Not intending to speak for Dangerosa. I believe she said earlier that the difference was not necessarily in policy (I think she referred to Sanders as “fine” with regard to reproductive issues), but in focus and priorities: that Clinton had been in the trenches every step of the way. It makes perfect sense to me to say “Hey, I like Candidate A on these issues, but Candidate B has devoted a great deal more time and energy to them–Candidate B is the one I trust to fight for what I want.”
I’ll give you my take on the high school/college issue. My daughter, as I probably mentioned on these boards at least once, attended our local public high school, in a district with a very high percentage of minority students and students from impoverished backgrounds. There were 320 freshmen. There were 150 graduating seniors. No stats, but my impression is that most of the dropouts do not go on to get GEDs, at least not anytime soon.
The difference in earning power between grads and dropouts is pretty big: “The average dropout can expect to earn an annual income of $20,241, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s a full $10,386 less than the typical high school graduate.” –By the Numbers: Dropping Out of High School | FRONTLINE. Finishing high school gives you half again as much income each year, all else being equal.
Making college tuition-free is of course helpful to students who have graduated from high school (though I’ll admit I have a few other issues with the suggestion). It does nothing for the one-half of students in my district, nearly all of them poor and minority, that drop out each year. Speaking again for myself…I’m much more concerned with fixing the dropout problem than with eliminating tuition at public colleges. Economically and educationally speaking, finishing college seems like a really good idea. Economically and educationally speaking, finishing high school seems like a necessity.
Well, I can definitely say I’m learning from this thread. We all have our own perspectives on life. I’m a white, millennial, high school grad from the Left Coast (near Portland, Oregon). I just happen to have a circle of friends from a middle class to upper middle class background, who all had trust funds that helped them get through college whereas I did not. I have more than a little resentment over this. That enormously impacts my worldview.
What is Hillary proposing that will increase the High School graduation rate?
Perfectly reasonable to have resentment over that! I would too. And it makes sense, then, that providing an easier path to and through college would speak to you in particular.
From my perspective as someone who has spent his entire career working in education in one form or another (I like to say I have “taught at levels ranging from kindergarten to college”), the question of how to get students through high school is really important and really complicated. Schools need to do a better job. Families need to do a better job. Communities and community institutions need to do a better job. Government needs to do a better job. Students themselves, often enough, need to do a better job. We need higher expectations, we need…well, we need lots of things, and they’re all interrelated. Improving just one or two of these things may help, but isn’t enough.
I think that Barack Obama has been in many ways a wonderful president, but one area in which he has really dropped the ball is education. He and Secretary Duncan have talked a decent game in some ways, but the results have not been pretty.
Well, I could go on about this at great length, it being my field and all, but I won’t. I’ll just say again that the issues regarding high school dropouts are really complex. Certainly there’s no magic bullet.
Anyway, I don’t think either Democratic candidate is talking nearly enough about what we need to be doing to get more kids through high school. I prefer Clinton to Sanders on this issue because 1) I think she is more able than he is to recognize complexity in general, and 2) I think she will have many more allies who will help her move any proposals along. But I don’t kid myself: neither of them is making this issue as much of a priority as I would like, and any edge Clinton may have is about circumstance more than about policy.
Yup, we all have our own perspectives, and ideally try to have some understanding of each others.
Can you share why in your particular circumstance Sanders’ college proposal (tax payer funded college tuition for all at all public colleges) appeals to you so much more than Clinton’s does?
Frankly it is people like me, upper income parents who have paid, are paying, and will pay, full retail tuition room and board for a total of four children into adulthood, who should love Sanders plan! But I don’t quite get why my kids (read “me” as it is the savings I’ve been working on for decades in 529s and otherwise) deserve it to be free. More affordable yes.
The Clinton proposal, if it could pass, would make it so that “no student has to borrow to pay for tuition, books, or fees to attend a four-year public college in their state” but would not give my kids so much while it would give people like you who need it more, all the help you need to get through college without debt. That seems both more doable and more fair to me.
As is usually the case, both plans are sound until you get to financing, which is always overly optimistic. The CBO will kill either plan dead or severely limit its ambitions. Campaigns and revenue estimates from their plans are universally totally bullshit.
Universal college is estimated to be somewhere in the ballpark of 70 billion dollars a year. That sounds like a lot of money! And it is. But keep in mind that our government already spends 3.68 TRILLION per year, and it doesn’t seem so infeasible. That’s about a 2% increase in federal spending.
I’ve noticed that conservatives scream “WHERE’S THE MONEY GOING TO COME FROM?!” with regard to social programs, but they never ever ask the same question about our military spending. If we can find money to kill people, we can find money to help people. It’s that simple. It’s simply a matter of priorities.
Why do you americans focus on the university so much versus the technical training? I can imagine that for the black americans or the other non white minority or immmigrants this bias among the sanders and the understanding focused on the pure economics is not attractive at all…
Military spending doesn’t grow and grow and grow. Social spending does. With military spending, you only need to figure out where the money is coming from in the year you spend it. With social spending, you need a long term funding mechanism.
