The Crew Forum Politics Thread (Read Before You Post)

I understand your revulsion at the "get off my lawn" nature of that post, but your argument in the latter part is a bit of a non sequitur. We're talking about post-secondary education, here, where the US is still at the top of the heap (for now) in delivering quality services. You're talking about math and science illiteracy, which is a problem long before anyone even talks about going to college. The systems are completely separate, and we're not going to be able to raise our math and science levels by flushing more cash down the toilet trying to get kids who really shouldn't be there AND are not of means to go to college subsidized by the rest of us. Kids who are math/science illiterate cannot be helped by forgiving college loans. The damage was done in our primary and secondary government schools.

By removing the education of learning full accountability? No thanks. While it may suck, its a perfectly good lesson to have to go through. I'm all for trying to get schools cheaper, but if they sign up for it, they need to pay for it. Or, they need to take a strong look at themselves and have some understand that college isn't the right thing for them. It took me three years of colleges to learn that... so I had debt AND the realization that I wasn't meant for college. I wouldn't trade it for the world either.

Do we? As Judge Smails correctly stated, "the world needs ditch diggers too, Danny".

If you want to argue that college is too expensive, I'd probably agree. If I was 18 today, I probably couldn't work my way through.

How about this. Before a penny of student loan is disbursed, the student has to put together a "business plan". Tell us how they intend to pay back the loan. Will an $80,000 loan to fund a degree in philosophy pay off? Is that English Lit degree really worth $100,000? If not, no soup for you. If you still want to go for it, sign that paper as a 18 year old adult, and bear the consequences of that decision.

I'm all for lower interest rates, deferring payments for those that can't find work, etc. IMO, however, things need to be made more difficult, not easier.

I agree to a certian extent, but now, as a reaction to the problem you mentioned, we are seeing a rising, selectively anti-intellectual movement that actually blames education itself for current political and econpomic problems. Apparently Americans are now too smart for their own good. Universities are being attacked for teaching kids the 'wrong' things. Social sciences are being villified because 'they don't MAKE anything'. The Chinese and Indians are being held up as paragons of virtue because they invest heavily in engineering, business and math while supporting very little education in fields like history, anthropology, lingusitics, sociology....Florida governer Rick Scott opined of anthropology that "It's a great degree if people want to get it, but we don't need them here." That is a profoundly ignorant thing for a politician of his standing to say - leaving aside for a moment the simple fact that he knows next to nothing about anthropology, despite his daughter having studied in the field. Rick Scott needs to take some anthropology classes rather than trying to get rid of anthropology in Florida. he's demonstrating a very simplistic, selective and biased approach to the problem of college tuition levels and post-graduation employment rates. Worse even than that, he's scapegoating something and banking on peoples' ingorance of it to carry him through.

The funny thing is, China and India are just beginning to figure out that if you crank out millions of businessmen, engineers and other 'hard' scientists to the exclusion of everything else, you get short term benefits in many areas but a very unbalanced intellectual pool in the long run, with negative results for society as a whole. The fields of anthropology, sociology and history have had profound effects on the ways that engineering, politics and business have developed over time.

It is important that our educational system serves everyone, and that it encourages students to follow their dreams. That doesn't mean everyone should be told they can be an astronaut, President of the US or a painter, but it should also not decide that certain fields are the 'wrong kind' of education for students to be following.

He's shown more willingness to work with people than I initially gave him credit for, but that itself will probably destroy his reputation with his 'base'.

I have made significant sacrifices in order to finish a college degree (twice) without taking out loans, so I have little sympathy with people who go to expensive colleges and end up in grave debt without having planned ahead. I drive an old car. I don't have a big TV with a million channels. I don't go on vacations. I worked hard to find programs that would give me funding and I worked jobs to pay the rest. It also took longer to get my degrees.

But at the same time banks and colleges can be very predatory when it comes to enticing 18 year-old kids and their inexperienced parents into a program that costs $20k or more a semester plus living expenses, and getting them to take out loans to pay for it. Or college programs that saturate the market with unemployable graduates out of greed rather than actively working with students to find jobs post-graduation. Or banks that make it very easy for parents and students to get in way over their heads in debt. This sort of thing needs to be checked.

