Perhaps, TNC, if you could demonstrate somewhere that isn't a third world country where what you suggest actually works.
Well, to kind of take his side in a snarky manner:
I like the idea of patronage, but having some dude adopt a child without taking charm/personality into account is difficult. So perhaps we should propose some form of testing, possibly standardized, in order to assess merit for said patronage. And then said entity sponsoring the child, perhaps residing primarily in a white house of some form, then provides the money for college.
(all snark aside: patronage was basically replaced with... scholarships and grants! They're a rich entity providing for a poor person to get an education. It's just minus all the idiocy involved in somehow approaching rich people as a broke peasant and proving your child is so awesome they should take them away from your family)
I don't think allowing people to buy their way into higher education is a good idea even if they could theoretically generate more financial benefits for the educational institution than the cost of having them (be they athletes or rich kids).
With some slight variation depending on the exact degree, a lot of degrees are essentially marks of quality; A brand name similar to Fair Trade markings. Combining a meritocratic system with one where people can buy access erodes that mark of quality. Everyone in your educational institution regardless of financial situation should be able to motivate their presence by their competence within the field of their studies.
Why would anyone recieve acess to education in exchange for non-academic services rendered, over actual academic merit? I couldn't motivate that on either moral of financial grounds.
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.
What makes that suggestion so funny is that I could swear I've had actual Americans argue the same point in a somewhat more circumspect manner; The State should not be managing this, because the market will provide. The only difference really is the idea of the origin of proper social class; Pedigree by virtue of whose cunt you managed to find your way out of or access to capital also based on which cunt you managed to exit.
Functionally, they are each laughably bad at doing anything useful for society as a whole, because they're horrendously wasteful.
(And function aside, I don't think you can have a functioning democracy without free access to higher education)
or you could tax those wealthy people and give those top ten students a free education!
Which has a purpose of enhancing skills, not being for a small elect, by the way
Something TNC seems intent on ignoring.
Really not even worth arguing. Just wait for him to go back where he came from, and take his backwards ideas with him.
You'd think it would have happened already given how poorly the West does things.
Though apparently just good enough college wasn't worth going to where he's from.
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AthenorBattle Hardened OptimistThe Skies of HiigaraRegistered Userregular
I skimmed most of this thread, but I wanted to throw in my two cents, completely biased and without research. IE everything in here is anecdotal.
In my mind, we don't need unskilled labor. We, as a species, should be pushing to eliminate unskilled labor as IQ and standard of living go up, as our tools are getting better.
That being said, the stigma that you MUST have a college degree to get a job is just wrong, especially when most people talk as if it doesn't matter which degree you get. This has led to the proliferation of degree factories, which are for-profit leeches in most cases and only serve to dilute the value of the degree. No, we need trades, guilds, and better apprenticeship routes. We need some way for craftsman to say "See this? It's worth just as much as that MBA." But even more than that.. and this is one of the darker secrets of the country and where we're heading... We need hybrid jobs.
My father programs robots. He volunteered to join the Air Force in a time when there was still a draft, and spent the last year repairing fuel tanks of F4 Phantoms in Vietnam. He then went to work for Caterpillar, going through an apprenticeship for being an electrician. From there he moved onto computers and programming. The man is someone I highly respect, because for his entire adult life he's been doing work that isn't glamorous but lets the rest of the civilized world progress. I especially liked the month when he worked on the robotics that operated inside an ice cream storage facility.
The problem out there is that this is not a glamorous job, from either side of the aisle. If you are interested in robotics, you are likely to gravitate towards MIT style robotics. If you are interested in programming, it's likely not angled towards this particular field. And how many people are taught how to maintain the robots? During the economic downturn, I knew that if you had the right skillset, you could get a job in a heartbeat if you could fill that role - and it's a field that is growing every day. This, right here, is what the future of America's workforce looks like - taking those awesome videos of people making Lego Mindstorms and applying that to industrial robots running 30-40 year old programming languages.
All I see this bill doing is deflecting the true source of the problem. My personal area of the world is blessed to have an amazing community college/trade school thanks to Caterpillar's needing to fuel their local factories. Most people don't have that.
or you could tax those wealthy people and give those top ten students a free education!
Which has a purpose of enhancing skills, not being for a small elect, by the way
Something TNC seems intent on ignoring.
Really not even worth arguing. Just wait for him to go back where he came from, and take his backwards ideas with him.
You'd think it would have happened already given how poorly the West does things.
Though apparently just good enough college wasn't worth going to where he's from.
If the TNC exibits the same level of social charisma in real life as he does in this thread... I doubt he would ever get a patron/adopted, At least not by anybody in the west and since all the good universeties are in the west.... Guess it would have been ditch digging for our friend. Very lucky that he was born a rich kid, because no way he would have made it on his own.
