How Colleges Are Pushing Out the Poor To Court the Rich 668
An anonymous reader writes "A change from 'need' based financial aid to a 'merit' based system coupled with a 'high tuition, high aid,' model is making it harder for poor students to afford college. According to The Atlantic: 'Sometimes, colleges (and states) really are just competing to outbid each other on star students. But there are also economic incentives at play, particularly for small, endowment-poor institutions. "After all," Burd writes, "it's more profitable for schools to provide four scholarships of $5,000 each to induce affluent students who will be able to pay the balance than it is to provide a single $20,000 grant to one low-income student." The study notes that, according to the Department of Education's most recent study, 19 percent of undergrads at four-year colleges received merit aid despite scoring under 700 on the SAT. Their only merit, in some cases, might well have been mom and dad's bank account.'"
Goodbye (Score:5, Insightful)
Q&A (Score:3, Insightful)
How Colleges Are Pushing Out the Poor To Court the Rich
It might have something to do with making it too expensive for the poor. Just a thought...
Re:guessing it's more complex than that (Score:4, Insightful)
Assuming you can get in, you say?
Not exactly as easy as it sounds when the portion of your application involving your grades is a very small part of whether or not you get accepted. Most top colleges these days are obsessed with students that show profound personal initiative and social engagement, which are both activities that cost money. They do not currently "compensate" for the extra advantages a wealthy student has in the application process. Added to the emphasis on alumni connections (oh hi MIT) you might as well flush the application fee down the toilet.
In capitalism... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:guessing it's more complex than that (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem here is that most families with $65k have no idea how to turn their 90th percentile kid into the kind of kid who gets into Harvard. They don't know about "SAT Coaches," don't know which extracurricular activities to push, don't have friends who can donate massive amounts to the orphanage little darling just founded in Kenya, etc. If one parent makes $150k, the other makes $60k, and their friends all work at Hedge Funds, it's really easy to look great on a college application.
More importantly they generally don't know that Harvard will be free for their kid. They see the Harvard name, they see the price tag in USNews is astronomical, maybe they google the actual tuition charges of roughly $37k, and instead of pushing their kid to apply to Harvard and spend $0 they push him to apply to [cheap state school] and spend $10,000 or so a year.
There was recently on article on three Latina friends from a small city in Texas. The one who went to Emory had loans, but that was because as a teenager she didn't understand all the paperwork requirements needed to get aid. Her family had nobody who had ever gone to a school like Emory, so they couldn't help very well.
Re:Goodbye (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Goodbye (Score:5, Insightful)
But you wanted it, your entire ideology is based on destroying equality under law.
Your entire ideology requires to discriminate against some to provide subsidy to others, this is just a tide going the other way, you have pushed and pushed and you have gotten now what you inevitably pushed towards - inflation, lack of productivity, lack of personal responsibility and lack of individual initiative.
The government creates the moral hazard of fake loans that nobody in their sound mind would EVER give you out of their savings to go 'study' sociology, philosophy, literature. There was a story earlier in the day on this site about an employer not interested in these graduates, they are not worth the time, they have huge debts and they have proven themselves to be incapable of not following the crowd, they have proven to be lemmings.
Obama's new 'Pay as you Earn' idea is going to change the way people pay back loans, no more the loan payment will be tied to the actual loan amount, now it will be tied to your yearly earnings, so it will make sense to rack up the biggest debt you can and stay in college as long as you possibly can stretch, and then find a low enough paying job so that you won't be repaying too much. In 10 years the remainder of your loan is forgiven, and so colleges will raise tuition faster than ever before in history, I even fully expect to see doubling of tuition in a single year. Why not, you are not paying for it, you are not price sensitive.
It's a bail out, it's inflation. Elizabeth Warren wants to push interest rates for student loans to be the same as the rate the affiliate banks get at the Fed's discount window.
Good politics, I am sure 99% of you will agree and 99% of you want that to happen. Of-course it's terrible economics, the banks should not be getting that free money, that's inflation.
