I took a look at some of the author's other pieces. He really seems to hate any form of student loan forgiveness and places basically all the blame for the student loan crisis on the students. He...
I took a look at some of the author's other pieces. He really seems to hate any form of student loan forgiveness and places basically all the blame for the student loan crisis on the students. He also works for the American Enterprise Institute which claims to be non partisan but leans strongly toward neo-conservatism. That doesn't necessarily discredit any of the points the author is making, but take them with a grain of salt.
Basically he made 2 points:
1)Students aren't paying nearly as much as the sticker price
and
2)Free college might mean more limited access. Other countries have experimented with it, and gotten mixed results.
Regarding #1, he's got a nifty chart that shows prices haven't actually gone up all that much. The source is "Author's calculation using the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study" which means we can't check his work. He claims that he's not including loans. I'm also suspecting that this only talks about tuition and not all the other expenses that students have to pay like books, housing, and whatever else. But we can't check his work, so this is speculation.
But regardless of whatever secret calculations he's done to prove this isn't a real problem, student debt has skyrocketed. It's now over $1.6 trillion as of the end of 2019 (source: this article)
Regarding #2 he does some clever word play to suddenly make the whole issue about 'access' rather than 'what happens to students afterward'. Our student debt crisis is crippling the economic prospects of entire generations of students. I'm a millennial and in a relatively good position, but many of the people who graduated at similar times to me have been absolutely fucked by this economy and the crushing debt they had to take on. And gen-z has it even worse because prices are still continuing to skyrocket. So sure, people have lots of access to college at the moment, if you completely ignore what happens to students afterward.
The consequence is that you have a staggering number of very highly educated folks in nearly impossible to pay off debt.
Our current system is completely unsustainable, and the solutions probably won't be simple, but I don't think the author gives a shit about students or even fully understands the struggles that recent graduates face.
... ... It's important to note that the author's $2,400 figure is tuition, not overall net cost. I believe that's all Biden's plan covers? Anyways, I think the second argument is much more...
There are at least two broad arguments against the Biden free-college plan. First, the problem it seeks to solve — unaffordable tuition at public universities — is extremely overstated. Free-college supporters argue that tuition at these public institutions — the only colleges covered by Biden’s plan — has risen to unaffordable levels, especially for students from low- and middle-income families. But this claim is usually based on published “sticker prices” at universities rather than the net prices that students actually pay after their financial aid is applied. In other words, free-college advocates measure college affordability before factoring in existing policies meant to make college more affordable.
...
In the 1995–96 academic year, students paid about $2,000 (in 2015 dollars) on average to attend an in-state public university after their student aid was applied. By the 2015–16 academic year, that number had risen just $400, to $2,400.
...
Funding shortages and limited access aren’t merely theoretical effects of free college; they are a standard part of the international experience with it. For example, Finland offers free public universities, but it can’t afford to offer them to all citizens. Its universities end up rejecting two-thirds of applicants each year. And when public universities — especially the elite institutions — have to ration limited seats, they raise admissions standards, denying entry to low-income students who tend to have lower test scores than their more affluent peers. That exact pattern was what ultimately convinced Australia and England to abandon their free-college policies and start charging tuition decades ago. Access to higher education actually increased as a result.
It's important to note that the author's $2,400 figure is tuition, not overall net cost. I believe that's all Biden's plan covers? Anyways, I think the second argument is much more convincing. Obviously a lot of the supposed "funding shortages" resulting from the plan could be solved by firing some % of the insane amount of administrators present at most American universities, but admission standards would still need to be raised. Perhaps reducing the bureaucracy is all that is necessary?
Theoretically it's not a bad thing, but a lot of high-paying jobs won't even look at you without a degree, even if it's not relevant to the field or shouldn't be necessary for the type of work...
Theoretically it's not a bad thing, but a lot of high-paying jobs won't even look at you without a degree, even if it's not relevant to the field or shouldn't be necessary for the type of work you're doing. So we would need cultural reforms that would make not having a college degree a socially acceptable life path. Basically it's a problem that doesn't exist in a vacuum, but instead is deeply intertwined with many parts of American life and culture.