He also ignores that if you need a patron to get into university, that patron would have a huge impact on what you study. No Art History majors need aply! (Thats what TNC is studying right)? Hell, even if I had a position as a art historian open, why would I want to pay for the education of one? I would just put out a want ad: Art Historian wanted. Not shift through several candidates that seem like they could be good art historians, wait 4 years, hope they don't screw up and then hire them.
Kipling217 on
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
Recognize that you don't already have a system whereby
(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.
I think there may be a misunderstanding re: what this system is supposed to accomplish. Here are the goals I think this system serves:
(1) it will require people to give thought to whether college is "worth it" since the commitment is increased from 4 years to six, effectively.
(2) it will provide these graduates, whom the state is already making an investment in, with 2 years of experience on their resume, and access to a network of people who went through the exact same process, which may help them get good jobs after their time in government is done.
(3) it will give state governments more manpower, without requiring them to pay full standard salaries. Even though these may not be career beaurocrats, at least they will be educated people who can take on tasks like community outreach programs, social work, museum maitenance/providing tours, etc. which may benefit everyone.
(4) It may instill a sense of pride/loyalty to the state, which may help keep people from moving out of state, or help funnel more qualified people into full time government work (possibly at the end of their career, when they are most qualified).
So I don't think this program would just be about getting an immediate, excellent return on investment from state fundin of higher education. It would be about conferring a bundled short and long term benefits on the state government, the participants, and the citizens of the state.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
You can effectively cut this "slack" by allowing those who have the means or the capacity to succeed and not just let every Tom, Dick and Harry go.
Or you could make college acceptance strictly merit-based, since there's no real social benefit to providing a college education to everyone with parents wealthy enough to afford tuition.
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.
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.
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.
Well, that is the winning argument right there!
I do recognize that this kind of private dynastic wealth is extremely rare, and I do generally want companies which are inefficient to go under, but it just seems like letting the kid with his name on the building into your "pure merit" school so that the family business doesn't go under (assuming it otherwise runs well and at a profit) is so low cost to society that it isn't neccessarily a bad thing. This is not the most principled argument, but sometimes you have to just accept that a course of action may be beneficial to society, even though you can't base it on a broadly derived normative principle.
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zepherinRussian warship, go fuck yourselfRegistered Userregular
spacekungfuman: I may be misunderstanding your plan. If your plan is to force people to do 2 years of servitude to the state for a degree, I'm against it because I'm against debt bondage (slavery). However if you are proposing that after 4 years of college an entry level 2 year term job is available at say a GS3 level, where they help pay for your college and allow you to pursue a masters degree if you desire. I could support that program. The best and brightest get scholarships, and don't need the government program (but it should be an option), everyone else takes on a loan and has a guaranteed option to pay it off (and a guaranteed job) with 2 years, or 4 years of government service.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
spacekungfuman: I may be misunderstanding your plan. If your plan is to force people to do 2 years of servitude to the state for a degree, I'm against it because I'm against debt bondage (slavery). However if you are proposing that after 4 years of college an entry level 2 year term job is available at say a GS3 level, where they help pay for your college and allow you to pursue a masters degree if you desire. I could support that program. The best and brightest get scholarships, and don't need the government program (but it should be an option), everyone else takes on a loan and has a guaranteed option to pay it off (and a guaranteed job) with 2 years, or 4 years of government service.
My plan is the government pays for school, like the Montgomery GI program, only you provide service after school is done, instead of before.
Edit: Of course, noone is forced to enter this program to go to school. It's just the program by which the state provides full non-merit scholarships.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I actually think it is hilarious you said "Yes, when you do all your shopping at Burberry, $2K a semester is trivial." since I actually wore a burberry shirt and coat today. I am literally your caricature of an out of touch rich guy
Alternatively you might actually be out of touch, and not a caricature at all.
So I get accused of being out of touch all the time here, and I guess it is probably true, but then isn't everyone who is not currently (or has not in the recent past been) poor out of touch with the poor in America? I don't want to derail the thread, but can someone explain to me how I could be "in touch" with a lifestyle that is completly different from my own? At best, I could have some second hand observations or some statistics, but that would only mean that I have a vague, academic understanding.
I am not one of those people who goes to charity galas and laments the plight of the [insert cause of the moment] and talks about how I "understand" or "sympathize" with their plight with other people also dressed in their formal wear, none of whom actually understand the issue. I find it really hard to stand those people, and prefer to just give to a charity I support without claiming to really understand anything other than that the situation is bad for certain people, and that giving money, toys, time, etc. may help. I am currently working on a draft tax credit that has a decent chance of passing at the Federal level (or at least several state levels) to help a certain specific class of poor home owners to be protected against having the land underlying their homes sold out from under them. I understand the mechanics of the tax code, how the credit would work, the political realities of drafting something that is palatable, etc. but I would never claim to understand the plight of the people it will benefit, because their lives are so different from my own. I feel like any claim that I really "get" their problem would be insulting to them.
Since you must recognize that it's an awful situation to be in, you could show more empathy.
