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I Owe It All to Community College

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Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#171

Post by praneshp »

ecdavis wrote: post #114
fatjokes wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the point. It undermines the whole STEM promotion that the US is currently undergoing. You never hear anybody brag about how they no can read gooder, if they're an athlete, butcher, scientist, whatever.

Plenty of otherwise intelligent STEM students and graduates hold the liberal arts in contempt and will take any opportunity to mock arts degrees/students/graduates. In my experience the prevailing attitude of arts students towards science was that it was arcane, difficult and something reserved only for the smartest and most studious. Many science students, on the other hand, view liberal arts simply as a waste of ti…

Very true. I'm a STEM grad, and till a couple of years ago used to have some sort of contempt for liberal arts.

It's only when I started to do technical writing that I let go of that attitude. It was quite humbling, to say the least.

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#172

Post by markdown »

benihana wrote: post #113
markdown wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OT: > irregardless regardless is fine.

so is irregardless. Can I ask why you take the time to correct someone when it was perfectly clear what the intent of the sentence was?

I live in a post-colonial country where English is the official language but 90% of the population have another language as their mother-tongue.

There is therefore a lot of "broken" english spoken, and I guess I'm just used to correcting people (and being corrected myself).

Irregardless is one of those words that is becoming OK to say just because so many people use it.

Language adapts and therefore English is descriptive rather than prescriptive, but I'd prefer if the opposite were true.

A statement in a programming language means the same regardless of the education-level, ethnicity, or social status of the reader. I wish the same were true for English.

Instead we have nonsense like Biweekly, which may refer to an event that occurs either twice weekly or once every two weeks. Why should it mean the latter when we have fortnightly for that?

----

Anyway, I like to correct people (in as polite a manner as possible) because I like being corrected myself.

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#173

Post by acveilleux »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #99
caseydurfee wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an initiative that will lead to higher earning potential for Americans, leading to higher tax revenues over the long term. Will it pay for itself? Probably not, but it's juvenile to act like all government spending is equal when it comes to the country's long term financial health.

Yes, potential. It will also further devalue high school diplomas as well as make good high schools less of a priority across the nation (everyone is going to CC anyway, right?). It probably makes bachelor's degrees even more of a requirement for decent jobs, making people more likely to take on student loans and spend their 20 and 30s paying them back for a piece of paper, restricting their mobility and options. Thr…

Actually, I live in a place (Quebec) that effectively has free Community Colleges (we call them CEGEPs) and has had them for decades now.

We have one less year of compulsory public education. I guess that devalued high school. However university degrees here are 3 years (4 for out of province students.)

Society hasn't collapsed. For many occupations, the "technical" diplomas (3 years instead of pre-uni 2 years stream) from a CEGEP are the expected level of education. There's an engineering school that specifically serves to convert those technical diploma to B.Ing (http://en.etsmtl.ca).

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#174

Post by enraged_camel »

jordache wrote: post #120
enraged_camel wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Not everything human produces ought to have an economic component. Painters, Poets, Musicians... ? Can you explain why someone needs a college education to become a painter, poet or musician?

To be in an environment with like-minded individuals so one can foster ambition, inspiration, and collaboration. Your sentiment can be applied to any skillset. The same reason why a college degree is not needed for programmers.. One can learn concepts and languages from books outside of college. However the resources available in a community of like-minded individuals provides great benefit for the study of said topi…

>>To be in an environment with like-minded individuals so one can foster ambition, inspiration, and collaboration.

Colleges are not the only such environment. But it is the most expensive.

>>Your sentiment can be applied to any skillset.

Not really, no. Would you let a doctor without w college degree operate on you? Have your city's bridges and buildings designed and built by engineers and architects who learned their trades from books?

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#175

Post by jamesli »

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.

Location, location, location, to borrow it from real estate market. In places like Bay Area, there is a surplus of excellent talents competing for academic positions. If one can't get one in Standard, Cal, UCDavis, USF, etc, they will fight for the positions in the community colleges. So it is not uncommon to meet excellent professors in community colleges in such places. I know a few who taught in community colleges in Bay Area and eventually got positions in 4-year universities in Midwest. I bet they wouldn't hesitate to come back if they can get a position here.

It could be quite a different story in other places. I lived in a small town in the Midwest before. It has a big university, which one might think would provide some good staffs to the local community colleges. The reality was it was pretty bad. The only students who were interested in learning were middle-aged, who took the classes more for leisure. The teachers were aloof, most of whom were not qualified in teaching in a college, IMHO.

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#176

Post by krschultz »

fatjokes wrote: post #3

> classes I dropped after the first hour (astronomy, because it was all math) Yet another cultural figure stating without embarrassment how bad they are at math.

And how many engineers are not embarrassed that they can't speak in front of a room of people?

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#177

Post by krschultz »

ahomescu1 wrote: post #167
v64 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> It's a fascinating philosophy that, in my opinion, severely underestimates the human affinity for greed and manipulation. Ironically, exactly the same can be said of Communism.

I had a teacher that explained politics not as a left/right spectrum, but as a political circle. At the very end libertarians and communists end up being very close to each other, with slightly different mechanisms.

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#178

Post by beeworker »

ctdonath wrote: post #117
randomnumber53 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Going from 50% deficit spending to paying off equivalent of 100% of GDP (which enjoys a 2-5% annual growth) amounts to "won't be able to". We'd have to cut spending by 1/3rd just to stop increasing the debt. We'd have to route all federal revenue to debt for 5 years to pay it off. Ain't happening.

Ah, but most of the US debt is denominated in US currency... It's a convenient loophole to use if it ever becomes a more serious problem.

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#179

Post by [deleted] »

RIMR wrote: post #115
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.

The Iraq War has cost us ~$6,000,000,000,000 (that's ~$17k per US citizen). Under Obama's plan, that money could be used to pay for two years of community college for every student willing to do the require work for the next 1000 years! Of course we shouldn't "buy everything that's cheaper than the Iraq war", but that's not what is being argued. This was just to show a contrast between two ~10-year projects. It doesn…

[deleted]

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#180

Post by icebraining »

jim_greco wrote: post #82
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.

That sounds like a good argument for government funding, except we can't see the privately funded "internets" that might have been crowded out by public investment.

To make an analogy, Comcast could say to the critics of their monopolization that "it's a good thing that we are here, otherwise you wouldn't have any internet at all!", but would you buy it?

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