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I Owe It All to Community College

nytimes.com

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Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#211

Post by ctdonath »

beeworker wrote: post #178
ctdonath wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Problem there is: there's only $4T in actual currency, but $18T in federal debt.

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#213

Post by crazy1van »

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.

> It's difficult to comprehend how our politicians could have any issues supporting such an initiative.

This just seems like a variant of the sunk cost fallacy. The money blown on the Iraq war is gone. We can't get it back. So why would that have any bearing on the cost benefit analysis of another expense?

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#214

Post by jejones3141 »

mtVessel wrote: post #205
markdown wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 descri…

Biweekly means every two weeks. Semiweekly means twice a week. (Fortnightly doesn't mean anything outside of the Commonwealth.) Please keep (politely) correcting people. It's only us against the hordes!

OTOH, were it not for bad Latin speakers, we wouldn't have the Romance languages. A John Simon/William Safire of the era is an important source of data on their development--he wrote a list of proper Latin terms and the corresponding words in the bad Latin he was seeing and/or hearing. Dang it, it's not caballus, it's equus!

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#215

Post by learc83 »

kghose wrote: post #102
es09 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 95$ per semester figure is for the State University at Sacramento - not for the community college. The current fees work out to ~5500$ per semester[1] for the same university. [1] http://www.calstate.edu/budget/student-fees/fee-rates/sacram...

To put that into further perspective, it costs us about $20000/year for day care for our baby. This is near Boston.

So you have to make close to $30k before taxes to pay for day care? Is this normal for daycare?

If one parent in a situation like this is making around the median individual income of ~$40k a year, it probably makes more sense financially to not work until the kid is school age.

Obviously it's not that simple because of potential lost future earnings resulting from delayed career advancement, but I wonder if people really bother doing the math.

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#216

Post by learc83 »

winter_blue wrote: post #209
steauengeglase wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, so between $327 and $587 (wonky 70s inflation) a semester in today's dollars? I'd have killed for that.

Between $327 and $587 per unit or credit, is extremely common for state universities. You generally have to be resident in the state for at least a year, to qualify. For example, tuition at Stony Brook[1] costs $6,170 annually. At 30 credits a year (15 per semester), that's $205 per unit/credit. You'll find that tuition in most state universities are around that range, across the country. [1] http://www.stonybrook.ed…

Mandatory fees add another $2,260 annually though. Doesn't really change your point, but it's not quite that cheap.

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#217

Post by Taylorious »

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.

To be fair not all universities are the same either. A university may have a great engineering program but have terrible liberal arts professors. Why pay thousands for an English class where you learn to write a basic five paragraph essay (which you should have learned in highschool), when you can pay a few hundred instead.

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#218

Post by learc83 »

danielweber wrote: post #153
smeyer wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't see your point about people who "just barely cannot get in". Most community college students did not need to do anything to get in. For the public community colleges in California, if I recall correctly, you just need to be 18 (or have a high school diploma or meet some other conditions.) Why do you think that funding community college would result in more students like the bottom 10% of those currently…

> As Reihan Salam of National Review notes, community college tuition is already low. In fact, it’s zero, on average, for lower-income families, after taking financial aid into account. Vox’s Libby Nelson wrote, “Community college tuition for poorer students is often entirely covered by the need-based Pell Grant.” So making it free takes care of people who couldn't handle the paperwork of filing for a Pell Grant. [1]…

They're still going to have to fill out the applications to get in, which aren't significantly different in difficulty from the FAFSA. And most colleges have people who will help you fill out the FAFSA anyway.

I can't imagine that eliminating the FAFSA form requirements will allow a noticeably larger number of substandard students to attend.

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#219

Post by ahallock »

Instead of 2 more years of "free" education, why not ask how we can add more value to the last 2 years of high school, so that people graduate with job skills? This is just an attempt to buy votes, and funnel more money into gov. $60 billion is an estimate, and it will probably be triple that. Look at other gov estimates and you'll see a pattern. How much was the Iraq war supposed to cost? What about that NASA project in Mississippi?

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#220

Post by ahallock »

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.

Or maybe both are wasteful spending--did you consider that? The proposal will cost much more than $60 billion. Why believe otherwise? How much was the Iraq war supposed to cost? This is just a feel-good initiative, and it worries me that no one can be bothered to bring up the cons. Do we really believe there's no ulterior motives at play here?
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