There was a Physics instructor at Pierce College in Washington State who was one of the best Physics professors I had. He was also the hardest. I doubt I would have passed any of my university courses if he hadn't put the fear of god into me.
I Owe It All to Community College
241–250 of 286 posts
Re: I Owe It All to Community College
#242Another 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…
CCSF is an excellent community college. One of the best in the country. Too bad it's mired in political fight over state accreditation and students are scared away.
Re: I Owe It All to Community College
#243Community college is an excellent place for continuation education as well. Over the years I have taken night classes there have nothing to do with my date job, like laws, commercial contracts, real estate, investment, languages, etc. It's a great way to expand your horizon in a classroom environment.
Re: I Owe It All to Community College
#244I am an instructor at a community college, and I have to say that I had earfuls of embarrassing pessimism from my colleagues yesterday. You'd have thought that Obama himself was taking the tuition directly out of our salaries to fund it.
I'm very curious; can you expand on what they were pessimistic about?
Re: I Owe It All to Community College
#245Another 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…
Congratulations man! You earned it.
Re: I Owe It All to Community College
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much do you think community college costs these days after a Pell Grant?
Is it more efficient to have a whole complicated financial aid system or just provide discounted access to everyone. Time is money.
At the school my partner went to, LA Trade Tech, it seemed like most students got financial aid. There were multiple offices involved in doing all the paperwork involved (in a multi-story building, too). The school was located in an area where the household income was around $25k per year, and many people worked at the minimum wage. It seemed absurd to me that they had to jump through so many hoops to get a few hundred dollars of aid.
Re: I Owe It All to Community College
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it more efficient to have a whole complicated financial aid system or just provide discounted access to everyone. Time is money.
I want to second this point. The percentage of young adults (this is the demographic that represents most fo the current community college population) living below the poverty level is about 40% [1]. So even in the absolute worst case scenario where the Pell grant only applied to those below the poverty level and all those above that level started taking advantage of the free community college your efficiency could d…
At LATTC everyone knew about financial aid. It was the default situation. I haven't been there, but I've been to CC in a low income community, and the assumption was that you'd get financial aid. Being middle class, middle aged, and not qualifying, I had to quietly explain that my personal income was past the limit, etc. I didn't want to stick out.
The problem these schools have is related to people lying to get financial aid, and then dropping out, never to be heard from again. If you get rid of the price, and school is free, all this fraud would end. (The fraud would happen elsewhere in the system.)
Re: I Owe It All to Community College
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
Over all my other problems with anarcho-capitalism and minarchism, the biggest is how much more time I'd waste and how much more anxiety I'd have. Just thinking about all the new stuff I'd have to keep up with to avoid getting screwed gives me a headache. Food safety guarantors, some sort of court and law associations, drug safety certifiers, all kinds of insurance I don't have to worry about now, and so on. Having t…
> 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…
LOL, so true. I'm starting to get the same feeling about Georgists. They're in a bubble of their own making, in denial about their own reality, and prone to making up new definitions for common words, making it difficult to communicate. It makes me a little sad, because I'm sympathetic to their cause, and read a bunch of articles from their writers around fifteen years ago.
Re: I Owe It All to Community College
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
And when you can't afford the insurance for the fire department? How are these people taken care of by such a system? I'm sure we all know people who've hit very hard times at some point in their life through no fault of their own. As much as I like the idea of Libertarianism it can't see how these people would make it through those times.
And when you can't afford the insurance for the fire department? I would assume it would be the same if you couldn't afford your property taxes in today's system. You don't own a house?
I think the answer is "sell the house and move somewhere cheaper."
Re: I Owe It All to Community College
#250I 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…
Those are called "price controls."