I Owe It All to Community College
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Back in 2009 I enrolled at Community College of San Francisco. I was 19 and had no idea what I wanted to do career wise, so I took broad and rigorous curriculum focused on transferring to UC-Berkeley.
The 2 years I spent there were some of the best of my life. I was frequently pushed and challenged by excellent professors who had true passion for their subjects (a few even had Ph.D.s). I grew a passion for learning Spanish (a subject that I had found painful in high school) among many others and got involved with several extracurricular groups. By my second year I was an elected student government senator and president of the business club. I was amazed by all the school had to offer hungry students and I took advantage of every opportunity. Not to mention I met some of my closet friends in life geeking out in study groups.
When it came time to apply to 4 year universities (fall and spring of my second and final year) I decided to apply to Stanford in addition to my originally intended UC-Berkeley. Just a few months later I was shocked to accept Stanford’s offer of transfer admission to complete my undergraduate degree. Going to a place like Stanford would have been unthinkable for me just a few years earlier in high school, back then I had pretty average grades (around a 3.4) and mediocre test scores. Community college let me re-invent myself as a student and start with a completely fresh slate.
When I got into Stanford I eventually started to focus in on a major and skill-set, taking a ton of CS classes in the process. While I hadn’t studied CS in community college (although I think they do offer it), I strongly feel the high level of general curriculum I took prepared me to major in nearly anything I would have liked at Stanford. I now work as a full-time software engineer, something I had no knowledge of whatsoever when I first started community college.
No doubt my admission to Stanford is an outlier for community college students (only a tiny percentage are admitted), however a ton of very intelligent and eager students transfer to 4 year universities every year, including several of my close friends. They have now entered the workforce and are highly contributing members to society and the tax-base.
I could go on forever about the benefits of community college (and in some ways how certain things were better than at a place like Stanford), however the short of it is that indeed, I also owe it all to community college, too.
I'm paying $47,336 to go to a private institution and wish this was true. Internal politics and tenure have ensured friends of department chairs have gotten the jobs irregardless of teaching ability, skill, research, knowledge in the subject area..
> irregardless
regardless is fine.
Can I ask why you take the time to correct someone when it was perfectly clear what the intent of the sentence was?
Or should I say 'irreinterpret it'? After all, you would 'know what I meant' if I wrote that.
Ambiguity is fine if you're writing for poetic effect, but if you're trying to get a point across, it should be minimised.
And it does fit the pattern of negating the root morpheme.
[1] why not irregard instead of regardless?
Also, most English dialects don't strictly follow double-negation rules. I know this drives non-native speakers crazy, but you'll get over it with enough practice.
There is therefore a lot of "broken" english spoken, and I guess I'm just used to correcting people (and being corrected myself).
Irregardless is one of those words that is becoming OK to say just because so many people use it.
Language adapts and therefore English is descriptive rather than prescriptive, but I'd prefer if the opposite were true.
A statement in a programming language means the same regardless of the education-level, ethnicity, or social status of the reader. I wish the same were true for English.
Instead we have nonsense like Biweekly, which may refer to an event that occurs either twice weekly or once every two weeks. Why should it mean the latter when we have fortnightly for that?
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Anyway, I like to correct people (in as polite a manner as possible) because I like being corrected myself.
That would make English very boring and dry. What of poetry and evocative prose? Natural languages and programming languages serve very different purposes, despite their similarities.
Natural languages, since their inception, have been subjective reflections of people, emotions, cultures, points in time. What you wish for isn't even possible, due to the fact that different people will always have the potential to interpret things differently, based on their genetic predispositions and life experiences.
If we tried to make languages more prescriptive, we wouldn't end up with some golden era where everybody communicates amazingly with each other, it would be more like 1984 where the potential for creativity and emotional expressivity has been largely diminished.
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Edit: I do understand the point, and of course I try to use words "properly" most of the time. There is a difference between inventing new constructs and usages in order to express something, and just simply being "wrong." E.g. mixing up "your" and "you're" is a pretty cut-and-dried error. But, at the end of the day, all the rules are totally subjectively made up, and their only true purpose is to make it easier for people to understand each other, so if you can accomplish that, the rules don't actually matter.
What I mostly get riled up about are words or phrases that are just plain wrong, but that have been used so widely that some dictionaries have accepted them as correct.
As a foreigner I feel the same about English and its declining quality of grammar on the web
Please keep (politely) correcting people. It's only us against the hordes!
Ooh, I'm gonna get so much mileage out of that one.
Since when, exactly? http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/18553?rskey=7qC25f&result=2#ei...
> The ambiguous usage is confusing, and might be avoided by the use of semi-
Really? I live and learn. I thought that was commonplace.
...literally describes our ENTIRE language. It's kinda what language is... I know "kinda" isn't officially a word yet but I like it and I'm guessing you know my intended meaning.
*were
BFE Community College will not have the same level of academic excellence.
