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.?)
We do all of this already with the military and honestly I'd love to see a non military version of it.
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.
You are missing the magnitude of the bullshit that goes in the third world. Republicans do not generally say "this government is illegitimate because it is Democrat", they say "this government is illegitimate because of some electoral flaw". But you Americans love your procedural objections - your entire goddamn judicial and governmental system is built on it - so how is that surprising?
It's not like your nation has never seen actual partisan war and renunciation of its overarching national identity before. It has, as a reminder.
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 it has changed somewhat.
Apparently you do since you were more than happy to go to Canada for school. And I doubt just so you could lament the state of their system compared to your home's.
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.
Including a lot of fishiness, like voting machines being shut down or not delivered to poor urban neighborhoods, a judge ruling that the code was all proprietary and couldn't be examined for flaws (despite people showing how easy it was to hack them), and the head of Diebold pledging to deliver Ohio to Bush.
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.
You are missing the magnitude of the bullshit that goes in the third world. Republicans do not generally say "this government is illegitimate because it is Democrat", they say "this government is illegitimate because of some electoral flaw". But you Americans love your procedural objections - your entire goddamn judicial and governmental system is built on it - so how is that surprising?
It's not like your nation has never seen actual partisan war and renunciation of its overarching national identity before. It has, as a reminder.
Actually they do pretty much. It was a huge thing right after Obama got elected on Fox News and the like.
You know what I'm reminded of? A circle of Internet Libertarians sitting around masturbating each other's fantasies about free Americans used to be. If you're going to say the United States circa 2008 is qualitatively similar to a nascent national awakening realizing that it is being suddenly ruled by a foreign Other, I'm going to say you have no perspective.
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 think the point you ought to try and argue, SKFM, is that it could encourage some recent graduates to remain in-state so that they have a better chance of recouping a state-level benefit for a state-level expenditure. About 25% of all Arizona residents aged 25 years or over have a bachelor's degree. That's a few percentage points below the national average (around 28%). If you could encourage more students to remain in state upon graduation, the state's labor pool might gradually become more attractive to employers who are looking for places to start new businesses or expand existing locations for current businesses.
I'm still not sure you can accomplish this with need-based financial aid on the scale you're talking about without a hefty pile of possible service exemptions, though. More than 40% of students at ASU received some financial aid; local private sector enterprise will wither on the vine if you remove 40% of every graduating class and prevent them from even having the option to take other jobs. It'll also prevent 40% of the state's students from enrolling in graduate-level programs for advanced degrees, and they obviously don't want to rely on only the 60% of students who didn't receive financial aid to fill 100% of all positions in law school, medical school, nursing school, etc. You want medical schools to select applicants based on academic qualifications and aptitude, not based on who's available after all the financial aid students were weeded out of the applicant pool.
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.?)
We do all of this already with the military and honestly I'd love to see a non military version of it.
Agreed on that.
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
I remember Obama talking about something like this, a civil service ROTC program or something, but it hasn't materialized as of yet. Probably just an empty promise, but I think it's worth pursuing.
I remember Obama talking about something like this, a civil service ROTC program or something, but it hasn't materialized as of yet. Probably just an empty promise, but I think it's worth pursuing.
Rather New Dealy.
I recall it too. Republicans were frothing at the mouth over the concept that young people would be forced to work in camps and the concept was backed off while they tried to get health care passed.
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
I remember Obama talking about something like this, a civil service ROTC program or something, but it hasn't materialized as of yet. Probably just an empty promise, but I think it's worth pursuing.
Rather New Dealy.
I recall it too. Republicans were frothing at the mouth over the concept that young people would be forced to work in camps and the concept was backed off while they tried to get health care passed.
Indeed, I think Beck tried to spin it as "Obama's Private Army" or some bullshit.
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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?
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 everything doesn't always have to be so serious, right? I mean, choosing whether to move closer to the office but get a smaller house or to move further but get a bigger house and better schools may be a "rich man's" dilemna, but it is still something that requires thought and attention. Just because your issue isn't literally life or death doesn't mean it isn't a real issue.
I remember Obama talking about something like this, a civil service ROTC program or something, but it hasn't materialized as of yet. Probably just an empty promise, but I think it's worth pursuing.
Rather New Dealy.
I recall it too. Republicans were frothing at the mouth over the concept that young people would be forced to work in camps and the concept was backed off while they tried to get health care passed.
The youth of America forced to live in camps!
Unacceptable.
Unless there are moslems launching explosives into the camp, in which case, USA USA USA USA!
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?
(1) does not apply at all unless we explicitly tie college into a mandatory 2 year service committment.
(2) is aimed at providing the jobs explicitly to make students more employable once their service is completed. The idea is to help ensure that students actually get jobs in their fields, since the state has already invested in them. We could just offer people employment with the state now, but institutionalizing the system will help to foster the network of field specific "public service alumni" that I was referring to.
(3) is hard to evaluate. If the state does not have a productive use for the additional manpower (even at a lower cost) then it is not worth pursuing, but if the state is having trouble recruiting enough people, or cannot afford to pay full price for everyone it would like to employ, then it seems worthwhile.
(4) is also served better by this plan, because we are requiring more people to be exposed to public service early on in their careers.
I can't say with any certainty that my suggestion is the most efficient or ideal use of state resources, but I think that this program would serve some compelling policy goals, and I think that in the public sector, that may be enough.
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
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.
