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...
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.
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.
You'd rather live in a society where there is no escape from poverty if you weren't talented^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^hlucky enough to be born a millionaire? That's where we're headed if what TFA is about becomes commonplace. The idea is that everyone pays for it through taxes. This inherent selfishness of "I've got mine so fuck everybody else" is what is destroying my country and I'm sick of it! All the conservatives who bitch about taking care of other people have benefited far more from society than they can fathom and yet they can't see it. Taxes are the price we pay for civilization and part of civilization is making sure that everyone has a decent standard of living. Yes, you're paying for other people, but guess what? Other people are paying for you at the same time so it all works out. If you don't want to pay taxes you clearly don't want to live in a civilized country either.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
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/
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.
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!
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.
Ah good, the self-righteous person who doesn't realize that there are plenty of people who work just as hard -- or harder -- than them and remain poor, and that the vast majority of the rich are people born into it. You got a break, good for you, stop acting like it's solely because you deserve it and other people don't.
A part time job and a summer job could put a pretty huge dent in $13,600 a year.
In the year 2013 during the worst economic times the US has seen in many decades:
1. Those jobs are very hard to come by. Just look at the unemployment rate for kids from 18-24. Just saying that they need to get the gumption and get a job doesn't reflect the reality of what kids have to deal with today.
2. You wouldn't even make close enough to put a ding in those expenses let alone a dent.
3. Average what? Tuition? Books will take up Summer earnings and colleges love adding all these other fees.
4. Unless you're really sharp or majoring in Women's Studies, a part time job during school is a burden and makes it hard to keep grades up and ...
5. In this day and age, kids are competing with people from all over the World. A GPA less than 3.5/4.0 means you are going to have a hard time getting employed. Compared to back in my day, just graduating with a 3.0 meant you were golden.
7. With Globalization, the opportunities available to kids are declining rapidly. Back in my day, Big Corp had an entry level track for us State U. grads and the Fast Track for the Ivy League grads and groomed folks for the future. Today, they want folks who "can hit the ground running" and entry level means two years of experience.
8. There's no going back. This is just a symptom of the rest of the World catching up with the West and our inevitable regression to the mean, if you will, of standard of living. Meaning, there are only so many basic resources on this planet and we are all going to have to reduce out living standards - except for the super rich 1%'ers.
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/
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.
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?
5. In this day and age, kids are competing with people from all over the World. A GPA less than 3.5/4.0 means you are going to have a hard time getting employed. Compared to back in my day, just graduating with a 3.0 meant you were golden.
I've never had a job ask me my GPA. Despite all the wording otherwise, aside from college admissions, my high school grades have never come up ever again. And, true to lower school experience, my grades in college never came up. The only time someone could have argued they mattered is when I went back for a masters, and even then, it was solely an issue of seeing if I completed my undergrad, not with what grades. My test scores have always been in the high 90-something percent, so maybe it matters more for the 50%ers, but for me, I know that nobody ever cared about my grades.
Learn to love Alaska
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
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.
I am in college now, and familiar with tuition costs. Right now, a Va resident can attend basically any college in Va for ~ 10k / year. Thats tuition, books MIGHT add another 1-2k, but you can generally rent books for $50/class x 4 classes x 2 semesters.
Yes, if you cant cover that, you dont have the gumption. Sorry.
And I love how the headline demonizes merit based aid. Oh the horrors.
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
GPA does definitely matter, especially for continuing one's education. A very close friend of mine desires more than anything to become a practicing physical therapist. Unfortunately, her undergrad grades are quite poor. During her undergraduate work, she thought (like you espouse) that GPA was not important. Her GREs are middling, and due to her GPA, no medical school is giving her a chance. It is rejection letter after rejection letter. I actually admire her tenacity. Its been more than two years and she is still applying and searching for a way to achieve her goal.
I welcome our new 99% overlords.
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.
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. . .
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
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.