As far as the material goes, the curriculum of the classes I took was nearly identical to the ones at ASU. The diffeq course actually had a higher workload than the ASU version. It's interesting that CC/university experiences differ so much even among students of the same school.
It could be quite a different story in other places. I lived in a small town in the Midwest before. It has a big university, which one might think would provide some good staffs to the local community colleges. The reality was it was pretty bad. The only students who were interested in learning were middle-aged, who took the classes more for leisure. The teachers were aloof, most of whom were not qualified in teaching in a college, IMHO.
Bedfordshire University is regularly last in the UK legue tables on Universities.
I agree with others that this has a lot to do with location. The classes I took were as rigorous as any other non-community college I've attended outside the bay area.
It's difficult to comprehend how our politicians could have any issues supporting such an initiative.
It will also further devalue high school diplomas as well as make good high schools less of a priority across the nation (everyone is going to CC anyway, right?).
It probably makes bachelor's degrees even more of a requirement for decent jobs, making people more likely to take on student loans and spend their 20 and 30s paying them back for a piece of paper, restricting their mobility and options.
Throwing more money into a broken system does nothing than embed it further. Just about all of us here value learning, but our education system needs to be benefiting people, teaching people, and it is not doing that.
College is a HORRIBLE way to "certify skill sets." It's the most anti-liberal certification I can imagine: it measures how long you can afford to go without an income. One big result of giving college educations to a bunch of people that didn't need them is the credentialism race. Why does an office manager need a college degree when it didn't 40 years ago? Because now there are enough job candidates out there with a college degree that it becomes an easy (and legal[1]) way to filter out people who aren't smart enough for college. If you are one of those who are smart enough for college, this sounds great, but it leaves the people who can't cut college material up a creek.
[1] Griggs banned degree requirements, but no one pays attention to that
This is predicated on one very big thing: filing a lawsuit and winning. Well, and they're certainly not going to hire you now. But you open the doors for other people to get in without a degree.
I can't imagine anyone actually thinking that.
"Who needs good elementary schools? Everyone is going to middle school anyway, right?"
We have one less year of compulsory public education. I guess that devalued high school. However university degrees here are 3 years (4 for out of province students.)
Society hasn't collapsed. For many occupations, the "technical" diplomas (3 years instead of pre-uni 2 years stream) from a CEGEP are the expected level of education. There's an engineering school that specifically serves to convert those technical diploma to B.Ing (http://en.etsmtl.ca).
...and therefore making higher education more accessible is a bad thing?
The positional element just shifts money around, devaluing high school diplomas.
Only the productivity improvement element will increase net earnings.
I'm not sure it could, unless I'm misunderstanding. The US could print up 15 trillion dollar notes tomorrow, and pay off all of it's debt. Of course, this would cripple the economy in a matter of hours, but it would still pay off the debt.
Looks like we have a lot of room for improvement at which it is going to take a very long time to truly devalue higher eduction where a bachelors degree is looked at like high school diploma.
Under Obama's plan, that money could be used to pay for two years of community college for every student willing to do the require work for the next 1000 years!
Of course we shouldn't "buy everything that's cheaper than the Iraq war", but that's not what is being argued. This was just to show a contrast between two ~10-year projects. It doesn't take a lot of work to figure out which investment has a higher return.
I would be curious to see how any war ROI is calculated when not in a conquer and pillage situation (spoils of war and what not).
As a European I am exceedingly glad the US got involved in WWII, since otherwise the Soviets would have won, but how do you put a prize on my freedom and the freedom of future generations?
$6 trillion exceeds that considerably, no idea on the source (I'm not OP), but inclusive of civilian costs to Iraqis it might be a defensible number.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War
There are two very comparable super-relevant historical precedents: public high school education (yes that was someone's idea too) and the GI Bill. Both of these social programs (as they would be called today) have made this country not only a better place but MONEY.
Oh, good.
What does economics say about who captures the benefit of education?
What's the rate of return on successful graduation from community college? (Hint: check Schenk Matsuyama 2010.)
What is the graduation rate from community college? (And isn't that number a lot lower than you expected?)
Now, given the fraction of benefits that is privately captured, and the fact that some fraction of students are delaying earnings while pursuing a degree, what return do you expect to the government?
Also, do you imagine there being any limit on magically pouring money into "education" and growing an economy? Why is it that no other nation on Earth spends as much money on education as the US does? [1] Why are they all leaving money on the table? In the particular case of post-secondary education, the US is almost 50% ahead of its next closest competitor in terms of spending per student. What is wrong with all those other countries? Have you not told them this is a macroeconomic fact?
[1] The US is at the top, maybe tied with Switzerland, in pure dollars spent per student. http://www.oecd.org/education/skills-beyond-school/48630868....
I don't think chart B1.1 helps you make that case, I think per student numbers are probably a wash to that end unless several other factors are taken into account. Of the countries in that study, we're number 5 for primary school spending per student, number 4 for secondary school spending, and number 1 for tertiary spending (and number 3 for total spending if we include educational "services"? Not sure what that means.) That data isn't painting a clear picture of America overspending on education.