That doesn't require you to have lived through it. I won't hold my breath though. People who are very successful in life often to go to great lengths to insulate themselves from even having to be reminded of the less fortunate. Gated communities and the like.
I don't think things are nearly as devious or deliberate as you think they are. It isn't as if you are likely to have random people from a different socioeconomic status show up at your door if you don't have a gate to keep them out. I think that because people with more money tend to do things that cost more money (i.e., go to more expensive restaurants, go on more expensive vacations, shop in more expensive stores) so they are less likely to have signifigant interactions with people who have less. Also, to the extent there is interaction (such as store clerks, waiters, etc.) or even extensive contact like friends who are in a different socio-economic class, you probably don't really talk about the differences in your lives or the problems people face because they are poor much, in part because talking about money is taboo.
Edit - I think this is actually a really interesting topic on its own, and may warrant its own thread.
This creates a culture of insulation where it keeps people who are well off from knowing how the the lives of the less fortunate work. This attitude is self-evident in laws like this one and countless others.
It takes a special effort for those with privlege to emphasize with those who don't. In matters of wealth, race, sex, etc.
I don't want to sound like an asshole, but this goes both ways. I find that I can't talk about issues I face (in real life or online) a lot of the time because who can't identify with them are extremely dismissive.
If you're rich you have no issues worth talking about, especially not to poor people.
You are kidding, right? There are problems that come with being a person, like health issues, that have no bearing on wealth at all. Even putting them asside, are you suggesting that it would be fine to ask about getting a honda or a Toyota on the car thread, but Mercedes vs BMW is off limits? The alcohol thread is full of discussions of expensive liquors. Is that wrong?
I actually think it is hilarious you said "Yes, when you do all your shopping at Burberry, $2K a semester is trivial." since I actually wore a burberry shirt and coat today. I am literally your caricature of an out of touch rich guy
Alternatively you might actually be out of touch, and not a caricature at all.
So I get accused of being out of touch all the time here, and I guess it is probably true, but then isn't everyone who is not currently (or has not in the recent past been) poor out of touch with the poor in America? I don't want to derail the thread, but can someone explain to me how I could be "in touch" with a lifestyle that is completly different from my own? At best, I could have some second hand observations or some statistics, but that would only mean that I have a vague, academic understanding.
I am not one of those people who goes to charity galas and laments the plight of the [insert cause of the moment] and talks about how I "understand" or "sympathize" with their plight with other people also dressed in their formal wear, none of whom actually understand the issue. I find it really hard to stand those people, and prefer to just give to a charity I support without claiming to really understand anything other than that the situation is bad for certain people, and that giving money, toys, time, etc. may help. I am currently working on a draft tax credit that has a decent chance of passing at the Federal level (or at least several state levels) to help a certain specific class of poor home owners to be protected against having the land underlying their homes sold out from under them. I understand the mechanics of the tax code, how the credit would work, the political realities of drafting something that is palatable, etc. but I would never claim to understand the plight of the people it will benefit, because their lives are so different from my own. I feel like any claim that I really "get" their problem would be insulting to them.
Since you must recognize that it's an awful situation to be in, you could show more empathy.
That doesn't require you to have lived through it. I won't hold my breath though. People who are very successful in life often to go to great lengths to insulate themselves from even having to be reminded of the less fortunate. Gated communities and the like.
I don't think things are nearly as devious or deliberate as you think they are. It isn't as if you are likely to have random people from a different socioeconomic status show up at your door if you don't have a gate to keep them out. I think that because people with more money tend to do things that cost more money (i.e., go to more expensive restaurants, go on more expensive vacations, shop in more expensive stores) so they are less likely to have signifigant interactions with people who have less. Also, to the extent there is interaction (such as store clerks, waiters, etc.) or even extensive contact like friends who are in a different socio-economic class, you probably don't really talk about the differences in your lives or the problems people face because they are poor much, in part because talking about money is taboo.
Edit - I think this is actually a really interesting topic on its own, and may warrant its own thread.
This creates a culture of insulation where it keeps people who are well off from knowing how the the lives of the less fortunate work. This attitude is self-evident in laws like this one and countless others.
It takes a special effort for those with privlege to emphasize with those who don't. In matters of wealth, race, sex, etc.
I don't want to sound like an asshole, but this goes both ways. I find that I can't talk about issues I face (in real life or online) a lot of the time because who can't identify with them are extremely dismissive.
If you're rich you have no issues worth talking about, especially not to poor people.
You are kidding, right? There are problems that come with being a person, like health issues, that have no bearing on wealth at all. Even putting them asside, are you suggesting that it would be fine to ask about getting a honda or a Toyota on the car thread, but Mercedes vs BMW is off limits? The alcohol thread is full of discussions of expensive liquors. Is that wrong?
Health problems are a separate issue, of course people will listen to those.
If you go into a car help thing and ask that, that's fair game. But which expensive car you want to buy is a slightly less pressing issue than questions that have to do with the poor like "should I pay my light bill or buy my heart medicine this month, I'm not sure" there is such a thing as false equivalency.
