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Arizona: College is only for the rich and athletes
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Patronage/Adoption though the example of his smarts not his charm in Highschool.
Atop that: I rather suspect that, given the job market, a very many graduates would welcome being able to work off their loans via public-sector employment. That's not Singapore. Singapore had 4% unemployment during the height of the global financial crisis. And it sheds its best and brightest to other countries like your cat sheds dander. In this situation the goals of "provide reasonably universal opportunities for acquiring funding" and "employ only people worth employing" do not diverge so widely, but we are not typically so lucky in the West. If you treat your public sector as a jobs program, you will not have a very efficient public sector.
Yes, this. Clearly, every single possible source of funds will obviously have rigorous testing for everyone that asks them for funds for an education, without any weight on how persuasive or charming that person might be.
Clearly.
How? How does someone who is smart, but poor, make themselves known to the people that would potentially be paying for their education? How do they prove it? How do they make themselves more attractive for this type of thing than the next person down the list?
--LeVar Burton
What possible incentives would wealthy families have to adopt and/or patronize academically gifted 18 year olds and then pay their entire college tuition? That may work in cultures with long-established traditions of largess from tribal elders, but in an American or European context it's a terrible idea.
I'd say that merit-based scholarships are an infinitely more practical and effective way of making sure that people who have the intellectual ability to excel in college but lack the financial ability to pay tuition can attend college.
Also, you still seem to be claiming that the American higher educational system is a failure simply because the "wrong" people are allowed to attend. That's, at best, circular reasoning.
If you're in college just to get a piece of paper, yeah you're doing it wrong. Thing is, I'm willing to bet if you do a survey that's not why people are going.
Hell, I'd lay odds that most "lazy, just in it for the paper cuz I gotsta have it" students are rich kids whose parents pushed them into it.
But the solution of adoption/patronage is, frankly, monstrous. There's a word for having poor people live off the good graces of the rich, it's feudalism, and it doesn't end well.
Truth is, even with the system we have, poor kids' backs are against the wall.
As I said earlier in the thread there are some big problems with higher education in the United States. There are too many people going to college and not enough going into skilled trades, the cost of education is ballooning rapidly past the rate of inflation, it is statistically harder for poorer students to get into good schools and afford to pay for them, leading to a massive, crippling explosion of student debt (this is an economic crisis that, when it pops, will have far reaching consequences that makes us wish for the good old days of 2008) and at the end of the road there is no longer the guarantee of a good job.
But this bill addresses none of those concerns and in fact magnifies them. It is a Poor Tax. It will lead to a school system full of the rich while the poor float around jobless, looking for work that simply does not exist which, again, doesn't end well.
Yes. But, and you may find this regrettably, America is not ruled by a authoritarian state and the state's options for extracting wealth from people with little income to extract are rather limited. Singapore only loses its grip on graduates outside its shores but America can only do so much about people even in America, insofar as you want to remain a liberal democracy.
I think the problems are not resolvable; the approach of imposing penalties of some sort is basically identical to the approach of imposing debt and, insofar as the problem is excessive debt, graduates putting themselves in a position of excessive penalties is exactly the same thing. Only now you have put the state in a position where your debtor's incentive to remove those penalties is not to seek high-paying employment but to serve their civil-service bonds with minimal effort. This is not good for making the most of public-sector employees. There is a reason working to rule is regarded as industrial action in the West.
But if you have the option of one or the other, either repay the debt or spend the time being a government employee, don't you both provide incentive to seek high-paying employment or work the job? Isn't the only significant penalty if you do neither?
--LeVar Burton
Your country has, through roughly a century of labour activism, made it rather difficult for employers private and public alike to extract effort from employees if the employee doesn't really want to do it. Many possible carrots but few (legally) possible sticks. This makes bonds and privately-provided skills training alike rather difficult unless the carrot of future career tracks can be made available, but recall what I said about treating your public sector as a jobs program.
I still disagree with this. Objectively, we as a country don't need more skilled trades workers. Those can be good jobs for individuals, but there's no shortage of people willing and able to do that work.