We also attract a large number of international students and they bring some money with them, some of them bring a lot of it.
Are we talking about increasing our annual spending per student? I though we were talking about increasing the number of students by funding the cheapest post-secondary education programs we have. Certainly this would reduce our annual spending per student.
Because the United States insists on taxing and spending money in ridiculously indirect ways that qualify as "small government", but actually cost more, rather than doing what every other country does and just having the national government spend directly on the relevant programs, but which are somehow too "big government" for Americans.
The average European "big government" is actually much slicker and more efficient because it doesn't build large bureaucracies designed to avoid the need for a small bureaucracy.
(Also efficient wars cost less time, and that one was even against a much more formidable enemy.)
This just seems like a variant of the sunk cost fallacy. The money blown on the Iraq war is gone. We can't get it back. So why would that have any bearing on the cost benefit analysis of another expense?
It shows you how society used to provide resources for people to bootstrap their lives.
The same individuals who benefited from this investment have not decided to pay it forward. They argue for lower taxes and support for education.
Time is money.
[1]http://www.ihep.org/sites/default/files/uploads/docs/pubs/br...
The problem these schools have is related to people lying to get financial aid, and then dropping out, never to be heard from again. If you get rid of the price, and school is free, all this fraud would end. (The fraud would happen elsewhere in the system.)
However, all that said: the FAFSA really isn't that hard to fill out. If a person cannot fill out the FAFSA, why are we sending them to college? Will we fill out their college application for them, too?
Is the goal to make "attended college" become completely useless as a job market signal? Why are we trying to cram people into college if it means nothing?
I'm working off these two premises:
1. The FAFSA is free to fill out, but it takes time and attention, which you say some people do not have.
2. Even if we make community college completely free, it will still take time and attention.
So, if the FAFSA is a significant barrier to someone getting into college because it takes time and attention, why do we think this person will suddenly garner a mass of time and attention when it becomes necessary to do the classwork?
In case it's the first: the FAFSA, once filled out, makes these students eligible to receive money in the form of student loans and grants, which can cover living expenses as well as tuition. And to address the second: having money means you don't have to work, or can work fewer hours, and in general reduces the cognitive load of 'how do I afford to live', freeing up time and attention that the student can now put towards their studies.
I don't know about you, but 75% of the cost seems like a pretty sweet discount. Seems reasonable if you want more, you should have to go through some kind of application process.
I think even if you are under a 2.5GPA in high school Penn State subsidizes 80% of tuition and the state does another 10%, so each semester of courses would only be at most a few hundred dollars.
If I could allocate my tax dollars toward programs like Community College and other non-University options (Coursera?) I would be all about higher taxes for education. But I get fatigued and resentful when public institutions cry poverty and then we see things like this:
> UC Berkeley Police Chief Victoria Harrison retired with a lump-sum package of $2.1 million and was immediately rehired as UC Berkeley police chief with higher pay than she had earned before her retirement.
http://www.utsandiego.com/uniontrib/20081212/news_lz1ed12top...
[1] http://www.calstate.edu/budget/student-fees/fee-rates/sacram...
For example, tuition at Stony Brook[1] costs $6,170 annually. At 30 credits a year (15 per semester), that's $205 per unit/credit.
You'll find that tuition in most state universities are around that range, across the country.
[1] http://www.stonybrook.edu/undergraduate-admissions/cost-and-...
If one parent in a situation like this is making around the median individual income of ~$40k a year, it probably makes more sense financially to not work until the kid is school age.
Obviously it's not that simple because of potential lost future earnings resulting from delayed career advancement, but I wonder if people really bother doing the math.
(I did two years at Orange Coast College, before transferring to get my BS, I will be donating to OCC this year, and my four-year school probably never)
If I can place any flaw on it, it's that the experience was in fact too edifying, and kind of ruined my attempts to survive the painful meatgrinder that was an actual full university education.
I think the true way forward is in replacing community colleges with certificates from online courses (with some in-person labs, probably). It's cheaper and would make for better quality of education.
I went to a CC as well, fantastically cost-effective, I had some real gems for teachers, but I can think of at least one who had no business teaching anything. If we make CC free, they become an additional paper prereq, and high school education becomes even less valuable because basic education gets pushed further back to the CC level.
Stop, stop, stop. I know many people on this forum like me value learning, but spending more money fixes nothing.
You are not supposed to be purchasing an education for yourself alone. It is supposed to make you a better person in terms of supporting your community, and your community is _supposed_ to support you for doing so.
I think you are being too narrow-minded in supposing we'd all be better off by adapting a policy that essentially maximizes selfishness and division of skill. One cannot have the flexibility to make good plans by refusing to make any sacrifices.
Taking a couple years of community college classes while HS age is a good investment. You can satisfy many of the general ed/lower division requirements & focus on your upper division major courses, when you transfer to a uni.
