Another anecdote on the power of community college:
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.
Not all community colleges are the same. If you live in close proximity to universities with high academic standards, most of the professors are going to be recent graduates of those programs, or educators picking up extra cash and some experience teaching at CC.
BFE Community College will not have the same level of academic excellence.
Yeah, while I think community college is great, the one I attended (GCC, in AZ) basically felt like high school all over again. Horrible professors, worse students, boring (and ridiculously easy) material; I hated it so much that I ditched college for two years before deciding to go back to school at a university. As soon as I was taking university classes I started to wonder why I hadn't just started at a university to begin with. It's good to hear there's community colleges out there that emit the same level of passion in students/professors though.
I took a couple math courses (discrete math and differential equations, I think) at GCC and MCC while attending ASU for Computer Engineering, and I thought the CC professors were more helpful and more passionate about teaching undergrads than the profs at ASU. In my experience the university professors were more worried about their own projects and acted like teaching 20 year olds was above them.
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.
Even within the same school, there are different professors of differing quality. I remember when I was choosing my courses for the next semester during university, I'd always check ratemyprofessor.com before making a final decision on a course.
Location, location, location, to borrow it from real estate market. In places like Bay Area, there is a surplus of excellent talents competing for academic positions. If one can't get one in Standard, Cal, UCDavis, USF, etc, they will fight for the positions in the community colleges. So it is not uncommon to meet excellent professors in community colleges in such places. I know a few who taught in community colleges in Bay Area and eventually got positions in 4-year universities in Midwest. I bet they wouldn't hesitate to come back if they can get a position here.
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.
Agreed -- little doubt that the Bay Area attracts teaching talent that colleges in less desirable areas aren't able to. That said, I feel strongly in the potential for community colleges nation wide to raise their standards and become places of first choice for citizens not entirely set on an expensive 4 year university with questionable value.
To be fair not all universities are the same either. A university may have a great engineering program but have terrible liberal arts professors. Why pay thousands for an English class where you learn to write a basic five paragraph essay (which you should have learned in highschool), when you can pay a few hundred instead.
Yes when I attended CC some of my instructors taught during the day at a private university that is ranked very high. One would always joke about how we were getting the same education as the students at the private school but for a third of the price since it was the same curriculum he taught there.
Yes I had to update my linkedin to try and make it clear it was Bedford Colledge (a FE college) and not the University of Bedfordshire where I went to do my Mech Eng Btech.
Bedfordshire University is regularly last in the UK legue tables on Universities.
I was frequently pushed and challenged by excellent professors who had true passion for their subjects
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..
I live in a post-colonial country where English is the official language but 90% of the population have another language as their mother-tongue.
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.
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.
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.
I think we agree with each other. Words like "ain't" entering the common lexicon (usually in spoken english) is fine by me ie. Words formed out of contractions of other words/phrases, or entirely new inventions.
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.
"Enormity" is one of those words. It used to be strictly "horrible," conveying a sense of wickedness, and to use it as a synonym for "enormousness" was glaringly wrong. But the mistake was so common, even among journalists and writers, that that it has gained acceptance in at least one English dictionary.
OTOH, were it not for bad Latin speakers, we wouldn't have the Romance languages. A John Simon/William Safire of the era is an important source of data on their development--he wrote a list of proper Latin terms and the corresponding words in the bad Latin he was seeing and/or hearing. Dang it, it's not caballus, it's equus!
So you're saying that when I correct someone publicly, I'm not being an insufferable pedant, I'm contemporaneously documenting usage for future linguists!
Ooh, I'm gonna get so much mileage out of that one.
While it has meant both every two weeks and twice a week for a long time, this is an interesting case where convincing people otherwise would pretty clearly improve our language. Even the page you linked to implies this:
> The ambiguous usage is confusing, and might be avoided by the use of semi-
"Irregardless is one of those words that is becoming OK to say just because so many people use it."
...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.
