The other day, Atrios mentioned this piece about the terrible state of public higher ed in Pennsylvania. It’s an old story–the state legislature keeps underfunding state colleges and universities, so they keep raising tuition:
State lawmakers, in effect, have offloaded more costs onto college students and families. Student payments now make up more than halfof the per-student revenue at publicly supported Pennsylvania colleges, double the national average.
And because many students and co-signing relatives have to borrow, Pennsylvania college graduates rank second nationally for the highest debt with an average $37,061, according to the Institute for College Access & Success. Only Connecticut college students graduate with more debt: $38,669.
New York has gone the opposite direction, with the Excelsior Scholarship, which pays for tuition at a state school as long as the parents’ AGI is under $125K, and the student agrees to live in New York for as many years as they went to school. That’s roughly a $28K benefit over four years, though most four-year schools require two years in the dorms and on meal plans, which is around $13K/year.
In downstate New York, a $125K AGI is probably barely a living wage for a family, but if we decided to make the cap $250K or $500K, or (I hope you’re sitting down) no cap at all, the Mayo Petes of sensible modern centrism would point out that a millionaire’s kid might get free tuition, thus causing the the moral center of the universe to shift from its bearings and catapult us all directly into the Sun.
I say, fuck that noise: If we want to start winning elections, let’s give something away, and let’s give it to everyone. All of this means testing just raises resentment among people who are not eligible, yet perceive themselves as scraping by. And how will we pay for it? Real answer: just like we pay for Defense, and besides, who fucking cares. Political answer: taxes on the 1%.
The next time Mayo Pete comes after someone proposing to give something to the middle class, they should tell him to fuck off to the library, where he can spend his spare time hunting for millionaires checking out books.
Ridnik Chrome
Mayo Pete?
trollhattan
You can “what-if?” yourself into oblivion and there’s no time for that nonsense. I also “love” something I’ve heard pundits utter far too often: “What about the person who paid for their college education? How are they going to feel if somebody else is getting the same education for free?”
I think this is where I’m supposed to don my “fuck your feelings” tshirt.
Bruuuuce
Appropriate, but ew. I think Imma skip the sandwich I was about to make.
mistermix loves your ass
@Ridnik Chrome: It’s a reference to his whiteness and blandness, I think.
the Conster
Why do we want to give control of our healthcare to the national government when all they’ll try to do, every time there’s a Republican administration, is starve it of funding and deny everyone they can **cough*women/poc*cough** access? Isn’t the main complaint about the VA is that it’s perpetually underfunded? Deliberately? Unfortunately as long as there is a white majority in this country, the GOP isn’t going anywhere because the white voting majority doesn’t want to share anything.
Bruuuuce
@trollhattan: A friend who was at the time a medical resident expressed something similar to me, saying that the doctors before her had all done 72-hour shifts, and so did she, to prepare for the very worst, so why should the next generation of doctors have it easy? (Aside, I noted, from the inevitable errors that result from exhaustion, and lives and health at stake, nothing much :-( )
Betty Cracker
I really fucking hate the obnoxious “Mayo Pete” nickname, but I agree 100% that Buttigieg is dead-wrong on this issue (and most issues since his hard-swerve to the center lane)
@the Conster: “Ma’am, this is an Arby’s drive thru…”
Major Major Major Major
Could we not call the D candidates stupid insulting names, kthx
VeniceRiley
@Ridnik Chrome: Black Twitter has been calling him mayo Pete from the beginning.
And yeah, means testing is a ticket to future cutting, sadly. I’m not against it, but, knowing my fellow Americans, I am willing to throw some millionaire kids a bone in exchange for their parents’ support.
Aleta
That’s been happening all along.
Chris Johnson
@Betty Cracker: Yeah. I think his calculus is like this: Biden is too old and is showing weakness. He’s outflanked on the Left, but more significantly… if he can play to CAPITAL interests and convince them he is better than Biden at serving them (and like I’ve been saying, Biden is not automatically going to serve the oligarchs. These days the voice of the party is more people-oriented, and ask black voters whether Biden has listened to them over the years: whatever the guy is, he’s no snake)
So, Pete volunteers for the role of snake. Make me President (over, say, Bloomberg, who is not really a persuasive candidate to anyone but Bloomberg) and I will serve your interests right down the line, as if I was the chosen successor of Trump picked by Mitch McConnell himself… but I, Pete, am not as dumb as Bloomberg. I’m younger, I’m smarter, I’m a slick Rhodes Scholar and I can get elected while STILL selling out all the people and delivering the country to the most wealthy. And I’ll make them all like it, and it’d probably work, too, thinks Pete. The ‘economy’ will booom, and doesn’t that solve everything?
