Profits are not equal amongst Public Schools.
What you're suggesting would work well, for an industry not designed to milk every bit of money from their 'subscribers.'
Colleges are profit driven. Free doesn't drive profits.
Stop Arguing over Elite Schools. Just Make Public Colleges Free
171–180 of 288 posts
Re: Stop Arguing over Elite Schools. Just Make Public Colleges Free
#172As others in the thread have noted, there are two separeate issues here: 1. Young people should be able to get a quality education regardless of their families' financial situation. 2. Everyone should have an equal shot at attaining positions of power in society (not so much for their own good, since almost nobody is going to attain these positions anyway it's a small benefit relative to the total population, as for…
Giving out legacy admission is Equity. You're giving "legacy" people the same education as people who earned it through merit, which is the definition of being equitable. Unless, you believe equity only applies to race? Equality is the term you're looking for.
Equitable, adj: fair and impartial.
If you actually believe that legacy admissions are a fair and impartial way to decide who gets to go to Harvard, I'm not really sure what to say.
Re: Stop Arguing over Elite Schools. Just Make Public Colleges Free
#173A nearly content-free article. The idea is not new, and little data is offered to support it. The success criteria seems to be "enrollment", which leaves a lot of room for things to go wrong. No downsides are mentioned aside from cost, which is dismissed with a tax that sounds like free money.
what other downsides could there be from making education accessible to everyone and not just those that can afford it?
i can think of two: one is the quality of the education. if it is to low and everyone graduates without having learned much then that would be bad.
another is having to many graduates without jobs.
but both can be fixed with more quality and being more demanding. one benefit: when you don't pay for education yourself there is no pressure to let you pass classes just to get your money.
Re: Stop Arguing over Elite Schools. Just Make Public Colleges Free
#174> There’s the age-old question of how we pay for this. Sanders proposed a Wall Street financial transactions tax. A 0.1 percent tax, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate, could raise $777 billion over 10 years. Or we could hike taxes on corporations and the wealthiest Americans. I have no problem taxing wall street or "the wealthiest Americans", but I don't see the connection between this proposal and…
I have a problem with taxes in general, and this is yet another stupid idea. Increased tax loads always get passed on to the consumer. What we will end up with is higher cost of doing business and 100% for certain federally run universities will still need taxpayer bailouts every single year. Lose lose all the way around. I have an even better idea: get rid of all freebies. If someone wants something, they can get of…
From my perspective education isn't a "freebie", it's an investment in our nation's future. Change is coming at us really fast and we need a bunch of sharp kids out there looking at all the angles. It's the same situation with school lunches. We need a bright, healthy population to face challenges.
You might look at this from a national security angle. Did you know that the largest category of recruit disqualification in both WWI and WWII was malnourishment? Did you know that our technological 'edge' comes out of public universities? We don't want a small pool of healthy Americans to call on, we want the Roman ideal of a sound mind in a sound body for every citizen.
Re: Stop Arguing over Elite Schools. Just Make Public Colleges Free
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
The entire US military budget is federal, but most of the education budget comes from the states. You're comparing apples to oranges.
Importantly, I'm asking for the original commenter to clarify their position. I'm not comparing any sort of fruit at this point other than pointing out the disparity at the federal level. Do you have figures comparing "all-in" funding for both defense and education at the state and federal levels? From casual inspection of the points posted so far, it seems like a more correct statement is: "The United States, nation…
Here are some figures: https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...
Putting the US as the 2nd in terms of "per pupil" funding in the world and pointing out that the federal education budget is just 10.5% of the total spend on education in the US.
Re: Stop Arguing over Elite Schools. Just Make Public Colleges Free
#176It's important to refer to this as "taxpayer funded" and not "free". That doesn't mean it shouldn't happen, but saying something is free strips it of value. What we should be internalizing is that this is a public good, like roads and bridges. Nobody's like "Dude, we are getting a free road!"
Re: Stop Arguing over Elite Schools. Just Make Public Colleges Free
#177A bit off topic, but honestly meeting people at top schools and mid/low ranked schools, I don't see much of a difference except in the opportunities these people have. Whether it is physics or CS, I don't see a meaningful quality difference in their work, only that the Stanford/MIT/Berkeley kid gets more internships and has an easier opportunity getting a new job if they mess up at their old one. I routinely see peop…
I will echo this.
The only things top school really do is gate-keep who is allowed to get in, providing as a consequence some sense of exclusivity. The quality of education does not seem to be that different. And even if it was, it doesn't matter that much in a field like CS that is mainly self-learned and gets reinvented every decade.
