning potential, it makes sense for that person to pay at least some of it back.
If it were only about the individual, you might be right. But an argument can be made that the state should pay for your schooling as an investment because you will be bringing in more tax revenue. On the other hand, if you "overeducate" the populace, the price of educated labor comes down, giving your industry a competitive edge in the global marketplace.
(Disclaimer: I live in Finland where your tuition is free and the state pays you for studying.)
Both of them were educated either by the military or on military scholarships.
No really... My English grand father was taught trigonometry because it was important for calculating artillery strikes. Poor guy was in the Royal Artillery... they did not wear ear protection in those days... Deaf as a post by the time I knew him.
My American grand father went to UCLA on an army scholarship.
You can bitch about that if you want... but my grand fathers would call you pansies. They didn't have the money to pay for school and they didn't whine about it. They took the options life offered them and thrived.
Learn from that. If you engage every situation expecting a handout you won't be worth educating. What are you worth to society if you always expect society to foot the bill? What do you offer in exchange? Anything? Why are you worth the system's time? If you're poor... point one is that you'd better appreciate you're at a disadvantage. That's just reality. Don't compound your misfortune by antagonizing everyone with a guilt trip.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The way to win college is not to go.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Yeah, you can work in prison... for 12 cents an hour. Let's face it, it's basically slavery.
Then you made poor choices.
I got a BS in psychology and did HR out of college. I ended up becoming a self taught SQL DBA because HR was low paying w/ crappy rewards. I own a house, work for a large company w/ good benefits and 401k.
Actually it's possible to get a GED while in prison, which can then open up jobs that net up to almost ten times that ($1.15.) Also, it's non-compulsory, which is kinda a deal-breaker for the definition of slavery. The point is that it's still possible to learn and better yourself from behind bars, and even these marginal jobs help inmates build job skills that reduce the rate of recidivism (repeat offences.)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
I would counter that something is messed up with the population.
What is your priority? Would you rather be raped and murdered while getting your government-subsidized college degree? Or would you rather pay more for your degree and have less criminals on the streets?
Also, prisons cost more because you have to pay for everything (room, board, medical expenses, education, legal fees, etc.) for prisoners. There are no football games and donors to offset the costs.
It's not like colleges are accepting less students. As a result, it's meaningless whether a school is paying out $20K versus 4 x $5K.
One thing that too many people ridiculously assume about parents able to afford college is that they will pay for it. The vast majority of my friends in that situation paid for it through--at least--a majority of student loans. The two poorest people that I know both received Pell Grants that covered their entire tuition. They also happen to be the two dumbest people that I know.
One has taken at least four years (perhaps longer, as I have not known her longer than that) to graduate with an Associate's Degree in French, which she knows less of than I do with two years of good High School French followed by two English-only French grades (bad, lazy teacher). She was not working at all during this time while she was on food stamps, welfare and--I suspect--social security for asthma. The last semester that I asked her about, she had dropped a "hard" English class, which would have given her an apparently rough nine credit semester. Finally, I was told that she imagined that her teacher was out to get her in the semester before the current one; it is possible that the teacher was, but I suspect that it was justified.
The other completely flunked out during his first semester. In all fairness, he simply did not have the maturity to go to college, and he went because his parents were excited to have him go. That does not change the fact that his grades were entirely undeserving of any scholarship, yet he received full compensation for his books and courses while still living at home.
Back to the article, the definition of "merit" is in question here. Is being of a certain race a merit based scholarship? I also noticed that there was no mention of government quotas (referring more to economic rather than race-based).
Besides, while I am all for options, why should a student be punished because he did well, but his parents happen to be not-poor (note: just because one is not poor does not mean that one is rich)? Similarly, why should a student unable to achieve the required "merit" be given some other form of compensation over anyone else?
Here's a real way to turn around things: stop giving scholarships for people going to school for pointless subjects. If someone wants to go to school for music or French, then they should pay for it out of pocket or via loans. The US government, and therefore its citizens, should not be bankrolling the next generation of worthless people that want a me-too college degree. Similarly, public universities should be pushing people to things that actually add value to the market and the economy. Having lavishly large Women Studies Departments is a nice-to-have that simply does not make sense from an educational standpoint. Heck, you can certainly become a feminist without one. How about steering those people into serious Psychology? And then widdle that down to realistic enrollment numbers, which will increase competitiveness in the program.
(Interestingly, one of the better programmers that I work with has a Music Degree from Virginia Tech, a known engineering school. I cannot help but to wonder how much better he might be had he spent his time in a CS program with music as a hobby, exactly as it is now? I know that being good at music tends to lead to above average math skills, but the collegiate level is a different ballgame, or at least it should be.)
But the conservatives believe in "starve the beast" and once they succeed in starving the beast, they blame the sequester on the Democrats, even though it's been a stated goal for years.
It's the "starve the beast" mentality that screws education. The conservatives won't cut funding, but they add as much regulation as possible, and fund none of it. The hope is that the schools will fail, and we can regressively tax the poor to pay for the education for the rich with vouchers and such.
Learn to love Alaska
In many cases, you can actually have those rights returned to you even if you are convicted.
In some (all?) states, you cannot ever have the right to own a gun returned to you.
It is a fact of life, like the sun rising, that all administrations will put blame to the previous politically different one. I mean up to the end the reps were blaming clinton for stuffs, and I recall distincly the dems doing the same during clintons year with bush snr and reagan. Heck they do the same in nearly all country.
And it is partially true , aprtially bullshit. Partially true since some politics made by the previous administration (no matter which) clearly will fail (for example banking law relaxation, Tax stuff). Partially bullshit since some stuff like economics are more or less throwing dice.
But every politician do it. Blame the previous guy.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
But doesn't he have to *survive* first?
bickerdyke
Gates himself was the child of rich parents with lots of business and elite connections. That is how he got the IBM contract, the rest is manipulation and misuse of monopoly power.
Education means shit. I have two Masters degrees (Comp Sci and Telecomm). The job is taken from me and goes to an employees spouse with far fewer qualifications, less intelligence and abilities.
Education isn't going to live your life for you. You have to do actual work in order to improve your situation. If the work you provide to an employer is of such a high quality that it can generate "heavy profit", then there should have been plenty of room to negotiate an increase in salary, 401k or a health plan. Your situtation now has very little to do with your education; for the most part your education is only relevant for your first job interview.
... whatever
The armed forces only have room for so many cooks before the rest are trained as grunts and shipped to some desert to die. Getting veterans benefits only works out if you survive. Of course OP might get a cool American flag for his trouble of raising one unit of cannon fodder.
... whatever
Nah, they can still vote in some states.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
This is measured by the amount of worthless monopoly money they have, right?
Depends on what you define as a good job. I'm a network engineer for a very well known service provider. I make twice the average household income in America. I would consider it a good job.
I have an Associates Degree, but it wasn't even a consideration for the job, all they required was a high school education, along with the ability and temperament to do the job. I demonstrated those quite handily that I was offered the position in under 24 hours.
