Greed. Get ready because they’re coming for free public k-12 next.
Nah. They just want to cut funding, not cut it completely. They need the dumb kids to grow up to be dumb workers and dumb voters. And to keep their own children in private schools to continue to rule over the poors.
Ah, but cutting it completely means they could potentially go back to child labour, and they’ve already been trying to set the ground work for it
You must live in a state where charter schools aren’t part of normal political discourse. It is happening, and it is what they’re striving for. They want the private schools, yes, but the mostly want unregulated for-profit religious charter schools where there is no oversight in what kids are taught (or if they’re taught)
There’s a real and important underlying reason you’re completely missing.
Ronald Reagan. That’s how this happened.
When it comes to Reagan I feel bad for dementia having to be inside him.
I’m sad that he died unable to remember what a horrible person he was.
He never thought he was horrible, so instead celebrate he was confused and horrified at the end :D
Honestly I can’t think of a single other person who I heard about their dementia and thought ‘good’
I have accomplished very little in my life.
I have pissed off innumerable people, been ostracized, ghosted, fired, disowned, discarded, and deserved all of it.
I have never lived up to my potential. I’ve got less than zero ambition.
I have been a historically awful husband and/or boyfriend.
But I accomplished one thing:
I got my daughter through college with no debt.
While she did the work to get admitted and slog through the classes and deal with the remote classroom bullshit of the COVID era, I’m proud that I was able to pull my shit together just long enough to keep writing those godforsaken checks so she will never know the struggle of being shackled to a lifetime of crippling debt.
I did one good thing in this lifetime, and because it gave her opportunity, it was all worth it.
It’s stories like this that make me thankful that my children have EU citizenship and will never have to struggle through college debt and neither will we as their parents.
It’s comments like this that make me happy i didn’t have kids (as a usa citizen)
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My school was expensive but was marketed as cheaper. It was cheaper through scholarship, factored in Pell grants and did not comsider the extra fees from bureaucracy.
The problem is that when you try to work while paying for school the grants go down and you pay more and still struggle.
While you do this you see your school build a sports stadium and see host extravagant dinners with business clients. You see how much the president or dean makes and how much the professors make.
I gave up and transferred to a non-profit university and the experience was night and day. It was affordable and the staff worked for you.
Look down at community colleges all day but I work with people doing the same job making the same pay (know your rights) but i don’t have 35 years of debt.
I got into University - they wanted $8,000/semester. Community College across the street offered 4 year degrees for $1200/semester.
Agreed! Community colleges are great, although the local one I attended was not without extraneous fees.
Holy shit dude, for profits are fuckin terrible. Although, that being said, I don’t know of any for-profits that have sports teams or large stadiums.
And I would also add that academia doesn’t really pay that well, at least for professors. They could make much more in industry in a lot of cases
Any private university is for profit, they just don’t explicitly say it.
Ones that aren’t directly corporate run and owned by their shareholders just go through more steps to funnel money to the rich
Because there is no cap on student loans for the most part. Kids who just finished high school are sold on the concept of these loans without knowing what they are really getting into.
If a guy can’t legally buy a beer, then they should not legally be allowed to sign up for 6 figure loans either
Seems like an easy “hey you predators took advantage of me while I was young and naive” case.
And then watch all the self serving reasons why we allow this just catch on fire.
You think that hasn’t happened already, like nobody has ever had that thought?
That’s what the entire student loan forgiveness from Biden was about, trying to eliminate people’s payments towards predatory student loans.
There’s literally no market incentives for it to be otherwise. Look at the factors.
50+ years of institutions and borrowers alike trained to believe that education debt is “good debt” that won’t hurt them.
“Club ed” arms race of expensive non-education-related amenities, targeting students. Essentially it is marketing costs passed on to the student/borrower.
Heavy subsidization of student loans by state and federal governments.
Laws to make student loans not discharged in bankruptcy.
Constant implication that growing amounts of student debts can or should be “forgiven” by federal programs.
If you are the lending institution or the college, literally all of those factors only incentivize charging more.
Driving prices down would require meaningful competition or a feasible alternative. I have encouraged hiring managers to look at alternative credentialing and training for this reason. No bachelors degree is worth going $200k+ in debt for.
Regarding your last point, I was an IT manager for a decade and hired many people. I saw no difference in the skill set between a community college grad with an Associate’s and a grad with a Bachelor’s from a prestigious university. The vast majority of skills simply don’t translate from university to real life, so I don’t understand why we still hold them so highly in IT. I can’t speak to other fields, though.
I very intentionally received only an associate’s degree with the plan being to immediately get a job and start learning from there. It’s worked great. Except that was 20 years ago and now many jobs “require” a bachelor’s or otherwise have the nerve to say that 4 years of on the job experience is the same as 1 year of college.
In my experience, I’ve seen the same thing. The university time kick starts things. But university lessons are so different than real on the job work.
Or regulation.
Driving prices down would require meaningful competition, or a feasible alternative, or regulation.
(Feasible alternatives do exist, eg trades, but are not treated as viable alternatives by society)
Some states are ditching the bar exam for attorneys. You can become a lawyer by getting experience as a paralegal. It shouldn’t be much different for other professionals.
And people who actually do most of the work (aka grad students) are still not getting a living wage.
