Why poor kids don’t stay in college
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The answer is pay-as-you-go trade school, but it's going to take the nation awhile to warm to the idea. As one of my favorite sayings puts it, America is a nation of temporarily-embarrassed millionaires. We need to change our collective belief that a university education is every American's right. It's simply unmanageable. Perhaps in a few hundred years we'll have amassed enough national wealth to be able to afford the institutional and social investment, right now it's a pipe dream.
I did not graduate college. I looked at the cost-benefit structure and decided I'd be better off making my own future as an autodidact. It worked for me, but I do not expect my children to follow in my footsteps, I am prepared to bear the entire cost of my children's education.
Very few people need more than a high school education plus on the job education and training. Maybe just doctors, engineers, and scientists. It's just that in the U.S. we use education as a red herring to divert attention away from the real issues. E.g. It's unpleasant to talk about the total breakdown in family structure in inner cities? Let's shift the discussion to forcing these kids into mostly useless college education, as if people in other developed countries aren't working good paying respectable jobs after leaving school at 16.
Germany is also not militantly opposed to the idea of public investment in public welfare. Your track has to be decided based on how much money your parents have because a majority of American voters don't want their money going to help other people's children.
When did we start looking down our nose at tradespeople in favor of college grads? I'm not sure, but I think it's wrong-headed.
We can afford to give every American child a university education, but to do so we'd need to raise taxes or cut other spending, and we aren't willing to do either of those things. Saying that we can't afford it pretends it's out of our collective control, not our responsibility, which is a plain lie. We choose not to. We make a choice that the defense sector getting absolutely everything it can dream of is more important. We make a choice that subsidizing employers' payroll expenses (keeping their minimum wage workers alive on welfare) so that they can sustain their profit margins is more important.
I'd argue these are wrong choices, but the politicians saying so don't poll too well. They are simply the choices we've made.
You're right though, expecting students to pay for it themselves is unreasonable. But it ought to be a burden shared by society, not restricted to the rich. Elementary education too was once a luxury for the children of aristocrats; that we've expanded it is progress.
That's what politics is. If you can't understand the concept of a political reality, then your views will forever remain the domain of the idealist, talked about, in the same tenor that one yaks about science fiction premises, but never implemented. Sure, Star Trek has a cool economy. How many Senators watched TNG?
Political realities are stronger than actual realities. It takes real people to change things, these people are beholden to other people and not your whims.
GP claims equal access to education is impossible, like FTL travel or perpetual motion. The political reality is that it's just something not enough people care enough about. Public opinion is a great deal more malleable than physics. We could care, and then it would stop being impossible. So it is not impossible at all.
I think you need to study geopolitics a bit more. These things are not unpredictable. You just have to think a little bigger than what you wish was. The current US election cycle is an excellent test of how far one person can influence the news cycle. Donald Trump has steam, but he's pandering to a base that can't elect him by itself and he's making too many enemies to be able to muscle his way through. Candidates who don't come up through the current political establishment all have the exact same handicap. Obama couldn't have gotten elected as an independent.
1) The increase in college enrollment has exceeded the capacity of many in-state schools (a.k.a. the more affordable ones) and influenced many 18-year olds to enroll in out-of-state schools (a.k.a. the six figure ones).
2) From a very young age kids today are taught that college is a no-brainer, and the quality of the college they go to will deeply impact their future success. So do you pick that community college route which is affordable, or that six figure out of state school?
Every part of this is a quagmire, and it's creating more and more frustration and outrage. I have no clue what the end result will be, but it won't be good.
In case anyone is seriously in this dilemma, take up to two years of CC for prelims etc, then transfer to university. $UNIVERSITY will be where you graduate from, not CC. You'll also have smaller class sizes and will probably get more out of your classes and teachers.
So, that strategy can work -- but it has limits.
If you're looking for in state, though, the savings from a CC are huge, especially if you can still live at home while attending, and it doesn't affect your academic record (well, it may indirectly in whether your GPA transfers when your credits do)
> If you're looking for in state, though, the savings from a CC are huge, especially if you can still live at home while attending
"Live at home while attending" vs. "move out to live near school" is a separate axis of variation from CC vs. university. But, yes, its somewhat more likely that this will be a viable option with a CC.
