91–100 of 286 posts
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.
This says less about education than it does about the inefficiency of the Iraq war.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 $2.1 mill…
The 95$ 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...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
FAFSA documents are not complicated to fill out, but the overall process require you to spend some amount of time on jumping through various hoops. Also, it has prerequisites and conditions you need to keep track of. For people who are short on money (and therefore time) all of that has significance.
College requires time and jumping through hoops. If you can't keep track of the FAFSA application, how are you going to keep track of the class assignments? Is the goal to make "attended college" become completely useless as a job market signal? Why are we trying to cram people into college if it means nothing?
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 $500 million a day. This proposal would cost 72 days of war. It's difficult to comprehend how our politicians could have any issues supporting such an initiative.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 95$ 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...
Probably not a coincidence, at all, that $5500 is just under the Pell grant amount.
I 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…
If the community college you went to was funded by taxes, and taxation theft, then do you view yourself as guilty of being a thief, complicit in that theft? I sure don't think so. The reason being that it isn't theft.
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…
I was frequently pushed and challenged by excellent professors who had true passion for their subjects I'm paying $47,336 to go to a private institution and wish this was true. Internal politics and tenure have ensured friends of department chairs have gotten the jobs irregardless of teaching ability, skill, research, knowledge in the subject area..
> irregardless
regardless is fine.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we just buy everything that is cheaper than the Iraq war, we will very soon be bankrupt.
This is an initiative that will lead to higher earning potential for Americans, leading to higher tax revenues over the long term. Will it pay for itself? Probably not, but it's juvenile to act like all government spending is equal when it comes to the country's long term financial health.
It will also further devalue high school diplomas as well as make good high schools less of a priority across the nation (everyone is going to CC anyway, right?).
It probably makes bachelor's degrees even more of a requirement for decent jobs, making people more likely to take on student loans and spend their 20 and 30s paying them back for a piece of paper, restricting their mobility and options.
Throwing more money into a broken system does nothing than embed it further. Just about all of us here value learning, but our education system needs to be benefiting people, teaching people, and it is not doing that.
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.
Maybe they are thinking of the bottom 10% of their class, and then imagining more students like that in the classroom. We're talking about expanded community college for the marginal student: that is, the student who just barely cannot get into community college today but could with a little more help.