The longest I've been unemployed since I turned 16 (I'm well into my 30's) was 3 months, and every time I change jobs, my pay rate goes up.
I personally think alot of folks use lack of education as an excuse. There's no magic recipe to being successful. No checklist to getting a 'good' job. It takes some effort. Virtually every out of work or underemployed person I know is severely lacking in motivation and will to better themselves and has perfected the victim mentality. My evidence is, of course, anecdotal, but it's all I have to go on, and I calls 'em as I see's em.
actually, your point is a pretty gross misstatement of what republicans are saying about the sequester. They are saying that slightly smarter budgeting by agencies could minimize the impact of the budget cuts on end users (in line with their stated goal of more efficient government). Whether or not you believe this will actually happen (though the FAA fix implies at least one counterexample), they do not blame the sequester on democrats, but rather claim the democrats are pushing for sell harming policies to maximize the pain of spending cuts to validate higher spending.
As stated above, the big difference between now and previous generations in the incredible increase in spending on administrators and special needs children. Whether or not you think it is valid for public education to have special medical and education instructors in each school for handicapped children, we may need to rethink this so we don't sacrifice so much for what isn't an incredibly efficient outcome. We could switch to the Japanese model where the government funds a small number of special needs schools where students in a large radius are aggregated so they can get both the education and health needs taken care of with reasonable gains from scale. You are not forced to move to be near such a school when you have a child with special needs, but if you do not, no special dispensation is made in your local public school.
Nothing is easy when we decide to publically fund universal access to anything. It's all very complex. And in most countries, we can show that the beast has to be starved to clean out the rot from time to time (look at US defence spending for a great example, or medicare doctors who only will perform procedures of questionable value simply because medicare reimburses new procedures at a higher hourly rate for it's first several years in existence) to understand why. A forcibly constrained budget makes people address painful questions and at least consider a more reasonable response.
Because it would seem the economic crisis has been a world wide thing, not a US thing, and it would seem that many countries including many EU countries, are having problems. So, pray tell, what country do you live in that has been unaffected? Prior to answering, you might want to do a bit of research to see if you are talking nonsense or not.
Actually, it's the same food.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
in line with their stated goal of more efficient government
The stated goal is to "starve the beast" and cutting funding while not cutting services helps starve the beast. The House is more Republican than Democrat, and spending bills come from the House. If the Republicans wanted the sequester to be "easy" they are the sole party with the power to do that now. But they are doing their best to do their worst and point to the Democrats.They got what they wanted, and are doing the opposite of what they promised. Just as you'd expect a politician to do.
The proof that politics is broken is that one party claims they would fix everything "if only" then they get all they ask for and do the opposite of their promises. Every time. Both parties.
Learn to love Alaska
The purpose of public education is to keep the power to the elites by instilling a specific set of believes into the populace.
The purpose of police is to protect the power from the populace.
If you actually want education today as opposed to a mortgage and no house, you can get that education for just the cost of your time, it's easier than ever before. But that's if you are determined to get that education. If you attend public school and most colleges you won't get anything better than that.
Google now only considers graduates from the most elite schools, if you didn't go to some Ivy league school don't bother sending in the resume, that's because Google (and other companies) are doing the same thing exactly as this guy from an earlier /. story, you CAN thank inflation in education for that, and that's a direct consequence of government money in education.
The way to get a productive member of society you have to have society that offers him freedoms that are guaranteed by an equally applied law. You have to get rid of government wars on drugs, wars on poverty, wars on money. You have to have a wealthy society if you want members of it to be productive.
You can't have people coming out of artificial college settings into a society that is poor due to socialist/fascist nature of it and expect them to do well. Why would they do well in a poor society? Socialism does one thing: it guarantees poverty in the long term, an equal outcome of poverty.
Individual freedoms do not guarantee any outcomes, but they guarantee that you can try and not be punished for trying and if you fail you can try again and you won't be held back by the system that promotes unequal treatment of people on the institutional level.
It is OK to try and fail, but in a poor society you are going to be very limited as to how many times you can attempt (if any at all). At the extreme, you have socialist or fascist societies that tell you how to live, where to work, what your economic output will be, it's all predetermined before you even get out into the real world. You cannot be all you can be, you can only be what you are told (or you can be a criminal and the system will eventually destroy you).
Productive members of society.... they don't come from hive mind, they don't come from a place, where from the early age you are told that society OWES YOU something, anything, any product, any service. They come from a place where from young age you know that you are equal under law but your failure is yours alone.
You can't handle the truth.
The glaring defect is the cost of education. There is simply no excuse for education requiring big bucks. We already see major courses being released on the net for free. If exams were graded and credit given for taking those courses on line and the tests machine graded what is the real cost of a course? Close to zero in fact.
The next issue is the lovely campus concept and the realities of keeping it going. We are now at the point at which technology will eliminate more and more jobs. A shock wave of side effects is upon us. Jobs for college grads are vanishing or paying poor wages. When a student loan is made there is an overwhelming chance that the graduate will never have reasonable employment and an even higher chance that the college drop out will prosper enough to pay off the loan.
Yet the public mind is not ready to confront the vanishing employment issue. Politicians won't address it at all. The economy is excellent while the workers perish. Symptoms include prisons hoarding inmates beyond historical levels, drug crises clinics overflowing, random acts of great violence, alcoholism, and a nightly news program that makes it look like we live at the bottom of a third world way of life.
The way out of this is to first grasp what is going on and then react to it. If good jobs are in short supply why would we want to limit abortions or allow immigration? Can we afford to have millions of convicts who do not produce something good for public use? How about finding a way for prisons to operate fish farms or some similar engine of production that benefits the public? Perhaps mushroom farming could be used to provide very low cost mushrooms in the market place. Surely there must be ways to actually get things done.
Better than nothing, then?
Then college did you no good. You could have spent no money going to college, taught yourself SQL and gone off to be a DBA and got where you are now far faster.
If it were true that anyone doing better would be able to negotiate a higher wage and better benefits, then the average wage would have gone up over the last 30 years. It hasn't - it has stagnated.
I love how the sequester "starves the beast", except for Congress. Congress hasn't taken a cut in wages - why not? Oh that's right because the Republicans (who control Congress) are entitled little whiners and hypocrits. The FAA debacle is prime example of that.
A thousand dollars for one course? I hope that wasn't the in-district rate--and if it wasn't, why isn't she going to a four year college or university which would cost about the same per credit hour (and which might still make her take a "wellness" or other health/physical education course to graduate unless she waives out because of age or transfer credit)?
And a liveable income as well?
There's your problem right there. These "demonized" jobs are all minimum wage which is not intended to be a living wage.
Au contraire !!! The OP has a credential saying that he or she can follow pointless directions for long periods of time. That's invaluable in today's Corporate environment. . .
It is. And having people pay for their secondary education is a way of achieving that, because that way they will choose jobs that are actually productive and hence let them pay for their education. If you make post-secondary education free, then people have much less incentive to choose productive jobs.