But everything doesn't always have to be so serious, right? I mean, choosing whether to move closer to the office but get a smaller house or to move further but get a bigger house and better schools may be a "rich man's" dilemna, but it is still something that requires thought and attention. Just because your issue isn't literally life or death doesn't mean it isn't a real issue.
I never said it isn't. But it's an issue of levels. I'm just trying to explain why you might run into a "lolk, rich guy" attitude.
Keep it in mind when you think things like "$2,000 isn't that big a deal." I try not to discount people's problems, but I think this might be one of those instances where one has to buck up. People who are struggling to make rent might not really care too much about whether or not someone can move house on demand.
These are problems that could very well merit their own thread on the help board or their own threads here in D&D, but they aren't the same level--again--as a proposed poor tax or how to fix our state education system to make it equitable for all Americans (and our foreign friends who study here).
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
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 agree that these are all good reasons that the heir should just hire someone to do the job, but that solution may not always be available in practice, since families are not always comfortable putting someone else in charge of the family business. This is clearly irrational behaviour, but since we have to accept this reality in at least some cases, in those cases I think we are better off educating the heir as well as we can, both through formal education and through getting on the job experience.
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.
While some of your ideas are good you're too focussed on how it benefits the government or saving government money not on what benefits the students most. They're not numbers on a spreadsheet they're living, breathing people who deserve a shot at gaining the most from college educations that will allow them to reach their utmost potential. Everything else should be secondary to that.
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
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 agree that these are all good reasons that the heir should just hire someone to do the job, but that solution may not always be available in practice, since families are not always comfortable putting someone else in charge of the family business. This is clearly irrational behaviour, but since we have to accept this reality in at least some cases, in those cases I think we are better off educating the heir as well as we can, both through formal education and through getting on the job experience.
But again, wouldn't this hypothetical Incompetent Hamlet be going to a private school rather than a state school? Private colleges can do whatever (though they shouldn't), this discussion is mostly concerned with the state system.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
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 agree that these are all good reasons that the heir should just hire someone to do the job, but that solution may not always be available in practice, since families are not always comfortable putting someone else in charge of the family business. This is clearly irrational behaviour, but since we have to accept this reality in at least some cases, in those cases I think we are better off educating the heir as well as we can, both through formal education and through getting on the job experience.
But again, wouldn't this hypothetical Incompetent Hamlet be going to a private school rather than a state school? Private colleges can do whatever (though they shouldn't), this discussion is mostly concerned with the state system.
Yes, but the meritocracy arguments seemed to be focusing on education as a whole, not just the public sector. I agree 100% that the people in this position (and I literally have one in my family. . .) will go to private schools.
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
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 agree that these are all good reasons that the heir should just hire someone to do the job, but that solution may not always be available in practice, since families are not always comfortable putting someone else in charge of the family business. This is clearly irrational behaviour, but since we have to accept this reality in at least some cases, in those cases I think we are better off educating the heir as well as we can, both through formal education and through getting on the job experience.
But again, wouldn't this hypothetical Incompetent Hamlet be going to a private school rather than a state school? Private colleges can do whatever (though they shouldn't), this discussion is mostly concerned with the state system.
Yes, but the meritocracy arguments seemed to be focusing on education as a whole, not just the public sector. I agree 100% that the people in this position (and I literally have one in my family. . .) will go to private schools.
Ah, yes. There's very little we can do about the private sector, though.
All my comments have been about handling the state system.
I would like to see a meritocracy across the board, but I'm also not against letting Rich Kids pay their way in, so long as it's not to the detriment of students who deserve a place more.
It's not our job to make sure Incompetent Hamlet doesn't fuck up his company. If it's big enough to hurt the economy like that, it's public, and the shareholders will cull the wheat from the chaff.
I fail to see why perpetuating dynasties and preserving inherited wealth should be a goal of higher education in this country. Or even a consideration. It should not be.
I fail to see why perpetuating dynasties and preserving inherited wealth should be a goal of higher education in this country. Or even a consideration. It should not be.
America's always had its own aristocracy. Only rather then it being royalty or nobility they're from business and politics.
I fail to see why perpetuating dynasties and preserving inherited wealth should be a goal of higher education in this country. Or even a consideration. It should not be.
America's always had its own aristocracy. Only rather then it being royalty or nobility they're from business and politics.
And their wealth will ensure that they find an education if that's what they need. It always has. Thus, it is not a worthwhile concern when considering our education policies.
I find the hypothetical, so-and-so needs a degree to run daddies business, to be a thoroughly uncompelling argument against merit based college admissions.
I fail to see why perpetuating dynasties and preserving inherited wealth should be a goal of higher education in this country. Or even a consideration. It should not be.
America's always had its own aristocracy. Only rather then it being royalty or nobility they're from business and politics.
And their wealth will ensure that they find an education if that's what they need. It always has. Thus, it is not a worthwhile concern when considering our education policies.
I find the hypothetical, so-and-so needs a degree to run daddies business, to be a thoroughly uncompelling argument against merit based college admissions.
The thing about America is that the rich can take care of themselves, they always have and they always will. No one is going to throw them outof their homes and steal all their money.
The government should be looking after the little guy, no matter what Mitt Romney thinks.
I fail to see why perpetuating dynasties and preserving inherited wealth should be a goal of higher education in this country. Or even a consideration. It should not be.
America's always had its own aristocracy. Only rather then it being royalty or nobility they're from business and politics.
