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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

#501

Post by jltsiren »

valval wrote: post #489
quag wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside of the USA the point of university is education. Only in the USA have I seen the meme that the point of universities is something other than education. I’m still trying to work out how and why there is a difference. Can you help me understand what the point is if it isn’t education?

In the EU, universities rarely have sports leagues you’re right in that, but all universities have various kinds of organised clubs and events all the damn time — not a week goes past without a lot of extra-curricular activities, of course voluntary. I have no idea how they handle things in say China, but at least here it’s quite obvious that the point of university is more or less to prepare students for life in gen…

Once upon a time, I was pretty involved with Finnish student organizations. It's more accurate to say that Finnish universities don't have that many organized clubs. It's the students who have them. Students often have a lot of free time, and they get involved in all kinds of activities. Their clubs tend to be independent legal entities with minimal formal connections to the university. Some of the more successful ones I knew often had some trouble maintaining >50% students in their membership in order to qualify for various benefits from the student union.

Second, according to Finnish law,

> The mission of the universities is to promote independent academic research as well as academic and artistic education, to provide research-based higher education and to educate students to serve their country and humanity at large.

It has been argued that getting involved in volunteer activities is part of the education. Participating in college sports would qualify, while watching them and supporting your team would not.

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

#502

Post by xkbarkar »

_8j50 wrote: post #478

Why is California uniquely... nice and compassionate to it's people? It's not liberalism because new england is probably even more liberal? Is it the economy? The weather?

Uhh. Google tent cities for a start. California is pretty brutal.

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

#504

Post by OJFord »

valval wrote: post #489
quag wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside of the USA the point of university is education. Only in the USA have I seen the meme that the point of universities is something other than education. I’m still trying to work out how and why there is a difference. Can you help me understand what the point is if it isn’t education?

In the EU, universities rarely have sports leagues you’re right in that, but all universities have various kinds of organised clubs and events all the damn time — not a week goes past without a lot of extra-curricular activities, of course voluntary. I have no idea how they handle things in say China, but at least here it’s quite obvious that the point of university is more or less to prepare students for life in gen…

> In the EU, universities rarely have sports leagues you’re right in that, but all universities have various kinds of organised clubs

I don't think that's true? It's just that they're not a huge public thing, televised, random locals watching live, with people attending the 'college' purely to play for the team, studying as a technicality. The only people involved, generally, are those playing (self-organised).

I played ice hockey in the UK university league (which was at the time in the EU, but I'm not nitpicking that point) and the team occasionally travelled abroad (I went to Eindhoven, NL) to play other university teams in Europe. (And get absolutely thrashed: hockey's bigger in much of Europe, especially colder countries, than it is in the UK, so they were the cream of a big pool of talent, while we were ..scraping a team together from interested parties is only slightly an exaggeration.)

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

#505

Post by andymcsherry »

mcny wrote: post #450
slavboj wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

My personal opinion, the first thing we should do is a complete ban on all “professional” and/or spectator sport in any and all educational institution. You can still have classes teaching sports but no spectators and definitely no “college spirit” nonsense. It doesn’t matter to me if these sports generate more revenue than it costs. It is a distraction that we don’t need. If people want to participate in spectator s…

Yeah, disagree. College sports generate a significant amount of revenue for the university, which funds scholarships for a huge number of students that otherwise couldn't afford to go there. They have the added benefit of being fun and add entertainment to the college experience.

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

#506

Post by throwawaylinux »

lisper wrote: post #477
sudosysgen wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on. Literally no one believes that teacher salaries are going to pay for themselves. When leftists say that something like public healthcare would be literally free what they mean is that the net cost compared to the alternative is null or negative, not literally that nothing is being spent. If you want to give me a link of someone who literally thinks that free college means that no one has to pay anything f…

I don't think they think that no one will pay. I think they don't think about it at all, or they think that government somehow has unlimited resources at its disposal.

It's actually that "billionaires" will somehow produce a whole lot more things and pay for it all for everybody else, absolving themselves of any further rational thought or moral responsibility to those with less than themselves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee8GedvPmBU

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

#507

Post by happytiger »

WalterBright wrote: post #80
happytiger wrote: post #17

About time. These kids needs all the love and support we can give them. Now let’s invest in a free state education for every citizen!

We already do. There's probably a free public school in your neighborhood.

College my dear friend. I apologize, but I meant post secondary.

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

#508

Post by londons_explore »

andymcsherry wrote: post #505
mcny wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal opinion, the first thing we should do is a complete ban on all “professional” and/or spectator sport in any and all educational institution. You can still have classes teaching sports but no spectators and definitely no “college spirit” nonsense. It doesn’t matter to me if these sports generate more revenue than it costs. It is a distraction that we don’t need. If people want to participate in spectator s…

Yeah, disagree. College sports generate a significant amount of revenue for the university, which funds scholarships for a huge number of students that otherwise couldn't afford to go there. They have the added benefit of being fun and add entertainment to the college experience.

Where does sports revenue come from? Isn't it ultimately parents of students and the general populace?

College sports aren't exactly an export like oil or software.

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

#509

Post by qwytw »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #419
qwytw wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> their descendants Or themselves since plenty of the victims were alive. This was a single event that lasted ~4 years with comparatively very good records. Slavery lasted for several hundreds years, there are not records for most slaves and even cases where they can identified good luck tracking down all of their descendants. That's several magnitudes more complex, to an incomparable extent. > Figure out how much th…

Your argument is that we should never do anything because attempting to do the right thing to people who have had their pasts and futures stolen is hard. Meanwhile we've got censuses going back hundreds of years. Do the math. It's not that difficult to come up with a minimum standard unless you're in the "do nothing" category.

I also have some more "ideological" objections. .e.g why don't we just focus on creating opportunities for all presently disadvantaged people regardless of who their ancestors 150-300 years ago were?

> is hard

Not hard, objectively infeasible to accomplish in a sufficiently equitable way.

> we've got censuses going back hundreds of years. Do the math

What math? And what would you do with those censuses? There are no individual records... Could you at the very try least try clearly define who would receive these "reparations"? Would any descendants of black slaves or enslaved Native Americans (or are we not thinking about the natives at all?) get the same share? Would it depend on the proportion of your ancestors who were enslaved? Would your current financial circumstances affect this? Would you have to do a DNA test measuring the proportion of your genome coming from Africa, Europe etc. and use that to calculate the payout?

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

#510

Post by sethammons »

andymcsherry wrote: post #505
mcny wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal opinion, the first thing we should do is a complete ban on all “professional” and/or spectator sport in any and all educational institution. You can still have classes teaching sports but no spectators and definitely no “college spirit” nonsense. It doesn’t matter to me if these sports generate more revenue than it costs. It is a distraction that we don’t need. If people want to participate in spectator s…

Yeah, disagree. College sports generate a significant amount of revenue for the university, which funds scholarships for a huge number of students that otherwise couldn't afford to go there. They have the added benefit of being fun and add entertainment to the college experience.

What if the schools discover other sources of revenue? The extreme conclusion being $corp University where more students can afford to go there but the main point of the school becomes slinging $corp products. Product could be ads, iphones, high end sex work, drugs, or anything with decent margins.
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