Of-course the banks are getting it from the Fed so that they can turn around and buy US Treasuries, to maintain the artificially low interest rates, to maintain the ability of the gov't to spend on your bankrupt social and military programs. The Fed also wants the banks not to fail for as long as they can stretch it, so the banks make the spread between the Fed's discount rate and the Treasury yield, a couple of percent, nothing fancy.
Except that it's over 2Trillion a year not counting the new 85Billion a month in just mortgages and refinancing. The Fed wants to reinflate the housing market, they are somewhat successful. The banks use these 'record profits' to inflate the bond and the stock market, stock market is record high.
Guess what, Warren's plan will make college tuition record high for the same reason that the stock and bond markets are high: inflation. Enormous inflation.
But her bill won't pass, however Obama's plan will and so don't worry, you'll be able to rack up all the debt you want and never have to repay it, just pay a little bit over 10 years. Of-course what are you going to pay it from? Who is going to hire these sociology and ethnic studies majors?
PhDs are going to wash floors in McDonalds.
Yes, it's the new feudalism, the politicians, your gov't, the bankers that are part of it are the feudals and you are the useful idiots.
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Now go ahead, this comment only has one way to go.
Re:living in america :( (Score:5, Insightful)
I read somewhere...
We spend more per capita on prisons than we do on school. Something it really messed up with our priorities.
Re:Q&A (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Goodbye (Score:4, Insightful)
I was surprised to discover recently that a friend of mine, a staunch Republican, had his Cadillac-plan health insurance cut by his defense-contractor employer and replaced with a bare-bones high-deductible plan.
...and the massive financial cost upheavals induced by Obamacare had nothing to do with that happening [yahoo.com], right?
Incidentally, I find it curious that we're in year 5 of Obama's administration (mind you, two of those years gave him full run of Congress), yet there are still progressives blaming presidents who are long gone.
Re:Goodbye (Score:0, Insightful)
Greece wasn't considered to be in trouble until it could no longer borrow. The socialists 'borrow' from the productive people. Once the interest rates for them go up they can no longer pay for their socialism. So they circle the wagons around their ethnic majority, that is the natural progression for docialists to nazism. So Greece has this growing a rather smooth transition.
Re:Q&A (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:living in america :( (Score:3, Insightful)
I read somewhere...
We spend more per capita on prisons than we do on school. Something it really messed up with our priorities.
I hear this statistic a lot as some kind of indictment of our education system, but if you think about it, it makes sense. People are expected to pay for or at least contribute to their (post-secondary) education because the purpose of that education is to benefit them, at least in the sense of given them a better chance at a higher paying job. If money is spent to help increase someone's earning potential, it makes sense for that person to pay at least some of it back.
Prisons, however, decrease people's earning potential. You can't work or get job experience while in prison. (You might be able to take college courses in some prisons, but a criminal record may still make it difficult to be employed in a high income job.) Since people aren't employed while behind bars, it would be unreasonable to expect them to pay rent. This means the government has to foot the bill. So it actually makes sense that the government spends more on prisons than education. It would, in fact, be quite strange if it were the other way around.
Re:Goodbye (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Goodbye (Score:5, Insightful)
The hallmarks of progressivism have always been regulating the working man "for his own good", in addition to aid and funding.
Fascism(real facism) is similar in concept, except more stringent, more violent, and more racist and factionalist.(progressivism is far friendlier).
What we've been heading towards since Reagan is Corporate Feudalism.
A good example of "fascism", would be the old Prussian style education system, where education was free, but it was harsh, strict, designed to teach group think and obediance and manditory.
Facists don't let people starve on the streets, but they aren't above shooting them there either.
Re:living in america :( (Score:5, Insightful)
I hear this statistic a lot as some kind of indictment of our education system, but if you think about it, it makes sense.
Wow, that train of thought has completely blown me away. I am not even sure on where to start replying to you.