What you cited is a decent talking point that I’ve heard from some pretty good writers, like Matt Yglesias, and it’s true to some extent, that being that we find a way to pay for the military so we’ll find a way to pay for anything else. But when proposing a brand new spending program, or a major increase in an old one, a candidate needs a funding mechanism, and if the funding mechanism is invalid, the program will never actually happen.
Absolutely. I think this is directed mainly at voters though, who tend to be more likely to go to college or want to go to college. Putting more people through tech school would be better for society, but probably wouldn’t do much for politicians’ careers.
when I read here the sanders people, I hear the voices of the same kinds who are the ultra left radicals who push anti-reform in the France in the student syndicates, who are primarily interested in preserving their priviledged routes using the rhetoric of the equality. They are never interested in the actual actions -like the change in the elite oriented university focus to the more democratic technical and apprenticing programs- to help the classes who suffer from the deep discrimination (ethnic/race) in the employment markets. Of course I can read this wrong, but the rhetoric and the focus - a picture of sanders marching and arrested is convincing? - echoes strongly for me as from this kind of narrow vision that does not understand it is narrow and self deceiving.
and having gone through the systems with “universal access” to the university (but that have ignored the technical training and the apprenticing), I see this as a very bad non solution for the problem of the social mobility and the problem of the ethnic minority in the face of economic challenges - and a bad economic solution by itself.
but I do not speak to your system, it is just an observation.
It’s a good observation, although there’s no malice on the part of Sanders supporters. Most politically involved young people don’t think of paths that don’t involve college, or failing that, just joining the workforce. we really should put more emphasis on tech school.
I can clarify I do not see the French student syndicates as being driven by a malice. It is a blindness and a self-regard, a kind of narrow vision that does not understand it is narrow and self deceiving as I said, but is in love with the grand rhetoric… (and blind to the fact that they claim to represent all the students but they are typically elected on a narrow basis from a small and activist set that is motivated and like them, not the broad participation).
So it is there was large manifestations against the labor law reform that is badly needed to help the youth, especially those who are not on the privileged paths.
My son just gave his speech in communications (high school Junior) in support of free college. My son isn’t going to go to college - he’s going to trade school. (Although honestly I think that the plans make public trade school affordable or free as well - sometimes we call them colleges).
He didn’t know about dropout rates (glad they are getting better, they are still miserable in Minneapolis for black kids). He wasn’t thinking through the barriers beyond tuition - you have to be college ready, you have to be able to take the time to go to college - which if your family needs you to step into a job, you can’t take. You need to be willing to stick with another four years of school at a time when a lot of kids feel “so done.” One of my girlfriends teaches remedial English at a community college - a lot of kids are just not set up for success.
Like DSeid, I also don’t need free college. We make enough money that it was possible to save for it. And with my son going to trade school, we have too much saved for college for my daughter - an unusual problem to have. I’m a good liberal - why is someone volunteering to pay for my kids to go to school when - provided you don’t tax me into oblivion or I choose to spend it on his and hers BMWs - I can afford to do it for them.
Black Americans have traditionally been shunted into vocational institutions in order to keep them out of mainstream education. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth to encourage those who have the most aptitude for higher education and the professional world to settle for vocational or occupational training.
Vocational, occupational or skills training is not a substitute for a liberal college education. College is meant to prepare you for complex thinking and creativity, not for a particular job.
It’s ultimately not cost-effective for society to pay to train individual workers for specific jobs. First, it’s difficult to know exactly what jobs are going to be needed at what time anyway. Employers should bear the burden for training people they employ.
Jobs are going away permanently. What society needs for the future is not people trained to do specific jobs, which are mostly going to be done by robots anyway, but people with developed minds who can solve problems on a broad scale.
Well this begins to go well into hijack territory but the universal free college promotion is often packaged with pointing to Germany as an example of where it is done … with no appreciation of the fact that relatively few young adults attend university in Germany (and those that do usually are living at home with most German universities being more like American community colleges than American residential colleges). The German system instead fairly early on (at High School placement) places many onto various vocational and technical training paths, much of that directly funded by Germany industries.
I am not sure how that early tracking would play in America and I am less sure of how many Millennials are wanting free college to mean that all get either a community college experience living at home or, for more than half, being placed on a technical career educational path from High School entry on with their free college being training by Big Business on how to be good workers for them. But the reality is that American industry does not need workers with a standard High School education and as much of fan as I am of a broad liberal arts education (and I am) the job opportunities are more for those with technical skills (and the specific knowledge to learn new technical skills) than a broad knowledge base.
True that neither Sanders’ nor Clinton’s plan addresses those issues. And I am not sure what an American plan to address those issues should look like. See Acsenray’s post for why the German approach is not one that fits so well with the values and mindsets of this country.
That’s a pretty obnoxious way to put it, but in any case, thats not going to change my mind about wither the purpose of college or government funding of vocational training.
I do not care to change american minds about their mythologies, as this is without any purpose, but of course I do note that I said not “vocational training”, the confusion between the tehcnical and the vocational…
You’re not going to change our minds about education policy if you don’t change our minds about education. And persisting in using the term “mythology” wont further your understanding either.