Higher education has been in a bubble for decades. Health care too. The US is a wealthy country so spending ever increasing fractions of GDP on education and health is partly a policy choice and partly the result of bad policy. At some point the higher ed and health care bubbles will burst, as the internet stock bubble did or the housing bubble did.

My view is that college isn't worth borrowing money for. If you can't afford a given school without borrowing money, go somewhere else. My 2nd and 3rd oldest nephews are in high school and that's what I tell them. Their older brother doesn't have any student debt and he's finished his 2nd year of law school. He was in the guard, then ROTC. His education has been interrupted several times for Katrina (he missed the US-Mexico match), basic training, flight school, and he'll miss this year as he's going to Kuwait next month. On the other hand, he's better off financially than his high school and college classmates.

You make a good point, though I'd like to add two things:

First, our colleges are still very competitive internationally. BUT, as you pointed out, our secondary education system is quite uncompetitive. This front-loads a lot of remedial education on colleges, so that students waste time and money learning things in college that they should be taught in high school or even middle school.

Second, and following on from that, it's important to add communication and criticial thinking skills to the 'illiteracy' problem you pointed out for math and science. I have personally been involved teaching college undergaduate engineering majors critical writing. While I'm sure they could analyze building loads with the best of them, they had no idea how to think for themselves when it came to analyzing a topic and articulate an argument in writing. THAT is what I was talking about in my previous post. How can engineers be successful if they can't communicate at a profesisonal level? These guys should have learned that stuff in middle school, but now they are being taught it in college. And I can tell you right now that engineering and math programs do not teach their students this stuff. It falls on social science departments - the very departments that are being told they are useless right now.

This is also a major area where the Chinese and Indians are struggling (though they are at least largely bilingual).

You're half right. People must be responsible for themselves. But predatory recruitment and loan practices by colleges and banks, and spiralling costs based on profiteering should not simply be chalked up to capitalism. The point of preventing people from getting into too much financial trouble is not to reward bad decisionmaking on the part of individuals, it's to prevent huge economic problems for everyone further down the road - AND, crucially, to improve America's educational system as a whole.

I am not advocating loan forgiveness. I am advocating reform going forward.

I am not naive enough to think that going ROTC or the guard as a way to pay of college is a big part of their decisions. However, joining the military for any branch should always be about wanting to serve this country. I have 2 brothers both in the guard (both currently in Afghanistan) and yes getting school paid for is a bonus. It's a benefit but it's always been about serving and not, "Oh hey, I can get my school paid for." My dad has been in the guard for 30+ years (how he paid for his school, partially). He has always wanted me to join and pushed be before I went to college. I have never had that desire to do so but am damn proud my brothers did. We need people like them. I would never join in a million years just because I want to get cheaper education. Service first. Benefits second.

What constitutes predation? What's profiteering, exactly? What does capitalism have to do with huge subsidies and their attendant problems?

There's an awful lot of emoting going on here, but not a hell of a lot of that vaunted critical thinking.

I've personally seen plenty of university departments taking in far more students than market conditions will handle, and not giving a damn what happens once they graduate. There's more to it than loading all the responsibility on students and parents. We're talking about kids here in many cases, and parents who may not have gone to college and have no experience with the finances. Yes, they should still understand basic finances, but I don't see you criticizing universities and banks enough for their role in the cost of education. After all, they are collecting the money. If graduation and post-graduation employment rates are dropping, and costs are rising despite plenty of subsidy money being made available, we have to look at all players in the system, not just the people taking on too much debt.

I never made a 1:1:1 link between subsidies : spiralling education costs : capitalism. The subsidies cause problems though abuse, not through any inherent flaw in the concept. Obviously reform is necessary. But I reject the notion that we should do away with subsidies entirely and instead get venture capitalists to fund bright students (in exchange for a cut of their future income), or other similarly more "free market" schemes. Education should be shielded from the vagaries of the economy as much as is practicable.

The notion that there is anything approaching "market conditions" which one can evaluate as to its capacity to bear a customer load in higher education is laughable.

Kids? Or adults who have reached the age of majority for everything but alcohol and car rental?

The universities and banks are operating as businesses. Businesses that have a pretty huge incentive from the government to not give a ******** whether or not the actual student pays back the loan, because Uncle Sugar will take care of it one way or the other. Is that REALLY the fault of the universities and banks, given their other considerations in needing money to operate to serve a customer base that is 1) constantly growing, and 2) demanding much more of them?