That’s Pete. That’s gonna be his reasoning.
I don’t agree with his view of the world, shall we say.
Roger Moore
I’ve said it elsewhere, and I’ll say it here: means testing is lousy politics. It divides people into givers and takers, with the givers becoming a built-in constituency in favor of ending the program they pay for but don’t benefit from. Building resentment and opposition into your program from day one is stupid.
Feathers
Remember that the state cuts in higher ed spending are roughly comparable to the rise in prison spending. Don’t remember where i saw it, it was a while ago, but the numbers were startling.
Allowing conservatives to claim the moral high ground is always and everywhere a problem.
Repatriated
@Roger Moore: Particularly when the constituency benefitting from the policy is skewed towards the least politically influential members of society, while the non-beneficiaries are the most influential.
Yeah, lousy politics.
snoey
@Roger Moore: @Roger Moore:
That’s why it’s terrible policy.
Free stuff for the “deserving” initially polls better than free stuff for everybody, or at least they all think that, so it is thought to be good election winning politics.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Chris Johnson: That’ll be a tough sell when it comes to Bloomberg, he didn’t become a rich man by being stupid.
burnspbesq
@Betty Cracker:
It’s obnoxious, but it rolls off the tongue in a way that “Wonder Bread Pete” doesn’t.
Forty-five years ago, the joke in my high school graduating class was that the only reason to go to Rutgers was if you couldn’t afford to go to college. Rutgers is still a shithole, but most everything else has changed, and the way we finance higher education has to change, too. That said, I do worry about the moral hazard associated with “free tuition.” I like the idea of kids having skin in the game.
I’d be open to all kinds of suggestions. Maybe loan forgiveness in exchange for work in the public sector. Maybe public funding on a level comparable to the UC in the 1960s, so tuition at a flagship state U is a thousand bucks a semester.
Raven
@Roger Moore: That was the rationale in Georgia for what Boortz calls “a tax on the stupid (the lottery) to pay for white suburban kids suv’s at school”. They love it because it’s so loaded in favor of the well off.
mistermix loves your ass
About “Mayo Pete” – I think any damage that does to Democrats pales (ha!) in comparison to the damage that he’s done by injecting his shitty Republican talking points into the campaign. Also, I’m easily amused, and I found that nickname amusing.
Major Major Major Major
From everything I’ve read about the guy, his actual honest-to-god beliefs are, well, moderate. He was saying this exact same stuff about college assistance in the spring. Same story with M4A. People are reading opportunism into positions that are not new.
randy khan
@burnspbesq:
Ahem. Speaking as a Rutgers grad myself, academically Rutgers actually is pretty good, and has been for a while.
Now if you’re talking football, well, let’s just say that the move to the Big Ten was a good financial decision.
PJ
@Chris Johnson: When Buttigieg started his campaign, he deliberately didn’t have any policies (in May or June he finally caved and start taking positions). He isn’t running to get any particular set of policies enacted, but to get Pete elected. And if you look at his career, he has followed the path that makes sure he always looks good on paper. And it’s worked well so far for him – he has a lot of big money donors behind him. If he can get Sanders and Warren to cancel each other out, and if Biden keeps fading, he will have a real shot.
Ridnik Chrome
@mistermix loves your ass: I’ve not been around BJ much recently, so I don’t know who’s in and who’s out here. But it’s useful to know it’s not just Bernistas who dislike Buttigieg.
Betty Cracker
@Major Major Major Major: FWIW, I mostly agree — it’s a question of emphasis; earlier in the primary, he talked about creative approaches to address a whole bunch of issues, and that somewhat disguised his centrism. It’s logical and not at all sinister (to me, anyway) for a candidate who’s gained momentum to become more risk-averse. But I miss the earlier version.
Chris Johnson
No. You need to stop thinking along those lines. He became a rich man by being a bastard, and by exploiting existing money, and by connections, same as all those bastards.
There is NO correlation between great wealth and being smart. Bloomberg is stupid, and he’s a bastard and needs to get out of our way. Fuck him. He is NOT smart.
