The main question I have is, how much will institutions be paid and on what metric(s) will they be, and what will they be allowed to charge beyond that?
I think in a transitory system, which is what we need to set up right now because a full fix will take too long to design let alone implement. That it will have to come down to student participation, essentially federal funds to colleges like loans that don't need to be repaid by the students. Basically kids get to pick the schools they wanna go to, the schools get to choose who they're going to take, and then the federal government pays them.
This shouldn't be thought of as the final resting position either. This would specifically be the old thumb in the dam till we can get a proper repair solution in here. I think this transitory system would need to institute price controls so that higher ed doesn't just loot the federal government via ridiculous tuition costs, but that those controls need to be flexible so that we don't accidentally kneecap institutions.
This thumb in the dam being requisite so we don't just forgive all these student loans and then pull the ladder up behind us.
I still think a bunch of this is relatively unnecessary weed work at the moment because we're not going to change curriculums overnight.
Which is hilariously the real big question everyone should be ready to answer.
Cause if we're going to free publicly funded college then the first big dumbass question that's gonna come up is: "what are my tax dollars being used to teach?"
Ban basketball and football at colleges, both private and public. Those programs rake in so much goddamn money and pay the players nothing. The players are used up and discarded when they get injured or age out.
Yes this is an extreme solution and I have no illusions it will ever happen. Yes it is easy to come up with solutions to make these programs not awful and worthwhile. I'd still rather burn them to the ground and rebuild them back up. Take care of the players who got in on a sports scholarship, but fuck the parasites that make fat stacks off the backs of kids. Fuck them hard.
I work at a public university, have for almost a decade. 100% free and public, we even take a lot of foreign students. All basic expenses are footed by the National Government, but each institution is free to handle its finances and governance.
Both the head of the university and the deans of each faculty are elected by vote every three years, where students, teachers and all the auxiliaries get to choose leadership.
All wages are on a scale, every emplyee gets X times a basic wage, depending on rank and function. For example, a Dean will get 2X the wage of an entry level non-teacher staff, so there is no bloat and everyone knows what to expect.
All positions, teaching, technical, administrative are contested, if there is an opening to a better position, all aplicants contest it.
Universities and Faculties are allowed to get their own funds through (extension universitaria, cant translate that one) working for the community? For example, in the institution I work at, you can study to get a degree for free, but there are other courses with specific content (basic english conversation, for example) that people can pay a fee to attend and are open to anyone who wants to take them.
There are good things about it, and a few not so good things. Im not completely aware of all the other systems in other countries, but at least I can say that this particular model works and its NOT necesary for people to pawn their future just to get a chance at improving their situation.
FANTOMAS on
Yes, with a quick verbal "boom." You take a man's peko, you deny him his dab, all that is left is to rise up and tear down the walls of Jericho with a ".....not!" -TexiKen
I mean, what the government could do is use the current tuition levels as a starting point, Remove federal student loans for undergrads, and then provide a 2+2 program, where you get 2 years community college paid for, and 2 years of public university paid for.
And only allow universities to raise tuition, fees and housing by 2 percent per year.
They could also do a flat fee type thing where they give 6k per semester for the first 2 years and 10k per semester for the next 2 years, and increase that per inflation.
I dunno that's some devilish details though.
Pushing more community college is actually really bad idea unless you are talking about the trades. Community college transfers tend to have lower GPAs and graduation rates. A lot of this is because the kind of acclimation to departmental cultures, bonds formed with classmates, and pace of classes/choice of material that occurs in the freshman and sophomore years is far more important to college success than it appears on the outside.
Politicians love the idea because it saves money, and the public likes it because it appears to make sense. For the generation of students who will get to be experimented on, it means worse outcomes for equal effort.
That strikes me less as a problem with community college, and more as a problem with academia as a whole. Academia is, in many ways, built on a 300+ year old model, and the flaws with it are causing many of the issues with academia.
Also, this is the same sort of argument that is used to justify eliminating affirmative action as well.
You are going to need to flesh out the latter. The argument I'm making is about student well-being.
In particular, it is about the fact that university education is designed around a four-year training model. We could make it shorter, and there's a lot of evidence that a three-year degree would accomplish much of the same result in many disciplines. That doesn't change the fact that a freshman survey course in a university is about building the knowledge necessary to take more specific courses that in turn build upon each other. Students also build relationships with other students and faculty, which studies show are crucial to student success.
Students who join the program mid-stream face the same sort of challenges that anyone does when they join an effort halfway through, and the universities do not have the resources to catch the transfers up. Plenty of studies support this.
I'm really not seeing how that has anything to do with affirmative action. This isn't about redressing inequalities in K-12. It's about the fact that any training program is going to have a set series of steps, and the people who come in from another program with another series of steps are going to struggle to keep up.
But since we are talking about saving money on the back of poor kids, creating new inequalities will be the policy of the day for awhile until the numbers show that we've fucked up another generation in our national effort to skin a dime so the rich can pay less taxes. And minority kids will suffer the most, since they are faced with both the cultural challenges and the fact that they are doubly behind because we saved some cash sending them to a different program with different instructors and expectations for two years.