Yet another cultural figure stating without embarrassment how bad they are at math.
I'm not ashamed of many of my faults, and I will gladly talk about them if they're contextually important, but I'm not proud of them.
In my experience the prevailing attitude of arts students towards science was that it was arcane, difficult and something reserved only for the smartest and most studious. Many science students, on the other hand, view liberal arts simply as a waste of time.
Neither attitude is particularly helpful.
It's only when I started to do technical writing that I let go of that attitude. It was quite humbling, to say the least.
Imagine how successful he could have been! What a waste of potential. /s
Kidding aside, he has at least tried to promote interest in space exploration, so that's a plus.
I know part of this is to battle rising student loans. Loans will be much cheaper if they can have community college as an option to start with that the government won't have to pay higher tuition for. It is actually very smart in solving the student loan issue, the balance of lower tuition and not having to pay for the first 1-2 years of university tuition will be very big.
I think some kids need something to go to right out of high school if noone was there to help them be serious at school. It is also badly needed for adults that might need a change of career or some path forward.
We need to do this and require 1Gbps internet across the US if we want to compete and care about our own infrastructure and people. We need to do this before we fund another war.
We're talking about expanded community college for the marginal student: that is, the student who just barely cannot get into community college today but could with a little more help.
So making it free takes care of people who couldn't handle the paperwork of filing for a Pell Grant.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/10/upshot/obamas-community-co...
I can't imagine that eliminating the FAFSA form requirements will allow a noticeably larger number of substandard students to attend.
It may be true that tuition is free for some, but to say it is often or on average probably depends upon a strange definition of the word. Anyway, the students' expense is not zero, there are never enough Pell grants to go around. Tuition is not the only cost. etc.
>So making it free takes care of people who couldn't handle the paperwork of filing for a Pell Grant.
My own experience in the '90s was that the time I spent filling out forms and travelling to offices and standing in lines would have been better spent at a minimum wage job.
- He aced an English class by doing "nothing more than embellish the definition I had looked up in the dictionary."
- His recollection of public speaking class was a gorgeous flight attendant.
- He never ended up graduating with a bachelor's degree and pursued a career which depends more on good looks than academic or intellectual ability.
I just don't understand why I should be footing the bill for more substandard students to get easy As, ogle girls, and pursue unintellectual careers. There's already plenty of aid available for intellectually deserving students (read: capable of filling out the FAFSA form). Adding more will just drive up the cost to taxpayers and continue to lower the quality of a CC education.
The real kicker is that students filling out a FAFSA form are asking for substantially more money.
Of my college experiences, including my M.S. program, most of the professors I look back on as having really provided me with a quality education were from my CC years (though the best professor I ever had in any subject was at my uni).
* Acting like regular college students don't have classes that are super simple to game and pass
* Saying life moments like dating/flirting aren't important (what exactly are students supposed to do between classes anyway!?!)
* Saying being an actor does not require intellectual or academic ability (hint: it does)
* Has no idea what FAFSA is like or what it's like to navigate that mess
* Pretending that they aren't already indirectly paying for people to "get easy As, ogle girls, and pursue unintellectual careers"
> Acting like regular college students don't have classes that are super simple to game and pass
Oh, I know they exist. I just wouldn't write about them in the admissions brochure or an op-ed touting their supposed value.
> Saying life moments like dating/flirting aren't important (what exactly are students supposed to do between classes anyway!?!)
I suppose some people consider them important (I don't), but that doesn't mean the taxpayer should be footing the bill.
> Saying being an actor does not require intellectual or academic ability (hint: it does)
Maybe for better actors it requires some intellectual ability, but I'm unconvinced that most of Hanks's community college classes had any impact on his career.
> Has no idea what FAFSA is like or what it's like to navigate that mess
I'm in college right now, on financial aid. I'm well aware of the complexities of the FAFSA and probably filed one much more recently than you. But it's nowhere near challenging enough that a bright, motivated student would find it a hindrance.
> Pretending that they aren't already indirectly paying for people to "get easy As, ogle girls, and pursue unintellectual careers"
Oh, I know we are. I'd just prefer to not pay for more of it.
> I'm in college right now, on financial aid. I'm well aware of the complexities of the FAFSA and probably filed one much more recently than you. But it's nowhere near challenging enough that a bright, motivated student would find it a hindrance.
It wasn't very long ago when I did FAFSA and I knew quite a few bright people who struggled with the process. FAFSA is not a perfect process and leaves a lot to be desired as I'm sure you are aware of.
> Maybe for better actors it requires some intellectual ability, but I'm unconvinced that most of Hanks's community college classes had any impact on his career.
This is an arbitrary thing to say, as clearly to Hanks some of the things he's recalling were significant to his life and his career. We don't get to make decisions for what is important to someone's development, that is up to individual people. There were many experiences that I've had that make me how am I today as a person and professional and I'm sure some folks may want to write that off.
