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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

#521

Post by BellsOnSunday »

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…

There are university leagues for every kind of sport in the UK. Most of the people involved take it very seriously but it's still just a form of recreation and doesn't attract crowds and money. I've never spoken with anyone who admires or envies the US system. If it came up in conversation I suppose most would find it utterly bizarre and likely to corrupt the purpose of a university, as I do.

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

#522

Post by fallingknife »

giantg2 wrote: post #290
fallingknife wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How on earth do they have the right to make rules about what food kids bring from home?

My local district restricts what a kid can bring in for thier personal snack during classroom snack time. It has specific types of approved food listed. In some cases, they even restrict what brand of food it is.

This is why I could never have kids. I hated the busyboides who run schools enough as a kid. As an adult I would probably come to blows with them.

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

#523

Post by ClumsyPilot »

nicoburns wrote: post #499
uoaei wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Socializing, learning to live with others, providing opportunities to join social and professional clubs/organizations, navigation of longer-timeline projects and assignments, etc. You could call all of these 'education' but the usual and implicit image of education in people's minds is lectures and tutoring sessions so it's worth highlighting these other aspects. All of these are present in universities around the w…

> Socializing, learning to live with others, providing opportunities to join social and professional clubs/organizations, navigation of longer-timeline projects and assignments, etc. These are all things that happen in universities, but they are also all things that young people have the opportunity to do outside of university.

>young people have the opportunity to do [this] outside of university

Same goes for computer science and like every humanities degree - you can become an autodidact in any subject that does not require expebsive equiment and facilities.

On the contrary, > 60% of most people's lifelong friends consist of people they met at school or university. That suggests we are not very good at connecting eith random people we meet on the street.

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

#524

Post by ThinkBeat »

This is no doubt good. It is also a strange patch.

I wonder if this could plausibly cause some families to purposefully get kids placed into foster care 1 or 2 years before college. Hopefully not. Usually that whole experience is a nightmare.

Letting everyone attend state college for free is the real deal. To save costs fire 90% of the admin staff.

(I have not done research on the California state specifically but most colleges have absorbed far too many admin roles. Then due to cost not done enough to expand the teaching staff)

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

#525

Post by phpisthebest »

superchroma wrote: post #324
phpisthebest wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the end of the day, and this will be controversial it does not matter. Prisons should be a place to house people that have been deemed unable to function in society until such time they can (sometimes that is never). This is not necessarily only violence but violent offenders should be the majority, but people that simply refuse to follow the rules of a society also degrade and are a danger to the society over all…

We've tried it your way for decades - where prisons are permanent storage for badly made humans - and it doesn't work. They fill up, cost the taxpayer and become yet another thing to exploit. Society looks the other way whilst they get mistreated. Obscenities like rape are constant grim realities of such facilities, and organizations like gangs thrive in them too. Recidivism rates are alarming to boot. The point of p…

In reality no one has "tried it my way", you have made the assumption I agree with the current prison system, I dont.

I also do not agree that the "reform" we need is simply letting criminals go who commit property crime, or because of the socio/econimic circumstance, or any of the other "liberal" or "left" visions of reform

Today's system is centered around punishment, not protection of society, or reforming people, etc. It is just punishment. The criminal owes a "debt to society". I disagree with this model.

There is a whole host of reforms I would support both to prisons, and to criminal justice over all. However simply refusing to prosecute shoplifting, or other "minor" property crimes is not one I can support.

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

#526

Post by ClumsyPilot »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #464
shuckles wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That comparison makes no sense. At the very least you’d want to look at per capita figures. Prop 13’s impact on the political economy, empowering comfortable boomers, is probably as bad as its impacts on the budget.

Prop 13 drives real estate prices up and rents while they lag also follow. And that drives the price of labor up as well. Even more malign it discourages muni's from approving housing because the property taxes don't cover the services that muni's have to pay for.

> And that drives the price of labor up as well.

This is the real reason manufacturing is leaving the West, not regulation and not evil plan by China. This is also the real reason for culture of thowing away things and not repairing -> a new dishwasher costs £300, but a mechanic needs to charge £100 an hour to pay rent.