If you come into a conversation about a poor tax and start the Lament of the Mercedes Benz, can you really blame people for getting resentful?
There's a joke from friends "Oh no, two women love me, my wallet's too small for my fifties, and my diamond shoes are too tight."
The point being that the issues that the poor face are often of a much graver significance than those faced by the rich for the simple fact that the rich are able to afford to have problems and as such they aren't as immediately pressing. The poor live one accident away from disaster, do you?
I would accept that health issues would be a different case (though in most instances the well off have insurance and can afford procedures and medicines).
For instance, my mother requires levithyroid or she'll die but if she can't make an insurance payment guess what becomes inaccessible to her?
When your best friend's dad dies you don't start complaining about not getting a parking space at the grocery store. Just keep it in perspective, man.
Recognize that you don't already have a system whereby
(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.
I think there may be a misunderstanding re: what this system is supposed to accomplish. Here are the goals I think this system serves:
(1) it will require people to give thought to whether college is "worth it" since the commitment is increased from 4 years to six, effectively.
(2) it will provide these graduates, whom the state is already making an investment in, with 2 years of experience on their resume, and access to a network of people who went through the exact same process, which may help them get good jobs after their time in government is done.
(3) it will give state governments more manpower, without requiring them to pay full standard salaries. Even though these may not be career beaurocrats, at least they will be educated people who can take on tasks like community outreach programs, social work, museum maitenance/providing tours, etc. which may benefit everyone.
(4) It may instill a sense of pride/loyalty to the state, which may help keep people from moving out of state, or help funnel more qualified people into full time government work (possibly at the end of their career, when they are most qualified).
So I don't think this program would just be about getting an immediate, excellent return on investment from state fundin of higher education. It would be about conferring a bundled short and long term benefits on the state government, the participants, and the citizens of the state.
But you have no way to guarantee this behavior is his point.
And the more manpower is useless if the workers are just slacking it as much as possible cause they don't give a shit.
If the state paid for me to get a master's and doctorate, I'd be able to do high-level work, and I'd definitely give a shit about the job I did because A. I'd be working at something that used my skills and B. I'd feel obligated to repay the investment with diligent and prompt effort.
spacekungfuman: I may be misunderstanding your plan. If your plan is to force people to do 2 years of servitude to the state for a degree, I'm against it because I'm against debt bondage (slavery). However if you are proposing that after 4 years of college an entry level 2 year term job is available at say a GS3 level, where they help pay for your college and allow you to pursue a masters degree if you desire. I could support that program. The best and brightest get scholarships, and don't need the government program (but it should be an option), everyone else takes on a loan and has a guaranteed option to pay it off (and a guaranteed job) with 2 years, or 4 years of government service.
My plan is the government pays for school, like the Montgomery GI program, only you provide service after school is done, instead of before.
Edit: Of course, noone is forced to enter this program to go to school. It's just the program by which the state provides full non-merit scholarships.
this doesn't sound like that bad of a plan to me, really (of course I'm biased because I would stand a better than average chance of getting a gov position actually related to my field)
the only major flaw I can potentially see is feeding/housing these people during their service (ie, would these costs plus those of paying for school be more than the potential profit of free work for the gov.?)
If the state paid for me to get a master's and doctorate, I'd be able to do high-level work, and I'd definitely give a shit about the job I did because A. I'd be working at something that used my skills and B. I'd feel obligated to repay the investment with diligent and prompt effort.
I do recognize that this kind of private dynastic wealth is extremely rare, and I do generally want companies which are inefficient to go under, but it just seems like letting the kid with his name on the building into your "pure merit" school so that the family business doesn't go under (assuming it otherwise runs well and at a profit) is so low cost to society that it isn't neccessarily a bad thing. This is not the most principled argument, but sometimes you have to just accept that a course of action may be beneficial to society, even though you can't base it on a broadly derived normative principle.
A) There's an odd assumption in there that as long as the kid is rich enough, his merit is irrelevant to whether he will actually manage to graduate - whether he will actually manage to benefit from the education offered. This is, I'd say, not a valid assumption.
If he has capital but lacks competence he should do things the capitalist way and pay an agent with competence to act in his stead. The idea that he would need the education himself meshes poorly with the capitalist framework.
It's, like, socialism, except only for rich people for the purpose of protecting corporate entities rather than individuals.
You can effectively cut this "slack" by allowing those who have the means or the capacity to succeed and not just let every Tom, Dick and Harry go.
Or you could make college acceptance strictly merit-based, since there's no real social benefit to providing a college education to everyone with parents wealthy enough to afford tuition.
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.
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.
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.
Well, that is the winning argument right there!
I do recognize that this kind of private dynastic wealth is extremely rare, and I do generally want companies which are inefficient to go under, but it just seems like letting the kid with his name on the building into your "pure merit" school so that the family business doesn't go under (assuming it otherwise runs well and at a profit) is so low cost to society that it isn't neccessarily a bad thing. This is not the most principled argument, but sometimes you have to just accept that a course of action may be beneficial to society, even though you can't base it on a broadly derived normative principle.