Joe Falco
@the Conster: That sounds more of an argument against the GOP than trying to marginally improve the lives of people. You can say the same about any other public good or service. We just have to fight the bastards period.
Betty
The change in support for higher ed in PA has been stark. This has to be addressed.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Chris Johnson: I’m from California, so I’ve not followed Bloomberg’s career, however while many get ahead via connections(right schools, right frats, etc) a good number of folk do get ahead by by being wicked smart, I’ve known some.
Martin
You’re still missing some of the key problems. That public support isn’t a lump sum of money, and probably for good reason. It’s $x for y seats. It’s constrained both on the amount, but also the scale. So, here’s how it plays out internally:
My institution gets subsidies for y state residents at $x. The value for x has been climbing since 2008, the value for y (now around 30,000) has been climbing as well. But I’m getting 120,000 applications for the 6,000 or so undergraduate seats that open up each year. That makes us VERY selective. Now, we could grow, but we can’t redistribute those $x among a larger y number of students. Nor can we reduce the y number of seats to increase the $x subsidy to reduce debt load (we average $16K at graduation, which is reasonable. Our students should earn enough from the degree to pay that off quickly relative to not going to college). Here’s where it gets ugly. I’m capped at y seats for CA residents, but I can charge Arizona residents $3x to come, provided I can get my marginal costs to add that student under $3x – which I can. I can charge Chinese students $3x to come as well. I can even charge them more, if I provide some additional services. I’ve gone as high as $4.5x.
Now, these are difficult decisions to make. I should give those seats to the HUGE number of CA residents that want to come, but I can’t because the state doesn’t allow me. I’m not allowed to charge Aunt Becky $3x to send her kid, because her kid is a CA resident. If she moved to Arizona, though, I could, and I could make a seat for her. Or if she moved to China or Mexico – anywhere but California. Only California students are constrained.
So, since I assume any federal college for all will have state level matches, because holy shit Alabama, can y’all spend a few dollars? You can’t fund the entire system off of Roll Tide merch. How does that work without falling into the trap above? How does a federal college for all program even without a match do that? If a federal program opens up, does my state program now treat all US citizens as in-state? Does my 120,000 applications turn into 250,000 applications, for less than 2x the number of available seats? Am I telling a kid who lives 10 miles from campus and who could commute to school, saving a HUGE amount of R&B money that I don’t have a seat, but maybe there’s room in Louisiana for him? Our CSU system has regional admission guarantees so students can go to school close to home. UC has state admission guarantees. Do those stay? Do they go? What impact does any of this have on the ability of campuses to grow to meet demand – because that’s the real problem. It’s not affordability. I don’t feel bad for the kid who walks out with $16K of debt – that’s less than what their first car loan will likely be, and this is at least an appreciating asset. But I do feel bad for the kid whose 3.4 shut him/her out of a 4 year degree because we ran out of space and we prioritized based on grades. And that’s happening out here.
Affordability isn’t really a massive problem. Yes, PA and CT are getting up there, but the overwhelming majority of students that get into their state universities will get out with relatively little debt. It’s the ones that go out of state or go to privates that are what the horror stories are written about. As big a problem is access. Universities are not always built where the students need them to be. Students from rural communities have much higher costs because they never have local schools. They get admitted at lower rates because they don’t even have the day to day familiarity with colleges, or the benefit of doing a summer program at their local community college. CA has 3 million college students and needs about half a million more seats created – particularly in engineering, computer science, and nursing. Do these ideas help with that? How do they help?
It’s not that a millionaire might get free college for their kid, it’s that if we’re capped on enrollment, we need to deny someone. And I don’t care how you structure the program, we’re going to wind up, despite our bets efforts denying the student from the most impoverished community because they don’t know how to work the system, or they don’t think the opportunity should go to them. The only way this works is if there’s a seat for everyone, and right now we’re not even close to that.
catclub
and here I thought mayo pete was from county Mayo and had the irish memory for not forgetting insults, or remembering debts
chopper
my brother teaches at a suny school and he was just explaining the other day how the excelsior scholarship has a bunch of issues for students.
Martin
Could we not call anyone stupid insulting names? It always feels like an ‘I’ll call you by whatever pronoun I want’ move.
