But think of the children!

[rah]

The "I want it all and I want it now" is not always the winning strategy, but yes, heavy student loans and high cost housing can influence decisions.

 

[Lexicus]

Those childbearing years also don't last forever

 

[rah]

My daughter is in her early thirties and not married yet. I want the grandchildren. Of course I didn't get married till my early thirties so it's hard to giver her too much crap.
I could care less about the investment in my home. It represents a very small portion of my assets. I've always gone very modest in that regard.

 

[Estebonrober]

Without independent data, from many sources collected over several years, the most you can really assert is that...
Some community schools still put together good programs that are applied science programs that might be immediately useful in some associated field.

Unsupported claims can be summarily dismissed.

https://www.brookings.edu/research/...opment-programs-in-public-community-colleges/

http://time.com/4773148/community-college-jobs-graduation/

https://www.aarp.org/work/career-change/info-2018/community-college-retrain-workers.html

I mean I can find more sources if you insist. It is easy enough to find them, although I must say that I feel like I'm just demonstrating the obvious. Around the US these schools produce vocational degrees for jobs that need filling. They usually do so by collaborating with local businesses. So I guess you can be antagonistic with me until your heart is content it doesn't change the reality on the ground here.

 

[Synobun]

Imagine thinking being paid an annually increasing wage is an "I want it all and I want it now" mentality.

 

[rah]

It's not.

 

[Lexicus]

Imagine thinking being paid an annually increasing wage is an "I want it all and I want it now" mentality.

Reminds me a bit of Mallory Archer mocking her employees: "my child died because I couldn't afford new bone marrow! Just me, me, me!"

 

[civvver]

I think there's many issues at play here making college not affordable.

Weren't state budgets for higher education cut a lot during the 2009 financial crisis and then never recovered? I don't have source data for that but that is what I heard, that a greater share of the tuition falls on students now than ever before.

Another issue I agree with TMIT, that college degrees are overkill for many jobs. I could've crammed all my technical training relevant to my career in my 4 year degree into 2 years no problem. Eliminate the liberal arts classes like mythology and philosophy, get rid of the technical ones that I never use like physics and advanced math. Then if you got rid of the wasted time in even the relevant courses you could probably get it down to a 12 month program. But anyway, more technical training programs for stuff like programming should exist. An employer is not going to review your transcript, at least not that I know of, so even taking advanced calc classes doesn't help me get a better programming job compared to someone who filled their work with more electives or something.

Then we have a supply and demand issue. All the state schools are full, always turning away applicants, so why wouldn't they raise prices? They will still fill their roles no matter what. We need to build and fund more public universities, high quality ones, not fly by night for profit programs like university of Phoenix or ITT tech. That would take big government investment though.

 

[rah]

Don't underestimate some of those LAS classes. In them you learn the code words to pass for part of the elite at cocktail parties and other social gatherings.

And there are some classes where you practice the methodology of research regardless of whether the topic has any relevance.

But yes, as you say specifically, for some technical training could be accomplished with considerable less time at a lower expense.

 

[civvver]

Language arts is very valuable for helping your critical thinking and communication skills, but really those should be taught in high school. If you graduate high school you ought to be able to write well enough to hold down any entry job, minus the technical parts like law or medicine or engineering and learning to speak in those terms. Sadly that's not always the case though.

 

[Synobun]

What do you define as "well enough to hold down any job", though? Most people I've worked with don't exactly have the most rigorous skill in crafting sentences but they "get by" when it comes to conveying an intended meaning.

 

[rah]

If they lack communications skills coming out of college (based on a simple smattering of the resumes I've reviewed over the last few years.) HS isn't doing enough to teach those skills.

 

[Ferocitus]

https://www.brookings.edu/research/...opment-programs-in-public-community-colleges/

http://time.com/4773148/community-college-jobs-graduation/

https://www.aarp.org/work/career-change/info-2018/community-college-retrain-workers.html

I mean I can find more sources if you insist. It is easy enough to find them, although I must say that I feel like I'm just demonstrating the obvious. Around the US these schools produce vocational degrees for jobs that need filling. They usually do so by collaborating with local businesses. So I guess you can be antagonistic with me until your heart is content it doesn't change the reality on the ground here.

Thanks but it was not obvious at all. People express opinions that are not always supported by evidence, or they cherry-pick data.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

It seems to me that the problem in the US is that universities have become so used to charging huge tuition fees that changing the system will threaten the incomes of a lot of very influential people.

Weren't state budgets for higher education cut a lot during the 2009 financial crisis and then never recovered? I don't have source data for that but that is what I heard, that a greater share of the tuition falls on students now than ever before.

So this is an anecdote and can be dismissed as such. It's also not an appeal to authority, I just want to share my experience as I had sort of a front row seat to some of the dynamics we're talking about.

From 2009-2011 I was the student member of a community college board of trustees. I also chaired a statewide committee of student trustees that interacted with the state government on behalf of all community college students. This was in Illinois in the middle of the great recession and If you are not aware, Illinois has major budgetary issues even absent a recession. Suffice it to say the school was in a bad way.