This may be a case of "YMMV depending on the state you live in."
Madness is what it is. Pure madness.
Sigh
I'm all for increasing access to education, but these types of majors with 0.02% chance of job placement in their field are a major disservice. Especially so for first-generation college students, and even more so when non-dischargeable debt is involved.
That said, I'm hopeful that the industry that I'm a part of can play a large role in fixing this.
That this shortcut to poverty by medical bills can happen in a modern western society is appalling.
If you had said that you went into a walk in clinic I would expect a much lower service cost. You went into the same place that is perpetually prepared for a mass casualty scenario and received that level of service. Insurance has us so disconnected from healthcare service costs its easy to think everything should cost the same as the local mechanic or lawn care service.
My wife was in a bed for 3 of the 4 hours, seen by two nurses for maybe 1 of those hours total, and the doctor for barely 30 minutes while she took a large dose of her standard drug that we get over the counter for $20 a month. I'm not saying people shouldn't get paid, but two thousand dollars? And that's AFTER insurance, by the way.
A collision specialist will charge a greater rate for services than a local tire shop because; the tooling is greater and the staff skill levels are greater.
>two thousand dollars? And that's AFTER insurance, by the way
You never mentioned that this was after insurance. If your bill was vastly more than $2,000 - I can agree that we have a cost issue (stemming from insurance interference in the marketplace).
I can't tell if you're clinging to this argument out of pride or if you're just deliberately refusing to understand what "emergency" care is for some reason. Maybe you haven't had the experience of dialing up a significant other's parents to let them know what's going on and which hospital you're going to in the middle of the night, but let me tell you that planning out which hospital was going to screw us the least in the pocketbook was NOT in the forefront of my mind.
Edit: Full disclosure, this was the best case scenario: In network hospital and everything. I research this stuff ahead of time for this exact reason. The insurance company only covers 60% of the visit until I spend something like $4,500. When you make under $40k, $2,000 might as well be $4,500 might as well be a million dollars, it DOESN'T MATTER because it's still going to ruin you for a long time.
I can only imagine how silly you are trying to be!
This has been well documented and studied time and again.
It's not like Sweden or Denmark have much worse hospitals or doctors -- on the contrary, even a crappy US hospitalization will cost you several times more than what it would cost you there.
Heck, I was taken into a first class private hospital in an (advanced) Asian country, stayed there for the night, was taken care of by 4 nurses, had several exams/tests made, was consulted by 2 doctors, oh, and they even got me there by ambulance after a friend called (I had fainted atm).
I expected the worst, but the next day I was asked to pay something amounting to $50 -- without even having an insurance coverage (as I was just visiting).
The treatment can be relatively simple, but in those cases you usually don't go to the ED to begin with: an in-home nebulizer device costs a few hundred dollars (uninsured) and pays for itself by saving only one ED trip (even if insured). The exception, naturally, is if your asthma is undiagnosed or usually not problematic, or if you run out of medication and need more in a hurry.
If it goes beyond that, the patient will often require intravenous medication, which a typical walk-in clinic is not equipped to administer. Even if the attack is obliging enough to occur when the clinic is open, all they will do is send you to the nearest emergency department.
The most severe attacks will require EMTs on-site, because the patient could easily die before reaching the hospital. One sometimes goes to the hospital in cases where one fears it will escalate to this as a simple preemptive, because if it goes badly you die.
It's true that there is a cost to handling all of this, and that needs to be understood. Still, it's worth remembering that this isn't some frivolous waste of resources: said resources are being applied to a legitimate need. The alternative is not to accept a lesser "level of service", it is to accept a nontrivial risk of dying of suffocation.
An asthma attack that cannot be controlled by the kind of self-administered drugs usually prescribed to asthmatics (or experienced by someone who does not have those drugs) is a life-threatening emergency; walk-in clinics are not not set up to handle them, will likely send you out to an ER if you present with one, and are often not open when they occur.
