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I Owe It All to Community College

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Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#81

Post by aaron-lebo »

romaniv wrote: post #71

I'm glad that it worked for him, but my community college was a complete waste of time with the exception of two (just two!) courses and the internship program. I think the true way forward is in replacing community colleges with certificates from online courses (with some in-person labs, probably). It's cheaper and would make for better quality of education.

Colleges as a whole should be completely replaced with something like certificates. Bachelor degrees are way too expensive for what they provide. The vast majority of people would be much better off with focused, relevant learning and skills.

I went to a CC as well, fantastically cost-effective, I had some real gems for teachers, but I can think of at least one who had no business teaching anything. If we make CC free, they become an additional paper prereq, and high school education becomes even less valuable because basic education gets pushed further back to the CC level.

Stop, stop, stop. I know many people on this forum like me value learning, but spending more money fixes nothing.

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#82

Post by jim_greco »

mindcrime wrote: post #9

I have issues with the Obama plan, not because I'm against community colleges, but because I have issues with how this will (probably) be funded (read: taxes). As a libertarian / ancap who believes taxation is theft, I don't support anything involving spending tax dollars, no matter how noble the end. That said, I'm a community college grad myself, three times over. I have an A.G.E. (General Education) from Brunswick…

> As a libertarian / ancap who believes taxation is theft, I don't support anything involving spending tax dollars, no matter how noble the end.

It's a good thing most of us don't feel that way and you're able to express yourself through a medium initially funded through Government research.

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#83

Post by danielweber »

romaniv wrote: post #70
danielweber wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sympathetic to this view. In general, I tend to favor flat programs that no one prices out of instead of need-based programs, because it gets rid of the marginal tax that happens when you earn more. (Every program that is just "for the poor" is a marginal tax on the person climbing out of poverty.) Also, I view the financial aid merely as price discrimination. We wouldn't consider another industry as compassionat…

FAFSA documents are not complicated to fill out, but the overall process require you to spend some amount of time on jumping through various hoops. Also, it has prerequisites and conditions you need to keep track of. For people who are short on money (and therefore time) all of that has significance.

College requires time and jumping through hoops. If you can't keep track of the FAFSA application, how are you going to keep track of the class assignments?

Is the goal to make "attended college" become completely useless as a job market signal? Why are we trying to cram people into college if it means nothing?

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#84

Post by ameister14 »

Shivetya wrote: post #20
mindcrime wrote: post #9

I have issues with the Obama plan, not because I'm against community colleges, but because I have issues with how this will (probably) be funded (read: taxes). As a libertarian / ancap who believes taxation is theft, I don't support anything involving spending tax dollars, no matter how noble the end. That said, I'm a community college grad myself, three times over. I have an A.G.E. (General Education) from Brunswick…

Libertarian here as well. I am more of the opinion that the government should set rules on the cost of education for any school accepting government aid or any school who accepts students who pay with government loans. Want to get the price of education back in line, drop the open checkbook. The issue I take with taxing to pay for everyone's college is that apparently there is no determination what constitutes a good…

That seems more likely to create a class structure than anything else. I find that a lot of people with good jobs are not well educated; they have skills but no cultural knowledge. Often, they discount the necessity of that knowledge.

Interestingly enough, that's a totally working class sentiment. If you want to move beyond that, though, and have genuine leadership and thought generated by these government funded programs, you can't limit people to studying only things that have a direct correlation with paying back the investment.

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#85

Post by slayed0 »

cgore wrote: post #77
danielweber wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we just buy everything that is cheaper than the Iraq war, we will very soon be bankrupt.

We're way past bankrupt already. That's what debt is. Zero was a long time ago.

debt =/= bankruptcy. Unrecoverable debt is bankruptcy. While the argument could be made that our debt is past a recoverable point, it is not a certainty.

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#86

Post by moskie »

danielweber wrote: post #66
snake_plissken wrote: post #56

The initial proposal from The President costs $60 billion over ten years or $6 billion per year. For some perspective, conservative estimates have put the cost of the war in Iraq at $500 million a day. This proposal would cost 72 days of war. It's difficult to comprehend how our politicians could have any issues supporting such an initiative.

If we just buy everything that is cheaper than the Iraq war, we will very soon be bankrupt.

Let me know when you hit the bottom of that slippery slope.

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#87

Post by v64 »

thoth wrote: post #30
mindcrime wrote: post #9

I have issues with the Obama plan, not because I'm against community colleges, but because I have issues with how this will (probably) be funded (read: taxes). As a libertarian / ancap who believes taxation is theft, I don't support anything involving spending tax dollars, no matter how noble the end. That said, I'm a community college grad myself, three times over. I have an A.G.E. (General Education) from Brunswick…

>As a libertarian / ancap who believes taxation is theft, I don't support anything involving spending tax dollars, no matter how noble the end. That's pretty hard core. How would you fund services like police/fire departments or infrastructure improvements (roads, electricity), basically anything where its existence benefits many (as opposed to say redoing education to require parents to pay for individual tutoring o…

The Wikipedia entry on Anarcho-capitalism[1] dives into these details. It's a fascinating philosophy that, in my opinion, severely underestimates the human affinity for greed and manipulation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#88

Post by jesseclay »

jdhawk wrote: post #80
jesseclay wrote: post #64

Another anecdote on the power of community college: Back in 2009 I enrolled at Community College of San Francisco. I was 19 and had no idea what I wanted to do career wise, so I took broad and rigorous curriculum focused on transferring to UC-Berkeley. The 2 years I spent there were some of the best of my life. I was frequently pushed and challenged by excellent professors who had true passion for their subjects (a f…

Not all community colleges are the same. If you live in close proximity to universities with high academic standards, most of the professors are going to be recent graduates of those programs, or educators picking up extra cash and some experience teaching at CC. BFE Community College will not have the same level of academic excellence.

Agreed -- little doubt that the Bay Area attracts teaching talent that colleges in less desirable areas aren't able to. That said, I feel strongly in the potential for community colleges nation wide to raise their standards and become places of first choice for citizens not entirely set on an expensive 4 year university with questionable value.

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#89

Post by jacalata »

romaniv wrote: post #71

I'm glad that it worked for him, but my community college was a complete waste of time with the exception of two (just two!) courses and the internship program. I think the true way forward is in replacing community colleges with certificates from online courses (with some in-person labs, probably). It's cheaper and would make for better quality of education.

I don't know if it would make for better quality of education in general. People attending community college tend to have less digital access and need more encouragement and support than your average college student. A number of studies on outcomes for classes taken online vs in-person at community colleges have been done, one of the biggest I know of being a study across the California community college system. They found that student dropout and failure rates were higher in online courses than regular in-person classes (after controlling for incoming background, etc) but that taking at least one online course made it more likely the student would graduate, probably because of enabling a course flow/meeting a requirement that was otherwise difficult to schedule.

http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_514HJR.pdf

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#90

Post by randomnumber53 »

cgore wrote: post #77
danielweber wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we just buy everything that is cheaper than the Iraq war, we will very soon be bankrupt.

We're way past bankrupt already. That's what debt is. Zero was a long time ago.

Being in debt just means one owes money. The US government has assets and various investments. Being bankrupt is when you can't pay back your debt, which the US most likely will be able to do.
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