The rest of the world clearly doesn't work that way, which is why the rest of the world is not doing as well economically.
[O]ver-educating the population makes nearly everyone poor.
There is a hell of a lot more value in an educated populace than can be put in dollars, even if one accepts the zero-sum premise you are outlining here. For starters, an educated population is much more likely to be a functioning civic population; that is, one that keeps its government under scrutiny and actually fulfills its end of the social contract rather than allowing the mindless pulling of a lever every four years to serve as a substitute for real governed consent.
That said, the employment value of being "educated" is becoming increasingly meaningless in a future where traditional vocational jobs that haven't yet been outsourced are being systematically eradicated by automation and the potential for AI-type programming to squash still more traditional "educated" work is growing. Cf. recent article in Mother Jones for a depressing analysis of the logical employment outcomes advanced AI could bring.
You compete with the rich on their pet things like Ivy League degree, you will lose the bidding war. But that is not the end of the world. Harvard is over rated. And if Harvard keeps prostituting itself to get more and more spoiled rich kids, it would lose its aura. The best way to teach a lesson to these univs is not to play the game they have set up. Ignore them, go to state schools, do well in the job market, the very same free market will rein in Harvard and its peers.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
These ranking models depend heavily on the quality of admitted student. So, the desire to score high in these ranking models necessitates movement towards a high-merit model of admission, and since we all know that SES correlates well with academic achievement, the high-cost/high-aid model also lends itself towards acquiring better students.
Poor kids drag down rankings, just like having a trailer park next door drags down property values. So, it should come as no surprise that colleges and universities everywhere would drift towards a model that attempts to exclude poor kids.
What's worse, a lot of the "merit" based aid is really not geared towards merit at all, but rather SES. I tutor math and science at a local high school here in rural America, and despite the fact that there are kids here who score in the top 10% on the SATs, they still cannot qualify for "merit" based aid because that "merit" based aid has other requirements for things like volunteering, community outreach, and other touchy-feely things that rural working class poor kids can't have because they're too busy working part time or doing farm chores to partake in these types of programs. If they were rich urban or suburban kids, they would not have this problem at all.
I'd much rather hire a new grad who spend their childhood learning a good work ethic, helping their family, and busting their ass to learn something. That kid has purpose.
$1.4 billion a year in our Obamacomony is a trifle
Nothing you said, literally not a single word of your reply, actually addresses whether it's more expensive to have someone in school or prison.
It's unquestionably more expensive to house an inmate than to teach a student. Per capita spending on inmates is about $50k; per capita spending on K-12 students is about $10k. The question is whether total spending on prison programs is greater than the total spending on education.
Every dollar you transfer out of the prison system into the education system touches five times as many people. If you can do education well enough that 80% or more of your graduates can find work that keeps them out of prison, then you win.
Free market my AR$E !!!!
Government basically OWNS the entire market for K-12 education! They also pour billions into so-called "higher education". Who do you think guarantees all those billions of dollars in student loans? Who do you think runs the STATE university system? What about all the grants and other BS that government uses to distort the market? Not to mention the various tomes of regulation imposed on the whole system.
Government and the Federal Reserve WRECK the housing and mortgage loan business and bail out the banks, but the statists blame the "free market". Government destroys the healthcare system of the USA and once again "capitalism" takes the criticism from the government worshiping leftists. Now the problems in education (which is almost EXCLUSIVELY a government system) are the fault of the free market too?
Government does a few things well, like bombing and killing massive numbers of people, incarcerating millions more, and coercing individual behavior through threat of violence.
Cost for my father to go to school (class of 1972): $1,200
Cost for me to go to school (class of 2000): $120,000
I know there's a bunch of idiots who think "well I worked at a dive bar and put myself through college, these damned kids can too." Let me know when that dive bar job pays you the $120,000.
Eat the Rich.
Lie? I remember hearing about something called "stop loss", where soldiers had to return to Iraq/Afghanistan even after their enlistment was up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-loss_policy
--PM
If you spend more on education, not just tertiary, but primary and secondary, it will nurture youth to have higher aspirations
This sounds right in theory, but the reality in my state is that some of the poorest schools have some of the highest per pupil spending rates. It doesn't do good to throw more money at a school when no teacher will teacher there (because the neighborhood looks like a DMZ and the students are all aspiring gangbangers).
It sounds like education in the US is a lot like heath care.
The US governments spend about 8% of GDP on health care, more per capita than most other developed countries, but most people get little of no cover from that.
Apparently the US spends an awful lot on education, more than many other countries where anyone can afford college without risking bankruptcy.
From TFA:
Neat fact: If the federal government were to take all of the money it pours into various forms of financial aid each year, it could go ahead and make tuition free, or close to it, for every student at every public college in the country.
Ravitch said elsewhere that the most significant factor in student achievement is parent income. Raise the parent income and you raise the student achievement.
The second sentence does not necessarily follow from the first. If the parent is some druggie or gangbanger piece of shit, then yes, their income (at least their reported income) is going to be shit too. And they're probably going to be an awful parent, with kids who perform poorly in school. But it does not follow (in this case, or many others) that giving said parent higher income is going to make them any better a parent. It's not like a higher income is going to get a meth-head or crack-head to quit drugs and clean themselves up, or make a gangbanger parent quit the gang and become a proper parent. There is without a doubt a CORRELATION between low-income families and kids in those families performing poorly in school (and being more likely to end up in prison). But I suspect the low-income is just another symptom of a larger disease, not the root cause.
Too often, it's the neighborhood itself that's the biggest causative factor. I expect you would get better much results from removing those families from their neighborhoods and putting them some place where crime was the considered unacceptable, not normative, behavior.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
It's because those dishwashers want the same "living standards" as the ones whose dishes they are washing. Chinese crap costs so little even the diswashers can afford huge tvs, but can't get a decent small house (their money goes to tvs and phones). It's all because of inflated expectations, due to ads, culture etc. If you want there to be people who serve others as a living there has to be someone that can afford to be served, that eans there must be big differences on income.