As a non-native speaker, I like when people correct me; it makes me sad to see them downvoted. On the other hand, it could be argued that since I already write well enough to be understood, I should disregard further improvements, but I just can't agree with that.
"Irregardless" isn't ambiguous, either. Everyone knows what it means. The debate is over whether it should be in the language, in a moral sense, which is different.
No, everyone doesn't 'know what it means', not without additional mental parsing. Myself, among many others, read it first as a double-negative, then have to double-take it and reinterpret it. Irrespective, irreducable, irrecoverable, irreconcilable, irrelevant, irreligious, irrefutable - irregardless stands out like a sore thumb.
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.
Wait, are you really sYing that when you see "irregardless" that your first response is not "that's an error and they mean regardless[1]" but "they mean regardless but negated so regard but that doesn't make sense so they actually mean regardless"?
Yet astonishingly you are one of the people who knew what it meant.
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.
I recently took some classes at city college in SF as well. One of my professors teaches the same class at Stanford and said he doesn't water the curriculum down for the CC class.
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.
CCSF is an excellent community college. One of the best in the country. Too bad it's mired in political fight over state accreditation and students are scared away.
The initial proposal from The President costs $60 billion over ten years or $6 billion per year. For some perspective, conservative estimates have put the cost of the war in Iraq at $500 million a day. This proposal would cost 72 days of war.
It's difficult to comprehend how our politicians could have any issues supporting such an initiative.
The Iraq War has cost us ~$6,000,000,000,000 (that's ~$17k per US citizen).
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.
Just because it cannot be measured does not mean it doesn't have value.
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?
This is an initiative that will lead to higher earning potential for Americans, leading to higher tax revenues over the long term. Will it pay for itself? Probably not, but it's juvenile to act like all government spending is equal when it comes to the country's long term financial health.
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.
> 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?).
I can't imagine anyone actually thinking that.
"Who needs good elementary schools? Everyone is going to middle school anyway, right?"
Actually, I live in a place (Quebec) that effectively has free Community Colleges (we call them CEGEPs) and has had them for decades now.
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).
So your problem is with the paper? Agree that the "system" is "broken", but I think describing college as just a "piece of paper" really over-simplifies the problem. Do we not need some way of certifying skill sets? And I'm unconvinced that what you would see would actually be a devaluing of high school diplomas. Potentially, we'd just view high school how we view elementary school now - something everyone assumes you do.
Are we not trying to encourage everyone to do more and become more educated? In what way could we benefit/teach people that doesn't cost anything?
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
"What is required by Congress is the removal of artificial, arbitrary, and unnecessary barriers to employment when the barriers operate invidiously to discriminate on the basis of racial or other impermissible classification." Saying that the case "banned degree requirements" is putting it too high.
The decision is more nuanced than that. If a lawsuit is brought against the company in question, they have to prove that their degree requirement is essential to the job in question. If it's not, then it could be said the degree requirement is to discriminate against a class of people.
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.
> 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?).
...and therefore making higher education more accessible is a bad thing?
Subsidizing community college would artificially increase the demand for CC and thus increase the price. This does not mean it will raise the price of traditional, expensive 4-year colleges and universities. CC does tend to feed into 4-year programs so it could cause some increase in demand (it could also decrease demand by acting as a substitute), but we are not talking about increasing our subsidy of 4-year programs.
Whether it makes a net difference to earnings on a large scale depends on the degree to which this education will be a positional good vs leading to actual productivity gains.
The positional element just shifts money around, devaluing high school diplomas.
Only the productivity improvement element will increase net earnings.
The wars in the middle east are not likely to make us more money than the cost. This is. It's an investment, like roads. It grows the economy. This is more or less considered a fact in macroeconomics.
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.
This is more or less considered a fact in macroeconomics
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?
> the US is almost 50% ahead of its next closest competitor in terms of spending per student
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.
Those numbers are dollars per student, if we start sending a lot of new people to community colleges our rank on that list might drop since community college is much cheaper than univeristy where many costs go towards things not directly tied to education: dorms, meal plans, sports equipment, stadiums, etc.