And their wealth will ensure that they find an education if that's what they need. It always has. Thus, it is not a worthwhile concern when considering our education policies.
Agreed.
I find the hypothetical, so-and-so needs a degree to run daddies business, to be a thoroughly uncompelling argument against merit based college admissions.
Even heirs needs to be trained if they want to a run the family business. That said, they can get that from private schools and work experience at said business. If they want to be in state schools they should only get their by merit only, not by their daddy buying the school's acceptance with a new wing.
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.?)
We do all of this already with the military and honestly I'd love to see a non military version of it.
Agreed on that.
Me too. One big reason is that there are no small number of kids whose parents are well off enough to disqualify them (in whole or part) for need based aid, but who are unwilling or unable (due to poor money management) to help their kids through.
Kids shouldn't get fucked because their parents suck, and every now and then that applies to the upper class kids too.
There should be a method for them to earn their aid without getting shot at.
Even heirs needs to be trained if they want to a run the family business. That said, they can get that from private schools and work experience at said business. If they want to be in state schools they should only get their by merit only, not by their daddy buying the school's acceptance with a new wing.
I dismiss the possibility of an heir who performs so poorly in primary and secondary school that he or she cannot gain access to any college program. Billy Madison was a movie, not a reality show. What actually happens is that a gift or donation needs to be passed to get the brat into one of the best schools. That pathetic reality is between the private institution and Bush senior. If a very wealthy person wants their child to inherit and run the family business, and didn't even bother to notice that junior was a dumbass early enough to hire tutors (a supremely unlikely situation) I don't see that as the states problem. At all. Not even in the slightest way. The company would be better off in a trust.
Even heirs needs to be trained if they want to a run the family business. That said, they can get that from private schools and work experience at said business. If they want to be in state schools they should only get their by merit only, not by their daddy buying the school's acceptance with a new wing.
I dismiss the possibility of an heir who performs so poorly in primary and secondary school that he or she cannot gain access to any college program. Billy Madison was a movie, not a reality show. What actually happens is that a gift or donation needs to be passed to get the brat into one of the best schools. That pathetic reality is between the private institution and Bush senior. If a very wealthy person wants their child to inherit and run the family business, and didn't even bother to notice that junior was a dumbass early enough to hire tutors (a supremely unlikely situation) I don't see that as the states problem. At all. Not even in the slightest way. The company would be better off in a trust.
Echoing this throughout the chamber.
It's funny how socialism is only a bad word when it helps out the poor.
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.
I don't really care.
And yet you reply.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
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 agree that these are all good reasons that the heir should just hire someone to do the job, but that solution may not always be available in practice, since families are not always comfortable putting someone else in charge of the family business. This is clearly irrational behaviour, but since we have to accept this reality in at least some cases, in those cases I think we are better off educating the heir as well as we can, both through formal education and through getting on the job experience.
But again, wouldn't this hypothetical Incompetent Hamlet be going to a private school rather than a state school? Private colleges can do whatever (though they shouldn't), this discussion is mostly concerned with the state system.
Yes, but the meritocracy arguments seemed to be focusing on education as a whole, not just the public sector. I agree 100% that the people in this position (and I literally have one in my family. . .) will go to private schools.
Ah, yes. There's very little we can do about the private sector, though.
All my comments have been about handling the state system.
I would like to see a meritocracy across the board, but I'm also not against letting Rich Kids pay their way in, so long as it's not to the detriment of students who deserve a place more.
It's not our job to make sure Incompetent Hamlet doesn't fuck up his company. If it's big enough to hurt the economy like that, it's public, and the shareholders will cull the wheat from the chaff.
Here is the story from in my family, fuzzied up a little to keep it from being identifiable.
I had an uncle who was a self made man. Came up from nothing, and without even having a college education he built a big, important company worth a lot of money, and which employees a lot of people in America and abroad. The Company is private, and my uncle and his wife owned it all. So eventually my uncle wanted to retire, and tried putting his son (who had been groomed for the job his whole life) in charge of a division. It was a disaster, and the whole division nearly went out of business. So my uncle stayed on, and continued to work until the day he was literally too ill to work anymore. Around the time that my uncle got too sick to run the company, his son (who was now in charge) made a deal to sell the company to a competitor (who proceeded to fire a number of employees), leading to a terrible feud.
This is not an example where the heir could not get into college (he went to a private school) but it does show that, for good or for ill, there are ridiculous situations like this where the fate of a company (and its employees) is literally going to be in the hands of a specific person whether or not they are qualified, and I think this is reason enough to make exceptions to a strict, across the board meritocracy policy (which I am generally in favor of).
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 agree that these are all good reasons that the heir should just hire someone to do the job, but that solution may not always be available in practice, since families are not always comfortable putting someone else in charge of the family business. This is clearly irrational behaviour, but since we have to accept this reality in at least some cases, in those cases I think we are better off educating the heir as well as we can, both through formal education and through getting on the job experience.
But again, wouldn't this hypothetical Incompetent Hamlet be going to a private school rather than a state school? Private colleges can do whatever (though they shouldn't), this discussion is mostly concerned with the state system.
Yes, but the meritocracy arguments seemed to be focusing on education as a whole, not just the public sector. I agree 100% that the people in this position (and I literally have one in my family. . .) will go to private schools.
Ah, yes. There's very little we can do about the private sector, though.
All my comments have been about handling the state system.