In the US , there's this all around " Me " thinking that kills every attempt to progress. If you think about it , it's the reason why nothing is working on a society level. When you consider the real roots of why , for example , the health care is private , when most democratic nations have universal health care , why the public school system is failing , why most democratic institutions have stopped working , it is in very large part due to egocentrism. The " me " without a care for the neighbor. The individualism pushed to extreme which is the root of most societal problems. It holds true of why the schools fail the children . Profit . let to do it's work has proven time and tme again to do nothing good for the humans . They do good for the 1 % of very rich that pocket on your misery. It is deeply set in the ways d America . It is not sustainable in the long run. Very soon , the destruction of all social measures will be complete. You will be the only country in the world where there is no hope of getting help in case of need. You all want to pay 0 taxes , that destroys all hope for a better tomorrow. The rich want to pay nothing in return for the mountains of money they receive , the Corporations want to pay 0 and hide their cash in fiscal paradises .Individualism does not work as a societal system. I hope one day you will start thinking in terms of " We " What can we do as a society , not individuals playing alone , but as a group. What can we acheive , as a group . What can we do with our neighbors , as a neighborhood . Even Cuba takes care of the sick . Very well , Canada , Denmark , most civilised societies. To make the school system work for everyone takes funds , means taxes. If you refuse the equation , to play your part and pay your share of the equation , the whole school system will be gone. Not because it's no good , but because you refuse as taxpayers to contribute to it . It is not all about the individual . It is not all about your personal financial gain , there are things worth a lot more than the dollar and cents in your account. If you could get rid of your medical insurance bills , imagine what that money could do for you , imagine what would happen to the school system if you were to take 1/5th the money it cost you , and everyone in the USA for medical insurance and bills , and put that money in the education system . Repeat the exercise for the medical system .The things " We " could do are incredible. But then again it takes a shift of mentality from " Me " to " We " . While the rest of the free world lives comfortably , healthy and well educated , what has the " Me " given you ?
He's right, actually. If you don't pay for your own schooling, then it sort of becomes meaningless to you. That was part of my motivation to do better in college than I did in high school. I paid for my college tuition on my own (save for the GI bill and fafsa - mind you I was only eligible for a single year worth of the GI bill) and I never had to borrow a cent.
Personally I think the problem is people are going to schools that they probably shouldn't be going to to begin with. For example, I know of a handful of people who are in law school and medical school, and the return on investment for those degrees is shitty. I once read somewhere that there are 40,000 new lawyers graduating each year, and some industry study indicated that we only need about 7,000 new ones each year. It's pretty common to spend upwards of $100,000 to $250,000 for medical school, and most people never make enough to pay for that in any reasonable amount of time.
Take a gander at the link in my signature. The video is about 20 minutes, but it is a pretty good narrative on why "follow your dreams" is more often than not very horrible advice. The "do what you want to do" mantra that is common today is part of the cause of these huge tuition hikes.
The other cause is loans being made available to people who shouldn't be taking them out to begin with, which artificially increases the demand, and thus increases the price. The loans don't even take into consideration whether or not the person going for their degree program is even smart enough to handle any job beyond bagging groceries for example; rather they just hand them out like candy to whoever wants them. This is why real estate became very expensive, if you may recall. People were getting loans where they shouldn't have been able to, and for the same reason as well.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
Change the law so that the colleges receive zero funding unless all scholarships are need based - and I do mean all.
Don't even get me started on collegiate level sports - those should be removed altogether. Slavery's modern embodiment is wrapped up in college sports.
Basically you've made some wrong decisions. Seriously wrong decisions. #1 being you had kids before you were financially ready. An unpopular reality but certainly only your fault.
Even as a socialist, I don't feel sorry for you and your child's bleak future. We have to take some personal responsibility and realize churning out children doesn't take skill, it's instead something that should be done with great care.
it's a chance you take. But at least it's a _chance_. Without the gov't you've got nothing to oppose the massive wealth of the uber-rich. Wealth inequality grows and grows. A rising tide drowns all but the biggest boats.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
US military fatalities are pretty low. The reality of military life is a lot different than left or right wing fantasies, and generally pretty boring to the average person 99% of the time. 1% of the time, it does get pretty exciting. This will sound dorky, but it has a lot of truth in it. If you're smart, motivated, etc you can learn a lot on or off the books. You get out of it what you want to, if you're willing to put in the work. Pretty much like college.
There's not much cannon fodder left in the US military. Even infantry is pretty geared up these days, and not interested in unnecessary fatalities. Too much so at times. Too many commanders are too risk adverse, and it is hindering getting things accomplished.
My medical care plan is 200 dollars a month. Even if you're paying 4 times that, That puts your total income at 2400 a month. Which is ~14 dollars an hour. Which is less than my sister is making on her internship right now, and is quite a bit less than any of my engineer friends are making. College isn't the problem dude. It's you.
I have an engineering degree (BS, AOE) from an in-state university. At this point, 20 years down the road, having lived frugally the whole time, I own a mobile home that is older than I am, on a rented lot, no retirement 401k, medical care plan is over 1/3 of my income, and no significant savings or money to send my 14 year old to college in 4 years. No land, either.
The companies that have used my skills have all profited heavily from them, but I have not. Nor is my anecdotal evidence far from the truth for most other college educated americans, recently.
Since the sole beneficiary of a college degree is the employers, I categorically refuse to send my kid to college, and have advised him not to waste his time on it, either.
Nor have colleges satisfied their charters, that I should support them.
Then you must suck at your job, negotiating pay, and/or budgeting. After 20 years with a BSEE, I have two houses, 220 acres of land, nearly $1M in retirement accounts, family medical plan that is $240/month, one kid through college, another in it, and a third on the way there. No, I did not get a dime from my poor-as-shit parents.
I agree that college is not for everyone - someone has to flip burgers, be a Walmart greeter, mow lawns, and clean houses.
Good job. You've categorically insured that your child will be living in a trailer park too.
What is he supposed to DO without a college education? What job is he possibly supposed to get?
That's just sick.
To pay for my three kids scholarships. Keep up the good work Brotards particularly the communications majors and environmental science majors.
You're doing it wrong....
Most people I know with those or even lessor credentials, are doing much better in life.
Not trying to sound callous, but sounds like you don't know how to negotiate for salary or move to where the better jobs are...?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
It's supply and demand -- cheap loans means more money means prices go up. This is the bubble people have been watning about since, hell, almost before Clinton.
Where does the money go? In most universities, the number of sinecure positions, positions unrelated to teaching, exceeds teachers. This indeed is something new.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Au contraire !!! The OP has a credential saying that he or she can follow pointless directions for long periods of time. That's invaluable in today's Corporate environment. . .
Well, not invaluable. Maybe required, but "follow[ing] pointless directions for long periods of time" doesn't really pay all that well and you risk your job being outsourced to counties whose citizens follow directions better than you.
What you really want to be is an "elected yes man." Politicians who do little thinking and let industries write legislation are invaluable.
More that than, it is the method by which you get your foot in the door for a job.
Today, a Bachelors degree is roughly the equivalent of the high school diploma of about 3-4 decades ago.
Employers for any job above the level of janitor aren't going to (in general) to even consider you for a job if you don't have a degree of some kind.
Much as one would like to think of college as an ideal place for broadening your mind, and it can do that too...but in the US, it is primarily there as the next step from HS to getting a decent paying job.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
It did do him good.
Without a college degree in most 'anything', you're not going to even get your foot in the door for any of the jobs he just described.
You have to have a degree these days to get most any decent job.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
There it is.. eat your bugs, watch Fox News, sit down shut up and pretend we live in a free society. FUCK THE SGAJGDJHGSA AJKDH ASdasdasdaskjdh akjsdh
What's that coming over the hill??... is it a monsta.. no it's Ricky Fosta!!