Other people I know have had better experiences at CC.
I fully support the idea of community college, in particular, I see it as a righteous place for things like coding bootcamps and trade training in general. Vo-Tech schools get a rough knock - they shouldn't.
One particular grief that has stood out to me is the financial recompense for instructing at a CC. I've looked into it (I am qualified to do so), and I believe I would take somewhere around a 40% pay cut to teach at a CC. That's ... suboptimal.
If the government picks up what little monetary cost isn't already picked up by the state or other groups, this will certainly attract some students to attend but I imagine those marginal students would be a lot less serious and would not benefit from the program. To paraphrase Nassim Taleb, it's always helpful to have some skin in the game.
An interesting statistic to look at is college completion rates [0][1] which haven't improved too much over the last few decades (although certainly on the way up for women). I was pretty surprised to learn that completion rates are only 30-35%. I imagine community college completion rates are even lower.
Even though more people will certainly attend, getting more people into college won't necessarily benefit anyone. For those that aren't able to perform in an academic environment (for whatever reason) are ill-served by the nagging insistence of politicians.
[0] http://www.hamiltonproject.org/multimedia/charts/college_com... [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/new-college-da...
I liked that the class size was small and that the teacher was willing to hear our questions. Some of the people were in the class for what seemed like grade 13 but about half the people were in it for the transfer program to a state university.
I admire the people who are trying to better themselves by taking advantage of community college (a bargain for education compared to the state schools). This is a very smart route whether they are trying to learn some new skills or attend the state schools on the cheap.
For those of you who think that there's no reason for you to look through the course catalog you really should give it a shot. I took an excellent project-based photography course and learned a lot that enabled me to take decent pictures wherever I go. There are public speaking classes, english writing, and all kinds of arts classes. Lots of other stuff like welding and auto mechanics. It's a great and relatively inexpensive way to try something completely different.
That said, I'm a community college grad myself, three times over. I have an A.G.E. (General Education) from Brunswick Community College, and an A.A.S in Computer Programming and another A.A.S in High Performance Computing from Wake Technical Community College. And I have to say, I'm an unabashed fan of community colleges in principle. I just want us to find better ways to fund things like this.
Anyway, I think so highly of the people who come through the community college system (well, some subset of them anyway), that I've often said that when the day comes that we can afford to hire employees at Fogbeam, I intend to recruit heavily at the local community colleges (Wake Tech, Durham Tech, Alamance Tech, etc.) I also intend to recruit at the "second tier" universities (UNC-Pembroke, Elizabeth City State, Fayetteville State, NC Central, NC A&T, Shaw, St. Augustines, Peace, Meredith, etc.
Why? Well, I believe there are really good people to be found - people who are easily smart enough to have gone to Harvard, Stanford, whatever, but just didn't for whatever reason. And if you're recruiting at these schools, you're probably not competing with Google, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Glaxo Smith Kline, Facebook, etc. for talent. Instead, you're competing with the local furniture manufacturing plant, the local electric utility, etc.
So yeah, community colleges are good. I'd just like to see more of the scenarios like we had at BCC back in the day. Some local rich millionaire type (a real estate tycoon) setup an endowment to provide free tuition at BCC for any graduate of any Brunswick County high-school. I'd love to see a concerted, nationwide effort to build a coalition of philanthropists of this nature to fund this "free college for everybody" thing, instead of taking it out of the federal govt. budget.
I am more of the opinion that the government should set rules on the cost of education for any school accepting government aid or any school who accepts students who pay with government loans.
Want to get the price of education back in line, drop the open checkbook.
The issue I take with taxing to pay for everyone's college is that apparently there is no determination what constitutes a good education or good student. As in, I do not want to see money thrown at majors that can never pay back the investment or require such skill and luck to achieve pay back relative to the cost. Then comes the student, if your just a fail student why should anyone foot your bill to stay in school? You get the same number of years as anyone else. If you don't achieve the diploma you pay back a percentage
Good point. Paying for somebody to get a degree in, say, Medieval History, so they only job they can get post-college is "Barista at Starbucks", seems suboptimal to me.
Diversity is what makes life. If you attach future earning potential qualifier to the free education, then you'll have a disproportionate amount of people attempting fit their square potential into a round hole.
Over a long period of time, you loose out the natural diversity that would otherwise exist in the general public - of people each dedicated to skill set they are best match for.
Not everything human produces ought to have an economic component.
Painters, Poets, Musicians... ?
In the end, there are no perfect answers to any of this, it's just a question of "which variables do you optimize for?"
Otherwise, you have to ask "is this education, or indoctrination?"
This is great. But then we need to stop talking about "investment" in college education. This is instead "consumption," like taking a ski trip to Aspen.
How much should the US pay for people to take ski trips to Aspen? I promise you they'll enjoy it.
So in the context of an environment where we encourage extended education via monetary assistance, we strip away all forms of assistance for the study of history due to some qualifier. Is this wise?