If you're trying to make the argument of diminishing returns for spending on education, that's pretty non-controversial.
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.
> Why is it that no other nation on Earth spends as much money on education as the US does?
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.
Agreed,
Nearly 40 percent of working-aged Americans now hold a college degree, according to a new report from the Lumina Foundation. In 2012, 39.4 percent of Americans between 25 and 64 had at least a two-year college degree.
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.
Education is a capital investment. Its ROI should be measured in terms of increased productivity per dollar invested, and we should be investing for maximum marginal productivity increase. Based on what little hard information I've seen and my scant anecdata of first-hand experience, I think community colleges are a fairly high-margin public investment right now.
Being in debt just means one owes money. The US government has assets and various investments. Being bankrupt is when you can't pay back your debt, which the US most likely will be able to do.
Going from 50% deficit spending to paying off equivalent of 100% of GDP (which enjoys a 2-5% annual growth) amounts to "won't be able to". We'd have to cut spending by 1/3rd just to stop increasing the debt. We'd have to route all federal revenue to debt for 5 years to pay it off. Ain't happening.
debt =/= bankruptcy. Unrecoverable debt is bankruptcy. While the argument could be made that our debt is past a recoverable point, it is not a certainty.
"While the argument could be made that our debt is past a recoverable point..."
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.
Right. The usa can't go bankrupt because they have their own currency. Also, a majority of usa debt is held by Americans, the remainder held by foreign governments with no better options to park trade surpluses (the USA playing an imprortant role as the most reliable debtor of last resort).
> It's difficult to comprehend how our politicians could have any issues supporting such an initiative.
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?
I'm sure the estimated cost for the Iraq War was significantly less than what it ended up costing. I'm thinking the estimated cost for Obama's community college initiative will far too low as well. In fact, I'm willing to bet community college costs skyrocket over the next few years in response.
That's still a non-trivial amount. 3 years of that is the entire SLS/Orion rocket system and NASA lives in fear of losing the budget to finish it. Comments like yours really show how insanely expensive modern war is.
Or maybe both are wasteful spending--did you consider that? The proposal will cost much more than $60 billion. Why believe otherwise? How much was the Iraq war supposed to cost? This is just a feel-good initiative, and it worries me that no one can be bothered to bring up the cons. Do we really believe there's no ulterior motives at play here?
They'll go up when our elected officials succeed in leveraging the low gas prices as an excuse to increase gas taxes either way, really... and then they'll likely go up again on their own for double-up power.
Today, the cost is somewhere around $50/unit, not too bad.
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 $2.1 million and was immediately rehired as UC Berkeley police chief with higher pay than she had earned before her retirement.
The 95$ per semester figure is for the State University at Sacramento - not for the community college. The current fees work out to ~5500$ per semester[1] for the same university.
So you have to make close to $30k before taxes to pay for day care? Is this normal for daycare?
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.
Between $327 and $587 per unit or credit, is extremely common for state universities. You generally have to be resident in the state for at least a year, to qualify.
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.
You can't allocate tax dollars towards specific programs, but you can allocate charitable dollars towards community colleges, and get a discount on your taxes. California community colleges are pretty inexpensive compared to most four-year schools, so a small donation can be turned into a scholarship for tuition, fees, and supplies. For a scholarship recipient, having those paid for can make a huge difference.
(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)
I want to second this point. The percentage of young adults (this is the demographic that represents most fo the current community college population) living below the poverty level is about 40% [1]. So even in the absolute worst case scenario where the Pell grant only applied to those below the poverty level and all those above that level started taking advantage of the free community college your efficiency could drop by a factor of two. In reality, there is a significant fraction of those below the poverty level who don't know about such Pell grant opportunities and the complexities of federal student aid and would never apply, but would jump at the opportunity for a free education. Also, a more realistic assessment of the efficiency question would require a better picture of how many people below the target of the Pell threshold would start taking advantage of the program. I would suspect that only a small fraction of people from the top 10% income bracket would pursue this, since they have other opportunities available. So lets say that we actually have something like a 50% reduction in efficiency to get the money to the target audience, and a side effect of a few tens of millions of people outside the target audience getting their education subsidized. There is obviously room for improvement, but I would support that scenario.
