Obama's budget

It is discussions like these which makes me abruptly proud to be an Australian, where the Government has paid for my undergrad and masters degree at Australia's top university (Melbourne Uni) without me ever having to worry about securing loans and grants for each semester. And all of this is paid off when my income hits a certain threshold that the debt is paid off through taxes.

On a side note, I also share in the authors lament for the end of Friday Night Lights, but more so for the fact that it allowed me to appreciate an idea of america in general which other TV shows do not display.

There are many other federally funded financial aid programs that could be cut before the Pell Grant. An example is the EOP&S program I was in while in community college. It was set up for low-income, first generation college students. The program pulls in millions of federal funding for offering services readily available for very cheap (if not for free) to any student who really wanted to look. The only service I really needed was priority registration. The Pell Grant, on the other hand, saved me from the full-time minimum wage job I would have been otherwise stuck with while going to school at night. Of all the kinds of financial aid to cut, the Pell Grant should be at the bottom of the list.

As a recent college graduate, I have seen tuition and fees raised the past few semesters. A couple of semesters had tuition freezes while I saw a substantial increase in fees. While I can not complain about the quality and value of education I received, it is merely an observation that college is becoming more expensive for students and families. Without the help of my family, I'm not sure I would have been able to afford college without working a full time job, which would have been impossible considering my class structure.

Colleges and universities naturally raise tuition each semester to continue to attract new students and provide for their current students. Making college more affordable should include allowing all applicants an equal opportunity for admission, regardless of his/her financial situation and tuition.

Actually, donning military fatigues is one way that people who can't afford college qualify for financial assistance to do so. And I'd argue that these folks are more deserving than the jocks who help top coaches get their $1 million-plus salaries. Now that's scandalous...So how about shifting some military budget into the development of a non-military youth corps to serve cities and rural regions that would be paid in part with tuition guarantees?

Sigh. If I was interested in blind partisan propaganda, I would read the NYTimes...

Education in America is an example of Goodhart's Law: "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes." Or as Wikipedia expresses its usual application, "once a social or economic indicator or other surrogate measure is made a target for the purpose of conducting social or economic policy, then it will lose the information content that would qualify it to play such a role."

What's the information content of educational achievement? Educational achievement is a crude measure of many things that are generally of value and great significance but which are unquantifiable or imperfectly quantifiable. Examples would include intelligence, stability, drive, diligence, and what one might call business humbleness: the ability to put the job first. Once pressure is put on graduation rates and college enrollments for purposes of public policy on a subject-- inequality, for example-- educational achievement begins to lose what made it valuable to begin with.

The problem with the theme that the rich pay ever-higher premia for expensive colleges that other kids cannot afford, is that it doesn't really work.

A friend's son will be attending an Ivy next year. He's not much of a scholar in truth, but he'll help a sports team and the Ivies have more money than God. So the kid's need-based scholarship takes care of everything, it's more money than his athletic scholarships to other schools would be.

Not a great story in my view because he'll be occupying a slot that a real student could be using instead. But you can't say the fancy private colleges keep out the poor, as he lives with a single divorced Mom who has a part-time job, no alimony, and limited child support.

I'm quite surprised that none of the TV character parents work for an institution of higher learning.

Some colleges give employees and thier families a free ride.
The one lady cited earned a Bachelors, and will continue at the trough until her kids get a free education - never mind using the degree to get work.

http://www.ohio.com/news/116212934.html

Perhaps M.S. can organize an e-mail campaign for us to pester FNL to get one of the characters to pester thier parent(s) to get a job at a college.

(sniff, sniff) I hate seeing fictional characters denied thier right to free higher education.

Regards

I think its pretty ironic everyone's beating on the gender studies majors, when I could use a gender studies major today to explain a strange trend in my data. I don't know anything about gender studies so I don't know why men and women are giving me such different responses in surveys. But, yet ooohhh its a useless major as I pour over their research papers online.

@M.S.