Why doesn't the hypothetical kid learn how the company works by spending several years working at different levels in the company? Why do they have to go to get a college education, when the business itself and the years of experience of it's employees are entirely accessible to them? Why wouldn't that be better for the business, the hypothetical kid and society as a whole?
I don't see anything wrong. Russians and Ukrainians don't belong in Turkmenistan, don't speak Turkmen the official language and try to get by on Russian which isn't an official language. You'll also note that it was in 2004 and the it has changed.
You mean the weird religious and pseudo-historical text the former dictator cobbled together is no longer the basis for the entire school curriculum? What progress! Now the American higher educational system can be reorganized for the noble goal of kicking out Russians and Ukrainians!
Seriously, you're advocating a social and cultural approach to higher education that only functions in cultures with a strong tradition of tribal interdependencies, and suggesting it be applied to a nation where such a cultural tradition has never really existed, outside of perhaps religious minority groups like the Amish and Native American nations circa the 18th Century.
You can accept it or not, I'm not forcing anyone to accept it. It was my opinion and idea and if it doesn't work with you or don't like it, then there is nothing I can do to change your mind.
We can tell you how full of shit you are though and how terrible and stupid your ideas are.
Recognize that you don't already have a system whereby
(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.
I think there may be a misunderstanding re: what this system is supposed to accomplish. Here are the goals I think this system serves:
(1) it will require people to give thought to whether college is "worth it" since the commitment is increased from 4 years to six, effectively.
(2) it will provide these graduates, whom the state is already making an investment in, with 2 years of experience on their resume, and access to a network of people who went through the exact same process, which may help them get good jobs after their time in government is done.
(3) it will give state governments more manpower, without requiring them to pay full standard salaries. Even though these may not be career beaurocrats, at least they will be educated people who can take on tasks like community outreach programs, social work, museum maitenance/providing tours, etc. which may benefit everyone.
(4) It may instill a sense of pride/loyalty to the state, which may help keep people from moving out of state, or help funnel more qualified people into full time government work (possibly at the end of their career, when they are most qualified).
So I don't think this program would just be about getting an immediate, excellent return on investment from state fundin of higher education. It would be about conferring a bundled short and long term benefits on the state government, the participants, and the citizens of the state.
My point is that you are assuming that the bundled benefits is a net positive one when taking into account the costs, whilst the present experience of student loan debt suggests this not to be the case, especially ex post.
You must be hiring people here who wouldn't already be hired if they were merely fresh graduates toting student loans, or there would be no difference. What of (1)-(4) cannot apply to these people?
I'm fascinated that we still have things like tribes in the twenty first century out of tiny exclusionary subcultures
You do live in this country, right? Everything is tribal here, we just organize it around political parties (which... end up being demographic to large degrees) and claim we're more civilized.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
I'm fascinated that we still have things like tribes in the twenty first century out of tiny exclusionary subcultures
It only gets really destructive when they make territorial claims. The first-world equivalent is not pop-cultural subcultures, which typically limit themselves to a form of expression and don't exercise control over livelihoods. It's neighborhood associations and ensuing NIMBY where you see the analogue of ethnic anxieties elsewhere. Even then it is sharply mitigated in its effects.
I'm fascinated that we still have things like tribes in the twenty first century out of tiny exclusionary subcultures
You do live in this country, right? Everything is tribal here, we just organize it around political parties (which... end up being demographic to large degrees) and claim we're more civilized.
This is wrong too; you accept the legitimacy of the opposing party if you lose and they gain power. You may always be outnumbered but your identification with your fellow Americans overrides your identification as a Democrat/Republican/whatever. This is inherently not the case in ethnic nationalist disputes.
You can effectively cut this "slack" by allowing those who have the means or the capacity to succeed and not just let every Tom, Dick and Harry go.
Or you could make college acceptance strictly merit-based, since there's no real social benefit to providing a college education to everyone with parents wealthy enough to afford tuition.
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.
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.
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.
Well, that is the winning argument right there!
I do recognize that this kind of private dynastic wealth is extremely rare, and I do generally want companies which are inefficient to go under, but it just seems like letting the kid with his name on the building into your "pure merit" school so that the family business doesn't go under (assuming it otherwise runs well and at a profit) is so low cost to society that it isn't neccessarily a bad thing. This is not the most principled argument, but sometimes you have to just accept that a course of action may be beneficial to society, even though you can't base it on a broadly derived normative principle.
Why doesn't the hypothetical kid learn how the company works by spending several years working at different levels in the company? Why do they have to go to get a college education, when the business itself and the years of experience of it's employees are entirely accessible to them? Why wouldn't that be better for the business, the hypothetical kid and society as a whole?