I would like to see a meritocracy across the board, but I'm also not against letting Rich Kids pay their way in, so long as it's not to the detriment of students who deserve a place more.
It's not our job to make sure Incompetent Hamlet doesn't fuck up his company. If it's big enough to hurt the economy like that, it's public, and the shareholders will cull the wheat from the chaff.
Here is the story from in my family, fuzzied up a little to keep it from being identifiable.
I had an uncle who was a self made man. Came up from nothing, and without even having a college education he built a big, important company worth a lot of money, and which employees a lot of people in America and abroad. The Company is private, and my uncle and his wife owned it all. So eventually my uncle wanted to retire, and tried putting his son (who had been groomed for the job his whole life) in charge of a division. It was a disaster, and the whole division nearly went out of business. So my uncle stayed on, and continued to work until the day he was literally too ill to work anymore. Around the time that my uncle got too sick to run the company, his son (who was now in charge) made a deal to sell the company to a competitor (who proceeded to fire a number of employees), leading to a terrible feud.
This is not an example where the heir could not get into college (he went to a private school) but it does show that, for good or for ill, there are ridiculous situations like this where the fate of a company (and its employees) is literally going to be in the hands of a specific person whether or not they are qualified, and I think this is reason enough to make exceptions to a strict, across the board meritocracy policy (which I am generally in favor of).
I don't understand how this anecdote supports the exception you are arguing for. It doesn't seem to line up at all.
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 agree that these are all good reasons that the heir should just hire someone to do the job, but that solution may not always be available in practice, since families are not always comfortable putting someone else in charge of the family business. This is clearly irrational behaviour, but since we have to accept this reality in at least some cases, in those cases I think we are better off educating the heir as well as we can, both through formal education and through getting on the job experience.
But again, wouldn't this hypothetical Incompetent Hamlet be going to a private school rather than a state school? Private colleges can do whatever (though they shouldn't), this discussion is mostly concerned with the state system.
Yes, but the meritocracy arguments seemed to be focusing on education as a whole, not just the public sector. I agree 100% that the people in this position (and I literally have one in my family. . .) will go to private schools.
Ah, yes. There's very little we can do about the private sector, though.
All my comments have been about handling the state system.
I would like to see a meritocracy across the board, but I'm also not against letting Rich Kids pay their way in, so long as it's not to the detriment of students who deserve a place more.
It's not our job to make sure Incompetent Hamlet doesn't fuck up his company. If it's big enough to hurt the economy like that, it's public, and the shareholders will cull the wheat from the chaff.
Here is the story from in my family, fuzzied up a little to keep it from being identifiable.
I had an uncle who was a self made man. Came up from nothing, and without even having a college education he built a big, important company worth a lot of money, and which employees a lot of people in America and abroad. The Company is private, and my uncle and his wife owned it all. So eventually my uncle wanted to retire, and tried putting his son (who had been groomed for the job his whole life) in charge of a division. It was a disaster, and the whole division nearly went out of business. So my uncle stayed on, and continued to work until the day he was literally too ill to work anymore. Around the time that my uncle got too sick to run the company, his son (who was now in charge) made a deal to sell the company to a competitor (who proceeded to fire a number of employees), leading to a terrible feud.
This is not an example where the heir could not get into college (he went to a private school) but it does show that, for good or for ill, there are ridiculous situations like this where the fate of a company (and its employees) is literally going to be in the hands of a specific person whether or not they are qualified, and I think this is reason enough to make exceptions to a strict, across the board meritocracy policy (which I am generally in favor of).
I don't quite get what you're hoping this example will demonstrate except the danger of inherited wealth.
If you run a company, you have moral obligation to choose the best successor to ensure your company survives. If that isn't your kids, that's a goddamn shame, but it isn't society's job to protect your empire.
This story shows that even if you go to college, you can still run the company into the ground. I'm not for banning rich people from college, I doubt anyone is, but the fairest way to run a state college program is to have it run on a meritocracy.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
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 agree that these are all good reasons that the heir should just hire someone to do the job, but that solution may not always be available in practice, since families are not always comfortable putting someone else in charge of the family business. This is clearly irrational behaviour, but since we have to accept this reality in at least some cases, in those cases I think we are better off educating the heir as well as we can, both through formal education and through getting on the job experience.
But again, wouldn't this hypothetical Incompetent Hamlet be going to a private school rather than a state school? Private colleges can do whatever (though they shouldn't), this discussion is mostly concerned with the state system.
Yes, but the meritocracy arguments seemed to be focusing on education as a whole, not just the public sector. I agree 100% that the people in this position (and I literally have one in my family. . .) will go to private schools.
Ah, yes. There's very little we can do about the private sector, though.
All my comments have been about handling the state system.
I would like to see a meritocracy across the board, but I'm also not against letting Rich Kids pay their way in, so long as it's not to the detriment of students who deserve a place more.
It's not our job to make sure Incompetent Hamlet doesn't fuck up his company. If it's big enough to hurt the economy like that, it's public, and the shareholders will cull the wheat from the chaff.
Here is the story from in my family, fuzzied up a little to keep it from being identifiable.
I had an uncle who was a self made man. Came up from nothing, and without even having a college education he built a big, important company worth a lot of money, and which employees a lot of people in America and abroad. The Company is private, and my uncle and his wife owned it all. So eventually my uncle wanted to retire, and tried putting his son (who had been groomed for the job his whole life) in charge of a division. It was a disaster, and the whole division nearly went out of business. So my uncle stayed on, and continued to work until the day he was literally too ill to work anymore. Around the time that my uncle got too sick to run the company, his son (who was now in charge) made a deal to sell the company to a competitor (who proceeded to fire a number of employees), leading to a terrible feud.