Costs are rising BECAUSE OF subsidy money, not despite it.

The concept of subsidies is inherently flawed. It will always attract rent-seeking behavior, and it will always pervert incentives.

That's a hell of a false dichotomy.

Why? Are you interested in education going out of business entirely?

The government does pay for a person's college who decides that it means enough to them to have to earn it. It's called the GI Bill. If you serve a 6 year enlistment and don't come out on the other side with at least half of your degree done and the other half paid for, it's your own damn fault for being lazy.

Not at all. The rate of post-graduation employment for college students has a direct effect on the universities that educate them. The market is not within higher education, but at the other end of it. Nevertheless, the effects can be profound for students and universities. If a certain field is saturated with young graduates, employment becomes more difficult and average pay drops. Fewer students will enroll. Unless you make it easier for them to get in and into debt...

I think it's disengenuous to suggest that the financial accumen of individuals aged 18-23 is equivalent to any other age bracket, and that upon attaining the age of majority one's age cesases to be a factor in the types of decisions they make, or the skill with which they make them. Every marketeer and statistician in the world would disagree with you on that.

You seem to have no problem with universities and banks abusing what I agree is a flawed system. Why? I'll tell you something else about universities: they are pretty tight-lipped when you ask them about the net cost of attendence, what the graduation rate in a particular school or program is and, crucially, how many graduates get a job in their degree field upon graduation. So they are proving they don't "give a ********" either way. And they should be blamed for that, regardless of what you think is wrong with the government's handling of the situation.

Universities are to blame because they collect money from students, banks and the givernment with the full knowledge that there is no outcome-based performance standard by which they will be judged. They create and aggressivley pursue enrollment quotas that may bear no resemblance to the availability of jobs for graduates.

Unlike most debt, student loans follow you through bankruptcy, and in general the debt collection powers of student lenders are broader than with any other type of loan. It's profitable for banks because they can squeeze students harder than anyone else. Why is this so? I think it it is predatory.

If we start with the assumption that subsidies are currently flawed in some way, than how do you not find any fault with universities and banks for taking advantage of the situation? It's detrimental to the economy and to our educational system, and it's unsuistainable. And they take no share in the blame for this? It's simply the fault of the guv'mint and stupid kids and parents?

Right now, I agree with you that subsidies are not doing their job. The money is supposed to go to students' education, but right now it's mostly going to university administrators.

I think we need to scale them back, and place more restrictions on the way they are used. But I don't agree that subsidies can never work. Anything can fail if badly implemented.

It's not a dichotomy; I never made those two options exclusive. You cut off the end of my sentence and made it look like one, though.

I don't see it as a binary choice, but I am certainly against education being a purely free-market commodity. And I don't want to see universities spending too much time being in the business of making money, or banks being able to squeeze students harder than everyone else for no apparent reason.

We're not talking about the same thing here.

But we trust 18 year-olds with cigarettes, driving a ********ing ton of deadliness on public roads, wielding a gun and deploying to chase dragons in faraway lands, and a whole host of other things. They're able to decide whether or not to risk their lives doing the bidding of our President, but we must coddle them in financial decisions?

They're using the system they're presented. This is what businesses do, and they'd be foolish not to. They follow the power and money because if they don't, they lose. The power and money are held by the government, and it's the government that dangles that power and money in front of the big bad corporations. Why is the government doing this?

They're incentivized to do exactly what they're doing.

Whose ********ing fault is that? They don't take the damn money, they go out of business.

BECAUSE THE SUBSIDIES PERVERT THE DAMN MARKET! From their perspective, they just have to churn out lambskin-bedecked adultolescents because the subsidies encourage it.

I've seen people on deferrals for most of 15 years after graduation. There are zillions of opportunities to consolidate and refinance. Student lenders get the money from Uncle Sugar no matter what.

The entire concept of subsidies is flawed, not just this particular implementation. You will not find a way to make them work without ********ing someone else, and hard. The shit of it is, if the companies (unis and banks) don't take them, they're ********ed, because someone else will. The government isn't going to stop handing free shit out.

I think something is missing here.

But of what I can read coherently, you fall into the trap of pretty much everyone: "if only the Right People were in charge, surely we'd be able to engineer a wonderful solution!" Ain't happening.