Served
@Betty Cracker: It doesn’t help his case that his tone has become extremely tut-tut and condescending as he has rolled out his policies, especially towards more progressive policies and candidates. And on top of that, he’s started to lean on Republican talking point framing to promote his policies/dismiss others’.
One of the two tactics I could probably grin and bear, but together they are toxic to me.
Chris Johnson
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Bloomberg is stupid.
If he was smart, like the other billionaires, he would get behind Mayor Pete, and count on the sheer amount of money he can give to ensure that Pete will rubberstamp absolutely everything they could want, country be damned. That would be smart (and evil) because Pete self-evidently has a better position politically in 2020 than Bloomberg has.
Bloomberg is running anyway. That makes him stupid. Maybe I’m not complaining? I prefer him to be stupid provided he doesn’t win. If he’s not out there in public fighting against the people, he’ll be doing it where we can’t see him. But he’s being arrogant and stupid, running to assuage his own ego. Mayor Pete is considerably smarter than that though (apparently?) he is not intrinsically a billionaire bastard at heart? He will just become whatever he needs to be, to get elected.
That’s scarier than Bloomberg.
The Moar You Know
And here’s what Mayo Pete and a slew of other people don’t get – and the people with money get entirely too well – is that if you give a millionaire’s kid free tuition then everyone gets “millionaire’s kid tuition”.
If you means test it (or literally any other benefit from any government) so that only poor people get it, you get “poor people’s kid” tuition.
And there’s a world of difference there.
Don’t damn the kids to poor people’s tuition just because some millionaire will save a few bucks.
Martin
@Aleta: Yep. So here’s how financial aid works. It varies by institution, but typically between 50% and 65% of full fare tuition is dumped into the financial aid pool. So if you’re paying full fare (as I am) and not getting financial aid (as I am) then you’re covering the tuition for at least one other student, and possibly 1.5 other students.
trollhattan
@Martin:
My kid
will beis in your hopper this year. Hers is the one with the nice typeface. ?Major Major Major Major
@Martin: I feel like we should start small and not call our high-polling presidential candidates dumb insulting names.
Next up, not calling respected & longtime commenters names, haha one step at a time.
Chris Johnson
And the whole trouble with a lot of these people, including Mayor Pete, is that they do in fact think “Well, if a person is a billionaire, they self-evidently are smarter and better than the rest of us, because that’s how that works. Otherwise they wouldn’t have made all that money. QED.”
They couldn’t be more wrong, but if they ask anybody it’s likely to be a billionaire, who will hasten to agree loudly and at length that they are indeed smarter and better than the poors, because look at all that money they made.
Oh, man, I got out of abject poverty and STILL hate these people so much. Scuse me. I lose perspective. Here’s hoping I am not hurting the feelings of all us Balloon Juice billionaires, who are surely worth all of the respect :D
CarolDuhart2
@Roger Moore: Also, how much are we saving with means testing, anyway? Someone has to actually enforce ever more complex financial calculus to exclude the one-in 1000 person who is living large while getting public benefits. And that costs money too.
Personally, I would make everyone under $250,000 at least marginally eligible, and under $30k no questions asked.
(If you object, you clearly make too much money to need anything at all, and you can have a seat)
Chris Johnson
@CarolDuhart2:
No, all of them. Literally everybody. Any number of billions. They still get the subsidy for college.
The only condition is that they might have to see or even meet a poor person. As for the cost, we can take it out of their taxes. Or maybe we can just tax specifically the ten wealthiest dudes an extra half percent: that’d do it, I think.
CarolDuhart2
@Chris Johnson: But that hard work story is only the first generation. Anybody want to talk about second and third generation? Should Bill Gates the Seventeenth get a break here?
Paul W.
Here fucking here, means testing is rarely (if ever) a useful exercise. Most of the things we need the government to intervene in are so broad that carving out these tiny exceptions is more trouble than they are worth considering the scale of the problems they solve.
Betty Cracker
@Served: I hear you. I’m in the tank for Warren, so Buttigieg’s deploying wingnut talking points against her and dismissing her pretty-well-baked-for-a-fucking-primary plans in favor of his own vaporware irritates me.
But that’s not all there is to the man. He gets it on many issues, including voting rights, gerrymandering and minimum wage.
He’s also the first openly gay person to be a top-tier presidential candidate, which means something to a lot of people who’ve been kicked around and disrespected.
