Or should I have written “friedo” instead of “Friedo”? I’m never sure whether I should always keep the non-capitalization of other posters’ names.
Fortunately, over the last few years our tertiary education system has become somewhat standardised so that qualifications gained at, for example, a TAFE can be transferred across to a university degree (this can be a much cheaper way of obtaining a degree for many people). These days, 2 year diplomas and associate degrees are very often very similar in content to the first couple of years of a university degree. The major differences are that they are not so expensive to obtain and that the entry path to those courses is not generally based on high school grades.
They thought of that.
And guys, let’s not forget the Advanced Placement (AP) system. At many high schools, both public and private, it is possible to take advanced-level classes in some subjects (English, U.S. or European History, calculus, etc.) which are taught at the university level. At the end of the year, students take a nationally-graded exam, and depending on their grades (they are graded on a scale of 1 to 5), most colleges/universities will grant a semester of college credit for that subject (usually you can get credit for a score of 4 or 5, and sometimes for a 3).
In fact, technically you don’t even have to take an AP class in order to take the exam, although it helps because if you take the class, teachers know what material to cover for the exam. (I did this for English and got a 5, although there was a very hairy moment on the exam in which I realized that they wanted me to write an essay on the use of the lement of time in one of a list of plays, and I was reading through the list and thought for a panicked moment that I hadn’t read ANY of the works on the list. Then I saw one I had read. Whew!)
This is very handy for good students, as it can exempt you from having to take many basic-level college classes, which, even though you have to pay a relatively small fee for the exam, can save a LOT of time and money. I got almost a year of college credit this way, which allowed me to graduate in 3 years instead of 4, which at $10,000 in tuition and $5,000 or so in room and board a year (at the time, at my private university, although that amount is before you factor in my scholarship) is quite a savings.
O.K., let’s talk about accreditation now. The U.S. is split up into five regions, each of which has a college accreditation board. The college accreditation board goes to each of the several hundred colleges in its region (about once every five or ten years, I think) and does a complete check of all the degree programs offered by that college. (They also do this about two years after a new college opens to give them an initial accreditation.) They check that the quality of the courses offered by that college is sufficient to allow them to say that they can offer that degree. The members of the accreditation board are faculty members (or former faculty members) at other universities, so essentially this is all other colleges saying that your college is sufficiently rigorous to satisfy them.
Each of the states also accredits the local schools in their state, but this is more pro forma. Basically, all they do is make sure that the school is offering enough courses, that these courses are using good enough textbooks, that the teachers have college education degrees, etc.
Not entirely true…public institutions are generally partially supported by tax dollars. This is why in-state students pay less tuition than out-of-state tuition. Out-of-state students (and/or their parents) haven’t been paying taxes in the state where the student is attending college, so they pay more in tuition. At the large public instutition where I work, the amount of money the university receives from the state is related to the number of credit hours students take. The tuition the students pay is only part of the cost of their educations. Tax dollars of state residents make up the rest (along with funding from other sources, i.e., grants from the federal government and corporations).
The statement that “college education is not in any way publicly subsidized” is complete, utter hogwash. I can think of at least four different significant subsidies that enter into college education:
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Direct appropriations. This occurs at all three levels of government. Many community colleges are supported by local boards of education - for example, both of my sisters have attended Frederick Community College in Frederick County, Maryland. FCC gets an annual budget directly from the county (and also the state). Public university systems receive enormous subsidies fromt their respective states. For example, in 2001 the University of Maryland received a direct appropriation of about 1/3 of its budget - $333MM out of $960MM total - from the state. The University System as a whole (no link - including about 10 other campuses) received approx. $930MM. The federal government also makes direct appropriations for certain universities, such as the five military academies (West Point, Annapolis, Air Force, Coast Guard, and Merchant Marine) and Gallaudet University for the deaf.
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Research grants. Mostly from the federal government, these mount into the many billions of dollars. Unfortunately I can’t find a single set of statistics - instead, you’d have to hunt through the various departments and agencies, with a paricular emphasis on the departments of Defense, Health and Human Services (esp. the National Institutes of Health), Energy, Education, Commerce (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and Agriculture, and the National Science Foundation.
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Student grants and scholarships. Pell Grants are the broadest category. The dollars are a lot smaller than loans, but in have grown rapidly, amounting to some [$10B in 2002.
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Student loans. Tax- and interest-rate subsidized, wildly complex. A cursory check of [url=“http://www.salliemae.com/news/stats.html”]Sallie Mae](http://www.ed.gov/offices/OUS/Budget03/Summary/App2/osfap1.html) statistics seems to show about $37B issued in 2000-2001 (note that they cite 2000 Pell Grants of $7.9B, compaired to $10B in 2002 - 25% growth in two years for the grant program).
In addition, most of the large state-supported research universities were founded with Federal land grants. For a history, see here: National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges.
tlw writes:
> Who goes to college in the U.S. (since college education is not
> in any way publicly subsidized) is broken down largely along
> race and class lines, and gender lines within the races and
> classes. I don’t have any percentages sitting in front of me, but
> just about every stereotype you could imagine given what I’ve
> just said will actually hold true in the stats.
tlw, this is a very confused paragraph, as a couple other posters have already pointed out. Could you explain what you mean here? Besides the fact that college education is publicly subsidized, I don’t know what you mean by the stuff about stereotypes. Do a larger proportion of whites than blacks go to college. Yes, although not hugely more. Do a larger proportion of students from well-off families go to college than students from poorer families? Yes, although not hugely more. And what about the differences between men and women? It used to be more common for men to go to college than women, and now that’s turned around completely.
Let’s wait for tlw to explain what he or she means before criticizing this post further.
