Hoene said the high poverty rate in the supplemental report is driven by California’s stratospheric housing costs.
The economy is fine. The housing prices are incredible.
I am noticing a bit of a mental leap here:
Free college = college for everyone. Or at least, more people going to college.
Since the OP asked how this works elsewhere, I think it is worth stressing that in nations where college is free this still does not result in everyone going to college. In fact, it is often a lower percentage than in the US. Of course in the US a degree is much more necessary, so its likely that there would be far more pressure than elsewhere. You’d need to limit it somehow. Limiting it by ability seems to work in most nations.
Right. Even here in the US, a science PhD is already free for most people who get one. The school will even pay you a stipend. But not everyone can enroll.
I like how the person above from Norway pointed out that because of Norways vast social system, one does not need a high paying job to have a good life. He said someone could be a cashier for life and do alright. I think it is the same in Denmark.
So if in the US we had a system where someone could be guaranteed a roof over their head, food, health insurance, and retirement their would be less need of college.
Excuse me: do I need to move to Canada to vote for you? I’m not sure I’d be eligible, getting on in years.
That would be the poster you just quoted 
Re: Norway costs, I did find this article: http://sciencenordic.com/norwegian-higher-education-costs-vary-wildly-across-disciplines-and-institutions
“The average Norwegian university student costs 20,350 Euro a year”, but that varies between €7700 (business admin) and €82,000 (medicine).
I didn’t see a link to the actual report in the article.
And, “The study did not include the costs related to the buildings used by students and staff. Analysts said including these expenses would have made the calculations too complicated.” It’s customary the apply a general overhead rate here to account for buildings and grounds. Is it completely accurate? Probably not. But more so than zero. Blame Deloitte.
Yup. Universal Basic Income, essentially.
Is there actually a degree in 14th Century French Literature, or is that hyperbolism? I ask because I am not sure.
Something that specific seems useless, sure, but as to the greater idea of studying literature and culture from certain eras is not without value. If nothing else, people with degrees like that can help to design sets and settings for shows like Game of Thrones and such.
STEM is important, but it is not for everyone, and just because STEM isn’t for you doesn’t mean that you can’t contribute anything.
Degrees which actually say that in the diploma, probably not. People that specialized, yes, and they’ve existed for quite a while.
Nope. There are degrees in French, and a few schools that offer degrees in medieval studies. No undergraduate institution in the US offers any degree remotely as specialized as “14th-century French literature.” It’s possible to specialize in 14th-century French literature as a grad student, by writing your dissertation about it, but even there, the actual degree you’d be getting would be in French or medieval studies, and the job you’d be hoping to get would involve teaching a broad range of courses in these areas.
So, someone with that sort of degree would not be a useless lump working at starbucks, but would have a marketable skill?
With as much automation and computerization going on, I am actually afraid that even STEM degrees won’t protect their holders forever, in fact, it is creativity alone that may be the last holdout against the robot takeover. I can see someone with a degree and specialization of that sort adding more to the content of our culture than another STEM major who only took that field because it was the only one that society deemed worthwhile.
There are lots more questions with “free college” than there are answers in the political discourse in the U.S.
Do you mean four years of free college, or two years - free community college is a different deal than four year schools.
Does it include technical schools?
Does it include all majors? Do I get to major in 14th Century French Literature? Or only English Literature if I get an education degree? Will you suddenly have a glut of people qualified to teach art and band and theatre? Or do I only get to major in a STEM field? What about Human Resources? Is that OK or if I want a business degree, it has to be Accounting?
Does it include private school tuition, or just public colleges and universities. If it is just public colleges, are students who choose a private school entitled to any federal or state money at all?
Is it gated? How? Test scores? GPA? Something blended? If we use GPA there would be pressure to artificially inflate GPA, but tests are reputedly notoriously biased against black kids. Do we try and adjust for that? Do we do any socioeconomic adjustments? Or regional adjustments? They spend twice as much to educate a student through High School in Connecticut than they do in Mississippi.
And speaking of state differences, do you get to go to school in any state, or is their a state residency requirement? If there is a state residency requirement, there is likely to be a state funding component - and a state funding component could create dramatic quality differences between states.
Is it financially gated? Do my kids (we have a mid six figure income) get free college? Do Bill Gates’ kids? How about someone who makes $80k a year?