None of this means he’s above criticism or anything, of course, but to dismiss him as “Mayo Pete” like he’s just another slice of Wonder Bread, indistinguishable from any other slice, kinda pisses me off. YMMV.
Raven
@Betty Cracker: I’m witcha.
Martin
I think students should have skin in the game as well. As a general rule, I think it’s appropriate to borrow money for appreciating assets – which we can generalize as housing/real estate, education, and healthcare. And that’s it. Yet, we willingly encourage people to carry debt for all kinds of bad reasons. That’s really the low hanging fruit here, not college.
That said, education serves another purpose as it’s beneficial socially, so it’s also something worry paying for broadly.
I think the best solution is a federal ‘college tax’. The government pays for college for everyone – 100%, up to a given dollar amount (schools will spend out of control if given the chance) and once you take that deal, you will be levied a (pick a number) straight 2% tax on all income and capital gains (realized and unrealized) for 20 years. You need not put money up front. You have skin in the game. If you go off and become Jeff Bezos – great – but you’ll be paying 100s of millions annually in your tax.
So, it’s means tested, but in arrears. Students don’t need to put money up front. If your education doesn’t result in a materially better income, it’s still just a percentage, so we can still train early childhood education teachers just as well as engineers. Everyone pays the same rate. Everyone starts in the same place – equally deserving.
The feds then return that money proportionately to the schools, but not fully equally. Princeton doesn’t get all of Bezos’ money, but they do get more of it than other schools. This will probably cut back on charitable giving, but that’s okay given how much of that goes into a handful of schools that literally have more money than they know what to do with.
Martin
@trollhattan: I’ll let my wife know to thumbs up the good typefaces. I’m not reading this year for reasons I can’t go into.
Martin
@Major Major Major Major: I just want exceptions for Subaru Diane and Benadryl Pumpkinpatch.
FlipYrWhig
I’m still not sure how left political discourse swung in about two weeks from “rich people should have their heads chopped off with a head-chopping machine” to “it is irredeemably evil to think rich people should pay for college.”
randy khan
@Martin:
Perhaps I’m oversimplifying, but it seems to me that if you have n seats for in-state students today, you can have n seats for in-state students tomorrow. Maybe the out of state seats get a lot more applicants; maybe not, but either way the in-state students are protected.
And I assume that any free college program will apply only to U.S. citizens or maybe to U.S. citizens and permanent residents, so you can still get the foreign money.
The key question is how the money comes into the institution – is it in the form of a tuition subsidy linked to each student so you can differentiate in-state and out-of-state student or in the form of a standard per-student payment, or something completely different? It seems to me that’s the actually tricky part of this (and something New York avoids by limiting the subsidy to in-state students).
FlipYrWhig
Also, I loved college and still work at one, and yet it seems entirely bananas to have competing plans about how to pay for more people to go to it because it helps them land a better job, rather than, say, ending the educational arms race and making K-12 public education vastly better, so that people who DON’T go to college can have good jobs and thrive at them.
Citizen Alan
@mistermix loves your ass:
Personally, I long ago stopped caring about hurting the feelings of Log Cabin Republicans.
Martin
The in state seats get a lot more applicants. That’s the problem. I need to convert out of state seats to in state seats and there’s no way to do that. The n seats are protected, but I need 2n seats. That’s my concern – it’s easier for a CA student to get into an Arizona school than a CA one. A lot easier, in fact.
Yutsano
@Martin: This is fine, but I’m still calling “Bobby” Jindal Piyush.
trollhattan
@Martin:
Much appreciated, and please give her my compliments on her good graces and spousal choices. :-)
The kid is dying to be released from the HS prison that is 12 pt Times New Roman, single-spaced. Free my people (to use Garamond)!
Roger Moore
@Martin:
This makes sense. When you subsidize something, you expect demand to go up. When you subsidize something without increasing the supply, you expect demand to exceed supply. The problem, though, is that if we find the money to subsidize more seats for California students, that will leave fewer seats for the out of state students, who will now need to find somewhere else to go to school. What we really need to do is to build a lot more universities so we aren’t so supply constrained anymore.
Martin
@FlipYrWhig: I think that oversimplifies a bit. High school basically does nothing but serve as a shitty college prep as it is. We treat it as an extension of K-8, but it doesn’t really fit as we’re asking students to decide on a path here, and then we penalize them a bit later if they made the wrong path. Plus it was really a solution to the problem of what do we do with all of these kids now that they can’t work in the mill.
