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All foster kids in California can now attend any state college for free

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Re: All foster kids in California can now attend any state college for free

#381

Post by xmddmx »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #362
xmddmx wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an educator, and a social democrat (approximately) so "yes"? What saddens me is that grand (and simple) plan "free education for all" gets watered down and chipped away to "free education for those who have money or connections" and later attempts to shore it up offten amount to "free education for $special_group". While I don't deny $special_group should get free education, what gets me is all the special-pleadi…

I understand and empathize, but you also realize that college in the 60's and in the 2020's are completely different beasts no, right? The genie is out of the lamp, but we literally don't have the room to stuff it back in. CA's population has tripled in 60 years, and high school graduation rates have risen signifigantly (which is of course good). There are more students competing for university today than there were…

> CA's population has tripled in 60 years

and so has the tax base and # of teachers. This is a non-issue. Society scales.

> and high school graduation rates have risen signifigantly (which is of course good).

Not necessarily : see my comment below.

Re: All foster kids in California can now attend any state college for free

#382

Post by gnicholas »

acer589 wrote: post #131
ecf wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t agree. My parents are low middle class. We didn’t qualify for any financial aid and they were tasked with trying to find a way to send both my sister and I to college which they couldn’t afford. So what did we do? Take out a bunch of loans. Good thing I got a decent job that can pay for them. Too bad for my sister who had a masters and is making $35k as a teacher in Tennessee which is barely more than minimum…

And those loans should be forgiven. Is this your position on anything becoming easier over time? "We shouldn't have ramps, my grandpa had to push grandma's wheelchair up the steps"?

Are you saying that under current law the loans should be forgiven, or that we should have laws under which those loans are forgiven?

I believe it's possible to have loans forgiven if you work in certain industries (like public school teaching) for enough years, but it's not a few years — more like a decade or two.

If you think someone who gets a masters shouldn't have to pay back their loans, I'd counter that such a policy would be a wealth transfer from taxpayers to universities. Masters degrees are almost always a negative ROI endeavor, once opportunity cost is factored in. We shouldn't be subsidizing them even further, which will lead people to get even more of them, given how little they add to future earnings.

Re: All foster kids in California can now attend any state college for free

#383

Post by commonlisp94 »

confidantlake wrote: post #329
giantg2 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I see these numbers I'm shocked at how it's not >98%.

If intelligence is distributed on a bell curve there are going to be some that can't graduate no matter how hard they work, and some more that can only graduate with a lot of hard work. Then throw in some more people that have some difficult life circumstances: parents dying, depression or other health issues, drug or alcohol problems, etc.

In my experience they just stop attending, not hit a class they can't pass. There is no standard of achievement required to graduate high school besides participation.

Re: All foster kids in California can now attend any state college for free

#384

Post by commonlisp94 »

lostdog wrote: post #219
throwaway72762 wrote: post #111

Is everything culture war all the time now on this site? Every post becomes a stupid comment section where we'd be better off getting an LLM to write the comments for us. Here it's people trying to insert their affirmative action narratives and also rant about California a bit (in a backhanded way). We can do better.

I flagged that top level affirmative action comment, and I hope more people do. Contentless flamewars about unrelated culture war policies are boring, and are a negative contribution to the discussion.

> unrelated culture war policies

It seems pretty relevant to me. The comment was also positive, applauding this policy for actually trying to identify improvishment.

I don't see how you could describe this point as "culture war", "negative", or "flamewar". I suspect you just don't agree.

What's unfortunate about HN is that when enough people disagree, those ideas go away and others aren't aware they are even being expressed. The intent of these moderation features is to remove low quality content, but it's almost always a filter for ideology and sociability.

I can't count the number of times I have been reading an interesting comment or submission, and suddenly its flagged and completely invisible.

