Slashdot Mirror
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...
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...
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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.
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.
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.
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.
<br><br>
Perhaps these trends toward elitism are related.
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!
I read somewhere...
We spend more per capita on prisons than we do on school. Something it really messed up with our priorities.
Easy. HR drone sees trade school? Then your resume goes in the trash etc.
If you want that awesome $29,000 a year job working 60 hours a week at the gringoDepot as a manager you need a full 4 year degree! To do anything aboe $17,000 a year you need a 4 year degree.
Perhaps someone in Silicon Valley or New York will rebuke my comment, but in the real world (Florida) that is what the jobs are and the lines for them are out the door and people are at the mercy of H.R.
Until their attitude changes on what is really required to perform a job they will just get an Indian instead with no experience but has the magical piece of paper. By the way I do have that magical piece of paper in case someone wants to tell me I am bitter. It just blows for those who did not get their careers started in 1999. For those who are reading this comment you are in a bubble.
If you are under 30 and have a 3.8 GPA but dropped out after your second year due to the lack of cash, well I am waiting for my coffee and fries. No H.R. will dump you for working at Starbucks or McDonalds instead of having an awesome job immediately which they also hypocritically turned down because you didn't have the magical piece of paper, so it cycles to a self fulfilling prophesy where there are no qualified applicants and we have a crises OMG.
http://saveie6.com/
In my experience, all the people who studied on their own and knew what they wanted to do and before they entered college became distracted and depressed. The filler classes just suck up time, motivation, and money. Then they'd just feel worse and worse for not focusing on their real studies
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?
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?
Actually, Utah has something exactly like that. You spend the first two years hands-on in the trade at a campus of the Utah College of Applied Technology (there are 10 campuses spread across the state). Each campus is partnered with a state-level university, so if you want that 2-year degree to become a 4-year one, you take 3-4 "bridge" classes, then the 2nd two years of the 4-year degree.
The coolest part about the system? a top-grade high school student can go to UCAT as early as they can start 11th grade (assuming they clear their state HS required classes). They can complete the 2-year degree at around 6 months after graduating high school, and the state pays for all of it. This leaves paying only for the last two years plus one full-time semester's worth of bridge classes.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I went to an awful lot of school to learn computer science. My shiny fancy degree got me an interview for a job. But guess what? None of the questions in the interview were answerable based on what I learned in school. I knew the answers because I wrote code for fun as a hobby, starting at the age of 15. But I knew the answers and got the job. And guess what? I have not used anything from school in the job. My job is all about the useful programming skills that I had to pick up to write fun little toy programs as a hobby.
There was an accreditation change in the mid 1980's that forced colleges to stop teaching programming languages directly, so instead of teaching C, they teach things like "database programming using C", and you're expected to pick the language up on your own, rather than as part of the curriculum. And yes, after that time, colleges started turning out people who practically could not program.
These days they teach "game programming in flash" for all those people who don't realize that Flash doesn't actually run on iPhones and think they will come up with the next great computer game. The Academy of Arts College in San Francisco is basically turning out a bunch of unemployable Flash programmers who couldn't program C to save their lives.
If you want a good education, you have to go to some place like Brown University, which provides self directed programs. You'll find these at the Ivy League schools, but a lot of universities or state colleges these days are basically diploma mills which arrange for you to spend 5 years there instead of 4 by choosing not to offer classes you would need to graduate when you are at that point in the program. The California State Universities are practically famous for that little trick.
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.
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
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.
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.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
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.
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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."
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.
> A lot of the reason people complain college is useless is that it doesn't teach you things that can only be taught with actual experience in industry.
Indeed this is true for many things such as the examples you give.
Although actually I did take a college class that did simulate the clueless pointy-haired boss.
The class was in our senior year, and we had to form small teams and design and implement a software product according to a customer's requirements.
Us undergrads did the coding, and the teams were run by graduate student "managers". The professor was the "CEO" and had final say.