But..But..But...That would hurt the profit margins of private prisons and how would law enforcement get "tough on crime" with less criminals?
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/05/12/colleges-paying-the-price-for-expensive-facilities/
I'm not from north America. My perception is that you had to be good at sports to easily get anywhere. Now the game has changed and suddenly you have to be rich?
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
There is another side to this. The middle class kids often get very little financial aid from the state because our parents make too much to qualify but don't make enough to actually afford college and we end up taking out huge bank loans that our parents co-sign putting their own credit and financial stability at risk since their only asset is their home. Merit scholarships take the edge off for kids in this situation often paying for books and meal plans. I know from experience and having just finally paid off $56,000 in college bank loan debt over 15 years (not counting the little state loans I received, only $5000 over four years) even with having had a merit scholarship based on leadership in almost 15 activities in high school I actively participated in.
Mod point granted, because I came so close to having that exact thing happen that I spent many a nights in tears over the thoughts of potential failure.
It's a huge gamble, with rewards getting smaller while risk grows and grows. While college was a necessity for me, I would only encourage my (potential) children to go for it if it was an absolute requirement for what they wanted to do.
Anecdotes of underachievement by those with far more advanced degrees and impressive scores are plentiful. To evaluate college you have to look at statistics, which pull in a large sample.
The general consensus is that a BS is the new HS diploma. Sad, but true. You need that ticket punched to get ahead. That said, go for the cheapest school that isn't a diploma mill or otherwise disreputable. Getting your ticket punched at State U is smart. Putting yourself deep in hock for an unmarketable degree from Big Ivy is where there's real potential for disaster.
FWIW, my BSEE was sold to me as the ticket to a steady career (50 thou a year will buy a lot of beer). Instead, it's been an up and down ride, with some stellar years but a lot of mediocre or bad ones. I don't blame school for that--it has a lot to do with personal circumstances that aren't measured by grades and SAT scores.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Everybody knows that Liberal was redefined, and that formerly it was what we now call Libertarian.
People are less familiar with the fact that Progressive was redefined. People who call themselves progressives these days are more accurately described as socialists or leftists in most cases.
Those who bear the true standard of the original Progressive movement today don't carry a particular name.
The hallmarks of the original Progressive movement were a "muckraking" press exposing corruption and proposing solutions. This occured around the turn of the 20th century. At the time, industrialists dominated the country and factored in most of the corruption.
Today, it's a mixed bag. There are corrupt leftists as well as corrupt right-wingers in government and society.
The acid test for me is the public employee unions. If you're a real progressive, you want to disentangle both unions and corporations from government. When you say that, the reaction you get really separates the wheat from the chaff. There isn't a whole lot of wheat out there, but it exists. The true progressive, Neoprog, if you will, recognizes that there is just as much muck to rake from one side of the aisle as the other.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It's true, Aramark food is pretty godawful.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
I don't know of any prospective, randomized, controlled trials in which they gave a treatment group of poor people enough money to lift them out of poverty and left a control group in poverty for many years.
If that were the kind of evidence we demanded to make policy changes, we'd never be able to do anything.
However, if you look around the world, those countries that have eliminated poverty -- for example, the Scandinavian countries and Germany -- have better educational performance than we do.
It also makes intuitive sense to most people that if you lower family income significantly, children's educational achievement will decline.
Poverty is also associated with other social pathologies, such as crime and poor health.
Considering education, crime, health and other factors, I think it's a good policy to eliminate poverty, as the Scandinavians and Germans have done. They did it with free education and transfer payments, among other things.
any kind of IT or engineering work, can be shipped overseas regardless of the quality of the work you do. That applies to almost any white collar job nowadays.
any kind of it. on engineering work, can be shipped overseas regardless of the quality of the work you do. That applies to almost any white collar job nowadays.
OK, the money goes to schools. How do you keep the students in the schools, shackles? In 40 years we have tripled spending on schools, what more do we need? Armed guards and compulsory attendance for 12 years may keep a boy in class but will that make him learn anything?
Where I live I know people who have about the same degree. And 20 years down the road, they have not lived frugal, own their own home. Have a retirement plan. No medical bills to speak of. Savings that still keep on growing by 500-1500 per month and kids in University.
Oh and 24-40 payed holidays per year. 13th and sometimes 14th month pay.
But call yourself lucky, because if you want the same, you have to become a socialist. And that is apparently worse then living in poverty.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
That's why so many "liberal" examinations of the issues have resulted to separating out "in-classroom" spending, but they are dismissed as inconvenient, and the numbers used by the school-haters are always total funding.
I see why you put the word "liberal" in quotes...
I'm curious how "rubber-room" spending is categorized? (fwiw, new york city statistically has one of the highest in-classroom spending ratios in the country)
An interesting read, if you have the time...
http://www.thegatesnotes.com/Books/Education/Where-Do-School-Funds-Go-Book-Review
Well, of course, no one is going to stand against the idea of eliminating poverty. I'm just saying that it may not be the magic bullet many expect. If you have a criminal culture in a given neighborhood or region, simply throwing more income at them probably isn't going to change them (not for a long time anyway). Hell, I've got relatives who are criminals and trash--and I can ASSURE you that more money isn't going to help them. A mental (and preferably spacial) change has to take place too.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
I have an engineering degree (BS, AOE) from an in-state university. At this point, 20 years down the road, having lived frugally the whole time, I own a mobile home that is older than I am, on a rented lot, no retirement 401k, medical care plan is over 1/3 of my income, and no significant savings or money to send my 14 year old to college in 4 years. No land, either.
The companies that have used my skills have all profited heavily from them, but I have not. Nor is my anecdotal evidence far from the truth for most other college educated americans, recently.
Since the sole beneficiary of a college degree is the employers, I categorically refuse to send my kid to college, and have advised him not to waste his time on it, either.
Nor have colleges satisfied their charters, that I should support them.
===
Sorry for your misfortune. Had you been living in most any other country, for example, Britain, Australia, or even Canada, for your skills and employment history, you would have been able to own a home, have $0.00 school debt, have had the equivalent of universal healthcare, and the ability to send your kids through 1st year university for free. The other years range from $2500.00 to about $4000.00, and with no guns. Yes, the world other than the USA is what is called a social democrat world, where you and your children can live well, and receive a good education.
Is the American dream still alive? Only if you are a clever lucky business person.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
I would like to add more people died in the 80s due to accidents then have died during wartime + accidents in the 90s and 00s. But like you said not according to the media.
If you spend more on education, not just tertiary, but primary and secondary, it will nurture youth to have higher aspirations, it will teach them more.
Spending money on "education" != improved education. I can spend $10 eating out, or $1 for self prepared food; the $10 meal is not necessarily 10x as filling or tasty.
Yes, we do want an educated citizenry, but raw money spent is not the way to measure that.
Nearly everybody I know with college degrees (many like myself in engineering) have made out quite well. I am most assuredly going to encourage my daughters to go to college.