Looked like one. If not, my bad.

It is nowhere near there and probably hasn't been ever. Why would it be bad to simply pay a fee (tuition for a class) for a service provided (learnin')?

Why not? They need to operate.

Explain this in non-emotional language.

Happy to see this thread back. On the subject of student loans, my girl friend started going to Ohio State and realized that the amount of loans she was taking out for a Psychology degree wouldn't be worth it down the road in massive debt. She made the decision, a wise one in my opinion, to switch to a tech school and get her RN degree where she won't have a cent of additional debt once she graduates in a field that has a lot higher chance of landing a job once she completes it.

P.S. I have about $20k in student loan debt and no degree to show for it. I'm not gonna bitch because it was my choice to take out those loans and not just work my way through college.

P.P.S. It looks Ron Paul will be nominated from the floor of the GOP convention in August as he has a plurality of delegates in at least 5 states(the threshold to be nominated from the floor of the convention). That should be muy interesante.

There's a huge difference between 'coddling' and 'preventing looholes from being rapaciously exploited'. Just because I think additional restrictions should be in force does not mean I'm advocating giving anyone a free lunch. Frank;ly, I don;t think 18 year old kids should be able to take on tens of thousands of dollars in student loans. Financial assistance should be in the form of grants, not loans.

I think many univerisites are very aware that they aren't just treading water - they're absolutely thriving on all this money, and they don't care what happens to the students they churn out. If the money came with more caveats they'd be much more careful about how it was used, particulalry if funding was linked to post-graduation employment rates.

Then of course there are the for-profit colleges like University of Phoenix, who have something like a 25% graduation rate and 80%+ of their funding is federal. Someone needs to pull the plug on them immediately.

Adultolescents? What on earth are those? And anyway, aren't they the slightest bit ashamed that they're paying lip service to their mission? To what extent does personal responsibility (as you previously mentioned the 18 year-olds should have) apply to them? They are knowingly churning out these 'adultolescents' you speak of. Why are they silent? They are not hurting for money right now. That might be a clue.

'Handing free shit out' - to students - may actually be a better solution. Instead of signing students up for big loans, make smaller, direct grants. If given directly to students, the money is contingent on meeting academic targets, if given to the university it would be contingent on post-graduation employment rates. This is a direct investment in the education of students, and should deflate tuition levels over time because it would replace the larger but rather illusory pool of loan money currently out there.

Private loans should also be much more regulated in terms of the amount that can be borrowed and the terms of repayment. They need to be made less attractive as a source of revenue for banks.

I don't think I am. But if you're going to take a fatalist perspective on it, we're both wasting each others' time.

One reason springs to mind immediately - the quality of education available to a person should not be directly related to the amount of money they are able to pay out of pocket for it. Sometimes your proposed system may work. But not always.

They do. But there is a subjective point beyond which 'operating' becomes 'profiteering'. You and I may bever agree on the threshold, but I hope you agree that such a point exists.

You are hardly impassive yourself. Uncle Sugar? Why do student loans follow people through bankruptcy more doggedly than just about anything else?

My oldest nephew is service-minded and is looking forward to his first overseas deployment. He flies Blackhawk Limas (the high altitude version) and originally expected to go to Afghanistan. That war is winding down so his unit is going to Kuwait instead. We've been in a buildup in the Gulf for a few months now to intimidate Iran into compliance with the non-proliferation treaty. We also still have a fairly large footprint in Iraq. Apparently some of the units that withdrew from Iraq are officially based in Kuwait but still spend most of their time in Iraq. Unless things heat up with Iran, he expects most of his flights will be running various folks to places in Iraq.

btw, his gig as an Army officer pays pretty well. Just the base salary is mid 40s but he gets a number of bonuses. He gets 1500 a month to pay for housing in his home town, which more than pays for his fiancee's apartment. He gets flight, and hazard, and tdy pay. I think he's only taxed on his salary too. He's had his college paid for, received enlistment and re-enlistment bonuses, and has enough for a down payment on a house once he settles down. On the other hand he's risking his life but so are cops and firemen, many of whom don't make as much.

