President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Most public high schools are in part funded through property taxes. It's one of the reasons suburban districts are so much nicer.

State aid formulas are then used to bolster funding in the poorer districts. Only it doesn't work, not really, because school performance is not primarily determined by the shininess of the school or even, necessarily, by the quality of the teaching, although total immersion helps. It's determined by outside-the-school factors. that's where the drug war has devastated black neighborhoods.

Harris mentioned something interested last night about how black children exposed to at least one black teacher by third grade are 13% more likely to go to college than black children who were not. This is based on a study (whose size I can't tell) in Tennessee that costs money to call up. I'd love to know if the 13% is 8 kids vs. 7 kids, or 56 vs. 49, or 100 vs. 87, or whatever. Because that's interesting to me, if the ratios are bigger. (8 vs. 7 is nothing, but I don't put it by a single researcher anywhere to do something like that and act like it means something.)

 

That's part of it, yeah. That's progressive America for ya.

College has become a place where you acquire liberal worldviews and libertarian practices rooted in consumerism. If you go into a college union and you see a credit card display, you are swimming with sharks.

 

Every non-union trademan I know works a job with no health care, no retirement, and zero paid vacation/sick days. But I still can't understand why parents aren't pushing kids to go after these jobs.


My oldest? He's on his way to becoming a union electrician after spending his summer as a laborer working on the big Metro shutdown in D.C.

 

DISASTER!

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/12/free-college-now-a-reality-in-these-states.html

 

ffs

 

You must use bitdefender. You need to pause it on this site.

 

Hence my quotation marks around the word "free."

 

To your last point, I do think college provides value beyond job training, but that's a different debate.

I don't understand your second point. Free college obviously isn't "free." Funding would come through taxes instead of tuition, so I don't think we're talking about a lack of resources for the universities to provide a quality education. So if tuition to State U is eliminated, how is that going to fundamentally change the education it provides? Why would students have to learn "what the people who made it free want you to learn?"

Also, "free college" doesn't mean every young adult gets to go to any college they want for free. Harvard would not become a "free" university, for instance. Free college would expand access to higher education for those who would otherwise be unable to afford it. Students would still have to qualify academically.

For argument's sake, let's say the quality of education provided by free universities does suffer and degrees from those universities are devalued. Serious students would seek out better schools where they can earn a degree that has more "value," however you define that. The students who attend free colleges would still learn things they didn't know, get exposed to subjects and career paths they may not have considered before college, and maybe find their way to a solid education that helps raise their future standard of living.

Or maybe they fail out, realize college isn't for them and they aren't saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in debt as they move on to find a career that doesn't require a college degree. They're still a step ahead of where they'd otherwise be.

I really fail to see the downside, unless you're strictly concerned about higher taxes (a legitimate concern, of course).

 

There is a happy place between "free" and "lifetime debt." It's called Canada. Tuition is higher up here now than it should be, but it's still affordable to most people. I graduated with a Masters degree, with no support from my parents after my first year of undergrad, with zero debt. I valued my education in part because I did summer jobs to pay for it, but also because anyone going to the trouble to obtain a university degree is smart enough to know that it has a value.

People who think that "free" or "low-cost" education means degrees won't have value are forgetting about the three or four or five or seven years of effort it still takes to acquire a degree. (Unless you go to Harvard, and then you can do sweet fuck all and still graduate.) Free tuition does not mean degrees are given away. You still have to earn them with the actual work demanded to earn them.

 

I find it more depressing. A bunch of posters afraid to say anything for themselves, or anything interesting, for fear that a couple ankle biters suck in their cheeks and do their usual tut-tut routine.

 

Of course it wouldn't. Very few of the "elite" schools would be. Places like Saginaw Valley would be.

It'll create an underclass education, and right fast. For what purpose? To flood the market with cheap business and sociology degrees? To create a bigger market for graduate degrees that suddenly become necessary to "broaden employment options."

I'm cynical on it, I'll admit. I don't trust higher education for a half second. Our nation's colleges and universities already chose to gouge students the minute the federal government started backing more loans, they've already created multiple housing options to separate the richies and the poors.