At LATTC everyone knew about financial aid. It was the default situation. I haven't been there, but I've been to CC in a low income community, and the assumption was that you'd get financial aid. Being middle class, middle aged, and not qualifying, I had to quietly explain that my personal income was past the limit, etc. I didn't want to stick out.
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.)
Not to mention that the more complicated the financial aid system becomes, the less likely the people who need educational help from a community college will be able to actually get it. By requiring you to already have the skills to navigate it, the complexity forms a barrier to entry that just discounting the cost does not.
I'm sympathetic to this view. In general, I tend to favor flat programs that no one prices out of instead of need-based programs, because it gets rid of the marginal tax that happens when you earn more. (Every program that is just "for the poor" is a marginal tax on the person climbing out of poverty.) Also, I view the financial aid merely as price discrimination. We wouldn't consider another industry as compassionate for looking through our finances before deciding what we could "really afford."
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?
FAFSA documents are not complicated to fill out, but the overall process require you to spend some amount of time on jumping through various hoops. Also, it has prerequisites and conditions you need to keep track of. For people who are short on money (and therefore time) all of that has significance.
College requires time and jumping through hoops. If you can't keep track of the FAFSA application, how are you going to keep track of the class assignments?
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?
College requires time and money, yes. The FAFSA is supposed to provide them for people who don't have them already. So saying 'if you don't have time and money you shouldn't go to college anyway' is kind of missing the point.
There seems to be a communication failure here, because you accuse me of saying things I'm not saying. They might be things you wish I were saying, but I'm not.
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?
There is definitely a communication failure here. Are you asking why filling in the FAFSA might solve someone's problems around lack of money, or are you disagreeing that lack of money is a contributing factor to the lack of time and attention they prospective students have?
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.
Community College isn't just about college level work. Some of their developmental courses start at the fourth grade level. Many of the people attending are fairly new to the country.
A lot of states already heavily subsidize the tuition of public community colleges and universities for residents. Where I live, in FL, 75% of the cost is paid for by the State of Florida.
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 know most of my peers (myself included) could have gone to Penn State local campuses for 2 years and then 2 years at State College for free, only having to pay room board and food (and overpriced books). I went with a private liberal arts college that gave me nearly a whole boat though.
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.
+1 to this. As someone who had both scholarships and pell grants (i made money going to a state school in utah) I still would have just preferred discounted tuition for all.
At the school my partner went to, LA Trade Tech, it seemed like most students got financial aid. There were multiple offices involved in doing all the paperwork involved (in a multi-story building, too). The school was located in an area where the household income was around $25k per year, and many people worked at the minimum wage. It seemed absurd to me that they had to jump through so many hoops to get a few hundred dollars of aid.
Depends on the pell award. Place I am working is at $1,650/semester Tuition and Fees for 12+ credits (prorated for under 12 credits). Books are around $350 semester and we don't have housing yet.
I had a more enlightening, more rewarding, more encouraging experience in community college than I ever have had before or since in any other form of education.
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'm glad that it worked for him, but my community college was a complete waste of time with the exception of two (just two!) courses and the internship program.
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 don't know if it would make for better quality of education in general. People attending community college tend to have less digital access and need more encouragement and support than your average college student. A number of studies on outcomes for classes taken online vs in-person at community colleges have been done, one of the biggest I know of being a study across the California community college system. They found that student dropout and failure rates were higher in online courses than regular in-person classes (after controlling for incoming background, etc) but that taking at least one online course made it more likely the student would graduate, probably because of enabling a course flow/meeting a requirement that was otherwise difficult to schedule.
My experience was that math & physics were very good. Basically the first two years of a standard state uni. curriculum for a quarter or less of the price. The CS courses were useless, all of the material I'd already easily learned by programming.
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.