I'm not sure how you have managed to have nearly nothing saved after being an engineer for two decades. How is it possible to have NO 401k? Every single job I have worked the past 15 years has had a 401k.
I have a feeling that your current financial condition doesn't have anything to do with the fact that you have a college degree, but is some combination of poor choices/bad luck.
Understood. I was never too good at talking my way into a job that used my cerebral side, unless you count process control and management at a photo lab; on the other hand, once in I usually got regular raises, sometimes every paycheck. Thing is I generally really wanted to work and at least employers figured that much out.
Best job 'up my alley' was totally accidental self-employment. Guy I knew from college asked a buddy to write a program for his company's energy audits. My buddy said he was busy, referred job to me. Best damn thing I've done, but after expenses, and the firm's lackluster 'marketing' the pay was shite.
As for anecdotal, I think I likely seen all kinds. Thing is, in my experience, the 'lazy and shiftless' often weren't - they were instead mostly crippled by a range of health issues often including mental, psychological, and emotional probs. They wanted to work, were good at some goodly variety of stuff, but had trouble fitting the procrustean beds available. And, without treatment, often not realistically open to them because of cost, they were mostly screwed. Seen others get a few breaks and do the bootstrap thing.
Congrats on your gig, man, and your path to it.
As in, go to prison or starve?
Jeez Louise, that's a tough call, especially when it's all you can see in front of you. Seen a guy pull the plug, faced with that one.
Eliminating poverty is a necessary, although not a sufficient, condition for improving educational performance.
If you just give cash to people and let them do what they want with it, some people would use it to improve in ways that you would consider socially beneficial and some would not.
However, when the government provides them with social services, such as health care, child care, academic and vocational education, libraries, housing, and even employment, that can change the culture of a neighborhood, even a criminal culture.
Science had a review of the long-term studies of preschool programs in low-income neighborhoods. Some of them did lead to higher lifetime earnings and less crime. Head Start didn't do all that well, but similar programs were effective.
I know that there have been studies of recidivism among convicted criminals in prison. There were programs in New York State that encouraged prisoners to earn a college degree, and they had zero recidivism. They were discontinued.
Intuitively, it seems to me that having large communities of people in poverty would create crime and social pathology. Reversing the poverty should reverse the social pathology.
BTW, I think I've seen people in the Wall Street Journal editorial page argue against eliminating poverty.
Speak it.
Was a time (up into '70s, anyway) one could support oneself on minimum wage. Nothing fancy, but pay rent, eat regular, own a cheap car. Support a family? Generally no, tho with odd jobs on the side, a garden, some rabbits or pigs, maybe dealing a bit of grass or 'shine, sometimes.
A quick search for "merit" returns this "something that deserves or justifies a reward or commendation".
Can anyone state with a serious face that an SAT score of 700 deserves "merit" aid? Look at the CollegeBoard site and you will see that a 700 ranks at the 7% percentile. Why on earth should the colleges provide any aid for a 700* score? Does such a person have any hope of graduating with a 4 year degree?
* this would be 700 on the Critical Reading + Math score, not the 3 part score.
What you really want to be is an "elected yes man." Politicians who do little thinking and let industries write legislation are invaluable.
So you mean most politicians then.
I'd not blame the liberals. The cultural shift has been going on across the board impacting all facets of life. I could go into the many factors I think contributed to the rise of it but that is a long post... It goes into politics and the media especially, who will reduce complex issues into 1 single number that is always a bad but people growing up into the idiocy are not exposed to alternatives. You've got to come up with things on your own because the culture isn't going to even give you a hint; other than providing ridiculous examples that might may a person discover the problem on their own if they don't tune out from the unpleasantness of the examples.
Education is falling prey to this crap on multiple fronts - the no child left behind crap which everybody now hates, is still living on and aspects of that are creeping in on us at the university now. I'm now being told to quantify all the main "outcomes" of the course so I can provide students 5+ grades on everything. Some of those "outcomes" that are listed (which is likely a result of the outcome based education fad of the 90s) are somewhat BS talk already-- those issues aside, many things that are listed in those are not quantified into some metric. You've then got to play number games so each one is weighted etc. and it eventually will influence how the course is structured. Students generally know what parts they are having trouble with already - if they don't, either they are not getting proper feedback or they are not emotionally or (less likely) mentally suited to college yet. I can judge skill level without relying upon numbers... The Lawsuit nation takes away subjective expert opinion; hell, people don't know the difference between fact and opinion anymore.
Another cultural problem is most students expect an A for hard work (a biased subjective judgement they perform on themselves) and will practically demand an A for effort. The system bends to the collective will of the students pushing for inflated grades and job training as the university is managed more like a BUSINESS churning out worker drones who are our "customers." Students will shop around for somebody will treat them like a customer. Just going to this dynamic is going to result in eventual structural changes! It is no different than subtle changes in language controlling people in 1984. Students are never customers and bad things come from conflating the two. Life is not a business metaphor!
Many students play any merit scheme you develop like a hacker on windows 95 (rev A.) A talent for playing the game is what a meritocracy promotes/rewards. The system pushes/enforces this meritocracy. Any static coded system will be out smarted by human brains... or now even by AI systems. It doesn't matter how complex it becomes, somebody will hack it because it is brain dead (and zero tolerance is a desperate act by policy coders in pursuit of Utopia.) Sure, a purely subjective system has flaws; people suck up, manipulate, etc. but we all know that happens anyhow because hacking the meritocracy is easy from both sides. I can use the system to knock an A student down to a B and defend it in court (which can happen, but is largely a risk that only has all the impact of a terrorist threat...) but the C I want to give is often just too much of a fight. Plus the management measures YOU by these metrics - if you flunk half because they deserve it you have a fight on your hands... and some assigned workshops... sometimes you just get a bunch of losers who need to flunk; but the cost of doing the right thing IS great. The customers are driving the whole system down the drain - and few old timers will discuss this because it is just so upsetting. Within a university giving "bad" grades is a relative judgement problem but within the whole system it is a larger problem - who wants to come to your college where a C means average/typical?? They grew up being "special" with inflated grades and unjustified HIGH confidence levels (another American problem as the studies show.)
Class warfare is part of the human condition. A worthy topic but so heated it is best to avoid it as much as possible.
This is an interesting point, with some caveat.
One could look at other statistics to find out which of the alternative is more likely or if yet another series of reasons is the explanation for the current situation. For instance the rate of violent crime, which is rather high in the US compared with a lot of other Western countries (e.g. intentional homicide rate is basically 5x higher in the US than most of Western Europe), and the reasons why people are put (and made to stay) in prison. So violence rate is an explanation, but not the only one. In many Western countries, prison is the solution of last resort for violent and dangerous criminals. In the US, thanks to the ongoing "war on drugs" since President Nixon, it seems that even non-violent drug offenses can land you in jail for a long time. Also, sentences tend to be significantly longer in the USA compared to other countries. Sentencing laws (three strikes, etc) are way tougher, and last but not least, prison building and operating is a private business in the USA. Why don't you read about it?