If you rent is 50% of your income, the rent is actuslly 75% of your income -> because when you pay for anything, say get a plumber, 50% of your money goes to pay the plumber's rent. If, hypothetically, rents were zero, the plumber would cost twice less. You would have 4 times more money.

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

#527

Post by ClumsyPilot »

jonhohle wrote: post #479
SantalBlush wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m really not trying to argue in bad faith. Many conversations about “free” social services ignore real capital and human cost of the proposal as if it doesn’t exist. Why stop at education when basic needs like food, water, and shelter could all be “free”? The cost of residential water in CA, for example, is about an ⅛th of the education budget. In the case of covered education for foster kids, I’m conflicted. I’m i…

> Many conversations about “free” social services ignore real capital and human cost of the proposal

Many compalins ignore the costs of missing these services.

We have 'free' firefighters because entire cities used to burn to the ground. That's very expensive to rebuild.

We have 'free' sanitation becauae The Black Death did more economic damage than both world wars combined.

We have free school education because having a population that can't read and write is economically ruinous. And politically ruinous - illiterate people can vote, join cults, maybe they support the inquisition and burning witches at the stake. We've been thought that.

No-one i ever met believes we should go back to the times where majority couldn't read and write becauae parents could not afford school. Some just believe that education stops at an arbitrary age.

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

#528

Post by kypro »

TheBigSalad wrote: post #268
ecf wrote: post #25

Where is the support for the middle class? The ones deemed too wealthy for financial aid, but not wealthy enough to actually afford the cost of college? Just more tax dollars being siphoned away from my family that got zero assistance.

I grew up on welfare in a shit neighborhood, but now I'm an upper middle class engineer. Trust me, poor people need the help. We are all indirectly benefitting from people getting out of poverty.

Unsympathetic take. Lots of people can use help. Just because you're on welfare doesn't necessarily mean your financial position is any worse (especially as a dependant).

I'm not from the US, but here in the UK when I when went to college and university the state would give students several thousand pounds a year for their parents being unemployed. My dad was a postman who used to do delivery driving on the weekend for extra cash for my family. We were poor, although I was deemed "wealthy" enough to be given no help because my dad made around £30,000.

The end result of this was that I basically the poorest person I knew from 16-21 because my friends either had unemployed parents so were given thousands of pounds to spend on laptops and things to help them get through university, or had rich parents who could buy stuff for them.

Because my dad was a postman I ended up having to work two jobs while at university and had to go into my overdraft almost every month.

Looking back now I am grateful for that hellish 5 years since I actually gained a lot of professional experience in tech during that time, but it came at the cost of severe depression and physical exhaustion. I cannot explain how difficult this period of time was for me. It shaped who I am today but I wished daily that my dad was unemployed so I didn't have to go through it.

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

#529

Post by ClumsyPilot »

watwut wrote: post #487
xmddmx wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question to ask is "how many kids graduate high school vs. how many should ". Turns out the answer is interesting - about 50 years ago, the graduation rate for high school was around 50%. These days it's much higher (90% or more in some areas). Does this mean the children is learning? Perhaps. It also may represent a failure of our systems - in the past, not everyone needed a high school degree to be a functional…

> Does this mean the children is learning? Perhaps. Kids also drink less alcohol, commit less crime, get teenage pregnant less often. So yeah, they are likely to be learning more then in 1970.

It is amazing how many people complain about "kids these days" while every measurable statistics shows that their generstion was much worse.

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

#530

Post by superchroma »

refurb wrote: post #495
superchroma wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making non-points. California has not effectively deployed various progressive policies. There exists certain people who are intractably violent or cruel and who cannot be healed or changed with the cutting edge of therapy or medicine. So what? This knowledge is not a sufficient excuse to give up on the problem. The status quo is unacceptable. That's the key fact.

California has not effectively deployed various progressive policies Oh yes it has. Mass release of violent criminals during Covid. Repeat offenders being released even for violent crimes. They are finally figuring out that these are the exact people who cause so many crimes. Shocking!

These are acts that are not aligned with the topic of reformation of prisoners. Critique of claimed progressive acts (acts done by self proclaimed progressives vs those acts aligned with formalized progressive ideology) is irrelevant. If you just want to dump rhetoric, you can make a new submission for that.
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