Yes, but doesn’t increasing the amount of college degrees out there actually make this problem worse? If everyone has a college degree it becomes no different as a signifier of commitment and...
Yes, but doesn’t increasing the amount of college degrees out there actually make this problem worse? If everyone has a college degree it becomes no different as a signifier of commitment and ability than does a high school diploma. I suspect if the number of people getting a degree each yeah significantly dropped, we would see it becoming less common as a baseline requirement.
As you note there are intertwined cultural factors at play here, but policy can and does shift culture as much as culture shifts policy. I think ideally we would get back to a point where college is not seen as necessary for every high-earning role, because it isn’t. This would help citizens because they would no longer have to waste 4 years and lots of money to get a qualification they likely won’t use, and it will help schools because they can move away from their assumed roles as developers of the workforce and back to their traditional roles as places of further education. This will of course require cultural change in things like removing the ‘stigma’ of not going to college and emphasizing the importance of vocations and guilds in our society. But it can be shaped by policy too, and I personally think free college for all moves us in the other direction (devaluation of the college degree, master’s becoming the new bachelor’s, etc).
Sounds like employers are putting the onus of basic training and vetting onto the school system. . . This seems like an HR problem more than an education problem.
but a lot of high-paying jobs won't even look at you without a degree
Sounds like employers are putting the onus of basic training and vetting onto the school system. . . This seems like an HR problem more than an education problem.
Nevermind that we have no access restrictions for most majors. Law and medicine are the big ones where you need a good GPA. A lot of lucrative subjects you can study for "free". (I'm paying 250ish...
Nevermind that we have no access restrictions for most majors. Law and medicine are the big ones where you need a good GPA. A lot of lucrative subjects you can study for "free". (I'm paying 250ish bucks a semester, but that gets me free public transport on top.)
I wonder what the effect is of making things like nursing and programming vocationally-trained careers vs studies. Does that make for less/more bugs and better/worse healthcare outcomes?
Ok, guess that needs clarification. We have Abitur and Fachhochschulreife, two different HS-level degrees. There's Fachhochschule, a kind of college that is more focused on preparing for specific...
Ok, guess that needs clarification. We have Abitur and Fachhochschulreife, two different HS-level degrees. There's Fachhochschule, a kind of college that is more focused on preparing for specific jobs. Either kind of HS diploma will work for that. Then there's proper universities, where a Abitur will get you in. Your grades don't matter here. You can get in with any grades and they (afaik) will accept you no matter what. The only exception are a few subjects (different from institution to institution) where you're not guaranteed admission. Instead, they pick the best candidates based on Abitur grades. But that is generally only applied to law and medicine.
In other words: generous capacities mean that there's no competition among students, even if studying is free.
Law though... You occasionally hear of books in the library having those pages torn out that are critical for the next exam. Ewww.
So it sounds like the instead of having two types of HS-level degrees in the US, we just use secondary school as a crucible to weed kids out who can't make it to college. And then the ones who...
So it sounds like the instead of having two types of HS-level degrees in the US, we just use secondary school as a crucible to weed kids out who can't make it to college. And then the ones who don't make it are kicked to the curb and expected to figure out what to do with themselves. This usually means either getting some job straight out of school where the onus of training/education is put on the employer, pursuing some sort of technical certification through various for-profit certification programs (most common in low-level technician jobs), go into a kind of apprenticeship in a skilled trade, or attending community college for an associate's degree.
And then the ones who didn't quite make it through the high school diploma do much of the same, but they have the option to get a GED which is a certification exam to attest you have a high-school equivalent level of competency even if they didn't complete the diploma.
So what happens if you went the Fachhochschulreife route and decided later in life that you wanted to work in business or something? Is there a pathway for an enterprising janitor to study up and become, like, an accountant?
There's a lot of ways. First, I should mention that even middle school can get you Hauptschulabschluss and Realschulabschluss (grade 9 and 10), which are enough to get you into some specialized...