I think the main reason public education has to exist is because people might not want to follow in their parents' footsteps, which throws the idea of inheritance out the window. Perhaps if we could instead devote our efforts to making a system to better match people with their job interests instead of forcing them down certain career paths just to be safe, we'd have a much more competitive and dynamic playing field that right now only corporations seem to enjoy.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I'm fascinated that we still have things like tribes in the twenty first century out of tiny exclusionary subcultures
It only gets really destructive when they make territorial claims. The first-world equivalent is not pop-cultural subcultures, which typically limit themselves to a form of expression and don't exercise control over livelihoods. It's neighborhood associations and ensuing NIMBY where you see the analogue of ethnic anxieties elsewhere. Even then it is sharply mitigated in its effects.
I'm fascinated that we still have things like tribes in the twenty first century out of tiny exclusionary subcultures
You do live in this country, right? Everything is tribal here, we just organize it around political parties (which... end up being demographic to large degrees) and claim we're more civilized.
This is wrong too; you accept the legitimacy of the opposing party if you lose and they gain power. You may always be outnumbered but your identification with your fellow Americans overrides your identification as a Democrat/Republican/whatever. This is inherently not the case in ethnic nationalist disputes.
This is why this idea is so fucked up. It goes against the detente that has sprung up across demographic tribal lines. You don't fuck over members of other tribes, because then they will fuck over you when its their turn. Its the Culture war going from trying to entice people to join your tribe, to trying to wipe out your enemies.
Its going to bite these gop silly gooses in the ass in the end. The people they are trying to screw are the segment of the poor poulation that is smart enough, organised enough to want/desire to go to college.
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
I'm fascinated that we still have things like tribes in the twenty first century out of tiny exclusionary subcultures
It only gets really destructive when they make territorial claims. The first-world equivalent is not pop-cultural subcultures, which typically limit themselves to a form of expression and don't exercise control over livelihoods. It's neighborhood associations and ensuing NIMBY where you see the analogue of ethnic anxieties elsewhere. Even then it is sharply mitigated in its effects.
I'm fascinated that we still have things like tribes in the twenty first century out of tiny exclusionary subcultures
You do live in this country, right? Everything is tribal here, we just organize it around political parties (which... end up being demographic to large degrees) and claim we're more civilized.
This is wrong too; you accept the legitimacy of the opposing party if you lose and they gain power. You may always be outnumbered but your identification with your fellow Americans overrides your identification as a Democrat/Republican/whatever. This is inherently not the case in ethnic nationalist disputes.
You've seen the Republican Party, right? Democratic rule is not legitimate in their eyes, hasn't been since at least '92.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Don't engage in disingenuous hyperbole. I won't deny that their leadership likes appealing to their most extreme elements for assorted demographic and institutional reasons. But they did not raise armed revolution when Democrats swept the legislature in 2006 and the presidency in 2008, even if they had been assuring themselves of a permanent majority just a few years earlier. You are either busy convincing yourself that Republican rule is illegitimate because They Did It First, or you are wrapping yourself in first-world ignorance of what ethnic conflict looks like. It does not look like Bush and Gore fighting it out with lawyers and courts; it looks like running gunbattles in the streets between partisan supporters.
Well, they decried the elections as fixed (ACORN, Black Panthers, etc.), decried the President as ineligible for the office, impeached the last Democratic President after wasting millions propping up minor details into gigantic scandals, etc. etc. etc. And our side, we trumped up a lot of things to make ourselves believe Ohio was rigged in 2004.
Yes, that is not as bad as literal armed resistance, but it's still decrying the legitimacy of rule by your opponent based on group allegiances. It's not like this is some bullshit unique to the third world.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Posts
Well, to kind of take his side in a snarky manner:
I like the idea of patronage, but having some dude adopt a child without taking charm/personality into account is difficult. So perhaps we should propose some form of testing, possibly standardized, in order to assess merit for said patronage. And then said entity sponsoring the child, perhaps residing primarily in a white house of some form, then provides the money for college.
(all snark aside: patronage was basically replaced with... scholarships and grants! They're a rich entity providing for a poor person to get an education. It's just minus all the idiocy involved in somehow approaching rich people as a broke peasant and proving your child is so awesome they should take them away from your family)
With some slight variation depending on the exact degree, a lot of degrees are essentially marks of quality; A brand name similar to Fair Trade markings. Combining a meritocratic system with one where people can buy access erodes that mark of quality. Everyone in your educational institution regardless of financial situation should be able to motivate their presence by their competence within the field of their studies.
Why would anyone recieve acess to education in exchange for non-academic services rendered, over actual academic merit? I couldn't motivate that on either moral of financial grounds.
What makes that suggestion so funny is that I could swear I've had actual Americans argue the same point in a somewhat more circumspect manner; The State should not be managing this, because the market will provide. The only difference really is the idea of the origin of proper social class; Pedigree by virtue of whose cunt you managed to find your way out of or access to capital also based on which cunt you managed to exit.