I think it would be more accurate to say that we need more jobs- of some sort- that can be done by people who don't go to college. But I just don't see where they're going to come from. We might be getting some more soon from the shale oil boom and gas fracking, and maybe there's still room for growth in basic retail sales jobs, but not nearly enough. So that's why I continue to believe that the best route forward for our society is to encourage as many people as possible to go to college, to develop as much knowledge as possible, but also to provide everyone with a small citizen's income so that they can survive without a job. We don't need to give everyone a job to reach full employment!
Sure, but presumably more profitable in the long run, since after I've payed off my debt I'm left with that high paying private sector job.
--LeVar Burton
Well, that's the option of the job. As for the debt: if it was that easy, would we be having an argument over excessive student loan debt?
Actually, skilled tradesmen are lacking in several parts of the union. I linked an article about Florida, and the situation in Texas is much the same. And on the higher education front, DARPA has been warning of a geek deficit for a while now.
We have a lot of people getting BAs and a lot of people with just high school. We have nothing in the middle.
And frankly, we don't have much to offer in the middle either, and won't so long as we don't replace the gone-for-good manufacturing sector with new industries or by bringing back some (never all) of those lost jobs with incentives to high in America. I'm thinking something like requiring companies based in the US to treat their foreign workers with the same rights as American ones. It'll be cheaper to open that factory in Noonecares, Indiana pretty damn quick in that scenario. But that's a discussion for another thread.
Now, I'm a Republican, but here's how I see the state of higher education. Every single American needs a post-high school education, either a degree or a trade. If the government needs to pay for that, fine. Turns out that's actually cheaper in the long run. We aren't a society of serfs so why try and inflict that on us? We need Americans for unskilled labor about as much as India does. (that's not at all for those keeping track).
As for unskilled labor, look at a globe. Odds are good if you put your finger on a bit that isn't blue you'd find a country that can provide us with unskilled labor as much as we allow through our immigration.
I like my America to have an educated rich populace. One that doesn't need Medicaid and welfare. That's what makes democracy work. We are the greatest country in the world, we might as well act like it.
I'm a money republican, we do what makes sense. And that makes sense.
Is it actually a big shortage though, or is it just a few niche areas that can't instantly fill every single job with perfectly-trained workers for a low wage? Because that's the kind of "shortage" that companies usually complain about.
And frankly I don't believe DARPA at all. People have been complaining about a lack of STEM degrees for decades now, and we still have more than enough. In fact I'd say there's a GLUT of science PhDs- there just aren't that many jobs for scientists these days.
And yeah, it would make things a lot easier if foreign companies everywhere would play nice but I think we have to assume that they never will, at least not for the next century or so.
I wasn't talking about foreign companies, I'm talking about companies like Apple who use slave labor. There are limits to what we can do thanks to trade law, but there is some wiggle room.
There are real shortages of skilled labor. We have plenty of people who can work at Taco Bell, but skilled trades could use a boost. I'm not saying it would solve the problem, but it may help a bit.
But this is all tangential to the state of higher education in America.
The way to fix US education is not to add a poor tax to our schools, sorry Arizona, it's just not.
yeah I think we can all agree that what Arizona is doing is ridiculous.
Well, everyone except TNC anyway lol. Even SpaceKungfumar won't defend it apparently.
Hmm... this clearly needs more though. Wouldn't having the government job available put a floor on what it takes to pay off the debt?
--LeVar Burton
Yes, it would. Like I said, it gives the debtor an incentive and a way to make the state effectively (1) absorb the debt, by (2) dealing with an unenthusiastic worker. Neither is good.
You'd set up a system of interdependence between the wealthy and government. If The top 10 students in a grade 12 class in an highschool have the best marks then they automatically get advanced into a system of school for 2 years where out of those 10, the top 5 are chosen, by random, by wealthy patrons who would either adopt/give them their patronage and the other 5 to be supported by the government for use in the bureaucracy after education.
This not only ensures that the cream of the crop from the education system gets in, it allows universities to retain their orginal goal of being only for select people.
Which has a purpose of enhancing skills, not being for a small elect, by the way
It's just ... fun.
It's like we've gone back in time to chat with the nobility.
I wonder if TheNomadicCircle has a Habsburg Jaw....
Bah, he'd probably just hire a poor kid to chew his food for him anyway.
