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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

#231

Post by twoodfin »

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…

Where do you get that $6T figure? It's absurdly larger than any budgetary expenditure.

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#232

Post by [deleted] »

mindcrime wrote: post #224
eropple wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see the appeal. Disenfranchisement, as per most modes of radicality. I have observed as a near-universality among ancap types that they have identified at formative times of their lives as being "othered." They're not the in-crowd and they're not fundamentally of it. My suspicion is that they have a secret (or unsecret) opinion of themselves as misunderstood ubermenschen. (I recall that phase of my life, bu…

Some of us just think that we, as a society, can do better than enforcing our beliefs and demands at the end of a gun barrel. And we prioritize principle over outcome, acknowledging that every system has it's pathological edge cases - including the current system.

[deleted]

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#233

Post by mindcrime »

saraid216 wrote: post #188
mindcrime wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and this is one of the reasons I don't want the government involved in education at all. But, since they choose to be so involved, I find myself feeling that government spending on education should take the value of that education into account. But you're exactly right, in that it's hard to actually do that. In the end, there are no perfect answers to any of this, it's just a question of "which variables do you…

If an education produces a non-libertarian, would you consider that of higher or lower value than an education that produces a libertarian?

I'd say that any education that "produces" a graduate with a specific ideology has failed in a sense. I'd like to think education should be somewhat neutral, presenting a NPOV and that people would make up their own minds what they value most.

Otherwise, you have to ask "is this education, or indoctrination?"

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#234

Post by toast0 »

Domenic_S wrote: post #25
brohoolio wrote: post #4

$95 dollars a semester. It shows you how society used to provide resources for people to bootstrap their lives. The same individuals who benefited from this investment have not decided to pay it forward. They argue for lower taxes and support for education.

Today, the cost is somewhere around $50/unit, not too bad. If I could allocate my tax dollars toward programs like Community College and other non-University options (Coursera?) I would be all about higher taxes for education. But I get fatigued and resentful when public institutions cry poverty and then we see things like this: > UC Berkeley Police Chief Victoria Harrison retired with a lump-sum package of $2.1 mill…

You can't allocate tax dollars towards specific programs, but you can allocate charitable dollars towards community colleges, and get a discount on your taxes. California community colleges are pretty inexpensive compared to most four-year schools, so a small donation can be turned into a scholarship for tuition, fees, and supplies. For a scholarship recipient, having those paid for can make a huge difference.

(I did two years at Orange Coast College, before transferring to get my BS, I will be donating to OCC this year, and my four-year school probably never)

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#235

Post by thedufer »

jacalata wrote: post #226
mtVessel wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

> Biweekly means every two weeks. Since when, exactly? http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/18553?rskey=7qC25f&result=2#ei...

While it has meant both every two weeks and twice a week for a long time, this is an interesting case where convincing people otherwise would pretty clearly improve our language. Even the page you linked to implies this:

> The ambiguous usage is confusing, and might be avoided by the use of semi-

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#236

Post by cbd1984 »

vacri wrote: post #197
cbd1984 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it isn't an improvement, much like how getting someone who spells it 'color' to spell the word 'colour' or vice-versa.

'colo[u]r' is merely a spelling difference. 'irregardless' is a double-negative to some people, and not to others. It's an ambiguous word.

"Irregardless" isn't ambiguous, either. Everyone knows what it means. The debate is over whether it should be in the language, in a moral sense, which is different.

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#237

Post by Total_Meltdown »

mindcrime wrote: post #224
eropple wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see the appeal. Disenfranchisement, as per most modes of radicality. I have observed as a near-universality among ancap types that they have identified at formative times of their lives as being "othered." They're not the in-crowd and they're not fundamentally of it. My suspicion is that they have a secret (or unsecret) opinion of themselves as misunderstood ubermenschen. (I recall that phase of my life, bu…

Some of us just think that we, as a society, can do better than enforcing our beliefs and demands at the end of a gun barrel. And we prioritize principle over outcome, acknowledging that every system has it's pathological edge cases - including the current system.

The big problem though is that the pathological edge cases of our current system are much better than the extremely pathological normal cases of a system without checks on what people are allowed to do.

I mean, anarcho-capitalism is basically what sovereign nations are at a smaller scale: Factions of humans who make decisions without any real checks on their behavior beyond the environment and the reactions of other factions. And I'm supposed to want a microcosm of global politics in my back yard? No thanks, taxes are fine, please fix the roads so I can get to Chipotle.

The only reason I could see for anyone wanting anything approaching individual sovereignty is if a) they somehow believe that there is no bigger fish in the pond, or b) they're really so naive to have no idea what other people could be capable of doing to them.

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#238

Post by PakG1 »

nearengine wrote: post #204
alexisnorman wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, while I think community college is great, the one I attended (GCC, in AZ) basically felt like high school all over again. Horrible professors, worse students, boring (and ridiculously easy) material; I hated it so much that I ditched college for two years before deciding to go back to school at a university. As soon as I was taking university classes I started to wonder why I hadn't just started at a university…

I took a couple math courses (discrete math and differential equations, I think) at GCC and MCC while attending ASU for Computer Engineering, and I thought the CC professors were more helpful and more passionate about teaching undergrads than the profs at ASU. In my experience the university professors were more worried about their own projects and acted like teaching 20 year olds was above them. As far as the materi…

Even within the same school, there are different professors of differing quality. I remember when I was choosing my courses for the next semester during university, I'd always check ratemyprofessor.com before making a final decision on a course.

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#239

Post by Yhippa »

I love my local community college. I already have an undergraduate degree in computer engineering but several years ago took a class in linear algebra to refresh my understanding of it as well as out of personal interest.

I liked that the class size was small and that the teacher was willing to hear our questions. Some of the people were in the class for what seemed like grade 13 but about half the people were in it for the transfer program to a state university.

I admire the people who are trying to better themselves by taking advantage of community college (a bargain for education compared to the state schools). This is a very smart route whether they are trying to learn some new skills or attend the state schools on the cheap.

For those of you who think that there's no reason for you to look through the course catalog you really should give it a shot. I took an excellent project-based photography course and learned a lot that enabled me to take decent pictures wherever I go. There are public speaking classes, english writing, and all kinds of arts classes. Lots of other stuff like welding and auto mechanics. It's a great and relatively inexpensive way to try something completely different.

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#240

Post by sjy »

danielweber wrote: post #138
remarkEon wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your problem is with the paper? Agree that the "system" is "broken", but I think describing college as just a "piece of paper" really over-simplifies the problem. Do we not need some way of certifying skill sets? And I'm unconvinced that what you would see would actually be a devaluing of high school diplomas. Potentially, we'd just view high school how we view elementary school now - something everyone assumes yo…

Do we not need some way of certifying skill sets? College is a HORRIBLE way to "certify skill sets." It's the most anti-liberal certification I can imagine: it measures how long you can afford to go without an income. One big result of giving college educations to a bunch of people that didn't need them is the credentialism race. Why does an office manager need a college degree when it didn't 40 years ago? Because no…

"What is required by Congress is the removal of artificial, arbitrary, and unnecessary barriers to employment when the barriers operate invidiously to discriminate on the basis of racial or other impermissible classification." Saying that the case "banned degree requirements" is putting it too high.
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