I think it would make much more sense to turn HS into half ‘shit you need to know in order to adult’ from civics to practical finance, and half career exploration – apprenticeship + study in the discipline. Not as a ‘pick your path’ exercise, but rather ‘go explore this for 6 months’ and then you try something else. Work in a hospital for a bit, or in a law office, or in a construction office, etc. No preference for trades vs professions. Not laboring, but learning about various occupations (including hands on) and the knowledge you need to do that work. There’s a lot of math in construction. I’d put any carpenter up against any mathematician to work out the rise and run for a set of stairs quickly. It’s just different ways of approaching it.
College doesn’t really care how much US history you learned in HS. We care a bit about math and english, but that’s really about it. So, don’t waste everyones time with that as a subject discipline. Learn critical thinking instead. That’s key. Do some exploration, figure out what you like to do and are excited to learn more about, and then you can head off to a dedicated trade school or a university program, and you’ll have a decent idea of what you’re getting into and have the skills to navigate that space.
FlipYrWhig
@Martin: I’m not sure we’re disagreeing. I feel like something’s going badly awry with the society-wide embrace of the notion that “to get A Good Job you need a college education.” What if instead of getting more people to have a college education to get A Good Job, we just worked harder to de-link the two, and let college be college again and not some weird job-training-by-proxy credential factory
P.S. Also, I like your HS reform idea.
Roger Moore
@Martin:
I think this is a bit of a mistake. We aren’t teaching HS kids about US history because we want them to become historians; we’re doing it because knowing history is an important part of being a good citizen. In that sense, history belongs in the half of school you labeled ‘shit you need to know in order to adult’. The problem is that there are a lot of subjects we teach in high school because we see them as part of being a well rounded adult, and HS is the last chance we’re sure most people are going to remain in school to learn that stuff.
Some kids know going into HS that they’re going to go on to University, and they may even have a good idea of what they’re going to study. Those kids probably need more Adulting 101 classes and fewer “figure out your course in life” classes. It’s the kids who don’t know if they’re going to go to college or go into a trade- or who know they’re going to go into a trade but don’t know which one- who need the most chance to explore different stuff to see what works for them. I think the German system of tracking kids into different kinds of secondary schools depending on where they’re likely to go seems like a good idea. I’m sure there’s lots to improve in it- it’s easy to track kids too much, so somebody who might benefit from college gets discouraged from going- but there really is an advantage to separating kids who know what they’re going to do after HS from ones who are still making up their minds.
Martin
@Roger Moore: Exactly. And I take FlipYrWhigs point that maybe it’s not more university seats that we need, but more trade schools, etc. That’s fine.
We tend to think of money in the wrong way. Housing prices here in CA are not a product of what it costs to build a house, it’s just the cost of getting access to one. Overall, it’s the most fair mechanism we have to regulate access to a limited resource. A seat a the Superbowl doesn’t cost any more to provide than any random game, but it’s priced much higher in an effort to get supply and demand in balance.
So if you don’t allow the supply of educational seats to adapt to demand, then there will always be a cost associated with accessing those seats. Public universities do it in two ways – the tuition does price some students out, but laws prevent us from scaling that. So we incur a different cost – how you need to perform to earn a seat. When I started doing this 25 years ago a 3.3 would have easily earned you a seat where I work. Within 10 years that was around a 3.6 and people were saying ‘my goodness, that so hard to get into’. Last year it was a 4.17. Now, the 3.3 student would still do just fine – they’d pass their classes and graduate. We don’t demand higher grades because they wouldn’t be successful, we demand higher grades because we we need something more powerful than $15K in tuition to reduce that demand, and we do that with grades and test scores. Which, by the way, is WAY more stressful for people to deal with. That’s why Aunt Becky paid half a million dollars to get her kid in through the athletics exception. These are signs that the system can’t hold.
And don’t take my word on my institutions reputation – ask Trollhattan, who is a much more fair arbiter of that. We’re a good university, but most Americans have never heard of us. We still earn a ‘who the hell are these guys’ when we show up in the NCAA basketball bracket. We are an academically focused school, in a nice town, with a lot of care still for our students with roughly the same application to available seat ratio as MIT. And that’s kind of fucked up. But at the end of the day, we need to get y applications squeezed down into x seats, and if we can’t do that by financially pricing ourselves out of the market, we’ll do it by academically pricing ourselves out. We have no choice. And my worry is if you take away what financial lever we have, we’ll just make up for it on the academic side. Again, we have no choice unless the system is set up such that we can grow with demand – and that’s going to be really politically tricky. The UC system alone could easily grow by more than the entire PSU system currently supports.
