My reason for posting was that SamuelA had declared Beckdawrek full of shit. Since he edited to remove that insult before I posted, I removed it from my reply as well. But, “full of shit” is different than not being a complete picture or quibbles about broader meanings.
There are options for higher education that are available to those with less means. This is entirely true. You do need to get good grades and work hard for them though.
Aside from that disagreement, I do think that there should be secondary education offered for free, including books, even travel expenses, maybe even a living subsidy so that students don’t need to hold down full time jobs while studying. Maybe just starting with 2 year, but a 4 years degree should be affordable as well.
Most 2 year colleges have programs that transfer to the universities to complete your 4 year. In the meantime, you have an associates degree, which is not meaningless. I wanted one because it would have opened a number of doors for me in jobs that required a college degree.
My parents had no problem providing the info that they had the money to pay for my college, the just had an issue with paying for my college because I was a liberal atheist in a conservative christian household.
I do agree that there is too much emphasis put on generational wealth transfers, and that ending both systemic poverty and effective aristocracy should be a goal of social efforts. Free college would be a good first step.
And then there is that. If one is willing to join the military, then you can get a free education from them too. I was never a big fan of authority figures though, I didn’t think I could make it through bootcamp without assaulting a superior.
Lucky her. She is the exception, not the rule. My daughter is far beyond the upper third in her high school class (top 10%) with a 34 ACT (and a 1400+ on the SAT the only time she took it when she forgot her calculator and her ADHD medication and got lost on the way to the test - it wasn’t a good day) and a 3.7 unweighted GPA - which weighted is significantly higher and included AP coursework in English, Math and Social Studies and college credit coursework in English, Math, Theatre, Economics, Political Science and two foreign languages (ASL and Spanish). She worked with homeless kids tutoring them. She was a Superior voice soloist in state competition and has acted on the Guthrie stage - one of the best regional theatres in the country. She raised over $10k for Relay for Life during high school. She was a youth delegate the the National UUA convention and gave talks on youth resilience. She got no full rides. (She did get partial scholarships from every school she applied to, and hasn’t been turned down by a school yet (and since she was ED at her first choice, she’s made her decision) - granted, we didn’t even bother with Harvard - she isn’t an Ivy kind of kid. And since we have a 529 that will fully fund her college, it isn’t a big deal).
Where I see highschool students fall short is not taking their ACTs early and often. And not doing the leg work to apply for scholarships and grants. We got a book grant from the volunteer Fire Dept. Her dad is affiliated with. A small gift scholarship from his former employer. And a small scholarship from Woodman of the World. These were above her full ride at her University. I am telling you there is money out there, you have to apply, apply, apply. We are not eligible for Pell grants so we drove her highschool counselors crazy looking for grants and scholarships.
And are those marks and scores sufficient to make Harvard free or cheap? No, they are not. Which you would know if you had read and understood your link. Got any more sage wisdom for those of us who actually attended schools that required good marks and high scores?
Free college is actually one of the more doable social programs there is. The main issue is simply cost, and are American taxpayers willing to pay the cost. And, in a world of limited resources and very low taxpayer tolerance in the US, are those who support big government willing to prioritize it over other things? Because when liberals talk about the social programs they want to see, they don’t tend to take into account the reality of limited revenues. The ambitions of some American liberals like Bernie Sanders go beyond what any European country’s taxpayers would be willing to pay for. There is no such thing as a health care system that covers vision and dental and with no co-pays, AND covers illegal immigrants.
Back to free college, the way I see it, we can just have public colleges the way we have public high schools. Instead of people graduating high school and having to worry about getting into college, they’d just advance to college automatically the same way they go from middle to high school. They can choose to drop out, but it would be a social norm that you just continue to go to school unless you have a reason why you can’t, such as living on your own and having to work two jobs or something. Such colleges should be no more expensive to run than high schools. And anyone can attend whenever they want. There would be some nominal fees, just to make sure people who attended were serious, but nothing even poorer families couldn’t afford if they were committed to education. Things like lab fees and cheap textbooks.
I think it differs depending on the European country, but here’s what I’ve heard :
a. Bachelor’s degrees are a standard of 3 years, not four. This obviously makes it cheaper on the government and there’s probably a tradeoff between cost and quality.
b. I don’t think they are nearly as deluxe or luxurious as modern American institutions. More the no-frills ones that our parents had to go to in the 1970s and earlier.
c. There’s a fairly deterministic set of standardized exams that determine if you’re even eligible for college at all. It doesn’t make sense for the State to pay for students to go who have a low chance of succeeding. I’ve heard these so called “A levels” are much more comprehensive than SAT/ACT but I don’t know much about them.
This is what I was thinking when I mentioned that college probably could be cheaper. I just don’t have good numbers. A while back I tried to deconvolute UVA’s budget but between undergrad, graduate, and professional schools – never mind that the hospital and med school (and associated academic departments) get administered separately, it’s a mess. How much does it actually cost per student for an undergraduate education? I don’t know. But yes there are an awful lot of frills to be had. And when many students or their families aren’t directly and immediately paying for those frills, why not?