There's a lot of ways. First, I should mention that even middle school can get you Hauptschulabschluss and Realschulabschluss (grade 9 and 10), which are enough to get you into some specialized vocational schools. Accounting(Bilanzbuchhaltung is the exact job I chose for you there): Realschulabschluss recommended. So if you got that, you're good anyway. A plumber might be desperate enough for an apprentice, he might take someone with a Hauptschulabschluss, if you seem smart enough for vocational school. If your diploma doesn't cut it, there's a "second opportunity of education" (Zweiter Bildungsweg). These are schools that can get you diplomas up to abitur. I'm not sure if you could even get a Realschulabschluss there, but Fachhochschulreife is probably doable. Then you could study at a proper Fachhochschule or Uni, depending on degree. That'd get you a bachelor of business administration for example. Or you could do your degree after vocational school, because after your accounting training you'd probably qualify for some form of business admin degree. I mentioned to turtle that there's a more restricted form of Fachhochschulreife that a vocational certificate gets you. It's limited to the degrees relevant to your certificate.
I'm reading up on some of this as I go. To summarize what I've learned today: It's really not a straightforward process at all.
ETA: Second opportunity schools often have classes in the evenings to make it easier to advance while having a job.
That's interesting, because that actually sounds less selective than it is in the US. Basically all accredited universities have some kind of GPA requirement. We have really low standards at our...
That's interesting, because that actually sounds less selective than it is in the US. Basically all accredited universities have some kind of GPA requirement. We have really low standards at our public schools though, so maybe that has something to do with it?
As I said originally, no restrictions for most subjects. And I really think it has to do with a) possibly more demand (see the rest of this thread) b) possibly less supply, i.e. less capacity at...
As I said originally, no restrictions for most subjects.
And I really think it has to do with
a) possibly more demand (see the rest of this thread)
b) possibly less supply, i.e. less capacity at universities - unlikely considering the bank they're making
c) Public schools, as you said. In germany, Abitur has most of the general-purpose classes a US college seems to have. My assumption is thus: A undergrad seems to spend a substantial amount of time on off-topic classes. History for a CS student, e.g. That is not a thing here. The standards in Abitur for a broad spread of topics are relatively high. I can't tell you the exact regulations, but the core consists of german, english, at least 1(or was it 3?) year of a third language, 1 form of art (theater, music, visual arts), history, politics&economics, maths, at least 2 sciences (out of biology, chem, physics). There's some more to it than that, I took CS, some geography. But generally, breadth-first-search is done by the time you have your Abitur. After that, the "off-topic" classes in higher ed is usually rather narrow. My master's demands almost a semester to be dedicated to a minor, for me that was [business administration, economics, law], but it could be various flavours of maths (optimization, stats or mathematical logic), psychology, various things that mix well with CS.
If you can't expect a good broad base in your students, you might find it prudent to be more picky. Here, the main way of "weeding out" those too "incompetent" for a degree is by having some of the harder classes mandatory towards the front end of the syllabus. Maths I is infamous in many STEM majors. So usually, people not suited for a major will learn that sooner rather than later and can go look for something else. Note that this weeding out only happens based on qualifications relevant for the major.
Abitur can be a bit hard to get for some because it is so wide in scope. But if you can't make that, there's the option of Fachhochschulreife, basically a diploma that guarantees admission to the more job-focused schools. That also exists in a more restricted form that qualifies you for specific subjects. So if you go to a vocational school for something mechanical, you can get a mechanical engineering Fachhochschulreife. This ensures that people who really suck at some subjects in the wide base still get to invest into their skills academically.
The author assumes that charity will always continue, this is the same argument that many libertarians use for why communities should govern themselves. That if there are no taxes to build schools...
This suggests that the existing financial-aid structure made up of targeted grants, tuition discounts, scholarships, and tax credits is hardly the failure that free-college supporters make it out to be.
The author assumes that charity will always continue, this is the same argument that many libertarians use for why communities should govern themselves. That if there are no taxes to build schools and roads and fire departments the community will decide on their own to provide such funds, it of course never takes into account the fact that some, perhaps even many/most, people will outright refuse to do so. If I had my choice, there wouldn't be a dime of my tax dollars being spent on the military for example; different people have different priorities.