Another brilliant way to spend your time is commenting on the Economist while doing a "job" that none over your bosses ever bothered to learn enough about to actually evaluate what you do :)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Global_Trap

I think JGradus has a point, and I think the idea that there are "hard upper and lower limits" to how many highly trained people an economy needs would be rejected by mainstream economists. Increasingly, mechanization and efficiency means we're all sitting around trying to find things to do with our time, and if we want to be paid for it, it has to be something a machine can't do. Colleges are supposed to train increasing portions of the populace to do those things.

Obviously, student loans do nothing but subsidize the cosseted northern liberals of our universities. Tuition rises because it can. If we cut off that spigot, universities would have to lower tuition or go out of business for lack of tuition paying students.

And you know what! a lot of people that go to college should not be going to college. If Subaverage Joe learns a trade and starts making money at age 19, isn't it better for him and all of us than enrolling in a crappy college, goofing off drinking and smoking pot for 2 semesters then flunking out?

Isn't it just boiling down to the old simple fact that only a certain percentage of people are actually, and will ever be, productive in a modern economy? The whole sending everyone to college thing is just yet another way to hide this fact, trying to find things for people to do as we have yet to learn how to deal with mass unemployment?

JGradus, I agree completely. I remember, back in my library-using days asking about esoteric things and being told without looking where to find the books on that topic and which I might particularly enjoy. Particularly at college, I suspected that the smartest people at the University were not the professors and certainly not students but the librarians.

What we really seem mostly to be complaining about is that people come into college without much education. I think there's a good point to be made that college isn't what it was because grades k-5 aren't what they were and high school, sadly, is what it was.

I take the point about gender-studies majors and ethnic-studies majors and so forth but how many people is that actually? When I was in college in the 90s, there was a women's studies department located in two double-wides in a parking lot behind the student union. I know there's a favorite stereotype of universities that says they exist for leftist indoctrination but I'd guess that that's a case of making the extreme the norm. Of course, I guess that with no data so maybe it's true.

@Jaylat

I actually sort of agree with you on that one.

I still don't see any problems with the concept with free learning, I just dislike that people with a degree in something completely useless still for some reason expect a higher salary.

My heroes are librarians, top educated, extremely important for a society (maybe about to be phased out though) and very underpaid.

@TCDPhilSec: Interesting take, and I might agree with you - especially as regards there being too many business and law schools. But a society should benefit from more, not less, real disciplines and those skills should vary over time. I don't think there's any "hard upper limit" to useful knowledge.

On the touchy-feely side, I'm all for more musicians and artists (but they have to be good ones). And while knowledge of human nature is admirable, I don't think gender studies or the latest academic idiocies get us there. How about more historians, or philosophers?

Go to a 2 year community college and then transfer.
I figure that with books ( @$150 each) and fees it costs $8,800 for
30 credit hours a year for 2 years.

http://www.tri-c.edu/payingforcollege/Pages/TuitionPaymentSchedule.aspx

But if people want to borrow and pay more, well we are a free to do as we please in this country.

Of course, I have the freedom to tell the whiners to shut up.

Regards

@Forsize

In Europe, where history comes from, the main reason for a University education was never training for an exact job but linked to the ancient ideal that knowledge in itself has a certain value that improves the character, even though it was mainly ATTENDED by people aiming at becoming priests or lawyers and such. It was also a training in certain philosophical systems, later replaced with the scientific method.

The view that upper education actually leads to a certain job is quite new, except maybe doctor's (the make you healthy sort, not PhD's). In Sweden it was as late as in the 60's that the government decided to move most educations to a certain job (still many of course are not) and in the UK it still much more important WHERE you studied than what.

So while you might be correct, although I do not agree, in questioning the wisdom of millions of people studying subjects of little direct value, it would be directly wrong to claim that this is something new.

Jaylat, I think forsize is entirely correct in his use of language. There are hard upper and lower limits to the number of professionally-trained people (e.g. lawyers) that a society needs. If that is all we want from tertiary education, then take out the axe. If we want to promote a greater understanding of the human condition, on the other hand, then we should also be educating people in more variable-payoff areas like the arts and humanities, where four students may not care for every one student that advances our understanding of ourselves as a species.