How attractive will that free college education be when its value plummets due to over supply in the market place? There's nothing inherently special to having a Bachelors degree. The value is relative to the economy that demands it.
The idea is to level the playing field for those who want to enter a career that requires higher education AND to diminish the separation between the haves/have nots over higher education. I don't think the value will plummet, God knows an educated population is preferable to the alternative. I think valuing a bachelors as a ticket to middle class is an error that can and should be corrected.
Do we have a number of people that take worthless (in your eyes) degrees? That isn't anecdotal? In any case, a degree of any kind is generally good enough to at least get your foot in the door. How many people get jobs in their majors anyway? Medical and education aside, obviously. What's stopping the brainless from sleeping in class from elementary to high school? And free college would only be for public universities. If you really want that private degree, by all means pay for it yourself.
I think it comes down to programs where tuition is dramatically subsidized, and contingent on grades with outcomes like skill acquisition, graduation and employment. So, we are fucked, basically. I do think that the idea of dismissing a social program because a distinct minority would abuse it is a stupid, uniquely American notion. If the worst abuse of our system is staying in fucking class, it would be a drastic improvement, in other words.
College shouldnt be seen as some beacon of success. There was an article yesterday (maybe CNN?) that discussed how recent med school graduates cannot find residency placements. A few years ago (and perhaps still), newly minted law school grads couldnt find a hiring firm. Supply and demand needs to be considered when thinking about how valuable a degree will be. The solution isnt providing free college, its promoting trade crafts (plumber, electrician, mechanic, etc.). You can make a very decent living for yourself with those skills, especially if you own a business.
I just did a random sampling of ohio public universities, and the tuition plus room and board is anywhere between 23k and 30k. You can multiply that by 4. You can get into a lot of debt at a state school. I know this is only ohio, and as I understand it ohio is more expensive than most state schools.
This is part of the mistake: college doesn't equal career, at least not any more. They offer a minimum skill set, but even an entry level job requires skills not addressed by colleges. The reason? Technology. I learned Access 2003 in college. How laughable is that now? My degree is expected to be relevant my entire career, so there's no incentive for colleges to teach skills that will quickly be eroded by technological change. Look at all of the trades fed by academia under assault, or over saturated: medicine, law, business, etc. The degree is next to nothing compared to your network and that's what the "elite" colleges really sell. So, a college degree is a ticket to the middle class, but not because it forces you to develop sellable skills, but because it provides you with the opportunity to develop those yourself and connects you to a larger network. I think making college education more available and reducing the ridiculous cost makes for a better society as a whole. Speaking about inefficient, we have built the best university system in the world: http://www.theguardian.com/higher-e...5/top-200-universities-in-the-world-the-table The fact that our poorest and most in need of a decent shot out of poverty are denied that system is obscene and it's shooting our society in the foot, by widening the gap. We have a fantastic system that is being shuttered to the people who need it most. I think about countries that have a highly educated population: Japan, Canada, etc. They are generally more stable, less violent, and more equitable societies. "According to Andreas Schleicher, director for education skills at the OECD, education in the U.S. has become much more expensive, and student debt burdens have reached troubling levels in recent years. Despite these facts, it is still considered a good investment, as U.S. residents with higher degrees earn substantially more than their less educated peers. It is also a worthwhile investment for the government. Schleicher explained that "taxpayers in the U.S. get $200,000 more out of every graduate than what they actually invested, so it's a good business for the government as well."
Free college is a noble cause, but I would personally rather see a revamp of the public education system. Raise standards in highschool, get kids reading and critically thinking in elementary school, bring pack PE and the arts, and give the kids a fucking recess. Get rid of the money drain of private contractors and charter schools, and ridiculous administrative bureaucracy. Remove all standardized testing. Hell, these things are cheap and probably cost less than the current cluster fuck. Make it so a highschool diploma actually means something, like a pathway to a trade school, or a wider range of grants/scholarships. You know, like it was 30 years ago before it all shit the bed. There are a shit ton of factors involved including race, immigration, class, but whatever. I know a lot of educators. The kids they get and consequently send off into the adult world are woefully undereducated, completely unprepared for college to the degree they can't string together a proper sentence let alone a proper paper. In some cases they're reading at a 5th grade level. Sure, a lot of them go to community college to flunk out, but it is a massive drain on resources. Let's start from the ground up. Doing something about college *costs* is an entirely different argument.
