Only now as an adult, having grown up in southwest Michigan, do I appreciate how unusual the region is. The amount of culture and philanthropy in area is very high considering the population. In Kalamazoo there's the Kalamazoo Area Math and Science Center (thank you Upjohn family), the Gilmore Keyboard Festival (thank you Gilmore family), the philanthropic work of the Stryker family, ... the list goes on and on. Abou…
I grew up in Kalamazoo. Living in other places makes me wish everywhere was like Kalamazoo.
I'd say the kids of Kalamazoo could use a break given the kind of stuff they have to deal with. http://www.calgaryherald.com/opinion/letters/Nose+Hill+Park+... Note: The above Kalamazoo sheriff is probably not quite as paranoid as the story suggests since Kalamzoo has a murder rate almost 7 times higher than Calgary despite being roughtly 1/14'th the size. If Kalamazoo is that dangerous, it's natural to assume a much…
For those rare non-calgarians: the stampede is a large local rodeo. It is a very big thing here, about the closest thing possible to a city wide festival. All week businesses provide pancake breakfasts and people wear cowboy hats. There is about a 0% chance that "Have you been to the stampede?" was a euphemism for "Give me all your money, eh".
Wow. That's neat. I once had a conversation with a state legislator where he argued it wasn't the responsibility of government to provide grant and loan opportunities for higher education, and that by doing so, the federal government was disincentivizing saving and investing. Instead, he argued universities should be more market driven (which I will concede might introduce more price competition in the face of rapidl…
"a subsidized higher education experience for a expanded pool of people is a long-term net gain"
I agree with this. Some of the benefits of an individual's education accrue to society at large. However, the vast majority of the benefits of an individual's education accrue to the individual. Why not split the funding in a similar way? If the benefits aren't worth the cost to the individual, that's a good signal that the benefits may not be worth the cost for society to subsidize.
What would be the unintended negative consequences of this? It reminds me of the story of a West African king who went on a pilgrimage to Mecca. On his way to Arabia, the king gifted so much gold to all intervening communities that the price of gold crashed, taking with it the economies of North Africa and Arabia.
Unlike gold which is a scare resource, knowledge is non-rivalous. College tuition acts as an economic exclusion mechanism and thus only allows consumers/students with sufficient means to gain access to it. By removing the exclusion mechanism for these students, it in effect turns college education into a public good. As a country, we've deemed that this is so vastly in the public interest that we provide free K-12 ed…
Public goods are both non-rivalrous and non-excludable. This is an important distinction. We fund public goods as a society because they are very difficult to fund otherwise since you can't exclude the people who don't pay. Education is easy to fund privately. It should be funded publicly to the extend that society benefits from it. Most of the benefits of an education accrue to the student.
What would be the unintended negative consequences of this? It reminds me of the story of a West African king who went on a pilgrimage to Mecca. On his way to Arabia, the king gifted so much gold to all intervening communities that the price of gold crashed, taking with it the economies of North Africa and Arabia.
You can look to Eastern European economies for that, as they still pick up the tab for majority of university education. 1) There's certain stigma attached to blue-collar jobs now that everyone and their pet hamster are proud bearers of a college diploma. Finding a good plumber is next to impossible. 2) There's a subset of people thrown into permanent unemployment. Might be a cultural thing, but second education is a…
In regards to point #1, I foresee (or at least hope we will see) a swing back in the other direction, as wages for skilled labor skyrocket and scarce supply of skilled labor makes it a laborer's market (pick and choose your hours, etc)
Anonymous? If memory serves me right it is the Stryker family that provides the scholarships.
Even if their identities aren't as well-hidden as covert espionage informants, that doesn't mean we should broadcast it if they have clearly elected to be quiet about it themselves.
FYI Kalamazoo has three venture capital firms whereas to my knowledge Grand Rapids and Lansing have none. In fact until a few years ago there weren't any VC's in the Detroit city limits.
http://www.finaid.org/savings/tuition-inflation.phtml (those graphs don't really do it justice, but if you know your math you know what a difference being several point ahead of inflation for decades does to the difference in price.) Its a shame that an entire generation of educated Americans are being enslaved by an unparallelled level of debt so early in their lives. The NYTimes has had many articles that give a go…
> I'm an optimist. The problem will fix itself thanks to technology. Education in the future is going to be nearly free. I think it is going to happen a lot sooner than people realize. Runaway education inflation will make even the "expensive" solutions look dirt cheap. You're presupposing that tuition has anything to do with the cost of providing education, and that tuition will go down if the costs go down. It does…
College in the US is about education and signaling. Capable people want to learn more after high school, so most of them go to college. It makes sense that the college one attends has become a signal since its so closely coupled with what capable people want to do anyway. In the future, this will not be the case. So many capable people will eschew a traditional college education that alternative signaling methods will arise. For instance, Y Combinator is a more powerful signal than Stanford is. (Stanford graduates don't automatically receive $150k in convertible debt for their endeavors once they graduate.)