Law is difficult to change, a law that states tuition is free (because it is paid in whole by the government) makes those avenues of aid no longer at risk of being lost/discontinued.
The libertarian world view posits that we shouldn’t address collective action problems through any sort of democratic “one man, one vote” framework. Rather, they think we should have what amounts...
If I had my choice, there wouldn't be a dime of my tax dollars being spent on the military for example; different people have different priorities.
The libertarian world view posits that we shouldn’t address collective action problems through any sort of democratic “one man, one vote” framework. Rather, they think we should have what amounts to an auction to decide what our national priorities should be. That this gives outsized power and influence to rich people is a feature, not a bug.
<...> <...> <...> <...> For an American-conservative publication, I find a lot in its policies to respect. What makes them clowns?
Exemplary
Since its founding, the magazine has played a significant role in the development of conservatism in the United States, helping to define its boundaries and promoting fusionism while establishing itself as a leading voice on the American right.
<...>
William Buckley Jr., on the purpose of National Review:
[National Review] stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it… it is out of place because, in its maturity, literate America rejected conservatism in favor of radical social experimentation…since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to…run just about everything. There never was an age of conformity quite like this one, or a camaraderie quite like the Liberals’.
<...>
In 1957, National Review editorialized in favor of white leadership in the South, arguing that "the central question that emerges... is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes – the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race." By the 1970s National Review advocated colorblind policies and the end of affirmative action.
In the late 1960s, the magazine denounced segregationist George Wallace, who ran in Democratic primaries in 1964 and 1972 and made an independent run for president in 1968. During the 1950s, Buckley had worked to remove anti-Semitism from the conservative movement and barred holders of those views from working for National Review. In 1962 Buckley denounced Robert W. Welch Jr. and the John Birch Society as "far removed from common sense" and urged the Republican Party to purge itself of Welch's influence.
During the 1980s National Review called for tax cuts, supply-side economics, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and support for President Reagan's foreign policy against the Soviet Union. The magazine criticized the Welfare state and would support the Welfare reform proposals of the 1990s. The magazine also regularly criticized President Bill Clinton. It first embraced, then rejected, Pat Buchanan in his political campaigns. A lengthy 1996 National Review editorial called for a "movement toward" drug legalization.
<...>
Victor Davis Hanson, a regular contributor since 2001, sees a broad spectrum of conservative and anti-liberal contributors:
In other words, a wide conservative spectrum—paleo-conservatives, neo-conservatives, tea-party enthusiasts, the deeply religious and the agnostic, both libertarians and social conservatives, free-marketeers and the more protectionist—characterizes National Review. The common requisite is that they present their views as a critique of prevailing liberal orthodoxy but do so analytically and with decency and respect.
<...>
In 2015, the magazine published an editorial entitled "Against Trump," calling him a "philosophically unmoored political opportunist" and announcing its opposition to his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president. Since Trump's election to the presidency, the National Review editorial board has continued to criticize him.
However, contributors to National Review and National Review Online take a variety of positions on Trump. Liberal commentator Peter Beinart criticized Lowry and Hanson for "breez[ing] by Trump’s blatant assaults on long-held conservative values in their rush to find something, anything, to congratulate him for," while National Review contributors such as Ramesh Ponnuru and Jonah Goldberg have remained critical of Trump. In a Washington Post feature on conservative magazines, T.A. Frank noted: "From the perspective of a reader, these tensions make National Review as lively as it has been in a long time."
For an American-conservative publication, I find a lot in its policies to respect.
I took a look at some of the author's other pieces. He really seems to hate any form of student loan forgiveness and places basically all the blame for the student loan crisis on the students. He also works for the American Enterprise Institute which claims to be non partisan but leans strongly toward neo-conservatism. That doesn't necessarily discredit any of the points the author is making, but take them with a grain of salt.
Basically he made 2 points:
1)Students aren't paying nearly as much as the sticker price
and
2)Free college might mean more limited access. Other countries have experimented with it, and gotten mixed results.