Functionally, they are each laughably bad at doing anything useful for society as a whole, because they're horrendously wasteful.
(And function aside, I don't think you can have a functioning democracy without free access to higher education)
You'd think it would have happened already given how poorly the West does things.
Though apparently just good enough college wasn't worth going to where he's from.
In my mind, we don't need unskilled labor. We, as a species, should be pushing to eliminate unskilled labor as IQ and standard of living go up, as our tools are getting better.
That being said, the stigma that you MUST have a college degree to get a job is just wrong, especially when most people talk as if it doesn't matter which degree you get. This has led to the proliferation of degree factories, which are for-profit leeches in most cases and only serve to dilute the value of the degree. No, we need trades, guilds, and better apprenticeship routes. We need some way for craftsman to say "See this? It's worth just as much as that MBA." But even more than that.. and this is one of the darker secrets of the country and where we're heading... We need hybrid jobs.
My father programs robots. He volunteered to join the Air Force in a time when there was still a draft, and spent the last year repairing fuel tanks of F4 Phantoms in Vietnam. He then went to work for Caterpillar, going through an apprenticeship for being an electrician. From there he moved onto computers and programming. The man is someone I highly respect, because for his entire adult life he's been doing work that isn't glamorous but lets the rest of the civilized world progress. I especially liked the month when he worked on the robotics that operated inside an ice cream storage facility.
The problem out there is that this is not a glamorous job, from either side of the aisle. If you are interested in robotics, you are likely to gravitate towards MIT style robotics. If you are interested in programming, it's likely not angled towards this particular field. And how many people are taught how to maintain the robots? During the economic downturn, I knew that if you had the right skillset, you could get a job in a heartbeat if you could fill that role - and it's a field that is growing every day. This, right here, is what the future of America's workforce looks like - taking those awesome videos of people making Lego Mindstorms and applying that to industrial robots running 30-40 year old programming languages.
All I see this bill doing is deflecting the true source of the problem. My personal area of the world is blessed to have an amazing community college/trade school thanks to Caterpillar's needing to fuel their local factories. Most people don't have that.
If the TNC exibits the same level of social charisma in real life as he does in this thread... I doubt he would ever get a patron/adopted, At least not by anybody in the west and since all the good universeties are in the west.... Guess it would have been ditch digging for our friend. Very lucky that he was born a rich kid, because no way he would have made it on his own.
He also ignores that if you need a patron to get into university, that patron would have a huge impact on what you study. No Art History majors need aply! (Thats what TNC is studying right)? Hell, even if I had a position as a art historian open, why would I want to pay for the education of one? I would just put out a want ad: Art Historian wanted. Not shift through several candidates that seem like they could be good art historians, wait 4 years, hope they don't screw up and then hire them.
I think there may be a misunderstanding re: what this system is supposed to accomplish. Here are the goals I think this system serves:
(1) it will require people to give thought to whether college is "worth it" since the commitment is increased from 4 years to six, effectively.
(2) it will provide these graduates, whom the state is already making an investment in, with 2 years of experience on their resume, and access to a network of people who went through the exact same process, which may help them get good jobs after their time in government is done.
(3) it will give state governments more manpower, without requiring them to pay full standard salaries. Even though these may not be career beaurocrats, at least they will be educated people who can take on tasks like community outreach programs, social work, museum maitenance/providing tours, etc. which may benefit everyone.
(4) It may instill a sense of pride/loyalty to the state, which may help keep people from moving out of state, or help funnel more qualified people into full time government work (possibly at the end of their career, when they are most qualified).
So I don't think this program would just be about getting an immediate, excellent return on investment from state fundin of higher education. It would be about conferring a bundled short and long term benefits on the state government, the participants, and the citizens of the state.
Well, that is the winning argument right there!
I do recognize that this kind of private dynastic wealth is extremely rare, and I do generally want companies which are inefficient to go under, but it just seems like letting the kid with his name on the building into your "pure merit" school so that the family business doesn't go under (assuming it otherwise runs well and at a profit) is so low cost to society that it isn't neccessarily a bad thing. This is not the most principled argument, but sometimes you have to just accept that a course of action may be beneficial to society, even though you can't base it on a broadly derived normative principle.
My plan is the government pays for school, like the Montgomery GI program, only you provide service after school is done, instead of before.
Edit: Of course, noone is forced to enter this program to go to school. It's just the program by which the state provides full non-merit scholarships.
You are kidding, right? There are problems that come with being a person, like health issues, that have no bearing on wealth at all. Even putting them asside, are you suggesting that it would be fine to ask about getting a honda or a Toyota on the car thread, but Mercedes vs BMW is off limits? The alcohol thread is full of discussions of expensive liquors. Is that wrong?
Do you really believe this?
Any way you cut it, that's not true. Wealth has an influence on health, and health has an influence on (the ability to generate) wealth.
Louis ck was basically referring to things like that when he said every rich person is a piece of shit.
