Scholarships in return for a government bonds already exist. But say you want it to be sufficiently common so that you can fund tens of thousands of students every year, instead of the handful already aiming for a civil service career track anyway. Then you have to answer this question:
What penalty do you imagine you could impose for non-performance of said civil service bond that you can't impose for a student loan debt to the state already?
You would have the equivalent of the "dishonorable discharge" which can make someone effectively unemployable.
Being dishonorably discharged makes someone effectively unemployable because it isn't just assigned willy-nilly for things unrelated to your work performance, like defaulting on your student loans/bonds. You may observe that having a horrible credit rating today doesn't impinge on your career, at least directly. So why would private-sector employers take this into account? Are you proposing to penalize employers if they dare to employ someone who failed to serve their bond?
I would think that what a dishonorable discharge from public service would imply about a person's work ethic and sense of personal responsibility would probably be enough. You can default on a loan for any number of reasons, some of which may not be viewed as your fault, but choosing not to provide promised government services for pay seems like something that most employers would be very concerned by.
That is kind of a point. There's a difference between a bad credit score and a bankruptcy for instance.
anecdote time: I studied in Singapore for a while; the country is hot on staffing its famously high-skilled civil service via student bonds. Ratios are high enough that the top schools in every cohort can easily have half their student population snagging scholarships for bonds that may last up to six years or thereabouts
Employers just don't care, and thus default is a problem, mitigated only the extent that the country can make it problematic for defaulting students to return (authoritarian state, blah blah blah). Think about it this way: someone else has already interviewed and vetted this student for you. Why wouldn't you want to snag them away from their bond?
That's a better point than the first point. Alright, I'm back to, "If you default you get stuck with the bill."
How's that go yo?
How can you collect this bill in ways that you can't collect via a straight-up student loan?
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.
You know, I am kind of curious TNC. What is it that you think is difference between the classes. Is it just the circumstances of their birth and upbringing, or something inherent?
Its the will, means of that particular person to gain that wealth and the specific thing to get him above the social standing he was currently at. Using his knowledge to build more on the opportunity rather than get the "piece of paper" type of mentality that needs to be stamped out. And it can only be stamped out by rigorous competition and through adoption.patronage in a family with means who has taken a liking to that student.
But again, the ability to obtain patronage has only a tangential relationship to the ability to learn the skills needed to do your job. I want the architect I hire to be good at being an architect. I don't really care if he's good at charming wealthy folks.
Patronage/Adoption though the example of his smarts not his charm in Highschool.
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.
You know, I am kind of curious TNC. What is it that you think is difference between the classes. Is it just the circumstances of their birth and upbringing, or something inherent?
Its the will, means of that particular person to gain that wealth and the specific thing to get him above the social standing he was currently at. Using his knowledge to build more on the opportunity rather than get the "piece of paper" type of mentality that needs to be stamped out. And it can only be stamped out by rigorous competition and through adoption.patronage in a family with means who has taken a liking to that student.
But again, the ability to obtain patronage has only a tangential relationship to the ability to learn the skills needed to do your job. I want the architect I hire to be good at being an architect. I don't really care if he's good at charming wealthy folks.
Patronage/Adoption though the example of his smarts not his charm in Highschool.
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?
Its the will, means of that particular person to gain that wealth and the specific thing to get him above the social standing he was currently at. Using his knowledge to build more on the opportunity rather than get the "piece of paper" type of mentality that needs to be stamped out. And it can only be stamped out by rigorous competition and through adoption.patronage in a family with means who has taken a liking to that student.
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.
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
Adoption and patronage are regrettably not sufficient to provide equality of opportunity...
Life isn't fair. And by taking one more average person with ever increasing debt who goal is only to get that "piece of paper" over those that are skilled but can't afford it and would be acceptable to adoption/patronage is paramount to a crime.
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.
Scholarships in return for a government bonds already exist. But say you want it to be sufficiently common so that you can fund tens of thousands of students every year, instead of the handful already aiming for a civil service career track anyway. Then you have to answer this question:
What penalty do you imagine you could impose for non-performance of said civil service bond that you can't impose for a student loan debt to the state already?
You would have the equivalent of the "dishonorable discharge" which can make someone effectively unemployable.