Re: All foster kids in California can now attend any state college for free

#386

Post by stevenjgarner »

I'm all for making education more accessible, but why does it have to be one extreme or the other (free or tuition) - if taxpayers are making education free, can't we levy a requirement for the graduate to at least volunteer Peace Corps style? Perhaps the term of volunteering could be inversely proportional to their grade such that someone who drops out early has to volunteer for a longer period of time.

Re: All foster kids in California can now attend any state college for free

#387

Post by dopidopHN »

krapp wrote: post #372
dopidopHN wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, I really do. Some meal is better than no meal. But we forgot how to make decent food at scale.

We didn't forget. It would just be expensive, and Americans simply don't want their hard-earned tax dollars to pay to feed other people's kids, so schools have to resort to cheap solutions. It took radical activism (mostly by the black community and groups like the black panthers) just to get school lunches to begin with, and Republicans/Conservatives have been trying to tear it down ever since.

I get your US context. That’s a handful. Thanks for providing that ( irony : 0% )

I just want to play devils advocate on the cost : How would be paying people minimum wage to batch cook food from scratch with local produce be more expensive ?

We did that for centuries without conserve, fridge and NPK to grow our food.

We now have access to cheap energy ( historically speaking ) and a variety of preservation methods. That should be considerably easier.

( and in fact i think it is, I’m in Quebec now, public hospitals switched to cook all their food on the same budget as previously frozen crap. A lot of French municipality are doing the same. Basically you have to pay the yearly salary of à cook, some gardener and a CPA to handle what can’t be grow ( 50% )

A frozen hotdog is pretty expensive for what it really is.

Question : how would be our Republicans friends do lunch for schools? Every kids bring a box ?

Re: All foster kids in California can now attend any state college for free

#388

Post by SoftTalker »

giantg2 wrote: post #72
bushbaba wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In California it’s ~85% of high school students graduate on average across all demographics https://www.cde.ca.gov/ds/ad/datasummary.asp

Every time I see these numbers I'm shocked at how it's not >98%.

The kids who don't graduate basically have just stopped showing up.

If you attend school and turn in your assignments, regardless of how poorly you do, you will graduate from a modern US highschool.

Re: All foster kids in California can now attend any state college for free

#389

Post by Manuel_D »

nomat wrote: post #232
Manuel_D wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The overall precedence is that reparations are paid to the people who experienced the harm, and the reparations are paid by those culpable of the harm. The Japanese who experienced internment were paid reparations by the United States government that took their property. Holocaust victims that had their property stolen were paid reparations by the former Nazis. By contrast Irish Americans could very justifiably claim…

The harms from slavery didn't end after the civil war. We had to pass laws a century later in the 1960s to outlaw the racist policies implemented by federal and state govts after reconstruction. The social (and legal) structure of american society has always had black people at the bottom, and until that is fixed then black people as a group are still being actively damaged by the legacy of chattel slavery.

And now you have to start picking which racist policies are worthy of compensation and which aren't. Asians faced the Chinese exclusion act, as well as redlining for example. Will the aforementioned anti-irish and anti-catholic discrimination also receive reparations? And again, how wilp you identify the liable party, or will we just tax everybody?

Re: All foster kids in California can now attend any state college for free

#390

Post by johnnyanmac »

xmddmx wrote: post #381
johnnyanmac wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand and empathize, but you also realize that college in the 60's and in the 2020's are completely different beasts no, right? The genie is out of the lamp, but we literally don't have the room to stuff it back in. CA's population has tripled in 60 years, and high school graduation rates have risen signifigantly (which is of course good). There are more students competing for university today than there were…

> CA's population has tripled in 60 years and so has the tax base and # of teachers. This is a non-issue. Society scales. > and high school graduation rates have risen signifigantly (which is of course good). Not necessarily : see my comment below.

Even if teachers have (which I'm not convinced of to begin with), Universities and land haven't. Its no secret that we've had an overpopulation crisis for the past few decades as is, so We haven't fully solved that issue as of now.

And I'm equally unsure if taxes have tripled, between increasing poverty on the bottom and more and more tax evasion on top.

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