The undergrads did all the work, but the graduate student said this: "My grade depends on me running the meetings. So you till me what we are meeting about, and I will then repeat your words and thus earn my grade by leading the meeting". Part of the customer requirements was that our application be distributed across a network. We were aware of CORBA, but choose to use a simpler, cheaper, more appropriate RPC system. The professor insisted that we use a full-blown Borland CORBA product, so that she would have an excuse to buy it for her research team and bill it as a classroom expense. Sounds like something right out of Dilbert if you ask me.
I still think there are a lot of useful things that could be taught in school, but aren't. What programmers need is experience writing programs. Not just theoretical knowledge of how to find the big-O of an algorithm, but how to actually design and implement a substantial amount of code. A lot of what it takes to create software is tedious, obnoxious practical stuff like figuring out compiler flags, selecting appropriate libraries, learning how to use those libraries, and figuring out unintended interactions between components that lead to bugs. Programming assignments in school are usually of the form "Here is a framework where everything is architected and coded except for one algorithm, go code that algorithm". This is fine for teaching the algorithm, but it misses out on all those other things I just mentioned.
When I was a TA for a graphics class, a big part of my job was handing out the programming assignments. I was given a fair amount of leeway, but I roughly stuck with what was done the previous year. An early assignment was to write a polygon rasterizer. We had a framework that allowed the students to just write the rasterizer and nothing else; they were given code to take input from the mouse to describe the vertices, and an output framework in the form of a setpixel function. The framework displayed the pixels as large blocks so you could see gaps between polygons that should have been adjacent (in case your implementation was flawed), and used color to indicate overlap (in case your implementation was flawed).
I thought this made the task too easy, so later when it was time to write a raytracer, I just gave them a set of requirements and suggested they use libPNG to write their output. Everybody succeeded in making a raytracer, and they learned how to think through the task of setting up the whole program. A more traditional approach would have just asked them to write ray-object intersection code, losing sight of the big picture.
Hamsters are at least as feathery as penguins. HamLix
"Never in my life has college been anything other than a money grab."
Your life is likely too short to matter. Don't need kids giving history lessons.
The California university system used to be free. When I went to college I paid $4 a semester hour, worked part time and graduated debt free without financial assistance. Never spent as much as $100 a semester on books and was always able to sell them back. Things have changed a great deal in a pretty short period of time.
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.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Are you really a conservative? or is it just a cartoonish parody of one?
The *minimum* score on the SAT now is 600.
The maximum is 2400.
It's three sections now, not two, so you get three scores that range from 200 to 800.
The ACT has also added sections, but each section is still graded on a 36 point scale, and the sections are averaged, so the total scores haven't changed.
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.
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
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?!?
I thought that was the case as well, but unfortunately it isn't. That is the combined reading and math score according to the article's source http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2012/2012160.pdf page 7.
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.
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!
Excuse me while I call you an idiot.
You're an idiot.
40.1% cannot push anything through the Senate. 40.1% cannot push anything through the House. 40.1% cannot do much of anything.
As for your statement that Democracy is designed to work that 50%+1 gets to kill the 50%-1, I would have to say that the Senate has the filibuster rule for that exact reason.
And I'm sure you are another that wasn't complaining about the filibuster when the Republicans controlled the Senate. Which is why my sig is so relevant so often.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
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.
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)
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!
But doesn't he have to *survive* first?
bickerdyke
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
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.
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. . .
[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.
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.
Coming from a country where college is free: you have to make sure there is no stigma against trades / tech schools. It's not that because it's college it's automatically 'better' or 'higher'. Also, it's not that because it is free, everyone is going to make it or even like doing it - far from it actually.
My blog, if you're interested: http://www.purp
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
You can bitch about that if you want... but my grand fathers would call you pansies.
I would call your grandfathers willing murderers.
They took the options life offered them and thrived.
On the suffering of others, more directly than most.
Why are you worth the system's time?
Ask yourself the same question. You are replaceable. In a system in which you constantly have to be keeping an eye on your value to society, we are all at risk. One medical problem and it's off to the glue factory you go.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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."
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 ?
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.