Being dishonorably discharged makes someone effectively unemployable because it isn't just assigned willy-nilly for things unrelated to your work performance, like defaulting on your student loans/bonds. You may observe that having a horrible credit rating today doesn't impinge on your career, at least directly. So why would private-sector employers take this into account? Are you proposing to penalize employers if they dare to employ someone who failed to serve their bond?
I would think that what a dishonorable discharge from public service would imply about a person's work ethic and sense of personal responsibility would probably be enough. You can default on a loan for any number of reasons, some of which may not be viewed as your fault, but choosing not to provide promised government services for pay seems like something that most employers would be very concerned by.
That is kind of a point. There's a difference between a bad credit score and a bankruptcy for instance.
anecdote time: I studied in Singapore for a while; the country is hot on staffing its famously high-skilled civil service via student bonds. Ratios are high enough that the top schools in every cohort can easily have half their student population snagging scholarships for bonds that may last up to six years or thereabouts
Employers just don't care, and thus default is a problem, mitigated only the extent that the country can make it problematic for defaulting students to return (authoritarian state, blah blah blah). Think about it this way: someone else has already interviewed and vetted this student for you. Why wouldn't you want to snag them away from their bond?
Are you talking about people taking jobs outside of Singapore? America makes it more difficult to take jobs in other countries, thanks to our world wid system of taxation. You basically have to be willing to leave the country completely in order to work outside America anyway.
If we think that we are not going to get enough people honoring their commitments, then we could impose fines in addition to requiring repayment. I definitely think that the logistical problems have solutions, even if we can't think of them right now.
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.
Scholarships in return for a government bonds already exist. But say you want it to be sufficiently common so that you can fund tens of thousands of students every year, instead of the handful already aiming for a civil service career track anyway. Then you have to answer this question:
What penalty do you imagine you could impose for non-performance of said civil service bond that you can't impose for a student loan debt to the state already?
You would have the equivalent of the "dishonorable discharge" which can make someone effectively unemployable.
Being dishonorably discharged makes someone effectively unemployable because it isn't just assigned willy-nilly for things unrelated to your work performance, like defaulting on your student loans/bonds. You may observe that having a horrible credit rating today doesn't impinge on your career, at least directly. So why would private-sector employers take this into account? Are you proposing to penalize employers if they dare to employ someone who failed to serve their bond?
I would think that what a dishonorable discharge from public service would imply about a person's work ethic and sense of personal responsibility would probably be enough. You can default on a loan for any number of reasons, some of which may not be viewed as your fault, but choosing not to provide promised government services for pay seems like something that most employers would be very concerned by.
That is kind of a point. There's a difference between a bad credit score and a bankruptcy for instance.
anecdote time: I studied in Singapore for a while; the country is hot on staffing its famously high-skilled civil service via student bonds. Ratios are high enough that the top schools in every cohort can easily have half their student population snagging scholarships for bonds that may last up to six years or thereabouts
Employers just don't care, and thus default is a problem, mitigated only the extent that the country can make it problematic for defaulting students to return (authoritarian state, blah blah blah). Think about it this way: someone else has already interviewed and vetted this student for you. Why wouldn't you want to snag them away from their bond?
Are you talking about people taking jobs outside of Singapore? America makes it more difficult to take jobs in other countries, thanks to our world wid system of taxation. You basically have to be willing to leave the country completely in order to work outside America anyway.
If we think that we are not going to get enough people honoring their commitments, then we could impose fines in addition to requiring repayment. I definitely think that the logistical problems have solutions, even if we can't think of them right now.
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.
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?
High-paying private-sector employment is likely to be more difficult than whiling away eight hours every weekday in a state office.
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.
TNC is right that too many people go to college, he's wrong that we need unskilled labor.
We need more welders and plumbers and shit like that, the US needs to better route people into the trades or higher education, because the focus on college and only college is partially responsible for our dropout rate. Partially it's the ridiculous social stigma.
I mean a welder or a plumber is probably going to do better than a computer science major financially, but the latter has a much higher social standing is considered more respectable. It's kind of counter to the "money is everything" thing that defines every other aspect of our society
That said, learning how to learn is pretty important, and I'd love it if even trades people got associates degrees, if we could somehow make that essentially free. Basic economics, writing, and research are pretty important skills.
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!
TNC is right that too many people go to college, he's wrong that we need unskilled labor.
