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Cheaper Access to Education Needed

Helix said:
enough options and policy changes that the average student loan debt isn't $26,600.

Project on Student Debt: State by State Data

it's a serious disincentive.
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It's disincentive for those who can't do the math and figure out that they'll easily come out more than $26,600 ahead with a degree, assuming they don't choose something like a trash collector career.
 
Tigger said:
I would suggest that we suffer as much from an overeductated population as well.
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Agreed, sort of. I would phrase it as an over-schooled population. There is a difference between schooling and education, and it has become more pronounced with the expansion of college courses in non-useful areas.

Ten years after I graduated high school, I ran across a former classmate at an after-the-bars-close diner. He had always seemed kind of slow back in high school, but he was celebrating his recent acquisition of a PhD in sociology and kindly deigned to talk to me, holder of a mere BS in math/engineering. As the conversation progressed, I realized that I was with a guy who, if you gave him an Audubon field guide to birds, would disappear into his basement for six months and emerge ready to pass his test: given any silhouette in the book, he would correctly give the common name of the bird, the Latin name, range, nesting habits, number and color of eggs, anything you could possibly want to know. But if you took him outside, he couldn't tell the difference between a sparrow and a duck.

And that is the difference between schooling and education.
 
Some of this is not over-educated, but rather not usefully educated.
The standard Humanities Degree is good for a well rounded education,
but may not be useful in finding a job.
Our society has somehow cast a shadow on craft/skill/trade labor.
All honest labor has value!
A pipe fitter knows things about welding and metallurgy that I could never guess at.
Part of this issue is feedback, the universities plan what degrees will be offered with little
input from the employers who would hire the students.

The cost of knowledge may be very low, but the cost of a accredited education is way up.
In 1978, I could pay for an entire semester's tuition, by working at K-mart for two weeks.(non commission sales)
All other factors aside, no one could do that today, even at community college.
 
Paschendale said:
The jobs that people increasingly need to do are more complex and require using more complicated technology than for previous generations. The same amount of education is simply not enough to be a competent member of society. As our lives lengthen, the proportion spent in education isn't shrinking. For our society to be strong and prosperous, everyone needs a thorough and effective education.
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Eh...half and half. SOME jobs are becoming more complex...many of them are becoming simpler. Tuning a carb used to be practically an art form, getting a fuel injected car running right is a simple matter of plugging a computer in, setting the factory specs, and voila. Technology has eradicated the need for entire chunks of knowledge that was once considered vital. Heck, I heard that writing cursive is no longer being taught in many classrooms, beyond a signature. Some folks scream bloody murder at this...others understand that we are not a world of post it's and paper letters...we text and email now. Handwriting is just not a very vital skill anymore. Beyond a personalized signature, anyway. Building cars used to require craftsmen, people SKILLED in their trade. Now it requires a small team of smart folk to keep the machines running, and lower skill assembly line workers. Teachers used to have to orate their lectures, and provide reference materials gleaned from personal experiences, or from hours of searching on personal time. Now they can show a vid, orate a little bit, and have all the references they could ever want, after a .0002 second google search. When you wanted to design a product, you used to have to be, in no small way, a competent sculptor...now all you need is CAD, and a decent computer. One takes years to become good at, the other takes months.
 
Diogenese, I agree. However there is another factor that you haven't taken into account.... Education versus Career.

I have an Associates Degree in Computer Aided Drafting. I quite commonly get asked why I didn't get a Bachelor's Degree. My answer.... "First of all the only place that had such a program at the time was in California and secondly because there's nothing a Bachelor's Degree in it would do for me than an Associates doesn't already do."
 
Tigger said:
Fine. However, they need to EARN that Education, not simply have it handed to them on a silver platter.
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How does one earn a basic education?

By mopping the school floors, or by peeling the gum off the bottom of desks?
 
In my opinion, this is all gonna be moot in a matter of years, anyway.

What information is out there that you want to know, that will help you pursue your passion or desire, that CAN'T be accessed by a relatively quick google search?

Fact is, KIDS don't care about higher education, their parents do. An 18 year old kid is not thinking 30 years down the road...their parents are. If kids DID care, and WERE thinking ahead...pretty much anything they wanted to know is right their on the net, open access, 24/7, for the low low cost of around 9 bucks per month, most places.
 
KevinKohler said:
How does one earn a basic education?

By mopping the school floors, or by peeling the gum off the bottom of desks?
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When I worked at a University, I had many students who had grown up wanting for nothing.
I told them, if they wanted to add depth to what they were learning at university,
They should get a job waiting on tables at a restaurant.
Waiting tables will teach people skills, better than any class!
 