Overall it perhaps emerges that the USA is vastly better at catching and managing criminal than Honduras, that has almost 20x as much crime than the US but only few prisoners. However it seems that the USA also likes to put and keep people in prison rather than look for alternatives for dealing with their problems (drug rehabilitation for instance).
Some statistics that I find interesting: about 90% of federal prisoners are there for non-violent offenses; there are currently more African-American in prison in the USA right now than there were slaves in 1850; and 67% of ex-prisoners reoffend within 3 years: when they get out of jail they cannot find a job, they are ineligible for welfare, and so they are caught in an endless spiral.
and then finish at a state school. Making sure it's a state CC with lower tuition get all the Gen Ed out of the way there. Not everyone has to or will go or has the study skills to go to a four-year school right out of high school. If you're God's next gift to medicine, science, engineering, etc.......the scholly $$$ will be there. But for the mortals there's nothing wrong with a solid two years of study at a good community college.
also, google for 'Railroad Monopoly' and 'Trusts'. Also the history of Unions and how they needed strong outside help from central government before they were effective at raising wages.
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Individual humans are chaotic in broad we're quiet predictable, and getting more so every day. Google 'Big Data' and see what I mean. Also, you're using a classic 'slippery slope' argument and assuming that as soon as we start regulating banks and eliminating wealth inequality the next logical step is fascism.
See, being a progressive is _hard_. It's hard because you don't have an ideology. You have the ability to make a hypothesis, take action based on it, and observe the results. It'd be so much easier when I can just do what I want based on an ideology and use that to make all my decisions.
So I'm stuck having to do a _lot_ of extra work. I've got to decide, as a progressive, if the benefit of regulating soda outweighs the downsides. And I've got to do that for _everything_. This is why we need 'elites'. One man's elite is another man's subject matter expert.
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between an elite that governs by hoarding wealth and pitting one man against the other and an expert in the field. One is peer reviewed and mistakes cost him his status as elite. The other runs North Korea. Investing in a strong central government is a risk, but siding with the Kim Jong Un's of the world because we won't even try to stand up to them isn't the answer.
Think of it this way. You're on a bridge and a train is coming. It's going to kill you. You can jump, but you don't know if you'll survive the fall. Do you wait for the train?
Once again, I'm open to a third option. I'd love to say the train is going to stop. But for 2000+ years of human history it hasn't...
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I throw BS. Unless you chose to work somewhere not paying well, this is on you. We hire starting engineers with aero degrees at $65K+ right now. After 20 years, you either are a failure of an engineer or really really did not get the analytic skills you needed in engineering school (and are a failure of an engineer).
So why wouldn't the solution be to better align the test to what you actually want students to learn - broaden the class of algebra problems tested for instance.
fixed this yet? It seems to me I read he had - low interest loans, etc.?
Or maybe that wasn't the right approach????
When one enlists voluntarily in the military, a contract for eight years of a combination active/inactive service is now the norm. A three year active duty hitch nets you five years reserve duty, which can become active duty at the whim of your Country's Warlords. This is a part of the contract one signs when enlisting.... no big surprise, is what I mean to say.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Your world sounds like a really dark and lonely place.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I'm talking about Earth. Not sure which world you're referring to.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Things are being done wrong... and doing the wrong thing with more more effort and money won't do much to change the outcome. Ken Robinson says it best, and with the entertaining delivery of a comedian. : http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_how_to_escape_education_s_death_valley.html
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Yeah, and millions died in the 40s, what's your fucking point? Pick any decade you want, I'll pick a decade that'll beat yours in military death ratio.
... whatever
Joining the armed forces carries a risk, and if the OPs kid is about as smart as his/her parent sounds, he's not going to be able to keep out of the front line. And subsequently, they're going to run a very high risk of getting fucking shot in the face.
Granted, there is a high risk of getting shot in the face just going to school in the US. Looking at it, the best choice for OP might just be to emmigrate the fuck out.
... whatever
Sorry, I know it must be taxing for Zontar of Venus to understand what's going on on planet Earth. But keep trying.
A wonderful thought, but difficult to do in practice. Broaden the class of algebra problems for instance and you will almost certainly see lower scores across the board since the fundamentals are more difficult to learn to use effectively - and a test where a 50% is a really good grade is going to be very disheartening to almost anyone taking it. Though perhaps that in itself would be a good thing to teach - get away from the "failure is bad" mentality that's being drilled into students. Failure is inevitable, it's how you respond to it that's important. Or we could make the problems easier, but for early algebra there's not really much of a way to do that, the problems are already mostly testing the stripped-down basics.
And that still doesn't address subjects like art, music, dance, and athletisism that are extremely important to developing a healthy, creative mind, but are virtually impossible to test in a standardized manner. And those subjects are already deeply under seige by funding based on standardized test results.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Talk about sucking! Is that all you've got? After 10 years with a BSEE, I have 5 houses, 7000 acres of land, nearly $30M in retirement, doctors pay me to come to the hospital when I'm sick, and all 6 of my kids are Fortune 500 CEOs. Perhaps you should consider a career change? I'm looking for a gardner for one of my estates.
Didn't mean to slough you off by not leaving a reply. You make a couple of good points; unfortunately, and perhaps a bit unfairly to you, I don't have much extra energy just now and am rather in a bit of a bad spot due personal crap going on.
My comments weren't so much about disparity of income, they were about disparity of perception of "personhood". Un-realistic perceptions and desires of living standards notwithstanding, and telling comment about where 'disposable' income goes being true for some, I simply stated that our remuneration structure right now guarantees a pool of serfs, those serfs not even earning enough to be considered by most standards to be self-supporting. (Yeah, clumsy language, worse than usual. Said I wasn't feeling good. Best I can do just now, left out some stuff, too.)
And no, I would not propose some external scale to re-assign wage and benefits, unless it were done by mutual consent, as is supposed to happen with all such in a representative republic. What I do urge is for us all to continually examine who we are, who we think we are, apply those thoughts to others, and ask ourselves "why am I so much better/worse a human?" and "Why am I a 'people' and they're not?" - or vice versa. One of the more common traits I've seen on slashdot, and all over, for that matter, is "I've got mine, fuck you." I suggest there's a continuum: me against the world vs. me and the rest of the world understanding and cooperating with ourselves. Everyone picks a place to stand, whether they admit it or not. Some feel the choice has been made for them. Many years ago a buddy in jail said "They've got your body, they fuck with your head. The only thing you have control over is your attitude." To which I added, "Choose carefully."
Waited till the trolls left. Specifically, (1) Negotiating pay, and (2) budgeting. I contend that those I worked for profited heavily from my work, therefore I'm good at my job.
Ever take Serway's College Physics (CP) /PSE/POP? Did you end up buying the study guide? If so, why did you pick that study guide to buy? I did the page layout, the formatting, all the artwork, some rewriting, etc. A lot of what went into that was what I put into it. My customer's contact (Saunders/Harcourt) mentioned that I was the best at this, that she was aware of.