He said "if you're born rich there's no way you don't grow up being a piece of shit". Which in general is true, although there are outliers.
Health problems are a separate issue, of course people will listen to those.
If you go into a car help thing and ask that, that's fair game. But which expensive car you want to buy is a slightly less pressing issue than questions that have to do with the poor like "should I pay my light bill or buy my heart medicine this month, I'm not sure" there is such a thing as false equivalency.
If you come into a conversation about a poor tax and start the Lament of the Mercedes Benz, can you really blame people for getting resentful?
There's a joke from friends "Oh no, two women love me, my wallet's too small for my fifties, and my diamond shoes are too tight."
The point being that the issues that the poor face are often of a much graver significance than those faced by the rich for the simple fact that the rich are able to afford to have problems and as such they aren't as immediately pressing. The poor live one accident away from disaster, do you?
I would accept that health issues would be a different case (though in most instances the well off have insurance and can afford procedures and medicines).
For instance, my mother requires levithyroid or she'll die but if she can't make an insurance payment guess what becomes inaccessible to her?
When your best friend's dad dies you don't start complaining about not getting a parking space at the grocery store. Just keep it in perspective, man.
But you have no way to guarantee this behavior is his point.
And the more manpower is useless if the workers are just slacking it as much as possible cause they don't give a shit.
this doesn't sound like that bad of a plan to me, really (of course I'm biased because I would stand a better than average chance of getting a gov position actually related to my field)
the only major flaw I can potentially see is feeding/housing these people during their service (ie, would these costs plus those of paying for school be more than the potential profit of free work for the gov.?)
You might. Maybe I wouldn't.
It's, like, socialism, except only for rich people for the purpose of protecting corporate entities rather than individuals.
Why doesn't the hypothetical kid learn how the company works by spending several years working at different levels in the company? Why do they have to go to get a college education, when the business itself and the years of experience of it's employees are entirely accessible to them? Why wouldn't that be better for the business, the hypothetical kid and society as a whole?
I can't see why we wouldn't want to model our educational system after the one in Turkmenistan.
You mean the weird religious and pseudo-historical text the former dictator cobbled together is no longer the basis for the entire school curriculum? What progress! Now the American higher educational system can be reorganized for the noble goal of kicking out Russians and Ukrainians!
Seriously, you're advocating a social and cultural approach to higher education that only functions in cultures with a strong tradition of tribal interdependencies, and suggesting it be applied to a nation where such a cultural tradition has never really existed, outside of perhaps religious minority groups like the Amish and Native American nations circa the 18th Century.
This is, to put it mildly, a horrible idea.
We can tell you how full of shit you are though and how terrible and stupid your ideas are.
My point is that you are assuming that the bundled benefits is a net positive one when taking into account the costs, whilst the present experience of student loan debt suggests this not to be the case, especially ex post.
You must be hiring people here who wouldn't already be hired if they were merely fresh graduates toting student loans, or there would be no difference. What of (1)-(4) cannot apply to these people?
You do live in this country, right? Everything is tribal here, we just organize it around political parties (which... end up being demographic to large degrees) and claim we're more civilized.
It only gets really destructive when they make territorial claims. The first-world equivalent is not pop-cultural subcultures, which typically limit themselves to a form of expression and don't exercise control over livelihoods. It's neighborhood associations and ensuing NIMBY where you see the analogue of ethnic anxieties elsewhere. Even then it is sharply mitigated in its effects.
This is wrong too; you accept the legitimacy of the opposing party if you lose and they gain power. You may always be outnumbered but your identification with your fellow Americans overrides your identification as a Democrat/Republican/whatever. This is inherently not the case in ethnic nationalist disputes.
I think the main reason public education has to exist is because people might not want to follow in their parents' footsteps, which throws the idea of inheritance out the window. Perhaps if we could instead devote our efforts to making a system to better match people with their job interests instead of forcing them down certain career paths just to be safe, we'd have a much more competitive and dynamic playing field that right now only corporations seem to enjoy.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
This is why this idea is so fucked up. It goes against the detente that has sprung up across demographic tribal lines. You don't fuck over members of other tribes, because then they will fuck over you when its their turn. Its the Culture war going from trying to entice people to join your tribe, to trying to wipe out your enemies.
Its going to bite these gop silly gooses in the ass in the end. The people they are trying to screw are the segment of the poor poulation that is smart enough, organised enough to want/desire to go to college.
You've seen the Republican Party, right? Democratic rule is not legitimate in their eyes, hasn't been since at least '92.
Yes, that is not as bad as literal armed resistance, but it's still decrying the legitimacy of rule by your opponent based on group allegiances. It's not like this is some bullshit unique to the third world.
They still think of themselves as "Americans" and not "Republicans".
Of course, the reason their rhetoric is so dangerous is because it edges up on the kind of tribal behavior you see in shitty countries.
Yeah, but they think of themselves as the only real Americans. The rest of us are Canadians or some equally horrible thing. :P