Even combined HMO/provider entities like Kaiser (who are footing the bill themselves, and don't get more money if you take a method that incurs greater costs) will, if you call their advice line with such an attack, direct you to the ER.
The way to fix this is to measure poverty by consumption rather than income, but this is unpopular since it would reveal how little poverty really exists (eliminating an axe that politicians love to grind).
http://freakonomics.com/2011/09/14/whats-the-best-way-to-mea...
Net return on housing equity is income that you can use to buy stuff with - for example, housing in a cheaper location + other stuff. Living in an expensive locale is a consumption choice.
When someone's home equity has appreciated, they are now living in a more valuable place than they were to start, but they don't have to pay for this. That's income.
The idea of treating appreciation in home equity as income is broken, because it means that this kind of mass urbanization and consolidation appears to be an increase in income when in fact it causes a reduction in real income.
Not in any place were welfare covers those costs. There are people unable to work for life (e.g. severily injured) that still get a special pension instead of getting thrown to the streets to be homeless.
And we're not talking about "unable to work forever" either. I've had hard working friends in the united states who blew all their pension savings because of some urgent need for a few months of hospital care or some surgery. This should just not happen (and it doesn't in other places in the West).
>The way to fix this is to measure poverty by consumption rather than income, but this is unpopular since it would reveal how little poverty really exists
How about you try lowering your personal consumption to the levels you find acceptable for the "non poor", and tell us how it feels? Or, try working 2 jobs to support a child as a single mother, and tell us all about the great cushy living these people have...
http://www.amazon.com/Nickel-Dimed-Not-Getting-America/dp/03...
This idea, that poverty is some absolute value, and we should be thankful that we don't have to eat from garbage bins or live in caves really needs the Ole Yeller treatment...
I have lowered my personal consumption to US poverty levels (<$20k/year) while living in homeless shelter like conditions (minus the homeless people, aka youth hostels). In fact i enjoy it so much that I'm checking into one tonight; hello Singapore!
The idea that poverty is not some absolute value is kind of crazy - if we solve all this kid's current problems but give other people flying cars and robots (maintaining his relative position), will he still be unable to finish school?
Also, why do you bring up a highly non-representative example (a person working full time) to personify poverty? Why not choose a far more representative person, like someone not working at all or even seeking work?http://www.epi.org/publication/poor-people-work-a-majority-o... http://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/cps/a-profile-of-the-working...
Kind of crazy? That has been the idea for millennia, being poor has never been about specific, fixed in time, living conditions. Poor vs rich is a monetary worth issue, not a "does he have a cellphone" issue, and issues of worth are relative. It's the same "relative poorness" that's behind a guy making $15k a year considered poor in the US and frigging rich in Somalia.
>if we solve all this kid's current problems but give other people flying cars and robots (maintaining his relative position), will he still be unable to finish school?
No, he'll be able to finish school alright (and nobody argued against that).
But he'll still be poor though compared to the people with flying cars and robots. And if success in that society is helped by having access to such things, he'll still be behind his peers that have that access.
Same way that if a guy that cannot afford a car has been given a place to stay, he has solved his homelessness problem, but cannot as easily find a job since he only has access to nearby jobs that don't require commuting.
>Also, why do you bring up a highly non-representative example (a person working full time) to personify poverty? Why not choose a far more representative person, like someone not working at all or even seeking work?
The very title of the first article you linked to is: "A Majority of Poor People Who Can Work Do". As the article itself says, 44.3 percent of the "poor people" are "working full-time". That's why I brought up "a person working full time" to personify poverty.
Sure, it's even worse for those who can't find a job, or can only find a part time job. But at least with a poor person working full time the standard BS arguments that one can say about an unemployed poor person ("he's just lazy etc") doesn't even register in the first place.
Note also how that source defines "eligible to work" to get that 44% number (by excluding students/age >64/disabled, many of whom could be working). The single mother working 2 jobs is not even representative of this narrowly defined "eligible to work" category.
The ones who succeed, are usually more tolerant to stress and that is a major reason they complete their college.