For a long time, that particular text was the top seller in the world -- no credit to me, all credit to others on that one. However, the study guide is typically a major money-maker.
Jump ahead to a career change, into prestressed concrete. The last place I worked -- where I was told to put a subordinate in a brakeless water truck, and asked "are the brakes fixed?", and was told that I had no right to ask that question... and subsequently fired in great betrayal, I was still later told that I was the best field engineer he ever knew, by the guy who betrayed me.
Now, I did get another job, nearby, at the same wage, doing the same thing, and was subsequently promoted to project manager. But I can say that it isn't that I suck at my job.
But I am not free to move. And I do suck at negotiating pay. But that is not just cause for a top performer to receive bottom pay; and I have seen enough other evidence that college degrees no longer pay off, that I do not intend to send my kid to college. Moreover, I have seen the colleges fail miserably at their primary mandate, and I don't intend to support that either.
I have told my kids, that they need to work at school such that they *could* go to college if they want to. But if they want a further education they should forget the degree, and just find out what the courses are, get the books, work through every single problem, try the stuff out themselves. If they still want a college degree, they should do 2 years of tech school, 2 years of work, 2 years of community college, 2 years of work, 2 years of university, and then they *might* have a chance of getting a job. But I'm not going to send them to that, because I don't consider it to be an idea that is likely to pay off.
At this point, my advice is more along the lines of agricultural and Christianity. Forget business and tech -- in our society's glorification of "greed is good/more for me, none for you", it made too much use of an empty promises.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
See my reply to another nearby thread; it applies to your post, too.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3742531&cid=43709853
One of the most successful people at our high school reunion was a girl who got married in her senior year of high school to another of my classmates.
When she got divorced from him, she went into business with her father, as executive janitorial services [janitors for rental business locations].
She's a millionaire.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
See my reply to another nearby thread; it applies to your post, too.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3742531&cid=43709853
More to the point of your post, I think my horizons are pretty broad. My career has bounced through programming, ancillary textbook creation, education, and prestressed concrete/surveying through project management.
It's not just a cynical view of life. Record numbers of people are buying into the "retraining" hype... doctors retraining as plumbers, plumbers going to med school to be doctors, and they're just getting school debt without ever getting a job.
That isn't cynicism, that's pragmantism you're seeing in me.
My other post, that I referenced, tells what I think a better path is, that I am going to be suggesting for my kids.
Let me remind you of a standard career guidance. Ask yourself, "what kind of a standard of living do I want? What will it cost?" Then ask yourself, "What jobs does society find valuable enough, to pay for that standard of living?". That kind of thing, in the past, has led actors to abandon acting for insurance sales. It's really good advice. Acting is a great career move for maybe, what, twenty people a year. It's okay for another thousand. It's lousy for everyone else: our society really does not value acting.
But let me point out that recently, our society also does not value... computer coding, and grocery store clerks, and drafting, and drawing, and manufacturing automobile rivets, and ... the list goes on. Our society does not value the laborer. Unlike "the laborer is worth his wage", our society says "the manager is worth the laborer's wage", even when the manager couldn't do the laborer's job to save his life. But our society then took it a step farther: the owner is worth...
Yes, I have a job. That's a great positive. But the rate of actual unemployment/underemployment/no longer considered unemployed due to overly long unemployment is so great, I can validly say that there is almost no job that our society places a living ... much less family ... wage on.
In light of that, going to college doesn't make sense. I rather say, prepare yourself as if you *would* go to college, and then wait on that.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
The budgeting I do as well as I can, but there are certain costs that are not in my control, and that does hamper me a little. One of the other posters very nearly hit my current family income on the head --sixty, which is just barely poverty level in our area--but before that, counting backwards year by year, it was probably pretty close to 60,60, 53,47, 43, 37, 35, 33, 30, 30, 12, 45, 30,25,22, and thn splitting my work and my wife's work, (17/43, 11/41, 8/40). Before that we weren't married. I made 4,12, 10. All numbers in thousands. We had all our children late (heavily related to the poverty.)
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
The budgeting I do as well as I can, but there are certain costs that are not in my control, and that does hamper me a little. One of the other posters very nearly hit my current family income on the head --sixty, which is just barely poverty level in our area--but before that, counting backwards year by year, it was probably pretty close to 60,60, 53,47, 43, 37, 35, 33, 30, 30, 12, 45, 30,25,22, and thn splitting my work and my wife's work, (17/43, 11/41, 8/40). Before that we weren't married. I made 4,12, 10. All numbers in thousands. We had all our children late (heavily related to the poverty.)
I don't know where you're living, but in 1985, I was making $30K fresh out of engineering school and it has only been up from there - now pushing $200K. Yes, I've lived in some expensive places, but college paid off in a MAJOR way for me. I knew plenty of the so-called "non-degreed engineers" and believe me they were paid way less and looked down on as merely lab rats. The problem is, now you need the college degree just to get in the door, so your advice will probably fail you kids.
I don't intend for my kids to work for others. I hope to buy a eight acre plot of property, and they get started in biointensive organic gardening, specifically in the form of a community christian garden. First hour, reading Bible and praying. Subsequent hours, limited talk as needed for work and training, but working the garden in a planned manner. Those who work use their working hours to bid on the produce it yields.
Doesn't sound profitable, maybe, but I could see it being a very valid way to live in this coming era. Plus,I suspect they'll have far more free time for learning and engineering, than I ever had.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Mostly, I lived in Virginia, though we spent 3 years in Lithuania. Also, 1985 was still a good year, economically speaking. By 1992, when I graduated from college, NASA was involved in a huge layoff, there were few jobs for new graduates who were not in a preferred minority, the Alumni association made the specific (and publicised) decision not to help new graduates who had not yet held a job, and that year was t_e year Generation X got its definition in a novel.
Clinton, whowas running for his first term, declared, in response, that if Generation X had been x'd out of everything by the greedy and spendthrift Baby boomers, they would fix everything by volunteering their time to Baby boomers for free.
It was not the best of years to graduate.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
First hour, reading Bible and praying.
Oh... I think we found an explanation for your current situation.
I have an engineering degree (BS, AOE)
I did bullshitting with Age-of-Empires during my engineering degree course too. I can't even hold a job.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
You are soooooo right.
1530, not 5300. texting sometimes goes bad.
it was Gore Vidal that noticed it before me.
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You are making an unwarranted assumption here. That assumption is that you could have prevented most of those prison inmates from being in prison if society had only spent more money on their education. Yet the United States spends more per student than Switzerland, Denmark, Norway or Germany. South Korea spends much less and its students do much better. The problem is not one of money spent on education. There are many reasons someone might become a member of the prison system, however almost always it concerns the failure to make good choices and to live a disciplined life. People with those traits typically also do badly in schools. As a matter of fact for all the money the U.S. spends on education or results are pretty abominable. We don't do education well, and the reasons we don't do education well have very little to do with how much we spend on education.