Colleges as a whole should be completely replaced with something like certificates. Bachelor degrees are way too expensive for what they provide. The vast majority of people would be much better off with focused, relevant learning and skills.
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.
What you're saying is mostly true, but it may not be all that relevant. The vast majority of people would be better off if you just gave them everything for free, but the _society_ as a whole would not be. Bachelor degrees, for instance, aren't supposed to be designed to serve the student, but to serve the community. (I.e., that's why they teach the 'classics' in the western/greek tradition.)
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.
There is a real societal value to liberal arts classes and other requirements beyond classes directly related to the job you are training for. Having a capacity to continue learning, skillful communication, and the ability to think for yourself are integral to your future success, but are often not covered by more technical classes.
When I started at my Local Community College, Bakersfield College, in 1997 it was $11 a semester. I think it's up $46 a semester now. I took my C/C++ courses from George Driver. I've recently returned to B.C. as an Adjunct Professor in the Computer Science Dept.
He never states he is bad at math. It sounds like to me he was much more interested in subjects like art, literature and film. Which, given his career makes a lot of sense.
Also, there is a difference between math and computation. If the course only required 9'th grade algebra level, I personally would rather drop it and take additional calculus courses.
I'm just impressed that a community college level astronomy course had math in it. Mine was nothing but familiarizing students stargazing and terminology.
Mine was also stargazing etc, with no math. A math based one would have been very fun but probably wouldn't enroll enough students to avoid being cancelled.
Not the point. It undermines the whole STEM promotion that the US is currently undergoing. You never hear anybody brag about how they no can read gooder, if they're an athlete, butcher, scientist, whatever.
Ehhh, I hear STEM people with an embarrassing grasp of writing/social interaction/the humanities wear that as a badge of honor. At least Hanks if self-effacing.
Those guys are idiots. I figure they turned a shameful weakness in high-school into a badge of belonging in college and real-life. It's also a lack of humility. I'm ashamed to be associated with them.
Plenty of otherwise intelligent STEM students and graduates hold the liberal arts in contempt and will take any opportunity to mock arts degrees/students/graduates.
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.
Well, he wasn't bragging about being bad at math. Also, people use reading every day so it's no surprise that most people are reasonably proficient at it even decades after college.
The community college effort is a worthy one. With a renewed focus on it, it may help make tuition higher up more competitive. It may also make the freshman/sophomore level basic classes much better.
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.
I am an instructor at a community college, and I have to say that I had earfuls of embarrassing pessimism from my colleagues yesterday. You'd have thought that Obama himself was taking the tuition directly out of our salaries to fund it.
Maybe they are thinking of the bottom 10% of their class, and then imagining more students like that in the classroom.
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.
I don't think that's relevant, is it? At least where I grew up (California), community colleges tended not to have admission standards and anyone could attend. Making it easier to afford seems to imply you'll be getting people who just barely cannot pay for it now, not people who "just barely cannot get in".
I still don't see your point about people who "just barely cannot get in". Most community college students did not need to do anything to get in. For the public community colleges in California, if I recall correctly, you just need to be 18 (or have a high school diploma or meet some other conditions.) Why do you think that funding community college would result in more students like the bottom 10% of those currently in community college classes?
> As Reihan Salam of National Review notes, community college tuition is already low. In fact, it’s zero, on average, for lower-income families, after taking financial aid into account. Vox’s Libby Nelson wrote, “Community college tuition for poorer students is often entirely covered by the need-based Pell Grant.”
So making it free takes care of people who couldn't handle the paperwork of filing for a Pell Grant.
They're still going to have to fill out the applications to get in, which aren't significantly different in difficulty from the FAFSA. And most colleges have people who will help you fill out the FAFSA anyway.
I can't imagine that eliminating the FAFSA form requirements will allow a noticeably larger number of substandard students to attend.
I can't either, (not proportionally larger) and if it does, I'd expect to see those individuals shunted into the remedial math and language courses which are already offered for that purpose.