If you spend more on education, not just tertiary, but primary and secondary, it will nurture youth to have higher aspirations, it will teach them more. If you have someone leaving secondary school with a good understanding of basic subjects (math, English, at least one science and computers) as well as a rounded splash of some elective subjects such as history, economics, art, music, religion they are much more likely to either look for further education on their own (even if they have to pay as much for it as in the US) and move on to being a productive member of society rather than ending up in prison.
That's not to say that everyone with a good education will never do anything illegal or end up in jail, but the number of people in prison with a poor education should stand out above anything else that to keep people out of prison, give them an education. Give them the ability to actually join society as a peer rather than as the bottom of the ladder cleaning the bathrooms or working as a parking attendant.
This concept of paying more earlier also has the advantage saving more money in the long run. If you don't need to pay for putting someone in prison AND have the benefit of that person contributing to the society they live in, it clearly is a win-win scenario.
Merit 'vs' Money (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's take Bill Gates as an example. He's been incredibly successful. Will his son follow in his footsteps? That's unlikely. But his children end up getting the best support, the best education and the best opportunities. Meanwhile, Manny at the local grocery store has a son Terry whom is as talented as Bill Gates. Terry doesn't get the opportunities of Bill's son so winds up becoming a street corner entrepeneur. By the time he's 20, Terry owns 3 crack houses, 4 brothels, is driving massive demand for international trade, has a workforce of 300 people and is a multi-millionaire.
Terry is just using his gifts in the best way he can, and because he's so damned smart
The education system forces people into boxes and tries to shoe-horn them into positions which fit with our current identification of what society represents. What society should represent should be driven by the individual drives of the people expanding it's boundaries, not by limiting the range of education to fit into a social model which has never not been broken. It's not about the money, it's more fundamental than that.
Re:Q&A (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah good, the self-righteous person who doesn't realize that there are plenty of people who work just as hard -- or harder -- than them and remain poor, and that the vast majority of the rich are people born into it. You got a break, good for you, stop acting like it's solely because you deserve it and other people don't.
Uh... no. (Score:5, Insightful)
What progressives have observed, time and again, is that power collects at the top. No matter what. People pass the advantages they have to their offspring, who use those advantages to increase their share of wealth and power at everyone else's expense. The American housing bust is a great example. Millions lost their homes and the equity in them. That wealth wasn't destroyed. It's was claimed by banks owned by the 1%.
So if power is going to gather at the top we're left with two choices. Either a strong central government that can stand up to that power, or hoping against hope that the money and wealth 'trickle's down'. We've also seen that money and wealth don't do that.
I'm open to alternatives (I'm a progressive after all). But I've never once heard one that doesn't boil down to some form of socialism, or that isn't just wishful thinking.
Re:Goodbye (Score:2, Insightful)
What you're describing is fascism, not progressivism.
Fascists, like all other progressives, believe that the government should manage the economy in order to promote the best interests of "the people". Of course, since like all other progressives, fascists believe that most people will not make the proper decisions for themselves, certain people will have to be selected to make those decisions for them. The difference between fascists and other flavors of progressives is that fascists select people who have demonstrated an ability to make economic decision in their own interests as the people to make those decisions for others, whereas most other flavors of progressive prefer to select people who have demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of economics to make economic decisions for everyone else.
Re:living in america :( (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why so many "liberal" examinations of the issues have resulted to separating out "in-classroom" spending, but they are dismissed as inconvenient, and the numbers used by the school-haters are always total funding.
Poe's Law Again (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you really a conservative? or is it just a cartoonish parody of one?
Re:In capitalism... (Score:4, Insightful)
If your definition of violence is taxation, then I am perfectly happy living in a "violent" society.
Everyone is technically doing better, but the people on the bottom get a tiny slice of the growth while each person higher up is getting more at a faster rate. Everyone is climbing a ladder, but the ladder is getting taller faster than the people at the bottom are climbing--even though they are still making progress in absolute terms. It doesn't matter that they're "doing better" based on some metric because they are still relatively worse off than the people around them. This has real negative effects on the health of the individual and on society. It's a sickness, and it eventually kills the society that doesn't address it as it has before in history. Don't be surprised if your countrymen are unwilling to follow you into that hell just so they can remain morally pure as you define it. The smug satisfaction you'll get from having lived free of coercion won't count for much when you're living in a slum with the rest of the new serf class. You're not a member of the elite either, and the most charity you can hope for from them is the privilege of being eaten last.