In all this discussion I can't believe that no one (unless I missed it) has made any reference to the college sports scam that goes on. If people are to be derided for doing degrees that they actually want to do (afterall university is about education not necessarily about getting a good job at the other end) then how comes we have numerous people with some slight athletic advantage, who probably throughout high school no doubt prioritized their sporting prowess over their education, no get handed free education at the expense of those people that actually want/should be there.

If we are to talk about college reforms, lets not over look the stupity of handing out free stuff to those that do not even deserve to be there. If you want a feeder league to the pros, then create one with your own money, not create a psuedo-professional league out of the educational system.

I am sure there are many holes to my argument, and that it is definately not a popular opinion but let me put this very simply. University is ultimately for education. It is not for sports, or for getting a well paid job it is for learning a degree.

I do not agree with paying off peoples student loans for that very reason. However university should not burden people with so much debt.

I know college students must take the brunt of the blame for going into debt. However so many people claiming "they should know better," without understanding that it really isn't their fault 100% that they didn't know better. Look at our current high school graduation requirements. Economics aren't even required. The only required socials studies credits are American Government and American History. Why aren't more classes required in Economics? Basic financial principles are important to every single person. Much more so than Biology, Earth Science, Geometry, Foreign Language, Band etc.

We are not requiring our future graduates to know what is needed in the real world. All high schools should be required to teach a half semester of micro and a half semester of macro. They should all also be required to offer a class on how to afford college that teaches students everything they need to know about affording college.

Our politicians and too many people are much better finding blame than realizing real problems that need to be fixed. Changing classes that high school students are required to take is one of the easier solutions. It wouldn't be a total fix, but it could definitely help.

Got no problem with this. Then again, outside of football and basketball, it seems that many teams have excellent students, and a number of teams end up with higher aggregate grades than the non-athlete pool. Athletics and education needn't be mutually exclusive, except where the professional leagues are getting a mostly-free, taxpayer subsidized minor league with lots of Communications "majors".

University is for both education AND getting a job at the end. The education is a means to the end (job), unless you're independently wealthy and can afford to study art history on a lark (I know exceptions exist - you could take that art history degree and become a museum curator, for instance). University is for explicitly specializing your knowledge to make one more of an expert in a particular field so that one can command a better salary/better "fringe benefits" than those not taking a similar path. Alternatively, it's for broadening one's knowledge to the point of being able to command a better salary/benefits and/or to be flexible enough to smoothly transition to a different/adjacent career either on your own terms or out of necessity.

We're no longer a civilization of Greek philosophers, at leisure to spend our lives pondering the world. Education has become a utilitarian endeavor, in spite of the old romantic notions lots of people carry around, especially as it's become something no longer strictly the province of the wealthy/leisure class.

I am 24 and graduated college 2 years ago. If I knew what I know now I would have taken one of my D1 scholarship offers for soccer and went that route. I should have known but I didn't. My parent's were not fully aware as I was the first to go to college. I am in no way blaming anyone but myself because I made the choice to go in a different direction but I did not comprehend the scope of the financial decision I was making. Lesson learned.

A-********ing-men.

To sort of answer your question, a cynical person might say that TPTB want it that way.

I'm not ready to go THAT far. ALL of those are important and prepare you for the world. Even band. Actually, you can learn quite a lot about life from things like band, choir, the arts, etc., especially if your school has a good program with good instructors.

As recently as the mid-90's, they did require micro and macro. And I think accounting was required of all but a few (and it was practical accounting, which really was quite useful).

The problem, though, is that the systems are completely and totally different and have totally different incentives. A lot of problems could be avoided by fixing government schools (and by fix, I mean something completely different than "MOAR CASH!!! MOAR TEACHERZ!!").

This is likely true of many if not most of the topics we dicuss here. Except that sometimes it's *fun*.

There are a few reasons I can think of:
1. To make student loans more attractive to banks, so they will actually give a loan to someone with no credit history and no guarantee of paying off the loan in the future
2. I believe the government is either backing every student loan now or is the largest student loan provider directly (forget the specifics). I imagine the government is protecting itself there.
3. It prevents kids from going to college, taking loans, getting done with college, immediately filing bankruptcy because they have no income and can therefor not pay back their loans, and then going out and getting a job.

Personally, I'm going with reason three as being the primary driver, but the other two are certain to be part of the equation (and a myriad of other things too, I assume)