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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

#261

Post by kefka »

sjy wrote: post #240
danielweber wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The decision is more nuanced than that. If a lawsuit is brought against the company in question, they have to prove that their degree requirement is essential to the job in question. If it's not, then it could be said the degree requirement is to discriminate against a class of people.

This is predicated on one very big thing: filing a lawsuit and winning. Well, and they're certainly not going to hire you now. But you open the doors for other people to get in without a degree.

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#262

Post by dredmorbius »

twoodfin wrote: post #231
RIMR wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wikipedia cites Brown and CBO and Brown studies putting the cost at $1 - $2.4 trillion. That's $3200 - $7700 per person in the US.

$6 trillion exceeds that considerably, no idea on the source (I'm not OP), but inclusive of civilian costs to Iraqis it might be a defensible number.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#263

Post by kefka »

keypusher wrote: post #206
SEJeff wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question. What funds Policemen, Fire departments, Emergency Medical people like EMTs and Paramedics? If we didn't pay taxes, and we didn't have any of those, it would be pretty lousy.

As far as I understand, most libertarians who believe in abolishing taxes also believe that these types of services should be provided by the free market. You pay some kind of subscription fee to a fire company, security company, etc, and you call them up when trouble hits. If you don't subscribe to such a service, your house burns down or get shot, too bad.

Yep, it's free until you have to pay for it. Hope you can afford it.

If you cant, you either lose your possessions or you die.

Sounds like a great deal! sign me up! /s

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#264

Post by teh_klev »

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!

In the spirit the correctness and accuracy, which Commonwealth? :)

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#265

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

rattray wrote: post #244
fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #42

I 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?

About the recent "Free Community College" announcement from the President. Mainly people questioning how would it be funded, if it was possible to fund it, and bog-standard politician insults.

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#266

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

learc83 wrote: post #218
danielweber wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I can't either, (not proportionally larger) and if it does, I'd expect to see those individuals shunted into the remedial math and language courses which are already offered for that purpose.

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#267

Post by SEJeff »

kefka wrote: post #263
keypusher wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I understand, most libertarians who believe in abolishing taxes also believe that these types of services should be provided by the free market. You pay some kind of subscription fee to a fire company, security company, etc, and you call them up when trouble hits. If you don't subscribe to such a service, your house burns down or get shot, too bad.

Yep, it's free until you have to pay for it. Hope you can afford it. If you cant, you either lose your possessions or you die. Sounds like a great deal! sign me up! /s

So basically the poor who more likely need those services more (more violence / robberies in poverty stricken areas) get really screwed. Sounds like a wonderful place to live. I might be tempted to call it Pakistan or somewhere that you have to pay bribes to the local service members.

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#268

Post by dhimes »

markdown wrote: post #200
resu_nimda wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. That would make English very boring and dry. What of poetry and evocative prose? Natural languages and programming languages serve very different purposes, despite their similarities. Natural languages, since their inception, have been subjective ref…

I think we agree with each other. Words like "ain't" entering the common lexicon (usually in spoken english) is fine by me ie. Words formed out of contractions of other words/phrases, or entirely new inventions. What I mostly get riled up about are words or phrases that are just plain wrong, but that have been used so widely that some dictionaries have accepted them as correct. Eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7…

"Enormity" is one of those words. It used to be strictly "horrible," conveying a sense of wickedness, and to use it as a synonym for "enormousness" was glaringly wrong. But the mistake was so common, even among journalists and writers, that that it has gained acceptance in at least one English dictionary.

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#269

Post by bane »

vacri wrote: post #254
cbd1984 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

No, everyone doesn't 'know what it means', not without additional mental parsing. Myself, among many others, read it first as a double-negative, then have to double-take it and reinterpret it. Irrespective, irreducable, irrecoverable, irreconcilable, irrelevant, irreligious, irrefutable - irregardless stands out like a sore thumb. Or should I say 'irreinterpret it'? After all, you would 'know what I meant' if I wrote…

Yet astonishingly you are one of the people who knew what it meant.

Also, most English dialects don't strictly follow double-negation rules. I know this drives non-native speakers crazy, but you'll get over it with enough practice.

Re: I Owe It All to Community College

#270

Post by [deleted] »

jacalata wrote: post #225
danielweber wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seems to be a communication failure here, because you accuse me of saying things I'm not saying. They might be things you wish I were saying, but I'm not. I'm working off these two premises: 1. The FAFSA is free to fill out, but it takes time and attention, which you say some people do not have. 2. Even if we make community college completely free , it will still take time and attention. So, if the FAFSA is a s…

There is definitely a communication failure here. Are you asking why filling in the FAFSA might solve someone's problems around lack of money, or are you disagreeing that lack of money is a contributing factor to the lack of time and attention they prospective students have? In case it's the first: the FAFSA, once filled out, makes these students eligible to receive money in the form of student loans and grants, whic…

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