They might not watch, but they might not attend college, either. Well, we can get them to attend college if use the college degree as a job credential so they can't get a good job without it, but that seems like a cruel policy, especially cruel to the least smart in society, so I don't think you'd want that.
Sending everyone to community college to learn various things produces a benefit to society that might not translate to economic benefit for that particular person.
An educated populace is good for a democracy.
Can you explain why someone needs a college education to become a painter, poet or musician?
Your sentiment can be applied to any skillset. The same reason why a college degree is not needed for programmers.. One can learn concepts and languages from books outside of college. However the resources available in a community of like-minded individuals provides great benefit for the study of said topic.
Colleges are not the only such environment. But it is the most expensive.
>>Your sentiment can be applied to any skillset.
Not really, no. Would you let a doctor without w college degree operate on you? Have your city's bridges and buildings designed and built by engineers and architects who learned their trades from books?
Sounds to me then like you're in favor of "government planning" of the economy, which is essentially what it is when the government is picking and choosing which majors (and which people!) to subsidize. Strange libertarian position.
I personally have found that due to rules in my state, that I am prevented from going back and pursuing a computer science degree, because there are such limits in place.
This also doesn't consider that people from worse are backgrounds tend to take longer to get through school. This can range from personal or family sickness (caring for parents is common). We always hear from the proud examples of people who overcame their circumstances, but it creates a survivor bias.
From an economic perspective, we are missing out when people get locked out for life who could contribute more to the economy. That's less wealth being created.
I just point that out because while it's easy for us to come up with seemingly simply solutions, but without any built-in flexibility we're back to the same place.
Interestingly enough, that's a totally working class sentiment. If you want to move beyond that, though, and have genuine leadership and thought generated by these government funded programs, you can't limit people to studying only things that have a direct correlation with paying back the investment.
That's pretty hard core. How would you fund services like police/fire departments or infrastructure improvements (roads, electricity), basically anything where its existence benefits many (as opposed to say redoing education to require parents to pay for individual tutoring of their children) - voluntary tipping, usage fees?
How would you pay for courts and enough government to enforce contracts?
"Looks like 341 Maple Street is burning down."
"Eh, let it burn, they're terrible tippers."
> usage fees
"We'd be happy to put out your house fire, sir. Just swipe your MasterCard here."
I would assume it would be the same if you couldn't afford your property taxes in today's system. You don't own a house?
Wouldn't food also fall into this category? Its existence benefits many. Would you want to nationalize food production?
Well you'd just wait for Marcus Crassus to come down with his fleet of slaves to offer you a rock-bottom price for your home in exchange for his firefighting services -- so you can at least get your possessions out before it burns.
Just thinking about all the new stuff I'd have to keep up with to avoid getting screwed gives me a headache. Food safety guarantors, some sort of court and law associations, drug safety certifiers, all kinds of insurance I don't have to worry about now, and so on.
Having to keep track of all that, who's best, who's had scandals and should be avoided, who's (known to be) subject to regulatory capture (think only the government is vulnerable to that?) or various other forms of corruption. Which ones give me bundle deals, are those actually better than buying the things individually from other providers. Ugh, it'd be miserable. Like all the problems of government and all the problems of real-world, imperfect-information markets in one. In my head it's like shopping for individual health insurance in the US (which is please-kill-me bad) or buying cars, but having to do that every. single. day. for one thing or another.
But I guess in all the relaxing free time I'd have left after that stuff (none, to be clear), I'd be really, really free to do whatever I could manage to pay for?
I don't see the appeal.
Disenfranchisement, as per most modes of radicality. I have observed as a near-universality among ancap types that they have identified at formative times of their lives as being "othered." They're not the in-crowd and they're not fundamentally of it. My suspicion is that they have a secret (or unsecret) opinion of themselves as misunderstood ubermenschen. (I recall that phase of my life, but then, I was fourteen.) With emotional and social development it became obvious to me, and to most recovering right-libertarian/ancap types I know of, that countless people helped me along the way because we decided, structurally and socially, that people should be helped. (We don't help everyone equally or sufficiently, and an expansion of it is decried by the you-got-mine, pulling-the-ladder-up-after-me types, but we try.)
I have made a pet interest of confronting the ancap types I occasionally run into--in tech, you sometimes stumble across enough of a True Believer to let their flag fly high--with questions of, what do you do when you're born into poverty? What is your recourse when you have nothing to sell? What do you do when somebody--but not the state, because the state doing it is Wrong, but Jim down the road with a real big gun and a couple muscley friends is just participating in economic activity--takes everything from you? The answers start evasively, but I've read as much von Mises and Rothbard as most of the vocal adherents and I can speak their language enough to fight on their own terms. Laughable handwaves of insurance companies and private security aside--and we called these "barons" in a prior age, but history and economics have already been laid aside to get into their weird twists of philosophy, so no it will not turn into feudalism, that's a silly notion--the answer is and will always be "and then you lose and you die". What chills me is that while most seem to have enough of an emotional intelligence to know that this argument doesn't win, I rarely hear even a shred of doubt when you finally get to that hard little core--because the idea of losing so totally as to be rendered economically incapable is not part of the equation. Other people lose, not them. This is also why there is so much overlap in this crowd of the worship of eat-your-dead meritocracy; that ancap nonsense devolves inevitably into feudalism is a feature, not a bug. Because they believe, as is their right, that they will be the knights, if not the barons and dukes and kings, of their new order.