The statement that “college education is not in any way publicly subsidized” is complete, utter hogwash. I can think of at least four different significant subsidies that enter into college education:
-
Direct appropriations. This occurs at all three levels of government. Many community colleges are supported by local boards of education - for example, both of my sisters have attended Frederick Community College in Frederick County, Maryland. FCC gets an annual budget directly from the county (and also the state). Public university systems receive enormous subsidies fromt their respective states. For example, in 2001 the University of Maryland received a direct appropriation of about 1/3 of its budget - $333MM out of $960MM total - from the state. The University System as a whole (no link - including about 10 other campuses) received approx. $930MM. The federal government also makes direct appropriations for certain universities, such as the five military academies (West Point, Annapolis, Air Force, Coast Guard, and Merchant Marine) and Gallaudet University for the deaf.
-
Research grants. Mostly from the federal government, these mount into the many billions of dollars. Unfortunately I can’t find a single set of statistics - instead, you’d have to hunt through the various departments and agencies, with a paricular emphasis on the departments of Defense, Health and Human Services (esp. the National Institutes of Health), Energy, Education, Commerce (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and Agriculture, and the National Science Foundation.
-
Student grants and scholarships. Pell Grants are the broadest category. The dollars are a lot smaller than loans, but in have grown rapidly, amounting to some $10B in 2002.
-
Student loans. Tax- and interest-rate subsidized, wildly complex. A cursory check of Sallie Mae statistics seems to show about $37B issued in 2000-2001 (note that they cite 2000 Pell Grants of $7.9B, compaired to $10B in 2002 - 25% growth in two years for the grant program).
In addition, most of the large state-supported research universities were founded with Federal land grants. For a history, see here: National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges.
If what you mean is that almost no American colleges or universities provide free tuition, even to in-state students, you’re correct. But to look at the enormous outlays above - cumulatively, in the many tens of billions - and fail to see a subsidy is simply ludicrous.
And the thrust of the argument is wrong on at least one basis, too: gender. The great “crisis” in higher education is “where are the men?” There are still a few areas in which men predominate - engineering is one - but they’re fewer and fewer (even engineering is seeing greater numbers of women), and more than outnumbered by majority-women professions. Men still have a numerical advantage in numbers of Ph.D. and professional degrees (J.D., M.D.), but that’s much diminished. Women are attaining more masters degrees than men. Among racial minorities, the imbalance is even more noticeable. For a start, see Education Week, scroll down to the secod article.
I’m not sure that it’s truly a “crisis,” especially compared with the scandalously low enrollments for blacks overall. And it may pause in the current recession, which makes employment a less attractive option to school. But the the trend seems pretty clear: overall, women now outnumber men on campus and there’s not much reason to think they won’t continue to do so.
Actually, you’re only required to attend kindergarten if there is public kindergarten offered in your state. Not all states choose to fund public kindergarten, and my state is one of them. There are some towns with it(I’m unsure if the students in these towns are legally required to attend, but I could look into it if anyone really wants to know), but not the majority though there are efforts to change that. However, many children from towns without them do attend private ones at their parents’ expense.
Nor are you legally required to go to school through 12th grade, because you could choose to drop out at age 16, no matter what grade you’re in then. People are strongly advised not to do this, but some do anyway.
elfkin477 writes:
> Nor are you legally required to go to school through 12th
> grade, because you could choose to drop out at age 16, no
> matter what grade you’re in then.
You’re right, which is why I wrote later in that post:
> There are state by state differences about what age one is
> allowed to quit going to school.
I think it’s not true that in all states that the age at which one is allowed to drop out is 16. I believe there’s some differences from one state to another in the age at which dropping out is allowed. In any case, I didn’t explain this very well in my first post. I was trying to say that there’s a free kindergarten to twelfth grade education system in the U.S. Everyone is expected to go through this system (or to a private school equivalent) in order to get a high school diploma.
I wasn’t aware that there were any places left in the U.S. where kindergarten wasn’t even offered. Could anyone tell me how common that is? Please cite something like a webpage with statistics.
Well, the people that post on message boards tend to be technologically savvy, which correlates loosely with educational attainment. If you want the straight dope on what percentage of the US population has a college degree, go to the US Census Bureau’s Education Attainment info, whose web site has statistics up the wazoo (more historical info, etc, can be found here). The bottom line is that 21.9% of the US population has a Bachelor’s degree or higher, although this number is skewed by the inclusion of people in the 15-21 year-old category, and by people above 60 years old, who came of age when post-secondary education was less common. Among people 25-54, the percentage having a Bachelor’s degree or higher is reasonably steady at 30% or so.
Among the total population, (from this table), a little under 5% have Master’s degrees, and an additional 2% have Doctorate or professional degrees. The same table shows percentages of the population who have some college, but either don’t get Bachelor’s degree or opt instead for an Associate’s degree (which is typically a 2-year degree as compared to the 4-year Bachelor’s).
This was harder to track down than I thought it would be…maybe I ought to have used a thesarus while looking :rolleyes:
http://www.aft.org/press/2001/071201.html
According to the goals of the American federation of teachers there aren’t many states that actually do offer universal state funded K programs, and not all that do even require attenance since they want to put both in place:
I may be misinterpreting the statitics but it looks like only 15 states require kindergarten attendance, and nine don’t offer it at all?
BTW, when I mentioned dropping out at 16, I was talking about my state’s laws still, not US law. According to this site there is a growing trend to try to raise the attandence requirement to 17 or 18 (it mentioned 8 states making the attempt to pass the law in 2001) but it doesn’t say how many states actually have the laws in place already. http://www.hslda.org/docs/nche/000010/200205130.asp
…and used a spell checker.