Support striking grad workers everyone! Search for the currently striking school, and donate to their strike fund if you can: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=support+grad+worker+strike&ia=web
That’s actually highly variable. Some schools have come a long way in that regard
AFAIK there is no school paying a living wage (based on MIT living wage calculator) to all their grad student yet, at least not in most major cities.
The grad workers union of JHU has just won a wage that is somewhat close to living wage, but not there yet.
Depends if you factor all the free credits in ig
The problem is that most grad students are not taking classes after the first two years, and focus solely on research. Many with masters will finish with classes even sooner.
Then it doesn’t make sense to factor in the tuition for most PhD.
Plus, I am referring to living wages calculated without factoring in any educational cost or child care cost. If they are included, the living wage will be much higher.
It all started when they outlawed bankruptcy discharging student loans. Cry and cry over “Lawyers will graduate from college then immediately declare bankruptcy on $5000 loans!”. Then, when they captured the students in inescapable debt, convinced everyone that college was the answer, and then Sallie May being put in charge of defaulted loans… being paid to collect… Federally guaranteed money… It’s like getting paid to get paid, perfect racket!
Greed. It happened because for-profit schools are allowed to exist.
For-profits aren’t really the problem though. They are a tiny tiny tiny fraction of higher ed. And Obama went after them pretty hard
Fro profit schools are not the cause.
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My money is on government bailouts that are never gonna be payed back for the people running the institutions (not the teachers or any of the staff that actualy do things).
I am going to riot if there is another bailout, I am so sick of that shit. The government should be buying these distressed properties at fire sale prices, firing management for running it into the ground, and fining the boards for running it into the ground.
Eat the rich.
People finding out why religions banned usury
And back then y’all could just move like 40 miles and become a whole other ass person. Now you’re tracked literally around the entire globe forever.
Yeah so they could corner the market on that shit instead lmao
It’s administrative bloat. All that money isn’t going to hire more professors. It’s going to pay for non-faculty admin staff who provide services to students and work to attract students to the school. Schools are in competition with each other and the trend has been towards providing an all-encompassing luxury experience. While at many schools the fancy buildings may be paid for in whole or in part by donations from rich people, government grants, or other non-tuition sources (endowment), the staffing and maintenance of these buildings is paid for by tuition.
Ultimately, what it comes down to is that students comparison shop four-year luxury “Club Ed” vacations, paid for with borrowed money. That student loans are available without collateral or credit history and automatically approved is a huge part of the problem. If the flow of money dries up, the bloat goes with it. But in the mean time only rich people would have access to an education.
We as an entire community, species even, let it happen.
It’s my firm belief that until we acknowledge this we are not moving forward. I’ve said this to downvotes on numerous related topics where the response is always “blame the government” or “blame the corporations” or “blame the billionaires”.
None of those excuses work because ultimately all of us are responsible for supporting a system that enables all those things and removes accountability from all but the ones who have no ability to change anything.
Collectively we need a good long look in the mirror about what is really important.
The other bigger problem is people have solutions. We’ve had solutions for decades if not centuries. Solutions no one wants to implement for a multitude of reasons of which a big one is “this is the way the system works”.
Fuck the system. The system is broken. We need to all come to that conclusion and then we can move forward.
We aren’t there yet.
One class is doing it to another.
I came up with a plan to lower college tuition years ago while tripping. It starts with the decriminalization of all drugs. And to prevent gangs and what not from profiting colleges will get the exclusive privilege of making and selling all drugs. Drug proceeds would be split between lowering tuition, setting up more college ran centers, and rehabilitation of drug users outside the colleges programs. With a small percentage allowed for the college to profit.
For the program itself, i would have the colleges set up drug manufacturing classes which should benefit students in other chemist and medical fields so it should draw in quite a few people. With the drugs made they then would be sold by college ran businesses whicj could also employ students to have on the job experience and to keep more money in the colleges sphere of influence.
At these centers where drugs are sold, there will also be areas for people to partake in the more dangerous drugs, which should be inheritly safer now that its not being tainted with other nonsense. There would be medical students watching and taking care of their patients making another facet of experience that will help in future jobs.
With all this taking place in the college system, and with plenty of opportunities to view patients, it should be easy to spot people who are in a real bad place that would benefit from health and life counseling. So for the people in need of help, counselors will approach giving an offer to participate in a program to train psychology students that comes with a heavy discount for their drugs while in the program.
My whole idea had several beneficial aspects for all of the country.
Lower colleges tuition
Raising the educational level of general poplus
Lower drug dependencies rates
Lower crime rates
Getting people help who need it
Reduction of drug over doses
Less burdens on are justice system clogged up with drug related crimes
Hampering outside nations who push dirty cheap drugs into our country
Extra tax money
Etc
Idk if anyone has any comments on my wistful thinking, but im open to revisions of my plan.
TLDR: Decrimnalize drugs and make collegese create dispense and sell said drugs to fund the well being of our society.
This is a very American answer. The easy and best solution is to tax the ultra rich and provide college to all Americans.
Jesus fucking christ this is the stupidest shit with the purest potential. I’ve never loved and hated anything so equally. I’m left completely indifferent.
You’re ambivalent not indifferent.
This is legalizing drugs with extra steps. Tax the shops and manufacturers, direct that money split into social programs, safe centers staffed by professionals and school funds.
