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.'"
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Re:Goodbye (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Academic degrees vs. trade school degrees (Score:3, Interesting)
Easy. HR drone sees trade school? Then your resume goes in the trash etc.
If you want that awesome $29,000 a year job working 60 hours a week at the gringoDepot as a manager you need a full 4 year degree! To do anything aboe $17,000 a year you need a 4 year degree.
Perhaps someone in Silicon Valley or New York will rebuke my comment, but in the real world (Florida) that is what the jobs are and the lines for them are out the door and people are at the mercy of H.R.
Until their attitude changes on what is really required to perform a job they will just get an Indian instead with no experience but has the magical piece of paper. By the way I do have that magical piece of paper in case someone wants to tell me I am bitter. It just blows for those who did not get their careers started in 1999. For those who are reading this comment you are in a bubble.
If you are under 30 and have a 3.8 GPA but dropped out after your second year due to the lack of cash, well I am waiting for my coffee and fries. No H.R. will dump you for working at Starbucks or McDonalds instead of having an awesome job immediately which they also hypocritically turned down because you didn't have the magical piece of paper, so it cycles to a self fulfilling prophesy where there are no qualified applicants and we have a crises OMG.
Something suddenly makes sense: (Score:3, Interesting)
The article mentioned South Carolina as one of the states where public universities are affected. I have taught physics courses at a large SC school and at the end of the semester there is the usual rush of emails from your students telling you that they deserve a higher grade than they got, contrary to all the evidence of their lack of ability and effort. Well, maybe they should have thought about that earlier and actually cared about doing work for the class.
Among them there are also always some who say "If I don't get a B in this class, then I lose my scholarship" (sorry guys, grades are not given out according to personal need). Several such students every semester. And I wonder, how did these students ever get a scholarship in the first place given their highly mediocre academic ability?
Now it all makes sense.
Victimless crimes (Score:4, Interesting)
It could mean (a) the United States has more crime (which would be a bad thing)
That's the impression I usually get from criticism of the number of prisoners per capita: the United States has declared too many victimless acts to be crimes.
Re:living in america :( (Score:5, Interesting)
Going to school to get a good job is not longer a reasonable expectation.
And it doesn't make sense. We are spending the money. If we could spend the same money to keep people out of prison, we would simply have a better life and culture here in the US. But as tone of your comment suggests, we will perpetuate this "every man for himself" mentality that got us where we are. Reality is far different from your notion of reality. Reality says that people give up on themselves long before the 12 years of public school are over. Their expectations of life have been defined for themselves already.
Prisons decrease earning potential even after getting out. That's another problem we are failing to face. Once a person has a prison record, they are black-balled for life. It's okay if prison were a deterrent to crime. For some people, it's a rite of passage.
Government doesn't "foot the bill." *WE* foot the bill. They just decide where the bills go. Once again, if the money that goes to prisons went to schools, even in part, it could make a huge difference in the long run. The problem is it wouldn't make a difference for several election cycles. And no way a republicrat will vote in money for schools instead of prisons when the opposing party would get the glory.
Once a person has gone to prison, they are no longer full citizens. They lose the right to vote and to bear arms.... legally. We have decided their career for them.
Re:Prisons are highly profitable (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know. I think it is a losing proposition to look at what the rich get and try and hone in on that action. The reality is that the rich get what the rich get because they concentrate resources in the hands of a few people. If you try and give everyone what the rich are getting, you're going to fail simply because to get what they have, you have to exploit someone. And if you're giving everyone everything, you have no one to exploit. That's why you end up with either hybrid capitalist-socialist systems like in Europe, or command economies. And we all know how well command economies go.
You may be able to make things marginally better if you could somehow reallocate what the rich have, but since you're simply reallocating the riches of a relatively few people, it doesn't go as far as you think it might. If you outright confiscated, not taxed, but grabbed every asset of the so-called 1%, you'd get about 1 trillion dollars *total*. That's a lot of money, but the US government goes through 4x that much in one year.
The real solution is certainly trying to somehow temper the avarice of the rich as much as possible, but primarily to work on protecting and efficiently reallocating what you already have allocated to "everyone else".
The only problem I have with "socialism" is that it expects the central government to do something efficiently. At a national level, I'm not sure that's realistic if the country is big or complex enough. If it can be brought down to a local level, there may be more opportunity to keep things realistic owing to fewer administrative costs to get the money where it is needed.