Rising inequality is the real threat of today. You solve that by what you call violence, but what the rest of the world calls taxation. Wealth flows and accumulates at the top, that's the natural state of things, and unless measures are taken to push some back down you end up with disaster. You end up with disaster by trying to flatten the curve too much also, like some idealistic societies have tried, but we are far from that today. We've gone much too far in the other direction, not enough redistribution, not enough opportunity to prosper for the vast majority so that the top ten thousand families can horde more and more.
Eventually, things WILL change. People won't put up with it forever. We will have a more equal society either through a period of blood, or through a period of measured, deliberate, structural changes. I, for one, would rather not have humanity lose another hundred years of progress and prosperity while we sort out our economic system; because the mob isn't going to get it right the first time either.
Re:Goodbye (Score:3, Insightful)
It is no longer possible to work your way through most University programs if you work for minimum wage.
I get in-state tuition, and the total cost of my living expenses and tuition is more than 25,000 dollars a year. If you allocate 30 hours per week for studies and find a way to work 40 hours a week at $8.25 an hour, you would only earn $17,490.
That leaves more than two thousand dollars per year. Now, one could realistically borrow this money, but who would lend it? I have a friend who was offered 13% interest. Fuck that bank.
College access has become primarily a credit issue.
Re:Average public univ = $13,600 a year (Score:4, Insightful)
5. In this day and age, kids are competing with people from all over the World. A GPA less than 3.5/4.0 means you are going to have a hard time getting employed. Compared to back in my day, just graduating with a 3.0 meant you were golden.
I've never had a job ask me my GPA. Despite all the wording otherwise, aside from college admissions, my high school grades have never come up ever again. And, true to lower school experience, my grades in college never came up. The only time someone could have argued they mattered is when I went back for a masters, and even then, it was solely an issue of seeing if I completed my undergrad, not with what grades. My test scores have always been in the high 90-something percent, so maybe it matters more for the 50%ers, but for me, I know that nobody ever cared about my grades.
Re:living in america :( (Score:4, Insightful)
Are they though? Or do they simply *test* as being two grades higher? The biggest complaint I've heard about the NCLB act is that it rather brutally encourages "teaching to the test", often to the detriment of imparting an actual education. When you get right down to it memorizing the proper process to solve a specific class of algebra problems (for example) will boost your test grade significantly, but be utterly useless in real life - the world very rarely packages problems in neat, clean, grade-appropriate form. Meanwhile the teacher that takes the time to teach general principles and strategies that are far more broadly applicable will have students that, for the most part, test more poorly because learning how to effectively use those underlying principles is a lot harder than memorizing useless routines.
It doesnt need to be this way... (Score:2, Insightful)
In the Scandinaian country where I live, all secondary education is free. It doesnt matter whether you're studying medicine, an engineering degree or art, as long as your exam score is high enough to enter the particular school, you're in.
And the government provides you with a scholarship for studying. Everybody gets 800$ a month for studying, and can borrow an additional 800$ monthly on top of that.
Other Scandinavian countries have a similar system in place, and all European countries offer their citizens a secondary education at a fraction of the cost of an American education.
So why exactly is an affordable secondary education so hard to find in the US?!?
Re:Goodbye (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Goodbye (Score:5, Insightful)
...and the massive financial cost upheavals induced by Obamacare had nothing to do with that happening, right?
No, it didn't. Private Corporation XYZ said let's make 2 billion a quarter PROFIT (and throw our employees under the bus) instead of 1.99 billion a quarter PROFIT (and cover their healthcare). Fuck them and you for being their brainless apologist.
Re:living in america :( (Score:5, Insightful)
Not bad, and I agree that education is a key element to much.