Minnesota has recently (thanks to Governor Mark Dayton) put a chunk more money into education. But not in college, or even high school – we have put into pre-school for young children.
Because statistics showed that was the area where we got the ‘biggest bang for the buck’ in funding. (It also has advantages in serving as child care for working parents.) Now we have to fight to keep that funding, from those who want to cut back again.
This would be key to making such a system work. Some people are simply not going to benefit from additional academia. Free for everyone is probably not ideal, but a free ride for anyone that can benefit from it and can maintain decent marks makes sense. Perhaps there should be some kind of incentive program for pursuing areas of learning that appear to be where society’s needs are deepest?
However, I get the feeling that there is a faction in this country that is opposed to more edumacation. Though they might be in the minority, they seem to have a pretty strong voice and the status quo on their side. And, of course, once the govermint gets involved in education, they will start indoctrinating our kids in ways we do not like.
I have so much to say on the issue of college funding that I don’t know where to start.
If I have time, I’ll make a long post later. But let me start with this.
The issue is that different kids pay different amounts and they are looking for different things. Most universities are not “need blind”–they take a certain % of kids that they know will pay the full shot without complaint. They have to take those kids because they provide the revenue. There are a bunch of kids in this group that meet the minimum standards of an institution, but aren’t primarily motivated by the academics,; as long as they go to a “good” school, they aren’t too worried about the details. These are the the kids that want juice bars and study abroad programs and lazy rivers and fancy gyms and high-tech dorms. That’s literally what they are picking a school based on, and schools are competing for those full-pay kids every bit as much as they are competing for the high-performing Pell-grant eligible kid.
In terms of scholarships and affordable college: there is a lot of middle ground between $80K in debt and a full ride. Full rides–even just tuition–are pretty rare if you aren’t 1) very poor and/or top 10% in something.
What really, really frustrates me is that the affordable options are so fucking hard to find because the system is a kluge of kluges. It takes an incredible body of specialist knowledge to apply to college these days: even middle-class parents are hiring professional college advisers at lawyer rates, because a lay person can no more negotiate the process than they can defend themselves in court. In my high school, I’d estimate that it takes at least 20 adult man-hours per each individual senior to make sure they each end up with an affordable 4-year option (which I define as they don’t have to pay more than their EFC + Fed subsidized loans, and that either covers living on campus, or they are going somewhere they can reasonably expect to live at home). And it obviously takes more than 20 hours of time from the kids themselves–way more if you count the intensive SAT prep that’s an essential aspect of the process.
The whole thing is so fucked up. I can’t stand it. It’s like dealing with healthcare/health insurance. It just shouldn’t be this hard.
We are seriously lacking on trade workers. My concern is that herding everyone into free universities will continue to make the trades weak. I read that jobs running large equipment pays over $100K after about 5 years and yet many jobs go either unfilled or foreigners are brought in to do the work.
Yes, this. Another hugely important thing to do is limit this funding to degrees that have a positive ROI! We don’t need more citizens who are medieval scholars or study sociology and who work at Starbucks! The government should pay for people to get degrees where most graduates are employed, *using *that *specific *degree.
Why pay for someone to study a topic they aren’t gonna use*?! Pay for grad schools that take people in their junior year. Med/law/business schools that take people in their junior year should be the ones that get priority funding. By junior year, I mean after a student has taken 2 years of the basics in college.
I have read that China is doing exactly this. They are graduatingliterally millions of engineers annually. Even if those engineers aren’t quite as good as Americans who got the premium training, quantity has a quality all of it’s own. Gee I wonder how advanced technologically China is going to be in 20 years if they are creating millions of people with the skills to create more advanced technology.
Our policy of limiting education will in no way limit America’s future growth. /sarcasm.
*statistically speaking. It is meaningless if a specific student fails to use their degree.
Really? Look what a burden that has been to California’s taxpayers, and a drag on their economy.
Oh, wait – California’s economy is going great – 10th largest in the world. Lots of companies run by graduates (Google, Boeing, Dollar General) contribute a lot to the economy. And the state is actually running short of college graduates to hire.
California also has the nation’s highest poverty rate:
What’s funny about California is that in many ways it represents the GOP ideal. It’s as pure a meritocracy as exists in the world. A young fella with an idea can become a billionaire, and a young fool with no work ethic can roam the streets of LA.
It has been done by various institutions in the past, and rather recently. And even universities that aren’t all tuition-free often offer full scholarships to some students.
It’s doable, not unworkable; but it’s opposed politically by certain political factions.
It’s opposed politically by the public in general if you have to raise our taxes to pay for it. Most of the money can and should come from existing education funding. There’s a lot of education funding that gets no results. Redirect it to free college.