this sounds like the plot of Orange County. the moral is, unless you’re stuck with a bad family situation or are madly in love with some broad, head to State U or Ivy.
I think if your kid is interested in basket weaving or philosphy then they’re better off starting with a 2-year college where they can get the fundamental courses out of the way. The tuition cost of a prestigious state college doesn’t justify their fairly bleek career choices.
IMO. any type of schooling that is in demand by the workplace, and causes people to be more productive should be free. we’ll get it back in world GDP growth. but if ur going to school for something that doesnt make money then ur a losing bet and taxpayers shouldnt have to subsidize your interests. got a friend who is a phd in bio eng in northwestern. he goes to school for free plus they pay him to go to school. thing is they need to maintain a 3.5 gpa or the gravy train stops.
cost benefit analysis on this.
CC’s are already so close to being free though, especially for low incomes.
I did one year in CC. When I remembered to apply for aid, I think I paid around 300$ per quarter (15 credits). When I forgot, it was about $1000 total.
When I transferred to a 4-year later, total bill was about $10k, of which I paid around $5k out of pocket, per quarter.
If you can afford full tuition, then by all means choose whatever school you’d like to go to, but if you have to take out 30,000$ in loans I don’t understand why you wouldn’t choose CCs for first two years.
I mean if we’re talking about training and career prep, the quality of the education in first two years is irrelevant. What matters is the school you graduate from, and your GPA (if at all). If you can’t get a 3.75 or above in CC you probably don’t belong in university anyway.
I almost hired a guy who did two years of CC and then transferred to an Ivy. Well, it’s Cornell, which is technically Ivy but we all know it sucks. Anyway I thought it was fine as he went to the CC because he was an accomplished athlete in an unusual sport not offered at Cornell and took CC courses over high school for that reason. And ultimately he was good enough for the second worst Ivy school. You could replace Cornell with any decent state school as far as I am concerned (apply cold water to the burn) and it would have been the same from my viewpoint. It seemed fair that he disclosed the two different GPAs (both good) on his resume.
There are lots of reasons someone might go to CC and then transfer. I know a few people who did this actually and they’re all smart people. Probably there are some retards too but that happens everywhere.
I’m not for free schooling in any context because:
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Bebe’s kids is your problem, not mine
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It’s unclear that the majority of people not already getting an education would really benefit all that much from CC. If we’re talking about free training for something that benefits society and has an ROI, then maybe we have a discussion. Someone studying sub-university level courses at CC probably is not really going to get an ROI for society in most cases.
I disagree with it because we already have universal, free high school that many people already don’t take advantage of and get good grades. If we have more “free school” largesse it just shifts the burden to taxpayers who don’t get the benefit of the cost. We already have enough cost aids for poor kids to go to 4 year schools (pell grants, need based aid, and merit based aid if they did well in high school).
I personally think we should have a user fee for public schools. Something nominal, like $250-500/per kid/yr would be enough for me. Something to make people like they have some skin in the game, particularly since school serves as daycare for people.
What America (and Canada, and Europe) needs is jobs, not higher educated baristas. The left has this idea that educating more people will create better jobs. If everyone gets an engineering degree, they’ll all be engineers! This might be marginally true, but only because you lower the value of skilled labour and therefore wages. In the end it doesn’t really work. 50 years ago you didn’t need a degree to do many jobs that require a graduate degree now. There is a huge bubble in education, and much of it is worthless. Making it free will only make it worse. Eventually people need to realise that a large segment of the population needs to be on substance wages in shit jobs, and these folks need to stop wasting their time in school. Someone needs to flip burgers and clean toilets, regardless if everyone had a PhD. This idea that everyone can have a big house, two cars and go to Mexico 3 times a year needs to end.
Sadly, this is true. Replacing the for profit education space (almost all of which is worthless) with free community college will do nothing except hose society for the benefit of the few. A pretty significant portion of the population is not meant for higher education. I do think we should have a pure meritocratic system to determine who is, but you meet some people and they’re clearly just not college material no way around it.
^ Exactly. The lack of opportunity in America is not due to a shortage of general studies community college grads. Rather, its a surplus of these folks that drives feelings of unfairness.
I agree with the last several posts but I think it’s also worth pointing out that Public K-12 education is absolute shit now. I felt like my first two years of College were spent studying topics I should have been taught in 11/12th grade.
Strip out the Politics and the Presdient’s idea is actually very smart but needs tweaking. Essentially, you have two tracks in middle school; you can either do one of these:
A. Regular track; involves finishing middle school, going on to high school and then off to college or whatever you choose.
B. Community College Track: involves finishing middle school, going directly from middle school to community college program. Program will involve first two years of high school (9th and 10th) grade. And next two years at community college earning you Associates in pre-approved fields where jobs are in high demand or where there is a hiring arrangement (like IT, Medical services, Nursing, Trade or etc). You school district would pay the community college for the two years you would have spent in 11th and 12th grade.