This is not an example where the heir could not get into college (he went to a private school) but it does show that, for good or for ill, there are ridiculous situations like this where the fate of a company (and its employees) is literally going to be in the hands of a specific person whether or not they are qualified, and I think this is reason enough to make exceptions to a strict, across the board meritocracy policy (which I am generally in favor of).
I don't quite get what you're hoping this example will demonstrate except the danger of inherited wealth.
If you run a company, you have moral obligation to choose the best successor to ensure your company survives. If that isn't your kids, that's a goddamn shame, but it isn't society's job to protect your empire.
This story shows that even if you go to college, you can still run the company into the ground. I'm not for banning rich people from college, I doubt anyone is, but the fairest way to run a state college program is to have it run on a meritocracy.
The point was just that sometimes people will fly against reason and put their company in the hands of their heir, regardless of credentials, and, acknowledging this unfortunate fact, I think it is worthwhile to break from ideas of strict merit based admissions (which I favor) to make sure these people get an education which will at least give them a chance of keeping an otherwise viable business afloat.
As a normative matter, I agree that we should never hand a company to someone who is not capable of running it, AND that admissions to college should be strictly merit based, but I am willing to bend the second belief when reality does not match the first.
If you take a libertarian stance, abstaining from encouraging nepotism will eventually doom all the businesses that practice it, gradually leading to its extinction in the free market. If you don't mandate education for people based on the idea that they'll inherit an enterprise for no meritorious reason, people will eventually wise up or go under, and then we won't have to worry about that problem anymore.
Which makes me wonder why conservatives practice the idea of inheritance economy. Forced education? Career imprisonment? Come on.
Paladin on
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.
We don't need that exception because, given financial ability, it's possible for anybody to go to college.
It might not be a great college, it might not even be a decent college if you've completely fucked up your secondary education. But you can go to college/university and wind up with a four year degree.
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
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 agree that these are all good reasons that the heir should just hire someone to do the job, but that solution may not always be available in practice, since families are not always comfortable putting someone else in charge of the family business. This is clearly irrational behaviour, but since we have to accept this reality in at least some cases, in those cases I think we are better off educating the heir as well as we can, both through formal education and through getting on the job experience.
But again, wouldn't this hypothetical Incompetent Hamlet be going to a private school rather than a state school? Private colleges can do whatever (though they shouldn't), this discussion is mostly concerned with the state system.
Yes, but the meritocracy arguments seemed to be focusing on education as a whole, not just the public sector. I agree 100% that the people in this position (and I literally have one in my family. . .) will go to private schools.
Ah, yes. There's very little we can do about the private sector, though.
All my comments have been about handling the state system.
I would like to see a meritocracy across the board, but I'm also not against letting Rich Kids pay their way in, so long as it's not to the detriment of students who deserve a place more.
It's not our job to make sure Incompetent Hamlet doesn't fuck up his company. If it's big enough to hurt the economy like that, it's public, and the shareholders will cull the wheat from the chaff.
Here is the story from in my family, fuzzied up a little to keep it from being identifiable.
I had an uncle who was a self made man. Came up from nothing, and without even having a college education he built a big, important company worth a lot of money, and which employees a lot of people in America and abroad. The Company is private, and my uncle and his wife owned it all. So eventually my uncle wanted to retire, and tried putting his son (who had been groomed for the job his whole life) in charge of a division. It was a disaster, and the whole division nearly went out of business. So my uncle stayed on, and continued to work until the day he was literally too ill to work anymore. Around the time that my uncle got too sick to run the company, his son (who was now in charge) made a deal to sell the company to a competitor (who proceeded to fire a number of employees), leading to a terrible feud.
This is not an example where the heir could not get into college (he went to a private school) but it does show that, for good or for ill, there are ridiculous situations like this where the fate of a company (and its employees) is literally going to be in the hands of a specific person whether or not they are qualified, and I think this is reason enough to make exceptions to a strict, across the board meritocracy policy (which I am generally in favor of).
I don't quite get what you're hoping this example will demonstrate except the danger of inherited wealth.
If you run a company, you have moral obligation to choose the best successor to ensure your company survives. If that isn't your kids, that's a goddamn shame, but it isn't society's job to protect your empire.
This story shows that even if you go to college, you can still run the company into the ground. I'm not for banning rich people from college, I doubt anyone is, but the fairest way to run a state college program is to have it run on a meritocracy.
The point was just that sometimes people will fly against reason and put their company in the hands of their heir, regardless of credentials, and, acknowledging this unfortunate fact, I think it is worthwhile to break from ideas of strict merit based admissions (which I favor) to make sure these people get an education which will at least give them a chance of keeping an otherwise viable business afloat.
As a normative matter, I agree that we should never hand a company to someone who is not capable of running it, AND that admissions to college should be strictly merit based, but I am willing to bend the second belief when reality does not match the first.
But this story shows that college doesn't always help. Part of your job as CEO is to choose a successor who is the best fit. You can't legislate for every eventuality. And again, most of these people will be going the private route.
I can see the benefit of allowing the rich to pay their way in, it gives the school income which they can then use to improve the campus and perhaps even provide scholarships and grants. But I think that you should have to meet the general entrance qualifications to get in.
