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Started looking and found out there's some much worse, and far more obvious cases that need to implement these reforms. [1] UPenn is THE most obvious. Sitting on a $20,000,000,000 endowment fund that went up +170% over 10 years while Philadelphia rots with drug use, poverty, and gun violence. BTW, amazing site to be horrified by gun violence (and vaguely fascinated). Look upon the awfulness of Philadelphia. [2] Sitti…
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Why are such things in the US so complicated? Where I live, studying is much much cheaper for most professions,for everyone! That's the only fair way. Also, a set of well educated people pays itself back later in the form of mostly income and added value taxes, which provides money to keep studying for cheap for the next generation.
Roger Freeman, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan's education advisor, was afraid that educated voters would turn the United States towards communism. One of Ronald Reagan's campaign promises was dismantling or breaking the department of education, similar to what he had done to California's state universities by limiting their budgets and moving the burden of tuition to students. At the time this was quite popular as i…
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Why are such things in the US so complicated? Where I live, studying is much much cheaper for most professions,for everyone! That's the only fair way. Also, a set of well educated people pays itself back later in the form of mostly income and added value taxes, which provides money to keep studying for cheap for the next generation.
American universities sell their students a lot of amenities that aren't really necessary for study. Not to mention the bloated admin class. You want to feel "in" when it comes to social justice? Here are your administrators that do the rituals of social justice as a full-time job, but they demand salaries. As for amenities, back in Europe, many universities don't even have a campus, just a scattering of buildings al…
Awesome. Now let’s lower the bar further and do it everywhere. And then let’s keep doing more until students can pay their tuition with a summer job, like they could when our elders went to school. I’ll hold off on asking for higher education to be free, as the culture still pushes back on that. But a return to the former model would be most welcome.
Do we also return the facilities to the state they were in before, particularly the residential programs? College enrollment percentage? What about a near universal military draft for men? Not that I think lowering the cost of education is a bad effort but appeals to some prior culture like they are apples to apples comparison is dishonest.
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Why are such things in the US so complicated? Where I live, studying is much much cheaper for most professions,for everyone! That's the only fair way. Also, a set of well educated people pays itself back later in the form of mostly income and added value taxes, which provides money to keep studying for cheap for the next generation.
the ideal is that college should be very expensive for rich people and cheap, free, or at least more affordable, for less wealthy people. american universities get closer to this ideal than you might expect. the days of outrageous student debt are thankfully fading away, at least for undergraduate degrees. it would make more sense to do this redistribution through taxes if possible, but many US institutions are priva…
This is a great step in the right direction. I can't speak directly for MIT, but there are issues with how these programs don't apply to parents with small family businesses. My parents had a small business, with my father taking home a salary of $XX,XXX. Duke University used the business assets to determine the EFC (expected family contribution) of literally 90% of the salary. Essentially saying to sell off the fami…
Isn't the entire point of these assessments to look at total assets, and not just annual income? I dont think this was an oversight or mistake. I think the expectation was that yes, people should sell assets if they have them .
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Why is the price you have to pay for something dependent on how much money your parents make? Feels so unfair
In my opinion, you're reasoning about it incorrectly. What if I said: the price is the same for everyone, but people with less access to money get proportionally more assistance paying that price?
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> They were given land and money specifically to serve the public good. Their duty is to deliver education. It's not solving political problems meant for elected officials (and the population at large).
If their duty is to deliver education, why are they sitting on a $20B hoard? Presumably they could spend a little bit of that to deliver some more education, couldn’t they?
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> Where I live, studying is much much cheaper for most professions,for everyone! I'll go out on a limb and bet people in your country earn much less than the average American, too. Why? Why don't companies just pay these people more? IT all comes back in income and value added taxes.
I don't know where the OP lives. But in Switzerland, where world-class univeristies like the ETH cost something like $ 1.5k a year in tuition, I'm pretty certain that people earn more on average than in the USA.
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Honestly, that wouldn’t be a bad way to fund education: education is free, but the university gets taxation power over you so they can tax you at x% of your income. It aligns incentives better than the current system.
In which case you may like how it’s done in the UK. it’s technically debt but in essence works as a graduate tax. The government pays for your education with a loan. You then only pay back 9% of your income over a certain income threshold. You do this until you pay back the loan or 30-40 years have passed. So in practice this is a graduate tax.