I've run a few drafts of this post to leech out most of the pejorative nature I feel the ideas and the ideologues are due, and what remains should be taken more to be a mark of how truly alien (and I mean that in the sense of "inhuman") you have to get and how much reality you must pitch out the window at highway speeds to bend into a mode where the ancap arguments even make sense, let alone appeal. I am convinced that there is something rather fundamentally unwell about the whole thing. I have tried very hard to relate to it for years and my conclusion inevitably ends up being something around a predilection for cultish predations or never-outgrown teenage immaturity, and neither are satisfying but both fit the facts in evidence. I mean, I can have a discussion with a Communist. A Marxist and I are operating in a fundamentally relatable frame of reference. I don't agree with where they're going, but Marxists do not eject the entirety of human history to reach their conclusions--we can talk and actually agree what words mean. Every ancap I have ever met has washed their brains and adopted the weird sublanguage of the movement (Orwell was right...) and I can't do a thing with them except hope like hell they never stumble on a lever of power.
I mean, anarcho-capitalism is basically what sovereign nations are at a smaller scale: Factions of humans who make decisions without any real checks on their behavior beyond the environment and the reactions of other factions. And I'm supposed to want a microcosm of global politics in my back yard? No thanks, taxes are fine, please fix the roads so I can get to Chipotle.
The only reason I could see for anyone wanting anything approaching individual sovereignty is if a) they somehow believe that there is no bigger fish in the pond, or b) they're really so naive to have no idea what other people could be capable of doing to them.
Ironically, exactly the same can be said of Communism.
Oh, here we are: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/firefighters-watch-home-burn-own...
http://www.brunswickcc.edu/new-page-453/
While in-state tuition is $1152/semester, out-of-state tuition $4224/semester, or quadruple.
So if community colleges are not paid for by taxes, benefactors would have to pay quadruple.
And I'm guessing you would want K-12 schools to be free too, so if those have to be funded by philanthropists too, then the bill would skyrocket.
Why is education for the citizens of a country considered something that a countries government should have no part in in the US?
If education really is something important for the country, would it not make more sense for the country to prioritize and fund it as opposed to leaving it to the whims of whomever feels like funding it that day?
Most of the benefit of food is private: when I eat, I am no longer hungry. That means I take care of my food myself.
Most of the benefit to education is, as well, private. If I become a lawyer, I capture most of the benefit.
It's when the benefit cannot be internalized that you need government involved. A public good is one that is non-excludable and non-rivalrous. National defense and most environmental causes are examples there. Education is a private good, since it is both trivially excludable as well as (if you listen to any NEA paper about student-teacher ratios) rather rivalrous.
We... do?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_and_Drug_Administration
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Ag...
It is also in a nations best interests to have an educated population.
10th Amendment says:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
It's not that the government should have no part in education; an ancap believes "a countries government" shouldn't exist at all. That's the an(archo) in ancap.
If you cant, you either lose your possessions or you die.
Sounds like a great deal! sign me up! /s
You prefer basically to enlist in the hope that more communities win the lottery of making a super rich person happy, than you do finding a way to extend access to pretty much everyone? I can't even fathom this line of thinking.
Myself, I prefer the vision of a society that, through enacted laws, reaffirms a belief that it is worth all of us paying for people to be educated.
It's a good thing most of us don't feel that way and you're able to express yourself through a medium initially funded through Government research.
To make an analogy, Comcast could say to the critics of their monopolization that "it's a good thing that we are here, otherwise you wouldn't have any internet at all!", but would you buy it?
No? Then what were CompuServe, Tymnet and Telenet, for example, all of which started their network businesses without using the Internet/ARPANET protocols?
If the community college you went to was funded by taxes, and taxation theft, then do you view yourself as guilty of being a thief, complicit in that theft? I sure don't think so. The reason being that it isn't theft.
I'm not "balking at expanding access to that system to more people". I'm suggesting that the way we fund it should be changed.
If the community college you went to was funded by taxes, and taxation theft, then do you view yourself as guilty of being a thief, complicit in that theft?
It would be reasonable argument, but it's also irrelevant because I can't change the past. And my political ideals weren't as well defined when I was 19, as they are now.
It started as a Republican plan in Tennessee, funded with state money in a fairly anti-tax state as states go.
> Some local rich millionaire type (a real estate tycoon) setup an endowment to provide free tuition at BCC for any graduate of any Brunswick County high-school.