No one is arguing that the rich should be banned from attending, but if you haven't worked hard enough and/or are incapable of doing well you shouldn't be going to college and you damn sure shouldn't be running a corporation that holds hundreds of people's lives on the line.
It's a moot point because the rich can always go the private route, but in the state university system, funded by tax payers, the only fair way to do it is merit based. It's the same thing as insurance, actually. We should provide a minimum level of care to everyone, if you can afford to you're free to go private. We should provide a basic level of education to everyone who is qualified, if you want something else or want to buy your way in, feel free to go private.
Again, it isn't John Q. Taxpayer's job to take care of the company's heir. That's on the parents.
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 agree that these are all good reasons that the heir should just hire someone to do the job, but that solution may not always be available in practice, since families are not always comfortable putting someone else in charge of the family business. This is clearly irrational behaviour, but since we have to accept this reality in at least some cases, in those cases I think we are better off educating the heir as well as we can, both through formal education and through getting on the job experience.
But again, wouldn't this hypothetical Incompetent Hamlet be going to a private school rather than a state school? Private colleges can do whatever (though they shouldn't), this discussion is mostly concerned with the state system.
Yes, but the meritocracy arguments seemed to be focusing on education as a whole, not just the public sector. I agree 100% that the people in this position (and I literally have one in my family. . .) will go to private schools.
Ah, yes. There's very little we can do about the private sector, though.
All my comments have been about handling the state system.
I would like to see a meritocracy across the board, but I'm also not against letting Rich Kids pay their way in, so long as it's not to the detriment of students who deserve a place more.
It's not our job to make sure Incompetent Hamlet doesn't fuck up his company. If it's big enough to hurt the economy like that, it's public, and the shareholders will cull the wheat from the chaff.
Here is the story from in my family, fuzzied up a little to keep it from being identifiable.
I had an uncle who was a self made man. Came up from nothing, and without even having a college education he built a big, important company worth a lot of money, and which employees a lot of people in America and abroad. The Company is private, and my uncle and his wife owned it all. So eventually my uncle wanted to retire, and tried putting his son (who had been groomed for the job his whole life) in charge of a division. It was a disaster, and the whole division nearly went out of business. So my uncle stayed on, and continued to work until the day he was literally too ill to work anymore. Around the time that my uncle got too sick to run the company, his son (who was now in charge) made a deal to sell the company to a competitor (who proceeded to fire a number of employees), leading to a terrible feud.
This is not an example where the heir could not get into college (he went to a private school) but it does show that, for good or for ill, there are ridiculous situations like this where the fate of a company (and its employees) is literally going to be in the hands of a specific person whether or not they are qualified, and I think this is reason enough to make exceptions to a strict, across the board meritocracy policy (which I am generally in favor of).
I don't quite get what you're hoping this example will demonstrate except the danger of inherited wealth.
If you run a company, you have moral obligation to choose the best successor to ensure your company survives. If that isn't your kids, that's a goddamn shame, but it isn't society's job to protect your empire.
This story shows that even if you go to college, you can still run the company into the ground. I'm not for banning rich people from college, I doubt anyone is, but the fairest way to run a state college program is to have it run on a meritocracy.
The point was just that sometimes people will fly against reason and put their company in the hands of their heir, regardless of credentials, and, acknowledging this unfortunate fact, I think it is worthwhile to break from ideas of strict merit based admissions (which I favor) to make sure these people get an education which will at least give them a chance of keeping an otherwise viable business afloat.
As a normative matter, I agree that we should never hand a company to someone who is not capable of running it, AND that admissions to college should be strictly merit based, but I am willing to bend the second belief when reality does not match the first.
You still haven't made a case for why there should be an exception, or how this exception would actually benefit society. In your anecdote, the wealthy heir had obtained an education and it still did not make him a suitable person to run the business.
There is no actual logic in your argument. It is a statement of "I support merit based college enrollment, except that I don't because there is a possibility that a wealthy person might be penalized at some point."
You are contradicting yourself. Wealthy people don't all own family businesses anyway, and the state shouldn't be in the business of trying to micromanage private businesses to make sure they passed down to people who will run them well anyway.
Any conservative or libertarian individual should completely agree with that last bit.
And you are saying you do agree with it, but then contradicting yourself and arguing for the exception.
I'm sorry but you either want the market to work or you don't. You want merit based or you don't. You sound like a "don't" in both cases.
AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
Let's take this hypothetical:
Two students are up for a place in Any State University. One is from a lower/middle class background. He'll need scholarships and grants to be able to afford to attend. Throughout high school he worked his ass off, saved up some money by working part time, took some dual enrollment courses, did some extracurriculars, and got a 3.7 GPA.
Student 2 is a rich kid, did well in school but not fantastic, and doesn't quite have the grades to get in on his own merits. Let's say he also played a sport and maybe was in a club or something. Took some upper level classes, was a solid B- student. But he's also the heir apparent to a big corporation and will one day be responsible for taking care of that corporation because his father won't hear of appointing a CEO from outside of the paternal line.
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We do all of this already with the military and honestly I'd love to see a non military version of it.
It's not like your nation has never seen actual partisan war and renunciation of its overarching national identity before. It has, as a reminder.
Apparently you do since you were more than happy to go to Canada for school. And I doubt just so you could lament the state of their system compared to your home's.
Actually they do pretty much. It was a huge thing right after Obama got elected on Fox News and the like.