Regarding #1, he's got a nifty chart that shows prices haven't actually gone up all that much. The source is "Author's calculation using the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study" which means we can't check his work. He claims that he's not including loans. I'm also suspecting that this only talks about tuition and not all the other expenses that students have to pay like books, housing, and whatever else. But we can't check his work, so this is speculation.
But regardless of whatever secret calculations he's done to prove this isn't a real problem, student debt has skyrocketed. It's now over $1.6 trillion as of the end of 2019 (source: this article)
Regarding #2 he does some clever word play to suddenly make the whole issue about 'access' rather than 'what happens to students afterward'. Our student debt crisis is crippling the economic prospects of entire generations of students. I'm a millennial and in a relatively good position, but many of the people who graduated at similar times to me have been absolutely fucked by this economy and the crushing debt they had to take on. And gen-z has it even worse because prices are still continuing to skyrocket. So sure, people have lots of access to college at the moment, if you completely ignore what happens to students afterward.
The consequence is that you have a staggering number of very highly educated folks in nearly impossible to pay off debt.
Our current system is completely unsustainable, and the solutions probably won't be simple, but I don't think the author gives a shit about students or even fully understands the struggles that recent graduates face.
...
...
It's important to note that the author's $2,400 figure is tuition, not overall net cost. I believe that's all Biden's plan covers? Anyways, I think the second argument is much more convincing. Obviously a lot of the supposed "funding shortages" resulting from the plan could be solved by firing some % of the insane amount of administrators present at most American universities, but admission standards would still need to be raised. Perhaps reducing the bureaucracy is all that is necessary?
Theoretically it's not a bad thing, but a lot of high-paying jobs won't even look at you without a degree, even if it's not relevant to the field or shouldn't be necessary for the type of work you're doing. So we would need cultural reforms that would make not having a college degree a socially acceptable life path. Basically it's a problem that doesn't exist in a vacuum, but instead is deeply intertwined with many parts of American life and culture.
Yes, but doesn’t increasing the amount of college degrees out there actually make this problem worse? If everyone has a college degree it becomes no different as a signifier of commitment and ability than does a high school diploma. I suspect if the number of people getting a degree each yeah significantly dropped, we would see it becoming less common as a baseline requirement.
As you note there are intertwined cultural factors at play here, but policy can and does shift culture as much as culture shifts policy. I think ideally we would get back to a point where college is not seen as necessary for every high-earning role, because it isn’t. This would help citizens because they would no longer have to waste 4 years and lots of money to get a qualification they likely won’t use, and it will help schools because they can move away from their assumed roles as developers of the workforce and back to their traditional roles as places of further education. This will of course require cultural change in things like removing the ‘stigma’ of not going to college and emphasizing the importance of vocations and guilds in our society. But it can be shaped by policy too, and I personally think free college for all moves us in the other direction (devaluation of the college degree, master’s becoming the new bachelor’s, etc).
Sounds like employers are putting the onus of basic training and vetting onto the school system. . . This seems like an HR problem more than an education problem.
Nevermind that we have no access restrictions for most majors. Law and medicine are the big ones where you need a good GPA. A lot of lucrative subjects you can study for "free". (I'm paying 250ish bucks a semester, but that gets me free public transport on top.)
I wonder what the effect is of making things like nursing and programming vocationally-trained careers vs studies. Does that make for less/more bugs and better/worse healthcare outcomes?
Can you explain what you mean by “access restrictions?” Like there is no diploma requirement or standardized testing?
Ok, guess that needs clarification. We have Abitur and Fachhochschulreife, two different HS-level degrees. There's Fachhochschule, a kind of college that is more focused on preparing for specific jobs. Either kind of HS diploma will work for that. Then there's proper universities, where a Abitur will get you in. Your grades don't matter here. You can get in with any grades and they (afaik) will accept you no matter what. The only exception are a few subjects (different from institution to institution) where you're not guaranteed admission. Instead, they pick the best candidates based on Abitur grades. But that is generally only applied to law and medicine.
In other words: generous capacities mean that there's no competition among students, even if studying is free.
Law though... You occasionally hear of books in the library having those pages torn out that are critical for the next exam. Ewww.
