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

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421–430 of 585 posts

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

#421

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.

Then it's not free. Opportunity cost is real.

I don't ask my kid to volunteer because he got a chicken pox vaccine, he just gets to not have chicken pox for free. And that's ok.

We can choose to make the next generations lives better than ours, even if we gain no material benefit ourselves. (Though I'd argue that an educated youth does materially benefit the populace.)

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

#423

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.

Do you plan to ask this of everyone who goes through K-12?

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

#424
post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"social democrat" - are you sure? the point remains: some services are social goods and should be treated as such, so that "nobody lacks for inability to pay". That's not literally "free" but has the same meaning in practice.

Something is not free if someone else is forced to pay for it. It’s really easy to be generous with other people’s resources.

It's easy to argue that nothing is truly "free" since tradeoffs always exist--at least to some small degree--but that isn't illuminating or helpful.

We all know what is meant by "free" in this context, and there's no point in acting obtuse about it except to argue in bad faith.

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

#425
post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

>How would be paying people minimum wage to batch cook food from scratch with local produce be more expensive ? Local produce is more expensive, as is cooking from scratch[0]. Another problem is that won't scale. You can't feed millions of kids twice a day every weekday from the local farmers' market. [0] https://www.vox.com/videos/2018/3/22/17152460/healthy-eating... > how would be our Republicans friends do lunch f…

Thanks for the vox link, I can’t load it now, I’m traveling and have no bandwidth.

I’m ready to change my mind once I’m reaching a wifi.

In interval :

how did we do it for millenniums before frozen carbs?

Random: Let’s say the Roman army. Ok. They were relying on canned food a lot. ( garnum )

But for sure they were not eating frozen hotdog

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

#426
post #294

This idea is not really new - the California Master Plan for Education essentially promised a free higher education to everyone in California. In 1960. [1] As these things go, the plan was eroded over time, with the (in)famous Proposition 13 of 1978 dealing a big blow. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Master_Plan_for_Hig...

There is this meme that Prop 13 is responsible for everything bad in California because of course we could pay for anything if we had more money. In reality the CA budget has grown faster than inflation for decades. https://www.statista.com/statistics/313176/california-state-...

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

#427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it should be free because of stories like yours. It shouldn't be a requirement to be saddled with debt to participate in society.

I agree it should cost less, but I don't understand why everyone seems to think the government (taxpayers) should be paying these tuitions. The problem is that tuition is ridiculous.

You do understand that the state won’t be paying individual tuition to state-run universities. They’ll just fund their actual operations.

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

#428

No, it isn't "free" - and those who actually make the money to support the unlimited taxation that pay for the "free" stuff are actively leaving the tax farm that is California.

It may not be free, but it's certainly quite cheap.

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

#429
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it should be free because of stories like yours. It shouldn't be a requirement to be saddled with debt to participate in society.

Problem with free tuitition is it only incentivizes cash grab from educational institutions. There will be gazillion universities overnight similar to coding bootcamps - all competing for state funded tuition without any regard to quality

States don’t pay the tuition for private K-12 students and they won’t pay the tuition for private colleges.

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

#430

Now in a better world we'd drop a word from this sentence and make it free for all state residents. That's closer to what it used to be. Realistically this doesn't change much since it's extremely unlikely a foster kid wouldn't qualify for a full ride prior to this. The only people who really get screwed are middle class families who make too much to qualify for aid, but can't really afford to pay for school.

It's already difficult to attend California's public universities as a state resident; the more popular campuses prefer nonresidents/international students because they pay full price. No-tuition residents will be even less desired by admissions offices.
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