>In fact, it’s zero, on average, for lower-income families, after taking financial aid into account. Vox’s Libby Nelson wrote, “Community college tuition for poorer students is often entirely covered by the need-based Pell Grant.”
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.
About the recent "Free Community College" announcement from the President. Mainly people questioning how would it be funded, if it was possible to fund it, and bog-standard politician insults.
This is pretty far from being a ringing endorsement of community colleges. If anything, it just reaffirms the complete lack of academic rigor they provide.
- 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.
> 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.
The point I'm making is that we expect people to continue living their lives while going to school, that doesn't change. Getting financial aid isn't a contract to live a strict monastic life nor should it be. Also, the fact that not every single person who gets aid goes on to use it for some optimal standard doesn't mean that it is a waste or that we as a society shouldn't do 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.
I had a very good experience at community college, and it cost me $11/unit. When I transferred to a four-year school, the matriculation advisors told me I was probably better prepared for having done my lower division math at the community college.
The real kicker is that students filling out a FAFSA form are asking for substantially more money.
I agree, I had an excellent CC experience. I've written about it on HN several times. My mathematics courses in particular were better run, by professors far more passionate about their subject and teaching it, than any of the higher maths I took when I transferred to a university.
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).
I went to a community college for my first year. It was a bad choice: the financial gains were minimal, the networking gained was lost when I transferred, and the academic environment was very weak (mostly because the normal major was "sex, drugs, and beer", not the instructors' fault).
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.
Instead of 2 more years of "free" education, why not ask how we can add more value to the last 2 years of high school, so that people graduate with job skills? This is just an attempt to buy votes, and funnel more money into gov. $60 billion is an estimate, and it will probably be triple that. Look at other gov estimates and you'll see a pattern. How much was the Iraq war supposed to cost? What about that NASA project in Mississippi?
I think community college is a great opportunity but I don't know if government funding this will really help many. From what I read, community college isn't very expensive and, since it is so valuable, I can't imagine that many people are on the fence about attending due to the monetary cost. There is a lot bigger investment required in terms of dedication, focus and effort, but I don't think the constraint is monetary.
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.
I love my local community college. I already have an undergraduate degree in computer engineering but several years ago took a class in linear algebra to refresh my understanding of it as well as out of personal interest.
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.
I have issues with the Obama plan, not because I'm against community colleges, but because I have issues with how this will (probably) be funded (read: taxes). As a libertarian / ancap who believes taxation is theft, I don't support anything involving spending tax dollars, no matter how noble the end.
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.
>As a libertarian / ancap who believes taxation is theft, I don't support anything involving spending tax dollars, no matter how noble the end.
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?
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.
The Wikipedia entry on Anarcho-capitalism[1] dives into these details. It's a fascinating philosophy that, in my opinion, severely underestimates the human affinity for greed and manipulation.
Over all my other problems with anarcho-capitalism and minarchism, the biggest is how much more time I'd waste and how much more anxiety I'd have.
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?
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.
LOL, so true. I'm starting to get the same feeling about Georgists. They're in a bubble of their own making, in denial about their own reality, and prone to making up new definitions for common words, making it difficult to communicate. It makes me a little sad, because I'm sympathetic to their cause, and read a bunch of articles from their writers around fifteen years ago.
Some of us just think that we, as a society, can do better than enforcing our beliefs and demands at the end of a gun barrel. And we prioritize principle over outcome, acknowledging that every system has it's pathological edge cases - including the current system.
The big problem though is that the pathological edge cases of our current system are much better than the extremely pathological normal cases of a system without checks on what people are allowed to do.
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.
I had a teacher that explained politics not as a left/right spectrum, but as a political circle. At the very end libertarians and communists end up being very close to each other, with slightly different mechanisms.
Reminds me of the recent cases that made national news where a property owner didn't pay the fire department fees/taxes, and when the property caught on fire, the local fire department watched it burn to the ground.
> How would you fund services like police/fire departments or infrastructure improvements (roads, electricity), basically anything where its existence benefits many
Wouldn't food also fall into this category? Its existence benefits many. Would you want to nationalize food production?