So it sounds like the instead of having two types of HS-level degrees in the US, we just use secondary school as a crucible to weed kids out who can't make it to college. And then the ones who don't make it are kicked to the curb and expected to figure out what to do with themselves. This usually means either getting some job straight out of school where the onus of training/education is put on the employer, pursuing some sort of technical certification through various for-profit certification programs (most common in low-level technician jobs), go into a kind of apprenticeship in a skilled trade, or attending community college for an associate's degree.
And then the ones who didn't quite make it through the high school diploma do much of the same, but they have the option to get a GED which is a certification exam to attest you have a high-school equivalent level of competency even if they didn't complete the diploma.
So what happens if you went the Fachhochschulreife route and decided later in life that you wanted to work in business or something? Is there a pathway for an enterprising janitor to study up and become, like, an accountant?
There's a lot of ways. First, I should mention that even middle school can get you Hauptschulabschluss and Realschulabschluss (grade 9 and 10), which are enough to get you into some specialized vocational schools. Accounting(Bilanzbuchhaltung is the exact job I chose for you there): Realschulabschluss recommended. So if you got that, you're good anyway. A plumber might be desperate enough for an apprentice, he might take someone with a Hauptschulabschluss, if you seem smart enough for vocational school. If your diploma doesn't cut it, there's a "second opportunity of education" (Zweiter Bildungsweg). These are schools that can get you diplomas up to abitur. I'm not sure if you could even get a Realschulabschluss there, but Fachhochschulreife is probably doable. Then you could study at a proper Fachhochschule or Uni, depending on degree. That'd get you a bachelor of business administration for example. Or you could do your degree after vocational school, because after your accounting training you'd probably qualify for some form of business admin degree. I mentioned to turtle that there's a more restricted form of Fachhochschulreife that a vocational certificate gets you. It's limited to the degrees relevant to your certificate.
I'm reading up on some of this as I go. To summarize what I've learned today: It's really not a straightforward process at all.
ETA: Second opportunity schools often have classes in the evenings to make it easier to advance while having a job.
That's interesting, because that actually sounds less selective than it is in the US. Basically all accredited universities have some kind of GPA requirement. We have really low standards at our public schools though, so maybe that has something to do with it?
As I said originally, no restrictions for most subjects.
And I really think it has to do with
If you can't expect a good broad base in your students, you might find it prudent to be more picky. Here, the main way of "weeding out" those too "incompetent" for a degree is by having some of the harder classes mandatory towards the front end of the syllabus. Maths I is infamous in many STEM majors. So usually, people not suited for a major will learn that sooner rather than later and can go look for something else. Note that this weeding out only happens based on qualifications relevant for the major.
Abitur can be a bit hard to get for some because it is so wide in scope. But if you can't make that, there's the option of Fachhochschulreife, basically a diploma that guarantees admission to the more job-focused schools. That also exists in a more restricted form that qualifies you for specific subjects. So if you go to a vocational school for something mechanical, you can get a mechanical engineering Fachhochschulreife. This ensures that people who really suck at some subjects in the wide base still get to invest into their skills academically.
The author assumes that charity will always continue, this is the same argument that many libertarians use for why communities should govern themselves. That if there are no taxes to build schools and roads and fire departments the community will decide on their own to provide such funds, it of course never takes into account the fact that some, perhaps even many/most, people will outright refuse to do so. If I had my choice, there wouldn't be a dime of my tax dollars being spent on the military for example; different people have different priorities.
Law is difficult to change, a law that states tuition is free (because it is paid in whole by the government) makes those avenues of aid no longer at risk of being lost/discontinued.
The libertarian world view posits that we shouldn’t address collective action problems through any sort of democratic “one man, one vote” framework. Rather, they think we should have what amounts to an auction to decide what our national priorities should be. That this gives outsized power and influence to rich people is a feature, not a bug.
The neolib is the frontrunner: send in the clowns.
<...>
<...>
<...>
<...>
For an American-conservative publication, I find a lot in its policies to respect.
What makes them clowns?
I find determinism's comment pretty confusing.