Opponents of affirmative action have argued that AA programs "set up" minority students to fail by pushing them into higher prestige colleges that they aren't "equipped" for. Of course, what turns out to be the case is that these institutions, having dealt mainly with upper class students from a mostly homogeneous background, didn't develop the resources to help support students from "non-traditional" backgrounds. And of course, when such support is provided, those students do, in fact, do well.
Just because there may be different expectations doesn’t mean those new expectations are legitimate. If community college transfers are struggling because of culture shock, then the answer is to ameliorate that shock, and assess why it's occurring. And if it means that academia needs to change, then it should be changed.
The culture shock is an issue, but the major problem is that different programs have different requirements and expectations. See my nursing program situation above and tell me how you ameliorate that issue by requiring cultural change in academia.
The real issue is that we know that the absolute best way to do this is to have students study what they want within the programs they can qualify for with their high school academics. We are just doing the American thing where we offer a cheaper alternative that we know is heavily flawed, then spend the next decade twisting the issue around to justify why it is failing when the answer would have been to do it right in the first place. And since this is America, it probably won't even save that much money in the long run.
Because the problem is most likely that the nursing program was built on the idea that the students would be entering into the program from the beginning from a "traditional" background. This is a bad assumption to work from!
If the issue is rigor, then community colleges should be made more rigorous. But if the problem is badly designed programs based on bad assumptions and culture shock, than those programs need to fixed to work better.
My community college was explicitly a feeder college: they worked directly with the California state university systems (CSU and UC) and a few nearby private unis (ex., University of the Pacific) to ensure that transfer credits were fungible and that transfer students got a soft landing.
It is possible. I can't say how easy or hard it is, but it's at least possible.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I still think a bunch of this is relatively unnecessary weed work at the moment because we're not going to change curriculums overnight.
Which is hilariously the real big question everyone should be ready to answer.
Cause if we're going to free publicly funded college then the first big dumbass question that's gonna come up is: "what are my tax dollars being used to teach?"
Ban basketball and football at colleges, both private and public. Those programs rake in so much goddamn money and pay the players nothing. The players are used up and discarded when they get injured or age out.
Yes this is an extreme solution and I have no illusions it will ever happen. Yes it is easy to come up with solutions to make these programs not awful and worthwhile. I'd still rather burn them to the ground and rebuild them back up. Take care of the players who got in on a sports scholarship, but fuck the parasites that make fat stacks off the backs of kids. Fuck them hard.
Not really the issue at hand though I don’t disagree.
The big money programs are mostly self sufficient, and the ones that aren’t are usually a drop in the bucket compared to state cutbacks when it comes to student bills. I hate the NCAA as much as anybody, but it’s not super relevant to the problem we’re discussing here.
Posts
I think in a transitory system, which is what we need to set up right now because a full fix will take too long to design let alone implement. That it will have to come down to student participation, essentially federal funds to colleges like loans that don't need to be repaid by the students. Basically kids get to pick the schools they wanna go to, the schools get to choose who they're going to take, and then the federal government pays them.
This shouldn't be thought of as the final resting position either. This would specifically be the old thumb in the dam till we can get a proper repair solution in here. I think this transitory system would need to institute price controls so that higher ed doesn't just loot the federal government via ridiculous tuition costs, but that those controls need to be flexible so that we don't accidentally kneecap institutions.
This thumb in the dam being requisite so we don't just forgive all these student loans and then pull the ladder up behind us.
Ban basketball and football at colleges, both private and public. Those programs rake in so much goddamn money and pay the players nothing. The players are used up and discarded when they get injured or age out.
Yes this is an extreme solution and I have no illusions it will ever happen. Yes it is easy to come up with solutions to make these programs not awful and worthwhile. I'd still rather burn them to the ground and rebuild them back up. Take care of the players who got in on a sports scholarship, but fuck the parasites that make fat stacks off the backs of kids. Fuck them hard.
Both the head of the university and the deans of each faculty are elected by vote every three years, where students, teachers and all the auxiliaries get to choose leadership.
All wages are on a scale, every emplyee gets X times a basic wage, depending on rank and function. For example, a Dean will get 2X the wage of an entry level non-teacher staff, so there is no bloat and everyone knows what to expect.
All positions, teaching, technical, administrative are contested, if there is an opening to a better position, all aplicants contest it.
Universities and Faculties are allowed to get their own funds through (extension universitaria, cant translate that one) working for the community? For example, in the institution I work at, you can study to get a degree for free, but there are other courses with specific content (basic english conversation, for example) that people can pay a fee to attend and are open to anyone who wants to take them.
There are good things about it, and a few not so good things. Im not completely aware of all the other systems in other countries, but at least I can say that this particular model works and its NOT necesary for people to pawn their future just to get a chance at improving their situation.
My community college was explicitly a feeder college: they worked directly with the California state university systems (CSU and UC) and a few nearby private unis (ex., University of the Pacific) to ensure that transfer credits were fungible and that transfer students got a soft landing.
It is possible. I can't say how easy or hard it is, but it's at least possible.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Not really the issue at hand though I don’t disagree.
The big money programs are mostly self sufficient, and the ones that aren’t are usually a drop in the bucket compared to state cutbacks when it comes to student bills. I hate the NCAA as much as anybody, but it’s not super relevant to the problem we’re discussing here.