We need more welders and plumbers and shit like that, the US needs to better route people into the trades or higher education, because the focus on college and only college is partially responsible for our dropout rate. Partially it's the ridiculous social stigma.
I mean a welder or a plumber is probably going to do better than a computer science major financially, but the latter has a much higher social standing is considered more respectable. It's kind of counter to the "money is everything" thing that defines every other aspect of our society
That said, learning how to learn is pretty important, and I'd love it if even trades people got associates degrees, if we could somehow make that essentially free. Basic economics, writing, and research are pretty important skills.
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!
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.
So, funny story. You guys remember that revolution we had? The one we fought to get rid of a hierarchical society with debt slavery and serfdom? Well we won. Let's not go back to that.
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.
TNC is right that too many people go to college, he's wrong that we need unskilled labor.
We need more welders and plumbers and shit like that, the US needs to better route people into the trades or higher education, because the focus on college and only college is partially responsible for our dropout rate. Partially it's the ridiculous social stigma.
I mean a welder or a plumber is probably going to do better than a computer science major financially, but the latter has a much higher social standing is considered more respectable. It's kind of counter to the "money is everything" thing that defines every other aspect of our society
That said, learning how to learn is pretty important, and I'd love it if even trades people got associates degrees, if we could somehow make that essentially free. Basic economics, writing, and research are pretty important skills.
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!
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.
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.
Pi-r8 on
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
TNC is right that too many people go to college, he's wrong that we need unskilled labor.
We need more welders and plumbers and shit like that, the US needs to better route people into the trades or higher education, because the focus on college and only college is partially responsible for our dropout rate. Partially it's the ridiculous social stigma.
I mean a welder or a plumber is probably going to do better than a computer science major financially, but the latter has a much higher social standing is considered more respectable. It's kind of counter to the "money is everything" thing that defines every other aspect of our society
That said, learning how to learn is pretty important, and I'd love it if even trades people got associates degrees, if we could somehow make that essentially free. Basic economics, writing, and research are pretty important skills.
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!
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.
Is it actually a big shortage though, or is it just a few niche areas that can't instantly fill every single job for a low wage? Because 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.
TNC is right that too many people go to college, he's wrong that we need unskilled labor.
We need more welders and plumbers and shit like that, the US needs to better route people into the trades or higher education, because the focus on college and only college is partially responsible for our dropout rate. Partially it's the ridiculous social stigma.
I mean a welder or a plumber is probably going to do better than a computer science major financially, but the latter has a much higher social standing is considered more respectable. It's kind of counter to the "money is everything" thing that defines every other aspect of our society
That said, learning how to learn is pretty important, and I'd love it if even trades people got associates degrees, if we could somehow make that essentially free. Basic economics, writing, and research are pretty important skills.
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!
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.
Is it actually a big shortage though, or is it just a few niche areas that can't instantly fill every single job for a low wage? Because 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.
I won't defend it either. I can see the thought process that leads someone to think that requiring you scrape up $2000 on your own will mean only the people who are serious will go to college, but the simple fact is that not every serious person can get over that bar. It's a really, really dumb and regressive way to try and solve a problem that I'm not sure even exists.
High-paying private-sector employment is likely to be more difficult than whiling away eight hours every weekday in a state office.
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.
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?
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?
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.
Seriously, skfm, TNC is pushing a notion substantially further to the right than I think you would be prepared to endorse. He doesn't object if poor children subordinate themselves to rich people to acquire higher education through cultural institutions like adoption or patronage; he objects if they do so via the market system, aka, by borrowing money and going into debt:
Certainly I'm not for banning education to those who can't afford it. Previous times showed that if a student had the potential but not the means they would be adopted and educated. What my argument is that there should be a strict limit on who gets in and who doesn't based on both merit and other factors. Those just arguing that I'm for only the rich are incorrect. Those with the mental and monetary funds without taking debt should be allowed to go in. Those without monetary funds should either be told to enter competitions to see only the brightest gets in or try to get noticed by those who could send that person to university. This free for all system does not work.
We're talking 18th century attitudes here.
As I pointed out earlier, he won't back any form of universal 'brightest' competitions because he wants those who are rich but not bright to nonetheless get a free pass. This is outright classism of a form we usually do not see in the modern West, to say the least.
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.