I'm not against giving people things for free, but one does need to wonder how it is going to be paid for, and you're not going to get very far if you are relying on fleecing the rich for it.
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There is a downside (Score:5, Interesting)
An over-educated workforce creates serious economic problems.
There are only so many jobs available that require higher education. When supply of educated workers is higher than the demand, a few bad things happen:
1) Lots of educated people simply cannot find work. The opportunities just aren't there. They wind up depressed, and working menial jobs that are below their skill sets and which do not pay them enough to make headway against their crushing student debt.
2) Salaries for the educated labor start coming down, since supply is so high. The people who manage to land the jobs must overwork themselves in order to hold them (since there is a line of people who would jump at the chance to replace them), and their low salaries means they can't pay off their student debts either (or if they do pay them off, it takes a very long time, which creates serious problems if they want to raise families).
3) Jobs that normally don't require an education start requiring one, since there are so many educated candidates (who cannot otherwise find work) applying. These jobs still don't pay enough for one to dig one's self out of debt, but now one must get an education and endure the mountain of crushing debt in order to get any job at all.
On the one hand, denying education opportunities to the poor is unfair. On the other hand, over-educating the population makes nearly everyone poor.
Re:living in america :( (Score:5, Interesting)
I have an engineering degree (BS, AOE) from an in-state university. At this point, 20 years down the road, having lived frugally the whole time, I own a mobile home that is older than I am, on a rented lot, no retirement 401k, medical care plan is over 1/3 of my income, and no significant savings or money to send my 14 year old to college in 4 years. No land, either.
The companies that have used my skills have all profited heavily from them, but I have not. Nor is my anecdotal evidence far from the truth for most other college educated americans, recently.
Since the sole beneficiary of a college degree is the employers, I categorically refuse to send my kid to college, and have advised him not to waste his time on it, either.
Nor have colleges satisfied their charters, that I should support them.
Re:Uh... no. (Score:1, Interesting)
Having lived in SF for over a decade I have firsthand knowledge of what these so called "progressives" really are: FASCISTS.
Maybe not the brand of fascism that we see in the NeoCons, but every inch as fascist in believing that they are some how superior to everyone else and that they and they alone have the right to tell others how to live their lives.
They want to tell you what to eat (let's ban the happy meal! Let's ban bad carbs, lets ban sugar!)
They want to tell you what to drink (no soda mmm'kay?)
They want to tell businesses what they can and can not sell in their stores (sorry Drugstores, you CAN'T sell cigarettes!)
They want to monitor your lifestyle (lets send a predawn police force out to inspect everyone's garbage to make sure they put their trash in the right bins)
These "progressives' are every inch as bad as the NeoCons in my book.
And frankly, I'd like nothing more than to see all them, Neocons, teabagger and progressives alike go fuck themselves and get the fuck out of this country and go build their dystopian hellhole on some island far from here.
I've seen the progressive propaganda flicks like "zeitgeist" and it's sequels.
What a load of crap.
These lefty ideologues who think they have the answer constantly overlook one "inconvenient truth":
HUMANITY IS CHAOTIC! WE ARE NOT UNIFORM, WE DO NOT LIVE BY SCIENTIFIC PRINCIPAL.
We are not orderly little ants needing their "scientific control" We do not want to live in orderly boring little societies where our daily lives are managed by a "scientific" elite.
We want chaos, we want spontaneity, we want to explore, take risks and die or thrive taking them.
We want to make our own decisions and create our own experiences.
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"
And I'm sure you will be quite happy. And I'll be quite happy knowing you are there instead of out here trying to take away my freedom to live my life the way I want.
Because if you ever did get "your way" I can guarantee you it would result in mass slaughter.
We all saw what the prohibition of alcohol and drugs have done to create power in the hands of the criminals.
Imagine when normal everyday life is outlawed and the masses are forced to live to your "scientific" regulations.
Rivers of blood in the streets will ensue. Because we will all be criminals then. And when the sugar eating, booze loving junk food eating population are considered criminals, you and your kind will be vastly outnumbered and rubbed out in a fit of violence.
Re:Goodbye (Score:5, Interesting)
When I moved from theUS to Lithuania, ten years after they were released by the USSR, I learned a valuable lesson. In places where there is plenty of freh, clean air, people don't talk about the air. In places where there is freedom, people don't talk about freedom. They live it.
Keep talkin, you're comin' thru.