This is, unfortunately, not something where I can easily give you a short, sweet and concise answer. There's a massive body of literature (and much debate) on the answers to those questions. I guess the most concise answer I can give here, without having to write a huge essay, would be to say "a combination of all of the above" (that is, "voluntary tipping", "usage fees", and "other").
And when you can't afford the insurance for the fire department? How are these people taken care of by such a system? I'm sure we all know people who've hit very hard times at some point in their life through no fault of their own. As much as I like the idea of Libertarianism it can't see how these people would make it through those times.
For the record, I'm not not a libertarian, and I'm not proposing or defending this system - but smacktoward's comment was just too silly to even be called a strawman argument.
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
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.
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.
The government is already picking and choosing - there is already criteria to decide what schools should be accredited and funded. It's not unlibertarian to defend they should have better criteria.
Limiting the number of years is rather inflexible and can lock people out for mistakes or significant changes in the market place (such as graduating into a global recession).
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.
That seems more likely to create a class structure than anything else. I find that a lot of people with good jobs are not well educated; they have skills but no cultural knowledge. Often, they discount the necessity of that knowledge.
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.
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.
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.
Not everything human produces ought to have an economic component.
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.
I think this is still narrow sighted. What we're talking about is collectivism vs individualism.
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.
Does the study of history have a direct economic impact to communities? In most cases no. I assume you recognize the importance of history for human culture?
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?
If you just want more people to have a better understanding of history, produce some good history documentaries to show on TV.
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.
I agree that diversity of opinions, perspectives, skills and backgrounds is important. That's one reason I oppose the monocultural idea that has crept in over the last few decades, that the one true path for everyone is spending their youth sitting in classrooms.
To be in an environment with like-minded individuals so one can foster ambition, inspiration, and collaboration.
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.
>>To be in an environment with like-minded individuals so one can foster ambition, inspiration, and collaboration.
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?
Yes, and this is one of the reasons I don't want the government involved in education at all. But, since they choose to be so involved, I find myself feeling that government spending on education should take the value of that education into account. But you're exactly right, in that it's hard to actually do that.
In the end, there are no perfect answers to any of this, it's just a question of "which variables do you optimize for?"
I'd say that any education that "produces" a graduate with a specific ideology has failed in a sense. I'd like to think education should be somewhat neutral, presenting a NPOV and that people would make up their own minds what they value most.
Otherwise, you have to ask "is this education, or indoctrination?"
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.
You're heaping praise onto a system that worked so well for you, yet balk at expanding access to that system to more people. Why? It's really hard for me to view that as anything other than extraordinarily selfish.
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.
You're heaping praise onto a system that worked so well for you, yet balk at expanding access to that system to more people.
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.
Agreed, actually... I don't like being taxed, but if it's going to happen, I at least want my money spent wisely. And I absolutely think education is one of the best (if not the best) outlets for that.
I would like to point out that under the BCC program you mentioned, the donor was paying in-state tuition for students, so most of the funding still came from taxes.
> 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 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).
Serious question. What funds Policemen, Fire departments, Emergency Medical people like EMTs and Paramedics? If we didn't pay taxes, and we didn't have any of those, it would be pretty lousy.
As far as I understand, most libertarians who believe in abolishing taxes also believe that these types of services should be provided by the free market. You pay some kind of subscription fee to a fire company, security company, etc, and you call them up when trouble hits. If you don't subscribe to such a service, your house burns down or get shot, too bad.
So basically the poor who more likely need those services more (more violence / robberies in poverty stricken areas) get really screwed. Sounds like a wonderful place to live. I might be tempted to call it Pakistan or somewhere that you have to pay bribes to the local service members.
> instead of taking it out of the federal govt. budget
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?
> Why is education for the citizens of a country considered something that a countries government should have no part in in the US?
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.
If you follow this Amendment, the States are free to educate their citizens any way they want, it's just that the Federal government isn't allowed to (a good restriction, in my opinion, since competition usually increases quality).