They are usually also the lighter cases (less unstable situations), with a least some parental support, and also the ones who got a few more lucky breaks.
In the end, though, they ascribe it all to their "hard work" and ignore those things -- condemning those less fortunate. Mostly like privileged stable upper middle class students do.
And that this holds regardless of "hard work" and "intelligent decisions for the future"?
E.g. even if both make the exact same good decisions, the poor kid has to work harder to overcome what it lacked in encouragement, financial ease to just study, parental support, the need to get a job to pay the rent even while at college, etc.
While my family stressed the importance of education while growing up and the ghetto provided a great example of what I didn't want for my life, I didn't have familial support in steering me towards intelligent decisions- in fact I had numerous family members actively trying to sabotage my endeavors to go to college because they wanted me to start a family. I was 100% on my own in all respects, it sucked but hard work and smart decisions paid off for me.
Are you unable to recognize that your experiences may not be in line with everyone else's?
> I do not buy the crap or the "poor me, poor me!" sob stories about how minorities are so disadvantaged when they had a HUGE advantage over me, and were better off than middle class kids when it came to college funding.
Again, you're an edge case. "I had it rough so clearly there isn't an issue with racial minorities getting through college." This is a really close-minded thought process.
> Oh and we're not talking community college or state university, we're talking the most difficult of all scenarios: a private university where your yearly tuition (just tuition) was just under 30k per year at the time, it is now over 36k.
My first thought would be "Why this guy complaining about how hard he has it and then going to an expensive, over priced school?"
> I was 100% on my own in all respects, it sucked but hard work and smart decisions paid off for me.
Nobody is saying you didn't work hard or make good choices. Nobody is saying ethnic minorities can avoid working hard or making good choices. The point is that simply working hard and making good choices is not enough (hence the whole point of this article).
Oh I agree, most of the poor had MUCH more money through financial aid and easier circumstances than I.
>Again, you're an edge case. "I had it rough so clearly there isn't an issue with racial minorities getting through college." This is a really close-minded thought process.
No, I had it rougher than most. Though, I'm not an edge case- I'm fairly typical for those of my ethnic and financial demographic: poor single mom, ghetto neighborhood, and crappy adult guidance. Perfectly typical. Furthermore I'm not the only kid from my neighborhood to make it, before I moved I ran into lots of other kids from my junior high. 30% are now in STEM jobs, with 50% in much better socioeconomic condition form which they were born in to. The other 50% I've not run into since. There were some who slipped through the cracks, like one jerkface who's dream in life was to be a gang member, then dropped out and lived his dream until he got shot, and another who decided it was more financially viable to take over his brother's drug dealing post than take a full scholarship to Fordham. There's more but in short you can't save them all from themselves, especially the ones who make it a choice to be a loser. Everyone has options and financial aid does put poor minorities on equal footing with the middle class for higher education. If it were a middle class kid who screwed up their life despite being given these same chances to attend college but squandered it (by dropping our or picking a crummy major) we'd call him/her a "loser" or a "screw-up".
>My first thought would be "Why this guy complaining about how hard he has it and then going to an expensive, over priced school?"
That's a ridiculous notion on your part. Your first thought should have been: "If this poor person from the ghetto made it though the most difficult of all financial scenarios in higher education, what's excuse do poor ethnic minorities (who get more financial aid) have?"
>Nobody is saying you didn't work hard or make good choices. Nobody is saying ethnic minorities can avoid working hard or making good choices. The point is that simply working hard and making good choices is not enough (hence the whole point of this article).
Some are saying that working hard and making good choice don't matter, that is utterly false and wholly insulting to anyone who is self-made from humble roots. If you look at the article do you feel the parent who encouraged their kid to major in Theater was making a good choice? SERIOUSLY? Other than rehearsing the line "do you want fries with that" in preparation for a lifetime of failure, what good would that major do? That is a perfect example of stupid choices with dire consequences. I've seen lots of middle class college students make this kind of mistake as well. "Oh! I'm going to major in Medieval Instrumental Arts!"