If its gated by performance, region or wealth - and limited to public systems, what impact will that have on the public systems. Will brighter students and richer students move to private schools? Will that in turn mean that graduates of private schools get more opportunity? Will that be OK? Or perhaps public colleges will become very competitive (they already are in a lot of states for the flagship schools), and you’ll end up with a lot of fairly open enrollment private colleges for people who didn’t manage to clear the performance gates.
We’ve managed to answer these questions to at least some level of satisfaction for 13 years of a student’s life, why are the last 4 so much harder?
But a lot of schools allow you to individually design a major. If you can put together enough coursework for “14th Century French Literature” at one of those schools (my Film Studies BA was such a degree), you can major in it.
And you probably can pull together enough coursework for at least a “Pre-Modern French Lit” major. French language and culture. History. And of course a bunch of literature courses. Plus some independent study work with a willing professor. Especially if the school has a tenured professor who has been doing their work in Medieval French Literature.
There are four schools in the U.S. that allow you to get an undergraduate degree in Holocaust Studies. That is probably not a terribly employable field - but its no doubt worth studying.
Just out of curiosity, did you find gainful employment that you feel contributes to society as much as if you had been required to take a STEM field degree?
Well, yes and no – getting a PhD in the humanities is generally considered a risky endeavor, since you’ve only got a 25-to-50% chance of securing a tenure-track job, depending on your particular subfield. That said, the actual employment rate for PhDs is 98%, so someone with that degree would almost certainly end up doing something, even if it’s not precisely what they set out to do, and such a person is more likely to end up, say, teaching French at a private secondary school or working as a study-abroad director at a university than working at Starbucks.
And in response to Dangerosa’s point, yes, it’s possible that a student could do a design-your-own-major program that focuses on something super-esoteric at the undergraduate level, but the students who have the initiative to do that sort of thing and the organizational skills to pull it off usually aren’t the ones who end up unemployed.
Have we? I’d disagree that we’ve answered the questions adequately for the first 13 years. And we are still arguing about most of them. My high school is dropping vo-tech training in favor of college prep coursework. Providing vouchers for private schools is a hot topic. How many resources should we put towards students who need IEPs? Why is there a huge disparity between the education you get in Edina Minnesota and the one you get across the border in the Minneapolis School district? Much less the disparity you get between Minnesota and Mississippi? Should we keep funding band and choir and art?
I retired with ample savings and the ability to send two kids to 4 year private colleges fully funded before I was 50 after a career in IT. Most people should hope to do as well as myself and my Sociology/Anthropology majoring husband (he still works).
So, I guess this brings back to the original question, where a poster rather dismissed anyone with a degree in “14th Century French Literature” as wanting to go to college but not knowing what they want to be when they grow up, is that really a thing?
It sounds like from what you have said, that anyone who would go to the lengths of building, studying, and graduating from that program would be a contributor to our society.
I don’t think that we can force people into the fields that we want them to go into. We can encourage them. We can tell them that people in this field have these job prospects with this type of compensation, and other people with different academic paths end up with different careers with their own set of compensations.
But to tell people that they may only go to college for free if they take one of the “accepted” courses is going to leave our population n a bit less well rounded.
To whom? Part of the deal with capitalism…though it gets violated in a number of large ways…is that while you’re enjoying your swanky dorm and lattes, other people are working. Those people are producing all the equipment to make all the stuff you enjoy, they are protecting you so that the campus is a safe space (for the most part), you’re no doubt receiving tons of services which involve collective bits of time from thousands of people.
So it makes a kind of sense that you should finish that degree, ideally on time, and be able to work your tail off creating new accomplishments of your own. Whether it be working as part of a large team to make the robots that will change everything, or just planning the wiring runs for factories, you’re doing something useful to the other people who created the resources needed for you to have a nice time in college. And if it’s a good college, the knowledge you learned adds genuine value. You’re doing a better job than someone who just picked it up ‘on the job’. Your robots actually work because you know the math, your factories don’t burn down because you properly designed the wiring runs.
What value does a medieval scholar or Holocaust studies major or sociology major add? Yeah, sure, they may be able to get a job, working in HR or advertising or something - but how does anything they were taught help in any way?