Ok, there's a couple of interrelated concepts going on here. Several years ago, I posted on this board how I thought that college was a bad idea in most circumstances - and was summarily lambasted by many board members. I guess genius is usually ahead of its time. Ahem. Ok, the 'I told you so' portion of this post is completed. First and foremost, as I ask with any topic is this question (and it is almost never answered): What does success look like? If success is getting as many people college degrees as possible, than we have been very successful, as shown by this graph. So if that's what success looks like, then we should keep going the way we are, because it is working. If success is measured by employment, then we need to determine if we are succeeding by that measure. It appears that we are not. What we need to do as a society is answer the above question with regards to a college. Are we trying to prepare students for jobs, or are we trying to educate them, or some mixture of both? I am putting cost aside for the moment, I'll get to that later. Let's look at ourselves (in the wider sense). Think about your daily interactions. How many of the people that you interact with on a daily basis do a job that objectively requires more than a high school education? Really think about that. I would posit the vast majority of jobs don't inherently require a college education. However, there is no motivation for employers to NOT hire college grads, because there's no outlay on their part. For most jobs, it is a meaningless bright line rule that does nothing more than require people to 'pay to play.' Since people have to pay for their own college (though certain employers will as a benefit), employers are able to sit back and say 'as between a college grad or high school grad, I'll take the college grad.' There's no sacrifice to them. Further, despite an increase in college educated people, we have seen a stagnation in wages. Now, let's bring money into it. Over the past 30+ years, college costs have dramatically risen, adjusted for inflation. So in sum, we have more degrees, wages have been stagnant (despite the increase in education among the work force) and costs of college degrees have soared. Further, worker productivity has risen dramatically while workers are paid the same or less (in real dollars). I believe the foregoing represents why so many people are angry at 'the system.' They should be - and in fact, I don't think they're angry enough. But I digress. The 'STEM' push is nice, but as pointed out above, eventually those disciplines will be saturated as well. Frankly, looking at responses on this board, I'm stunned at how little people know about our political system. But our education system is about numbers and what can be measured. Critical thinking can't be measured so we do away with it in schools - for instance, my wife (whom has a Pharm D and a JD) last took a civics course in the 80's - and let me be clear, politics is the most important discipline, bar none. Science? Nope, bows to politics. Numbers? Nope, bows to politics. Medicine? Nope, bows to politics. I'm not just saying that because I'm a political scientist. I'm saying it because as a society we have to answer the questions of what kind of society we want, or another way - how and among whom will resources be apportioned? There is no 'fixing' the college system. What needs to be fixed is the 'employment' system. Either we have good paying jobs increasing in this country, or we have what we have today. More and more 'educated' people competing for fewer and fewer well paying jobs. If you fix the employment system, then the education system will follow. Not the other way around.
Instead of making college 'free' I would rather increase subsidies. Then tell colleges if they want them they have to explain tuition costs. Also if they dump way too much into sports instead of education (a major problem right now) then their subsidies get reduced or cut entirely. And about colleges needing a good sports program to recruit students... It's only true if the academics suck. Mnsu has awful sports but people go because it's a better school than most other state schools. There's more to college than watching a basketball game.
This was penned by the student body president of Scripps College: “Regardless of your political party, this intentional violence committed directly to a student of color proves to be another testament that racism continues to be an undeniable problem and alarming threat on our campuses.” What was this intentional act of violence? Someone wrote "Trump 2016" on a whiteboard. These are the college students that want me to pay for their education. I don't think so. http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/03/2...-trump-message-act-violence.html?intcmp=hpbt3
In fairness to the student, she was a Mexican. I imagine that if you were Jew in Germany and someone wrote #Hitler1933 on your door, you might be a bit aggravated.
Exactly when has any candidate in this election endorsed extermination, imprisonment, or deportation of anyone legally in this country?
None. Yet. But my point remains. When a presidential campaign front runner's idea of an immigration policy is putting up a wall, I would imagine that it would make one nervous.
And from the other side: It's funny and frightening how much in common those on the far left and those on the far right seem to have.
I think you can say that education and worker productivity are strongly correlated while wages and productivity are not, largely due to the decline of labor protection/representation. I also think that for $40K/year, you are a customer and the customer is always right. That's why all the SJW nonsense is tolerated and in some cases, encouraged. University administration becomes in effect, customer service. I think the problem with these discussions is the assumption that if college were free, the current model and it's consequences would persist. Would we, as taxpayers, be ok with funding Phoenix University and other diploma mills? I don't think so, and a well-designed law would address that. Subversively, I would explore a specific payroll tax on companies that require higher education and have otherwise skirted the tax system. If you want employees that are a product of that system, pay your entrance fee. However, if you offered dramatically reduced tuition to the state schools, or subsidized the student loan programs (or more likely, a blend of both depending on the state systems), and instituted some outcomes requirements, the effect would be pretty positive. It would entice more kids to avoid the low-cost option, or shoot for some longer-term strategies (like doctors, which we are in short supply of). A couple scenarios from my friends: I'm an engineering student in high school. I'm going to pay $80k to take English 101 and the like for two years (and inevitably ruin my GPA and wreck my scholarships when I fuck up those classes), not graduate and have almost $100K in debt? Nope. High school and done...unemployed off and on for 5 years now. He won design awards in high school and was offered a partial ride, but $2500 on a $25,000 bill isn't really swaying anyone. I'm interested in medicine, but too leery of getting $500k in debt and flaming out or failing the board exams. The stakes are too high and that debt doesn't go away easily, so I skip medical school. Gets a "safe" degree in business, goes into finance and gets laid off in 2008, when everything collapsed. I'm a decent kid, but my parents are fucking done with me at 18. I can't afford college independently, even with the scary, stupidly huge loans. I skip it, and end up sliding from a middle class background into poverty because I couldn't get anywhere financially by 22 and laid off twice for 3 and 8 months respectively have rendered my long-term career prospects shit. Too late to go back to school and too early to have really transferable skills, I am fucked and losing out bad, currently on my 3rd fast food management job. I'm not defending their choices or circumstances, I'm saying that reducing the cost of an education would have likely improved society as a whole. This is anecdotal as fuck, but well...statistics back up the assertion that a better educated population is a net positive for society. I'd love to see a revamping of our education system in general, but the barriers to entry for higher ed are fucking us over in the long term.
I feel that if state universities were to become free, it might make them more competitive to get in. Assuming enrollment rates are the same, with the financial barrier lifted, getting in just got harder. Which isn't a bad thing. And with that being the case, a lot of cultural changes would need to take place or the kids that wouldn't want to go to college in the first place still won't go, even if it's free. Free college doesn't mean automatically getting in.
They can be as nervous as they want. Having a stance against illegal immigration doesn't make someone Adolf Hitler. Fucking Christ.
No, but: Bar all Muslims from entering the nation and Investigate all Muslims with extra scrutiny, make them register, all the other things Trump has suggested is awfully Hitler-ish. Just replace "Muslim" with "Jew" and see how his speeches sound.