What happens when no local, benevolent millionaire decides to dedicate their fortune to free tuition? That takes many millions. Besides, sending kids to college for things you don't care about is boring--most rich philanthropists want to influence what their money will do. You are much more likely to see a real estate tycoon build a new building, which happens all the time.
> I'd love to see a concerted, nationwide effort to build a coalition of philanthropists of this nature to fund this "free college for everybody" thing, instead of taking it out of the federal govt. budget.
Because a tax is far easier and is almost exactly what you describe. This is absurdly inefficient and would only serve your worldview.
I don't understand the libertarian perspective. Why is it so important that people should have the freedom to not participate in "concerted, nationwide efforts" to fund services that benefit the whole society, while you're simultaneously acknowledging that those services should exist. Taxation seems like such a straightforward, simple way to achieve what you've described, at the cost of a freedom (the freedom to not participate), which is a freedom we don't want everyone to exercise anyway (as it means the collapse of the social service in question).
However, because of the cost and my own reluctance to get student loans, I ended up enrolling in a community college with the intention of just doing some basic courses for cheaper before transferring. While taking your typical math, science, history, and english courses; I also took an elective called "Intro to Computer Art" or something like that. Mind you, I hadn't taken any art courses in high school at all - no music, drawing, painting, whatever; I only took the minimum requirements and then filled my extra spaces with advanced math, science, and computer science.
I enjoyed the elective and decided to take more in the same program ("Visual Communications"). I explored traditional design, web design, video editing, and 3d animation. At the end, I got my Associate degree in Graphic Design (having never had wanted to be a designer at any time before college). Of course, all the exploration meant I spent well more than 2 years there (I also took things like Astronomy, which I liked after I changed teachers).
From there, I found an internship through the dean of the program who forwarded me an email from a company looking for interns and, afterwards, found my first job in the field through someone I had taken a couple of classes with.
From there, I was able to learn development on the job and change jobs a number of times - each time for a better experience and generally better pay. From a Texas suburb, I've gone to Minneapolis, New York, and now the SF Bay area all based on what I initially learned from community college.
My case is a bit different than what the President is intending, as he seems to see it more for learning a specific skill (like a trade school) instead of exploring what it is you want to do.
I think this is fine, but I really believe that the best case for community college is that it's a great place to explore different programs if, like me, you're leaving high school with no idea what you want to do (as many people seem to do).
Both of those things can be obtained outside of college(community or otherwise). Too many people will get the degree for its own sake and simply coast by for this program to be worth it.
Some of the professors there were a little zany, and had questionable teaching credentials ("Oh! You're a local businessman? Come teach a course on business!"), but the enthusiasm and... interestingness... of the education hasn't really been paralleled in high school, 4-year college, or grad school, in my experience.
It's called FAFSA, and most of my peers did the same. I'm not sure why we need to make it globally free when those who can't afford it can get paid to go.
Also, the solders mentioned to tug at our hearts strings get school paid for.
Soooo why the need for a hug pay check from congress?
I can see no reason NOT to support this proposal completely and immediately.
I'm one of those people who didn't apply themselves in highschool and didn't have anyone push me to do well. I couldn't afford to go to uni because my parents made just enough so that I couldn't get any aid. They also didn't have money to spare and were smart enough not to cosign loans for me to go to a university. Who can blame them? Its crazy to spend 10s of thousands of dollars to take intro classes that are basically just substitutes for how terrible our k-12 system is. My parents did encourage me to go to college though, so I went to one nearby right after highschool.
I would like to point out that even though its cheap, if you aren't in district its quite a bit more expensive. I think it ended up being around $100 a credit hour where I went since I wasn't in district. I know that is peanuts compared to universities, but if you have to pay out of packet, it adds up really quick, especially with books etc.
I was lucky that my parents let me use their car and live at home for free. Because of this, I could pay for the classes outright by working 30 or so hours a week at minimum wage. Its really depressing to work for months and all summer, saving virtually all of the money you make, and then blow at the start of each semester.
Ultimately this worked out well for me though, because by getting high grades and most of an associates degree, I was able to get significant transfer scholarships and not have to take a bunch of pointless intro classes. I'm not saying that all liberal arts classes are pointless, but some of them are, and it feels like hell to have to pay for those classes out of pocket, especially when you make minimum wage (which was $7.40 at the time). I would rather just read a book on a subject than take a class in something that I only have passing interest in.
I still have some debt from university due to double majoring and adding another year (which is when my scholarships ran out), but I still got out with < 15k in debt. And hey, that's peanuts when you get a software engineering job right out of school. I would have had so much more debt if I didn't go to CC first.
I will say that I meant quite a few people abusing the Pell grants though. People who lived at home for free and had no ambition would get Pell grants which covered their classes and gave them an overage for living expenses. They would just take the easiest classes and pocket the overage check. It was like a job for them. So I'm sure there will be people trying to do the same here, and there will be sleazy schools trying to get a chunk of the money too, but those are just problems that need to be solved.