Every quarter would go by and money the state owed the college would not be deposited in school accounts. The state would be late month after month until they just canceled payments outright. And of course they weren't telling the school what their plan was so the school could prepare accordingly because there was no plan. It was a total cluster****.

The first thing the school did by way of response to the budget crisis was to hire the wife of prominent local member of Congress to be the president of the college. They needed a new president anyways and she was exceedingly qualified for the job. She had been a teacher and a principal and came with her own connections outside of her husband's influence. But the fact that she married into a political dynasty wasn't exactly lost on them either.

This sort of thing happens at schools all over the country. They pick administrators that are very important so they can leverage their connections into more funding for the schools. For public schools, this is something of an untenable situation. They cannot afford to pay market rates for that kind of talent and here I don't mean in the strict monetary sense. If my college had paid the president what she could get on the market for her connections and abilities, there would have been a massive political scandal.

So how do they compete? Well, in this instance, part of how it was handled was by offering up significant money to renovate her office which included a nice private bathroom. The professors at the school hated this - because they hated the administration anyways - and the 'golden toilet' became a running meme within their circles. What they didn't understand was that the President was bringing in money through the federal and state government that the school couldn't have gotten anyways. And she was really good at her job of running the college! So throwing her perks in the way of a super nice office was well worth it as they were competing with massive colleges and universities (private and public) which could all afford to pay her more in cash.

But in other instances, colleges do pay sky-high salaries to administrators and unfortunately this doesn't always pay off. Moreover, once salaries at the very top begin to climb, so too will the salaries for people on the next level down in the administration and so on. At the end of the day, schools have become administration heavy and students are paying the costs because the states have been negligent in their duties to fully fund public education. Even when budgets have improved, the states have learned that this is a cost they can push onto a certain segment of the population without significant pushback.

College kids don't flipping vote so there's no check on the cycle.

Unfortunately, it's not just the students who suffer. Across the board, colleges and universities are turning to extremely underpaid adjunct positions to control costs. In theory, adjunct faculty have a valued place within the system. Not all people want to teach full time and are fine not getting on a tenure track. This is especially true at community colleges where you will find a lot of professionals teaching a night course a semester on the side purely out of their love for teaching. But more and more it is becoming normalized that departments will be expected to function with a few rockstar professors (that bring in the grant money) and an army of adjuncts making near or even less than minimum wage teaching the workaday classes.

And while it is true that administrative salaries have climbed and there has been a push by schools to spend frivolous money on stadiums and luxury housing, at the end of the day the failure lies directly with the state to fully fund their obligations. And in many cases, as the states have withdrawn funding, so too have their interests wandered. There's less public oversight over how money is spent because schools have been sort of left to fend for themselves. And when the schools raise their own funds through bonds and tuition hikes rather than through the legislature, there is even less oversight on how it's spent.

This problem is multifaceted and it's easy to caricature golden toilets without addressing the root issue. Our states have failed us and now you and I are failing to address the issue through the ballot box. Even with the recent wave election there is no serious plan to tackle any of this.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Oh and to add onto the 'we have failed at the ballot box'.

The locals regularly killed efforts to raise local taxes to fund the school. They were able to pass some bonds but in general, funding education is a losing proposition during a recession because demand is sky high but funding falls off a cliff. Moreover, the populace did not fully see the point of the school or give it unwavering support. The original acronym for the school was BAC, which they joked to mean 'bring a crayon'. The acronym changed to SWIC, at which point it became 'still writing in crayon'. Parents didn't want to send their kid there because they thought dumbass little Jimbob was definitely WashU material or whatever. They thumbed their noses at the place and saw it at best as a place for a kid to figure out what they want to do without spending exorbitant tuition, room and board before they moved on to a "real" college.

Not everyone had that attitude, but you don't see people lining up to vote in favor of tax increases for community colleges or sending off alumni donations the way they do for Ivy League schools either. And as for the utility of the place, well it helped turn this dumbass Jimbob high school dropout into a taxpayer so I like to think it has a place in our society and should be supported. I would be a net drain on society if it had not been for the school and that goes for a lot of people like me.

 

[Ferocitus]

Have both major parties failed to provide adequate funds over a long time, or was it just on a Daley basis?

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Both parties in almost all the states. I don't think there is much of a correlation between one party and funding or the other. Could be wrong but there was little pushback to college cuts so long as tuition could climb to offset them so both sides raided higher education coffers to fund other priorities. It's hard to argue for college and against ambulances or kindergartens.

 

[civvver]

What do you define as "well enough to hold down any job", though? Most people I've worked with don't exactly have the most rigorous skill in crafting sentences but they "get by" when it comes to conveying an intended meaning.

If they lack communications skills coming out of college (based on a simple smattering of the resumes I've reviewed over the last few years.) HS isn't doing enough to teach those skills.