I think the point you ought to try and argue, SKFM, is that it could encourage some recent graduates to remain in-state so that they have a better chance of recouping a state-level benefit for a state-level expenditure. About 25% of all Arizona residents aged 25 years or over have a bachelor's degree. That's a few percentage points below the national average (around 28%). If you could encourage more students to remain in state upon graduation, the state's labor pool might gradually become more attractive to employers who are looking for places to start new businesses or expand existing locations for current businesses.
I'm still not sure you can accomplish this with need-based financial aid on the scale you're talking about without a hefty pile of possible service exemptions, though. More than 40% of students at ASU received some financial aid; local private sector enterprise will wither on the vine if you remove 40% of every graduating class and prevent them from even having the option to take other jobs. It'll also prevent 40% of the state's students from enrolling in graduate-level programs for advanced degrees, and they obviously don't want to rely on only the 60% of students who didn't receive financial aid to fill 100% of all positions in law school, medical school, nursing school, etc. You want medical schools to select applicants based on academic qualifications and aptitude, not based on who's available after all the financial aid students were weeded out of the applicant pool.
Agreed on that.
Rather New Dealy.
I recall it too. Republicans were frothing at the mouth over the concept that young people would be forced to work in camps and the concept was backed off while they tried to get health care passed.
Indeed, I think Beck tried to spin it as "Obama's Private Army" or some bullshit.
But everything doesn't always have to be so serious, right? I mean, choosing whether to move closer to the office but get a smaller house or to move further but get a bigger house and better schools may be a "rich man's" dilemna, but it is still something that requires thought and attention. Just because your issue isn't literally life or death doesn't mean it isn't a real issue.
The youth of America forced to live in camps!
Unacceptable.
Unless there are moslems launching explosives into the camp, in which case, USA USA USA USA!
(1) does not apply at all unless we explicitly tie college into a mandatory 2 year service committment.
(2) is aimed at providing the jobs explicitly to make students more employable once their service is completed. The idea is to help ensure that students actually get jobs in their fields, since the state has already invested in them. We could just offer people employment with the state now, but institutionalizing the system will help to foster the network of field specific "public service alumni" that I was referring to.
(3) is hard to evaluate. If the state does not have a productive use for the additional manpower (even at a lower cost) then it is not worth pursuing, but if the state is having trouble recruiting enough people, or cannot afford to pay full price for everyone it would like to employ, then it seems worthwhile.
(4) is also served better by this plan, because we are requiring more people to be exposed to public service early on in their careers.
I can't say with any certainty that my suggestion is the most efficient or ideal use of state resources, but I think that this program would serve some compelling policy goals, and I think that in the public sector, that may be enough.
I never said it isn't. But it's an issue of levels. I'm just trying to explain why you might run into a "lolk, rich guy" attitude.
Keep it in mind when you think things like "$2,000 isn't that big a deal." I try not to discount people's problems, but I think this might be one of those instances where one has to buck up. People who are struggling to make rent might not really care too much about whether or not someone can move house on demand.
These are problems that could very well merit their own thread on the help board or their own threads here in D&D, but they aren't the same level--again--as a proposed poor tax or how to fix our state education system to make it equitable for all Americans (and our foreign friends who study here).
I agree that these are all good reasons that the heir should just hire someone to do the job, but that solution may not always be available in practice, since families are not always comfortable putting someone else in charge of the family business. This is clearly irrational behaviour, but since we have to accept this reality in at least some cases, in those cases I think we are better off educating the heir as well as we can, both through formal education and through getting on the job experience.
While some of your ideas are good you're too focussed on how it benefits the government or saving government money not on what benefits the students most. They're not numbers on a spreadsheet they're living, breathing people who deserve a shot at gaining the most from college educations that will allow them to reach their utmost potential. Everything else should be secondary to that.
But again, wouldn't this hypothetical Incompetent Hamlet be going to a private school rather than a state school? Private colleges can do whatever (though they shouldn't), this discussion is mostly concerned with the state system.
Yes, but the meritocracy arguments seemed to be focusing on education as a whole, not just the public sector. I agree 100% that the people in this position (and I literally have one in my family. . .) will go to private schools.
Ah, yes. There's very little we can do about the private sector, though.
All my comments have been about handling the state system.
I would like to see a meritocracy across the board, but I'm also not against letting Rich Kids pay their way in, so long as it's not to the detriment of students who deserve a place more.
It's not our job to make sure Incompetent Hamlet doesn't fuck up his company. If it's big enough to hurt the economy like that, it's public, and the shareholders will cull the wheat from the chaff.
America's always had its own aristocracy. Only rather then it being royalty or nobility they're from business and politics.
And their wealth will ensure that they find an education if that's what they need. It always has. Thus, it is not a worthwhile concern when considering our education policies.
I find the hypothetical, so-and-so needs a degree to run daddies business, to be a thoroughly uncompelling argument against merit based college admissions.
The thing about America is that the rich can take care of themselves, they always have and they always will. No one is going to throw them outof their homes and steal all their money.
The government should be looking after the little guy, no matter what Mitt Romney thinks.
Agreed.
Even heirs needs to be trained if they want to a run the family business. That said, they can get that from private schools and work experience at said business. If they want to be in state schools they should only get their by merit only, not by their daddy buying the school's acceptance with a new wing.
Me too. One big reason is that there are no small number of kids whose parents are well off enough to disqualify them (in whole or part) for need based aid, but who are unwilling or unable (due to poor money management) to help their kids through.