Trickle down economics has worked out so well for us that now we should apply it to education!
If we really follow through with this "public sector as jobs program" idea, I think we could arrive at a number of natural incentives to complete your mandatory time and to do well. If we match people with jobs that are relevant to their degrees, then in addition to the professional interest that we hope they would have in the work, doing well could easily become a means of getting influential reccomendations, and access to a network of people who moved from the same government job into the private sector. Also, there may be long term benefits to giving people their starts in government. Anecdote time: three former tax partners from my firm who started in government recently left mid-7 figure jobs to return to Treasury as top people. Treasury can't offer pay anywhere near the private sector, but the impression that working there left on these lawyers ultimately netted Treasury some of the top minds in tax law.
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
The government does a lot of things, but not necessarily everything needed to match up with all the university degrees out there. Even the potential jobs done by an Art Major would be better outsourced for example.
(1) people take on high student loan debt to pay the cost of education,
(2) go to mysteriously highly-paid civil service entry-level jobs,
(3) generally sufficiently high, in fact, to justify the high cost of education
And you propose to replace what you have with a system whereby
(1) people take on long service bonds and the state picks up tab for the high cost of education,
(2) people go to low-paid civil service entry-level jobs and the state nonetheless extracts mysteriously highly-valuable work out of them,
(3) generally sufficiently valuable, in fact, to justify the high cost of education
I reiterate that the basic problem is the same! Only now you are shifting responsibility for solving it to your civil service's human resources department instead of distributed among many untold numbers of graduates. On the upside your civil service gets more influence over what courses people take. Central planning certainly occasionally works well, but I do wonder.
And the return on investment for higher education isn't immediate work you can beat out of them, it's the tax revenue you get off of them in the long run which will feed the programs we all want.
I am not sure this is true. For example, if a family has a vast fortune and owns companies, estates with lots of staff, etc. then it is probably a good thing to make sure that the heir to the fortune is educated enough to run the whole empire, otherwise the while thing may fall apart and lots of people may lose their jobs.
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
Isn't that excessively complicated? Why involve the government in arranging and enforcing patronage? Why not just tax those rich families and have done with it?
--LeVar Burton
Sounds like picking winners and losers to me. IRL, the "heir to the fortune" will be pushed around by smarter, craftier men if their idiots. It's not my job to make sure that Johnny Rich Boy can take over Big Daddy's fortune. If they're incompetent, they deserve to fail. I know this is a point you have presented in the past, SKFM and it's a sentiment that I generally agree with.
Why is it okay for the poor, universities, and small businesses to fail when they can't adapt but we have to protect the Rockafellers their latest Hapsburg Prince?
I believe in a merit based college system, especially when it comes to scholarships, but if someone wants to pay for their own ride I'm not going to stop them since the income from them can be used to fund poorer students. But it isn't societies job to bring up the heir to the throne of corporations.
These cases are, by definition, pretty rare.
Happily developed economies tend to have fewer situations where inheritance has a possibly massive detrimental impact on the lives of many, in part because publicly-run corporations with dispersed shareholdership have better management on average than family-run ones.
It is interesting, in a sick sort of way, to see his arguments.
I've heard that the antebellum south developed some really complex philosophy to justify slavery. Maybe this is similar.
And in addition to the points I made above, I have a feeling that the heirs to the fortune 500 aren't going to be going to state schools anytime soon.
If you're rich you have no issues worth talking about, especially not to poor people.
Burke might have rejected equality of opportunity, but since then conservatives have generally accepted it as a desirable principle
TNC doesn't seem to have gotten quite that far yet
e: the reason, I think, why TNC is making a distinction between the two otherwise identical schemes to fund higher ed from the pockets of the wealthy is that his own phrasing makes it clear that the wealthy have a moral right to demand that education be funded to their design, with the civil service cooperating to their desires, whereas the other is such that the polity exercises legitimacy instead: this wealth is no longer yours; we appropriate it for the general will; if you despise its appropriation and its purpose, well so much the worse for you. But in most parts of the world the landed aristocracy and Parliament are not still treading a careful balance of power.
Really not even worth arguing. Just wait for him to go back where he came from, and take his backwards ideas with him.