Scholarships in return for a government bonds already exist. But say you want it to be sufficiently common so that you can fund tens of thousands of students every year, instead of the handful already aiming for a civil service career track anyway. Then you have to answer this question:
What penalty do you imagine you could impose for non-performance of said civil service bond that you can't impose for a student loan debt to the state already?
You would have the equivalent of the "dishonorable discharge" which can make someone effectively unemployable.
Being dishonorably discharged makes someone effectively unemployable because it isn't just assigned willy-nilly for things unrelated to your work performance, like defaulting on your student loans/bonds. You may observe that having a horrible credit rating today doesn't impinge on your career, at least directly. So why would private-sector employers take this into account? Are you proposing to penalize employers if they dare to employ someone who failed to serve their bond?
I would think that what a dishonorable discharge from public service would imply about a person's work ethic and sense of personal responsibility would probably be enough. You can default on a loan for any number of reasons, some of which may not be viewed as your fault, but choosing not to provide promised government services for pay seems like something that most employers would be very concerned by.
That is kind of a point. There's a difference between a bad credit score and a bankruptcy for instance.
anecdote time: I studied in Singapore for a while; the country is hot on staffing its famously high-skilled civil service via student bonds. Ratios are high enough that the top schools in every cohort can easily have half their student population snagging scholarships for bonds that may last up to six years or thereabouts
Employers just don't care, and thus default is a problem, mitigated only the extent that the country can make it problematic for defaulting students to return (authoritarian state, blah blah blah). Think about it this way: someone else has already interviewed and vetted this student for you. Why wouldn't you want to snag them away from their bond?
Are you talking about people taking jobs outside of Singapore? America makes it more difficult to take jobs in other countries, thanks to our world wid system of taxation. You basically have to be willing to leave the country completely in order to work outside America anyway.
If we think that we are not going to get enough people honoring their commitments, then we could impose fines in addition to requiring repayment. I definitely think that the logistical problems have solutions, even if we can't think of them right now.
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.
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.
If we match people with jobs that are relevant to their degrees,
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.
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.
ronya on
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
What about people who don't want to work for the civil service? The idea of university is to give people choice.
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.
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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.
You know, I am kind of curious TNC. What is it that you think is difference between the classes. Is it just the circumstances of their birth and upbringing, or something inherent?
Its the will, means of that particular person to gain that wealth and the specific thing to get him above the social standing he was currently at. Using his knowledge to build more on the opportunity rather than get the "piece of paper" type of mentality that needs to be stamped out. And it can only be stamped out by rigorous competition and through adoption.patronage in a family with means who has taken a liking to that student.
But again, the ability to obtain patronage has only a tangential relationship to the ability to learn the skills needed to do your job. I want the architect I hire to be good at being an architect. I don't really care if he's good at charming wealthy folks.
Patronage/Adoption though the example of his smarts not his charm in Highschool.
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?
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.
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?
"More fish for Kunta!"
--LeVar Burton
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
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.
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.
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.
Seriously, skfm, TNC is pushing a notion substantially further to the right than I think you would be prepared to endorse. He doesn't object if poor children subordinate themselves to rich people to acquire higher education through cultural institutions like adoption or patronage; he objects if they do so via the market system, aka, by borrowing money and going into debt:
Certainly I'm not for banning education to those who can't afford it. Previous times showed that if a student had the potential but not the means they would be adopted and educated. What my argument is that there should be a strict limit on who gets in and who doesn't based on both merit and other factors. Those just arguing that I'm for only the rich are incorrect. Those with the mental and monetary funds without taking debt should be allowed to go in. Those without monetary funds should either be told to enter competitions to see only the brightest gets in or try to get noticed by those who could send that person to university. This free for all system does not work.
We're talking 18th century attitudes here.
As I pointed out earlier, he won't back any form of universal 'brightest' competitions because he wants those who are rich but not bright to nonetheless get a free pass. This is outright classism of a form we usually do not see in the modern West, to say the least.
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.
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.
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
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.
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.
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.
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.
Like, seriously, this shit is the kind of thing even the most hardcore right-wingers in this nation wouldn't touch. Most wouldn't even support it, and certainly not openly. Many might propose ideas that result in the kind of feudal bullshit he's peddling, but this isn't actually their explicit intent.
Posts
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.
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.
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.
Steam: CavilatRest
(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.
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.