But why does damn near every 'good' job these days require a fucking college degree? Many use little more than what can be gotten readily with a year or two of voc-ed, if that. (1986 want ad in local paper for a dish washer at country club ended with "Send resume [sic]..." Inflation indeed.)
Further, ask yourself why have we effectively demonized such activity as parking cars or cleaning? It's useful work which in some manner makes life better for others. Should this not be a source of pride? And a liveable income as well? Why do we continually stratify tasks such that we have people upon whom we look down our noses? Doesn't this say something a bit nasty about the fragility and skew of our own perceptions about self-worth? Why is someone who brings food to a table or washes the dishes that come back somehow a lesser being? Is it required to have a de facto caste system? Or is that just the way it is because that's just the way it is? Seems to me what humans make they can generally un-make, or make differently.
Re:living in america :( (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:living in america :( (Score:3, Insightful)
But doesn't he have to *survive* first?
Re:living in america :( (Score:4, Insightful)
Education isn't going to live your life for you. You have to do actual work in order to improve your situation. If the work you provide to an employer is of such a high quality that it can generate "heavy profit", then there should have been plenty of room to negotiate an increase in salary, 401k or a health plan. Your situtation now has very little to do with your education; for the most part your education is only relevant for your first job interview.
Re:living in america :( (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends on what you define as a good job. I'm a network engineer for a very well known service provider. I make twice the average household income in America. I would consider it a good job.
I have an Associates Degree, but it wasn't even a consideration for the job, all they required was a high school education, along with the ability and temperament to do the job. I demonstrated those quite handily that I was offered the position in under 24 hours.
The longest I've been unemployed since I turned 16 (I'm well into my 30's) was 3 months, and every time I change jobs, my pay rate goes up.
I personally think alot of folks use lack of education as an excuse. There's no magic recipe to being successful. No checklist to getting a 'good' job. It takes some effort. Virtually every out of work or underemployed person I know is severely lacking in motivation and will to better themselves and has perfected the victim mentality. My evidence is, of course, anecdotal, but it's all I have to go on, and I calls 'em as I see's em.
Re:living in america :( (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:living in america :( (Score:4, Insightful)
There's not much cannon fodder left in the US military. Even infantry is pretty geared up these days, and not interested in unnecessary fatalities. Too much so at times. Too many commanders are too risk adverse, and it is hindering getting things accomplished.
Re:Uh... no. (Score:4, Insightful)
So if you think these "progressives" have the answer I suggest you go get yourself put into some sort of institution. There your life will be very well ordered. You will be told what and when to eat, when to sleep, what to do, what to wear. You will be given limited access to bad things such as TV and books. And all of this dictated by "scientific" principal and "resource management"
I can understand your sentiment, but I have news for you. We are being managed by an elite already. They are the people sit on corporate boards and in executive suites and make decisions about what will be made, marketed and sold and how it will be done. They lobby congress and write "draft" legislation. They fund think tanks and foundations to shape policy and public opinion. They move in and out of government to make sure government and industry play nicely together.
Through PR and advertising you are already being told what to buy and eat, what to value and who to vote for. You are given a limited range of ideas to choose from in politics and can vote for Coke or Pepsi in every election. The major news media tell you about what goes on in the world, and you have no choice but to trust them even though you know that the message is being spun and massaged and they are leaving out the parts that are embarrassing to our government or against the narrative. I mean, do we really know who the rebels are in Syria and why we are supporting them?
The difference between this and what is envisioned in Zeitgeist (for the record, I find the idea of a resource based economy intriguing, but do not fully endorse it) is that in Zeitgeist they are open about what they are doing and why. And they advocate it for the betterment of everyone. You may not agree, and I don't agree with all of it either. But what we have now is a covert means of manipulating and influencing people's thoughts and opinions. It is being done for the benefit of a very few, not for everyone. And most people, by design, aren't aware that it is going on. We are already being managed. But instead of doing it by sustainable scientific principles, it's being done for power and profit.
Re:Goodbye (Score:2, Insightful)
Reality trumps theory every time.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)