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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...
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.
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."
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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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.
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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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.
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.