Why is education for the citizens of a country considered something that a countries government should have no part in in the US?
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 food 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.
> If food 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?
Actually I support a guaranteed income so that (among other things) people can be sure to be able to feed themselves. It is in a nations best interest to not have a starving population.
It is also in a nations best interests to have an educated population.
That sounds like a good argument for government funding, except we can't see the privately funded "internets" that might have been crowded out by public investment.
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 I wouldn't buy it because your analogy doesn't make any sense. There was no private investment in the 'internets' to crowd out when it was being built. There are plenty of options for an ISPs like Comcast.
There was no private investment in the 'internets'
No? Then what were CompuServe, Tymnet and Telenet, for example, all of which started their network businesses without using the Internet/ARPANET protocols?
At loose ends as my senior year in high school passed (long story, short on ambition), I defaulted in to taking a scholarship at the local community college, offered to the top 10% of local high schools. A software engineer moonlighting as an adjunct taught my first course in programming (in FORTRAN, on punched cards, no less!). Somehow, he conveyed an enthusiasm and an understanding that inspired me to continue, to pursue and obtain a BSCS at a state U, and to have a happy career as a developer. I owe it all to Community College (and a whole series of other supportive events).
My experience at Glendale Community College was that there was a real bimodal distribution of student, with one peak around very serious, hard working students trying to better their position and another around a group of students that were just going through the motions. GCC and most CCs are already pretty cheap. By removing the already low cost, I fear that proportion of less serious students would skyrocket. (As a service approaches zero cost, the percent of user that abuse that service reaches it's maximum.)
Do you feel like the less serious mode of students are a net drag on the other mode? On the one hand, sure it might diminish the atmosphere or something. One the other hand, their tuition and fees support stuff that they're probably not using as much.
For my personal story, I graduated high school in 2001 and wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do. I was good in Math and liked computers, so I was planning on going to a normal university and just finding something in those fields (I didn't have a major or a program in mind, I was just going to go in as "undecided").
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).
The main benefits he reaped from CC are an atmosphere of learning and growth, and the ability to engage with interesting people, not the degree itself.
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.
Community college is an excellent place for continuation education as well. Over the years I have taken night classes there have nothing to do with my date job, like laws, commercial contracts, real estate, investment, languages, etc. It's a great way to expand your horizon in a classroom environment.
I have found that the best math teachers were from community college. One teacher explained the solution to a calculus problem I had developed out of curiosity , and it wasn't even on the curriculum. He didn't have to do that, but I appreciated he did
My father was a math professor at a community college. He was proud of his teaching and his students. Those students --- largely people looking to become nurses, firemen, or other professionals --- benefited from his love of teaching. He got his PhD in education during his teaching career, and even developed a game to help teach math. The game sucked, frankly, and was never released anywhere but it shows how much he cared about teaching.
I took differential equations from a semi-retired Harvard PhD (this was in rural Washington State, so it was kind of a big deal) at my local podunk community college. He was also great, and started a math club for all interested students, where we'd sit around and work through high-level math problems and read math papers. He did this during his free time because he really loved math.
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.
There was a Physics instructor at Pierce College in Washington State who was one of the best Physics professors I had. He was also the hardest. I doubt I would have passed any of my university courses if he hadn't put the fear of god into me.
I got paid to go to community college and now I'm getting my masters at UIUC.
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 will give it an upvote, if for nothing else, than for the powerful writing. He makes a very lucid point though. Even hardcore capitalists could not argue with the idea that though the success of a man should depend on his efforts, bringing him to a state when he can start making an effort should be supported.
I'm probably late to this party where everyone seems to be hating on the President's plan, but I'll chime in since this plan would have had a huge affect on me.
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.
I had a great experiences at the two community colleges I attended. The teachers really seemed to care. Now, my two years at a state college were a waste of time. I only got the BS degree because I wanted something from this
state school. To the teachers, and guidance counselors at Indan valley college, and College of Marin; A huge thank you!
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.