Kids shouldn't get fucked because their parents suck, and every now and then that applies to the upper class kids too.
There should be a method for them to earn their aid without getting shot at.
I dismiss the possibility of an heir who performs so poorly in primary and secondary school that he or she cannot gain access to any college program. Billy Madison was a movie, not a reality show. What actually happens is that a gift or donation needs to be passed to get the brat into one of the best schools. That pathetic reality is between the private institution and Bush senior. If a very wealthy person wants their child to inherit and run the family business, and didn't even bother to notice that junior was a dumbass early enough to hire tutors (a supremely unlikely situation) I don't see that as the states problem. At all. Not even in the slightest way. The company would be better off in a trust.
Echoing this throughout the chamber.
It's funny how socialism is only a bad word when it helps out the poor.
Here is the story from in my family, fuzzied up a little to keep it from being identifiable.
I had an uncle who was a self made man. Came up from nothing, and without even having a college education he built a big, important company worth a lot of money, and which employees a lot of people in America and abroad. The Company is private, and my uncle and his wife owned it all. So eventually my uncle wanted to retire, and tried putting his son (who had been groomed for the job his whole life) in charge of a division. It was a disaster, and the whole division nearly went out of business. So my uncle stayed on, and continued to work until the day he was literally too ill to work anymore. Around the time that my uncle got too sick to run the company, his son (who was now in charge) made a deal to sell the company to a competitor (who proceeded to fire a number of employees), leading to a terrible feud.
This is not an example where the heir could not get into college (he went to a private school) but it does show that, for good or for ill, there are ridiculous situations like this where the fate of a company (and its employees) is literally going to be in the hands of a specific person whether or not they are qualified, and I think this is reason enough to make exceptions to a strict, across the board meritocracy policy (which I am generally in favor of).
I don't understand how this anecdote supports the exception you are arguing for. It doesn't seem to line up at all.
I don't quite get what you're hoping this example will demonstrate except the danger of inherited wealth.
If you run a company, you have moral obligation to choose the best successor to ensure your company survives. If that isn't your kids, that's a goddamn shame, but it isn't society's job to protect your empire.
This story shows that even if you go to college, you can still run the company into the ground. I'm not for banning rich people from college, I doubt anyone is, but the fairest way to run a state college program is to have it run on a meritocracy.
The point was just that sometimes people will fly against reason and put their company in the hands of their heir, regardless of credentials, and, acknowledging this unfortunate fact, I think it is worthwhile to break from ideas of strict merit based admissions (which I favor) to make sure these people get an education which will at least give them a chance of keeping an otherwise viable business afloat.
As a normative matter, I agree that we should never hand a company to someone who is not capable of running it, AND that admissions to college should be strictly merit based, but I am willing to bend the second belief when reality does not match the first.
Which makes me wonder why conservatives practice the idea of inheritance economy. Forced education? Career imprisonment? Come on.
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.
It might not be a great college, it might not even be a decent college if you've completely fucked up your secondary education. But you can go to college/university and wind up with a four year degree.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
But this story shows that college doesn't always help. Part of your job as CEO is to choose a successor who is the best fit. You can't legislate for every eventuality. And again, most of these people will be going the private route.
I can see the benefit of allowing the rich to pay their way in, it gives the school income which they can then use to improve the campus and perhaps even provide scholarships and grants. But I think that you should have to meet the general entrance qualifications to get in.
No one is arguing that the rich should be banned from attending, but if you haven't worked hard enough and/or are incapable of doing well you shouldn't be going to college and you damn sure shouldn't be running a corporation that holds hundreds of people's lives on the line.
It's a moot point because the rich can always go the private route, but in the state university system, funded by tax payers, the only fair way to do it is merit based. It's the same thing as insurance, actually. We should provide a minimum level of care to everyone, if you can afford to you're free to go private. We should provide a basic level of education to everyone who is qualified, if you want something else or want to buy your way in, feel free to go private.
Again, it isn't John Q. Taxpayer's job to take care of the company's heir. That's on the parents.
You still haven't made a case for why there should be an exception, or how this exception would actually benefit society. In your anecdote, the wealthy heir had obtained an education and it still did not make him a suitable person to run the business.
There is no actual logic in your argument. It is a statement of "I support merit based college enrollment, except that I don't because there is a possibility that a wealthy person might be penalized at some point."
You are contradicting yourself. Wealthy people don't all own family businesses anyway, and the state shouldn't be in the business of trying to micromanage private businesses to make sure they passed down to people who will run them well anyway.
Any conservative or libertarian individual should completely agree with that last bit.
And you are saying you do agree with it, but then contradicting yourself and arguing for the exception.
I'm sorry but you either want the market to work or you don't. You want merit based or you don't. You sound like a "don't" in both cases.
Two students are up for a place in Any State University. One is from a lower/middle class background. He'll need scholarships and grants to be able to afford to attend. Throughout high school he worked his ass off, saved up some money by working part time, took some dual enrollment courses, did some extracurriculars, and got a 3.7 GPA.
Student 2 is a rich kid, did well in school but not fantastic, and doesn't quite have the grades to get in on his own merits. Let's say he also played a sport and maybe was in a club or something. Took some upper level classes, was a solid B- student. But he's also the heir apparent to a big corporation and will one day be responsible for taking care of that corporation because his father won't hear of appointing a CEO from outside of the paternal line.
We should let which student in?