Re: Stop Arguing over Elite Schools. Just Make Public Colleges Free
#178Or perhaps we should stop pushing everyone to college and encourage those who have the aptitude to go into trades. Of the successful tradespeople I know, the only thing going to college would have done was delayed their entry into the workforce and saddle them with debt. Might they be able to run their businesses 10% more efficiently or grow twice as big had they had more business education? Probably, but there are f…
I don't think it's fair or reasonable for only those from well off families to have the chance at college though. College access shouldn't be tied to ones socioeconomic background.
I commented elsewhere, but I came from a not-well-off single parent house. I paid for college with loans. Then I paid off the loans.
If someone has done well in school and wants to go into a stable, well-paying profession, it's probably the only area (besides a mortgage) that I'd recommend taking a loan. I paid zero dollars for four years to go to school and live and eat on campus.
Going into an engineering program, the risk was relatively low that I would not be able to pay it back while still in my 20s (which I did). 20 years later, while the cost of the degree was high the opportunities that it made available were beyond what would have been available without it and payback was amortized over time.
Re: Stop Arguing over Elite Schools. Just Make Public Colleges Free
#179As others in the thread have noted, there are two separeate issues here: 1. Young people should be able to get a quality education regardless of their families' financial situation. 2. Everyone should have an equal shot at attaining positions of power in society (not so much for their own good, since almost nobody is going to attain these positions anyway it's a small benefit relative to the total population, as for…
As someone who is likely funding what is ultimately a money/power grab, if I'm paying for education, I want it to be for degrees that have direct, immediate impact: educators, doctors, hard sciences. While there is a possibility of funding the education of the next great novelist, sociologist, artist, or historian, there will never be a return on that investment for the vast number of students in those fields. I don'…
> As someone who is likely funding what is ultimately a money/power grab, if I'm paying for education, I want it to be for degrees that have direct, immediate impact: educators, doctors, hard sciences. While there is a possibility of funding the education of the next great novelist, sociologist, artist, or historian, there will never be a return on that investment for the vast number of students in those fields. I don't know why we'd force that risk on the public.
Do you also feel this way about public high schools? Personally, I just think that a world in which everyone has access to education is a better world for everyone.
> Colleges (public or private) are too good at absorbing any money that is made available to them, to be trusted as being fiduciaries of public education, IMHO. As student loans and public money are made available, they have raised tuition to fill the gap without providing any additional benefit for their increased incomes.
Agreed, but this is a problem than can and must be solved. Public universities are nowhere near as bad in this regard as private ones and are thus the best place to invest.
> For the second one, the only thing that mucking with a private institutions admissions process will do is turn it into a public institution that is no longer elite. They're private, let them do what they want.
Private universities are deeply embedded in our society as gatekeepers to positions of power and thus the public has a legitimate interest in how their admissions process works (not to mention that they receive large amounts of public funding). If getting rid of legacy admissions means that they are "no longer elite" (to be clear it should make them more "elite" in terms of actual research and academic performance, but possibly less elite in terms of controlling access to money and power) that's an outcome I'm happy to see.
Re: Stop Arguing over Elite Schools. Just Make Public Colleges Free
#180I don't follow the logic the author is using. Let's say we make all public colleges free for students. "Elite" schools will still exist, and top students will still target schools such as Ivy/MIT/Stanford/etc. One look at the people in executive offices or top political offices and you'll find a substantial portion are graduates from elite schools.
As an Australian who benefited from a great public college (or as we call it uni) if public schools were free and high quality what would motivate the demand for elite schools? Yes elite schools are still networking grounds. But wouldnt the hope be that if people who already came out of public schools weren't saddled with crippling debt, enough of them could pay it forward to the broader group than their own elite sc…
> As an Australian who benefited from a great public college (or as we call it uni) if public schools were free and high quality what would motivate the demand for elite schools?
In San Francisco, where I live, some in the community are challenging smart kids tracking into exclusive experiences in public K-12 schools.
Among people who are eligible for tracking, tracking seems really popular. But the plurality seems really unhappy with it. So there will always be XYZ, a word I cannot use, in communities to de facto track in public schools, or sometimes there will be legacy admissions, or whatever.
Maybe you don't believe these stylized facts. Like you already sound like the same people in this community who want to end tracking: us vs. them. I know you probably don't actually want that, but you're the perfect example of a tipping point, expressing an eensy weensy amount of resentment for "elite school buddies," that somehow winds up in "end gifted programs." Surely you see that.