Personally, it think it’d be better if we simply made Ole Miss a better, more desirable school than ship half the state of Mississippi out to California. And if it was setup that way, it wouldn’t last once legislators (including Democrats) saw the disparity of funding flows. Then they’ll start monkeying with it, and I don’t know what that would leave us with.
Jay
@Martin
A 1985 MBA had a value ratio of 4:1.
The “best’ 2017 MBA had a value ratio of 1:85:1.
In 2019, outside of select schools/fields, your “generic” MBA, based on current and projected wage and benifits trends, has a 35 year ROI vs. 8 years in 1985. Just think what the value ratio was in 1975 on an MBA when University was practically free.
Funny thing is, a plumber’s ticket has a 2 year ROI, and. 25 year lead on earned benifits.
Like everything not billionaire/millionaire owned, like pretty much everthing except the COL and Housing, education isn’t appreciating but depreciating.
between 1974 and 2018, adjusted for inflation, the median income earners accrued a mere $151, ( in 2018 dollars) per year in income growth.
Yeah, with free University you might get some Trust Fund babies camped out on campus for a decade. So what? They would be wasting their time, others time and effort, and their parents money anyway. Most people go to University to get a “career”, and they don’t waste time getting there. A few go for the education, and they don’t waste time either. Some go for the sports, …… don’t get me started on that.
as for “debt forgiveness” for socially/community valuable careers, isn’t that the current program screwing over 99% of the idiots who bought into that pipe dream?
make College tuition and textbooks almost free,
wipe out College loan debt,
issue income tax credits to those who paid theirs, or just part of theirs, off or down, maybe even give a percentage of it as a one time rebate. Millenials can splurge on childcare or maybe a car, Gen D, maybe a condo or modest house. Some people might even decide to have kids.
Maybe some mediocre white guys will even take advantage of the program and get a degree, leave Deplorable, Idaho, and maybe even get an advanced degree, meet some minorities, LGTBQ, maybe even a woman or two,…….
Major Major Major Major
@Citizen Alan:
??????????????????????
Daddio7
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship”.
This
Martin
But that’s not what they’re learning, mainly because the students themselves recognize that there are entire categories they need to know which school isn’t doing anything to prepare them for. History is important, but recognizing who is a reliable narrator is vastly more important, because half of the history we’re taught are lies or half-truths. And that’s the world they live in now. To the credit of my kids high school, they got Zinn along with their normal history textbook. The intent wasn’t to say ‘Zinn will tell you the truth’, it was to say ‘here are two wildly divergent presentations of the same event, how do we evaluate this’.
And that’s a real concern they have, but if school isn’t helping them with that, if it’s saying ‘here’s the presentation you can trust’ with nothing behind that, because, it’s not like appeals to authority carry any weight any longer now that Trump is president, then the whole exercise yields nothing. Calculus is less a barrier to college than knowing how to calculate how much that college loan will cost you, or how to weigh a cost benefit for choosing a given school. We can’t on one hand say ‘oh, kids are racking up too much college debt’ and then completely neglect to teach them how to assess a reasonable debt load, and how to consider alternatives. Is $100K too much debt for an engineering degree? Probably not. Is $50K too much for a degree to teach pre-school? Absolutely.
It’s through these more practical exercises that you can better instill the appreciation for knowing history. That’s what experiential learning is about – in a classroom, students can’t weigh what information they need to retain and what they don’t, so the tend to retain none of it, because none of it has any context. So the constitution being ratified in 1789 isn’t retained knowledge, because, who gives a shit? But put them in a realistic situation where historical knowledge is valuable, and then they’ll know ‘oh, this is useful, I should learn this’ and odds are they’ll do that on their own – and that’s really what college is looking for – self learners. Do you recognize what information and skills you need to have? Do you know where to get that knowledge? Then you get out of their way.