Re-working the President’s proposal like this would make the program pay for itself. I think this is a policy proposal from thr President that would need to be re-worked to address issues of affordability.
another giant Obama Fail. Isn’t the official statistic something like 40% of college grads TODAY already end up taking jobs that don’t require a college degree at all? I fail to see how throwing even more people into the pot of college graduates from crap schools will improve anything
Now what will work is perhaps free tuition for trade schools. people need to stop thinking college=success. and realize there are a ton of trades that pay very well and don’t require that much time -> plumbing, electrician, masonary, the jobs can’t be outsourced, and if you are good, you can easily startup your own business, be your own boss
You could go on forever about how messed up education is. People invest thousands and thousands of dollars for college. Very often its for mediocre instruction from a well-paid professor that earned its position b/c he/she has been published many times in academic journals, not necessarily b/c they can actually teach students a skill. Some of the most distinguished professors at universities are often terrible teachers that view teaching a class as a nuisance that distracts them from a research article they are working on.
The thought of free community college? It’s basically already available for free on Khan Academy and other sites, and it’s actually taught by a guy that is a great teacher. I went back to grad school a few years ago for economics and needed to brush up on calculus and used the site for free and while it doesn’t go deep into stuff, the instruction was considerably better than anything I remember from my prior “teachers” that cost pretty good money.
It may seem like a better utilization of resources if we used our best teachers, scaled the hell out of them by making their instruction available on the internet and took tests (just like CFA) to earn degrees. It’s probably not that simple to implement and I’d never expect it to happen but bottom line is college education should cost a small fraction of what it actually does. Much of the real content is out there for free.
So the poor WalMart worker should pay the way for Dr. Bio Eng to have a huge salary later? Education need not be free. Good jobs have good salaries that are the reward for choosing wisely. Having a cost to school forces rational people to decide whether the cost will be recovered later in life. Making college free distorts that analysis. Even in engineering or other high demand fields. And asking for the poor and middle class to pay for our school so we can outearn them by a multiple or two or ten later is morally bankrupt.
Formal education just isn’t the answer. Employers require it now because they are no longer able to test employees without being sued for discrimination due to disparate impact. degrees serve as proxies for intelligence because employers can no longer directly test for it.
definitely. the poor wal mart worker benefits more when the bio engineer develops a cure for something, makes a ton of money, then gets taxed.
i understand that people need to make rational choices on what to be educated on and the only way to apply that is putting a cost. but applying a cost on education also places a barrier on people without money.
assuming education is free. everyone gets a stab to be a bio engineer. the creme of the crop rises to the top and passes the failures drop and figure out their next best bet (i.e. educated barista). the best people will then make the most money and be taxed at progressive rates to support the people at the bottom. all im saying is free education promotes competition and everyone’s first shot at college should be free. the idea that ppl with money are the only ones that can educate their kids seems silly to me.
sure the whole thing sounds expensive, but i would rather have the best at the top. making education free will also increase teacher’s pay. teachers imo, are underpaid too, which is prolly why we dont have the best teachers giving quality education k-12 to the general public. right out of college, i made more than my teacher that is prolly near retirement. to me that is ridic.
i’m not 100% positive on my position wrt this topic, though i do lean toward it being free. by your reasoning, you could argue that kindergarten should be private and that parents should judge whether their kids are worth sending to school or if they should just stay at home and cook and clean.
first argument: as the accepted age of what makes a “minor” these days, in terms of maturity, is clearly in the 21-25 years old area, and not the 17-19 years old it used to be, are we not responsible, as a society, for taking care of the more immature 21-25 year olds in the same way we took care of 17-19 year olds in 1980?
second argument: this is the true question. “are today’s 17 and 18 year olds really ready to make a life altering decision at age 17 or 18?” i personally was a MINOR when i made my higher education decision and had no understanding of the importance of the decision. if society was there to protect me from myself from ages 0-16, it was because i was an incapable minor, correct? so at 17, i’m apparently no longer a minor when it comes to the potentially most life altering choice? hmmm. no 17 year old understands the lifelong burden of student debt.
You may well have had a sense of how important the decision is, but knowing that doesn’t help if you still don’t have access to sufficient information about the world you are going to work in after you graduate. Are you going to graduate into a recession? Are you going to graduate into a world where quant skills are important, or whether communication skills are more important? In some ways, knowing that and how your school feeds into that is even more important, but also relatively unknowable.
For example, quant skills would seem to be a no-brainer necessity for a US graduate… except if quanty stuff is all being outsourced to China, India, and Russia, or their H1-B visa equivalents, maybe it’s more important to be doing the communications part of stuff?
For those that can’t afford college and really want to go, there is a way around it. It’s called Seeking arrangement.com.
There, you can find a sugar daddy or mommy to pay your way through college. Some pay up to $3k a month.
I like the idea of free or very inexpensive community college, because it’s both extremely inefficient and fantastically annoying to be surrounded by ignorant asses.
However, I’m not sure that cheaper education will solve that problem.