Federal student aid cut once again

Have kids of their own, out of wedlock, and purchase a Cadillac in order to get some of that sweet, sweet Welfare.

 

Call me cocky or foolish, but it's not in our collective best interest to have people dig ditches when they are able to do put their talent to better use.

 

Shhhh, careful. That's the attitude of the entitled.

 

I absolutely agree.

Would you argue that free money for college, with no oversight, strings or planning, has led to people putting their talents to better use?

This is another one of those examples where trying a half-assed, market-based solution just creates more problems than it solves. It's the voucher program of higher education.

Again: Rapidly rising higher education costs, the rapid devaluation of college degrees and the rise in freely available college money are all interrelated. It's the law of unintended consequences that so many people want to ignore. The world and the economy is a big, complex place, and you have to put more thought into your solutions to problems than "We want people to do X, so we'll give them money to do X."

 

What strings should be put on college aid? I think the problem is much wider than financial aid. It's universities who keep growing and spending money on dorms, rec centers, athletics, and other amenities, and then need students to pay for them.

My university relaxed its admission standards for undergrads who started in the fall. The resulting mess is administrators are complaining on how freshman aren't prepared for college.

I don't know how to fix the mess, because it's more than just students being unprepared. Parents who work all the time to make ends meet, and thus don't have the time to make sure their kids are on track contribute to the issue. The rise of single-parent families is part of that. Parents who blame teachers and administrators for everything instead of their kids is an issue as well.

Education is a mess. Money won't solve everything, but cutting the poor out isn't the solution, either.

 

A big, easy one: identify majors that the economy is most desperately in need of (medicine, engineering, etc.). Maintain adequate grades in one of those programs? Don't pay a cent for college. Want to major in Art History or *shudder* journalism? Find a way to pay on your own.

To me, that's the direct cause of the government's lazy approach to college aid. They've flooded the market with indiscriminate money, and schools are doing whatever they can to soak that money up.

If the government gave everyone $20k to put toward the purchase of a car tomorrow, you'd see even the most basic models become a lot more expensive with a lot of unnecessary bells and whistles.

 

I think this a huge overreaction to the actual cut. By and large, per the Democratic source quoted, the biggest cut rests on the reduction of the number of semesters of support from 18 semesters to 12 semesters. I am a bit murky on the full-time/part-time mechanics in play here -- apparently the limits are in place even if you're part-time -- but even if you're a half-time student, that still gets you three quarters of the way through. And by the way, the bill increases spending in several other DOE programs. That doesn't strike me as "cutting the poor out."