Half the students that go into engineering have almost no idea what it really is. Same for areas like sociology, public health, etc. Engineers have some of the worst appreciations for history, yet it’s a discipline that benefits more than almost any other from it – because engineering disasters are almost always failures of communications, poor political decision making, ethical lapses and so on and not of bad math. But we invest more and more in the math and less and less on the stuff that actually makes a difference – stuff that you can easily expose students to in high school. Does economics matter? Sure, look at countries that are working on climate change and countries that aren’t (something students care about and is relevant to them). The difference isn’t sociological but economic – the countries making progress have structured financial incentives to make progress, the other countries haven’t. How much of organ donation, a public health issue, is really a minor public policy decision of whether to have donors opt into the program or opt out of it? (All of it).
The first problem that high school needs to solve is the question of ‘why do I need to know this’. That’s a constant question. And right now the honest answer is ‘so you can get into college’ which is a totally shitty answer, but its at least an honest one. Get that question out of the space – put them in a space where the answer is demonstrated. Once they know why they need to know it (which isn’t to jump through the next bureaucratic life hoop) then they’ll really learn it.
J R in WV
@Ridnik Chrome:
I despise Sanders, I dislike Buttigieg. Mayo Pete is pretty accurate descriptively. Don’t know who we will support now !!
I like Warren, but can she win? Who knows!
Martin
@Jay: You might be overindexing on the MBA dataset there. The cost of an MBA has skyrocketed relative to almost all other degrees, and the market has been flooded with them.
J R in WV
@Major Major Major Major:
OK, I’m with that, Major^4 — wait, that’s a name!!! What am I to do???
Roger Moore
@Daddio7:
Sorry, but a couple hundred years of experience shows that quote is a load of horseshit. The past couple hundred years of history shows that democratic government is perfectly capable of restraining its impulse to vote the public lots of free stuff. There’s a far bigger problem with oligarchic governments draining the treasury to fund the interests of the wealthy few.
burnspbesq
@randy khan:
if i told you what high school I went to, you’d understand.
BruceJ
@burnspbesq:
Ok, Boomer.
45 years AGO YOU DIDN’T HAVE “SKIN IN THE GAME” 45 years ago the state paid for the majority of a college education at a state institution.
I know this because I WAS THERE AT THE TIME. When I was in college, tuition was $225 a semester. I paid more for books every year than I did to go to school, at a damned good state university.
The reason that same university charges > $10k per semester now is because the state was taken over by Republicans who think taxes are evil and people need “skin in the game”. Not THEM, of course. They glide through life completely skin-less.
ProfDamatu
@Martin: Dead thread, but I’ve been reading your posts with interest. I work (faculty) at a state college in Virginia, and we – indeed, probably the entire state university system here – are going to be facing the exact opposite problem to yours: the dip in the birth rate that happened about 15 years ago is going to result in fewer potential students for the same number of seats (we’re already having challenges with meeting yield targets), and I get the impression that it’s much the same in most of the surrounding states.
It’s not that our school sucks; we’re probably near the top of the state university system (though not the flagship), known as a great regional school, etc., it’s just that the number of potential students is going to be a lot smaller. I don’t want to minimize the issues that CA is going to be facing in terms of higher ed, but it may be something of an outlier.
ProfDamatu
@BruceJ: Ugh, totally agreed! Even 25 years ago, when I started college, inflation had gotten to the point where it was almost impossible to get through college without loans – I guess in some states you could still work your way through college, but it would probably have meant taking 5 or 6 years to graduate, as by then, a minimum/low-wage job wouldn’t make a dent unless you were working so many hours that you wouldn’t be able to take a full load. It’s even worse for my students today.
I don’t think the notion of “skin in the game” with respect to higher education costs is quite as pernicious as applying that idea to health care costs, but it’s not a great framing either. I could support something like the suggestion made above, that students pay a percentage of their income for a set number of years after graduation (but without all of the baggage that comes with loans and their servicing), but it would have to be a lot more complex than charging a flat percentage – there would need to be income floors before the charge kicked in, and some sort of progressive scaling of the percentage. Otherwise, it’s just a regressive tax on kids who chose the “wrong” major, or simply got unlucky in the job market. (And I have a lot of sympathy for that “wrong” major thing; ultimately, even chasing the hot new field is no guarantee of a good, stable income – not to mention the fact that by the time you graduate, the field you went into may have become oversaturated. Really not a fan of penalizing students for failure to accurately predict the future!)