They ought to be able to write a properly formatted email or memo that conveys a clear and concise point. They ought to be able to write either a speech or presentation to convey some basic data and be able to take questions on it and answer them. They should be able to read someone and summarize what it said, ie reprocessing some basic data. Just making up an example, one should be able to make a presentation on why they like or dislike doughnuts and feel it would be profitable or not profitable for their business to get into the doughnut business. Replace doughnut with anything. Sadly many, many high school grads can't do this at all, or do it very poorly. They can't express their own ideas in a coherent manner.

When I took a speech course in college we had to give a persuasive speech on anything you choose. This one guy choose to talk about investing in the stock market. His whole speech could be summed up as invest in the stock market because it's good. That's it. He had no data or even well formulated opinions, just hey invest cus I heard it's a good idea. It was horrible. And we were in our 2nd or 3rd year of college, I forget.

 

[Synobun]

That seems like an unreasonable expectation if it isn't a part of their job. What are mute people, or those with stutters, or people with speech delays supposed to do under your basic qualifications expectation here? Expecting good language skills feels somewhat privileged to me.

I suppose I'm biased as I was both a recipient and provider of speech therapy when I was a child (I was a part of a reading and speech program where older kids could help teach kids with delays), and then I was involved with tutoring and editing from the moment I was a teenager to... well, now. My job revolves around people not having great language skills, and I know enough at this point to also know that a lot of people don't choose to be "sub-par".

Don't get me wrong, any time I've had to work with others it also annoys me when they fail to communicate effectively, especially when they are otherwise intelligent. But that's kind of my point... the mechanisms behind "communicating effectively" aren't necessarily equally accessible for all. You could be an expert in whatever it is your job is in but not be able to conduct meetings and speeches at a college level, and I don't believe it's reasonable to consider that employee inadequate because of it.

 

[civvver]

Oh and to add onto the 'we have failed at the ballot box'.

The locals regularly killed efforts to raise local taxes to fund the school. They were able to pass some bonds but in general, funding education is a losing proposition during a recession because demand is sky high but funding falls off a cliff. Moreover, the populace did not fully see the point of the school or give it unwavering support. The original acronym for the school was BAC, which they joked to mean 'bring a crayon'. The acronym changed to SWIC, at which point it became 'still writing in crayon'. Parents didn't want to send their kid there because they thought dumbass little Jimbob was definitely WashU material or whatever. They thumbed their noses at the place and saw it at best as a place for a kid to figure out what they want to do without spending exorbitant tuition, room and board before they moved on to a "real" college.

Not everyone had that attitude, but you don't see people lining up to vote in favor of tax increases for community colleges or sending off alumni donations the way they do for Ivy League schools either. And as for the utility of the place, well it helped turn this dumbass Jimbob high school dropout into a taxpayer so I like to think it has a place in our society and should be supported. I would be a net drain on society if it had not been for the school and that goes for a lot of people like me.

Another big issue that everyone's been discussing in Michigan lately is property evaluations and taxes. Our per pupil funding is somewhere kind of in the middle of the 50 states but it used to be much higher in the 90s, early 2000s, and adjusted for inflation it's dropped since then. In the early 90s we passed this law called Proposal A that put a cap on how much the taxable value of your home could go up in a year. So if you owned a house that was worth 100k, and next year the market boomed and it was worth 120k, the taxable amount would only go up to say 105k (I don't know off hand the actual limits). When you finally sell the property then the taxable value for the buyer jumps to match the full assessment. The excuse was basically we don't want to price people out of their homes with runaway taxes, and it made sense at the time I think.

But fast forward to the housing crisis, everyone's property values dropped, and even though they've mostly rebounded, the taxable values haven't because of the cap. There's no limit to how much it can drop, so if the value of your house dropped by half, so did your taxable value, and now if it's recovered you still might only be paying taxes on 75% of the value or whatever. I guess it's a big issue because the majority of our school funding is from property taxes.

That seems like an unreasonable expectation if it isn't a part of their job. What are mute people, or those with stutters, or people with speech delays supposed to do under your basic qualifications expectation here? Expecting good language skills feels somewhat privileged to me.

I suppose I'm biased as I was both a recipient and provider of speech therapy when I was a child (I was a part of a reading and speech program where older kids could help teach kids with delays), and then I was involved with tutoring and editing from the moment I was a teenager to... well, now. My job revolves around people not having great language skills, and I know enough at this point to also know that a lot of people don't choose to be "sub-par".

Don't get me wrong, any time I've had to work with others it also annoys me when they fail to communicate effectively, especially when they are otherwise intelligent. But that's kind of my point... the mechanisms behind "communicating effectively" aren't necessarily equally accessible for all. You could be an expert in whatever it is your job is in but not be able to conduct meetings and speeches at a college level, and I don't believe it's reasonable to consider that employee inadequate because of it.

A speech impediment shouldn't stop you from conveying your ideas or writing effective memos. I don't mean public speaking, more like presenting data to your boss or co worker, 1 on 1 is fine. Maybe I phrased it wrong. But I'm talking about getting rid of those courses at a college level and condensing things like STEM degrees into a couple years.