But they're also playing under quite different chances and difficulty levels, and facing much different odds. Heck, they're really playing a different game, period.
What's hard to understand about a kid from a well off middle class family with 2 educated and working parents who put money aside for their kid's studies has it much easier than some poor kid with one parent with unstable job and medical bills?
http://thewireless.co.nz/articles/the-pencilsword-on-a-plate
That said, that very real situation is why my wife and I took care to find each other, prioritizing a family and educational history alongside other "desires", why we work hard to provide a loving, stable, and nurturing environment, and why we're putting aside money in 529s for our kids.
I don't know what the outcome will be, but we are making our own investments and current sacrifices to help our kids achieve whatever seems best for them. That not every child worldwide has that same beginning is perhaps unfair, but it won't cause me to do less for my family in the interest of fairness.
What a caustic statement! Blinded by this much vitriol you are blindly ascribing your opinion to whatever aspect of the issue you feel.
For every "privileged" student, there are "less fortunate" who get a tax break, a student discount, a grant or whatever. The world is a bit more dynamic than you paint it to be.
"Caustic", "vitriol", "blinded", etc. There's nothing complicated about what I wrote. Some people get to play life in easy mode, others don't.
To give an easy example, some kids in the 40s, say, were born into post-slavery poverty, racism, segregation and Jim Crow laws for example. Would you say they should be just as likely to go to college and succeed as some silver-spoon fed upper middle class kid, and if they didn't it's their fault?
While "de jure" segregation doesn't hold anymore, it's not that much better for million of young kids in the projects even today.
>For every "privileged" student, there are "less fortunate" who get a tax break, a student discount, a grant or whatever. The world is a bit more dynamic than you paint it to be.
All these things (tax breaks, student discounts, grants) don't substitute having money, a stable family to support you, the encouragement you need early on as a child, and a good school and neighborhood in your youth.
Privileged students have all these by default (their families are simply educated, white, well-off, etc), the less fortunate students only get a chance at this if they manage to be able to go to college in the first place, which means they have already defeated the odds.
After all affluent kids have also downright bought degrees and college admission, by paying teachers, having their parents give donations to the school, etc.
Just force corporations to pay proper taxes, use that money to make college free, and you'll be doing wonders for this country's citizens. Alternatively, consider that the Iraq war expenditure could have paid for college in this country practically through the next century.
> Just force corporations to pay proper taxes,
Considering that the USA is one of the few countries that taxes on overseas profits, and has a higher rate of tax than many countries, what exactly are 'proper taxes'?
And considering that many countries have eliminated or reduced the cost of university without raising taxes excessively, why is it impossible to do the same in the USA?
The higher nominal corporate tax rate is misleading because of the structure of credits, deductions, etc.; the US collects a low level of corporate taxes compared to other developed countries (e.g., significantly below the OECD average.)
In what other country does the government fight so hard for its corporations' profits that it imposes treaties like the TPP on other countries? In what other civilized country can a corporation operate without giving workers vacation, or even a maternity leave? Only the US! That level of government support and exploitation allowance should have a global tax because it is unique in the civilized world.
It will merely set a new bar that everyone will need to adhere to, to get a job. IE: a bachelor's degree will be the new requirement for most jobs.
"The general idea is that you can increase overall productivity with education"
But does this general idea actually work? Unless you just give everyone a diploma, the problem will just be pushed further down the education chain.
If college were free, there will be a greater demand (of potential students) and the same amount of supply (universities) as we've always had.
This will mean more strict enrollment guidelines (IE: more difficult testing) and students that have the money for tutors or the parents that can help them study will always be at an advantage, and get in.
To me, this seems like it will just be a repeat of what we have now. It's a quick-fix that is doomed to fail.
We should completely get rid of the student loan system. Colleges will be forced to reduce their rates because nobody will actually be able to afford it and offer some scholarships to the academically talented.
Not everyone should go to college. You can still make a very good living in the skilled trades (plumber, electrician). Free tuition for all will not solve this issue and magically make students more capable, educated, or interested in a 4 year degree.