KevinKohler said:
How does one earn a basic education?

By mopping the school floors, or by peeling the gum off the bottom of desks?
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A basic education doesn't have to be earned. And, except in inner-cities, primarily it's very successful - K-12.
 
longview said:
When I worked at a University, I had many students who had grown up wanting for nothing.
I told them, if they wanted to add depth to what they were learning at university,
They should get a job waiting on tables at a restaurant.
Waiting tables will teach people skills, better than any class!
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I made that post with highschool in mind, for some reason. I was just wondering allowed how a kid is supposed to "earn" grade school, or highschool...



And yeah, I agree. I waited tables during the summer in college for a year, and worked in the school cafeteria during the school year. My Phi Delt name was "lunch lady", lol.
 
Tigger said:
By having parents who pay taxes is how one "earns" a basic education. Anything beyond that is a privilege.
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What if a child is left for adoption? What have they earned?
 
KevinKohler said:
How does one earn a basic education?By mopping the school floors, or by peeling the gum off the bottom of desks?
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I mopped floors to earn an education, worked OK for me. Actually the job experiences while in school probably equipped me better to succeed than the actual academic topics, one paid me, the other I had to pay...so backwards.
 
Think about what a college is, and then compare it to a decent daycare program, or preschool.

You send your kids to daycare and preschool for the same reasons you send them to college, really. My daughter has not learned anything at her day care that I couldn't teach her...though she has learned a considerable amount. They have some very good teachers there. But guess what? I work 50 hours or more a week, and so does my wife.

Do we expect that to suddenly change in 14 years or so? Probably not. College is a daycare with a more extensive education program. You send your kids off, for the first year, they become wards of the school, until they are allowed to live off campus...they are provided with structure, meals, etc. For many of the schools of education, degrees, the info they are being taught is either freely or cheaply available on the internet, or most any bookstore, or amazon. But what the net DOESN'T provide, nor the bookstore, nor amazon...is the structure. They won't take care of your kid while you're still at work. They won't give goals and tests.


Think about that, next time you consider the price tag.
 
Muhammed said:
MIT OpenCourseWare | Free Online Course Materials
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This only came about as a result of the suicide of a hacker who REVEALED that information against the will of the school.

There are more and more people like him, though. The harder schools try to hoard that information in order to profit from it, the greater the resistance to that hoarding, and the more and more they are gonna get hacked.

A good thing, IMO.
 
Paschendale said:
And how exactly does a person do that?
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my daughter served 6 years in the army, including a combat tour in Iraq to "earn" her education

By working to save up for it?
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I worked two jobs and went to night school to "earn" my education

The idea that a person ought to suddenly be all on their own at 18 and have to start building themselves up with minimum wage jobs and move on from there is an outdated model that hasn't been valid for 20 years and never will be again.
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If you actually parent your children...then when they trun 18 they will actually have some skills and a work ethic and will not "suddenly" be all on their own.
 
longview said:
When I worked at a University, I had many students who had grown up wanting for nothing.
I told them, if they wanted to add depth to what they were learning at university,
They should get a job waiting on tables at a restaurant.
Waiting tables will teach people skills, better than any class!
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Excellent point. The people skills learned by waiting on tables are extremely valuable, and can not be learned by reading a book or attending a lecture.
 
OscarB63 said:
my daughter served 6 years in the army, including a combat tour in Iraq to "earn" her education
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Good for her. Not all of us are willing to agree to kill people at the government's behest in order to obtain the skills we need for self sufficiency.

I worked two jobs and went to night school to "earn" my education
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Good for you. Now, education costs ten times as much, and those jobs pay exactly the same. I'm assuming you didn't study math.

If you actually parent your children...then when they trun 18 they will actually have some skills and a work ethic and will not "suddenly" be all on their own.
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Irrelevant tangent! There are many who suggest that there is some kind of moral imperative to be self sufficient at 18. They ignore whether or not that is a practical reality. It may have been 50 years ago. It is not now. It simply takes a lot more time and money to learn all the things a person needs to learn to be a competent member of society. This thread is about realizing that reality and altering the financial structures that govern education to make it easier for society to educate its members.
 
KevinKohler said:
How does one earn a basic education?

By mopping the school floors, or by peeling the gum off the bottom of desks?
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I did it by working; starting as a data entry clerk, then as a computer operator (evening shift plus some weekends). The company (Singer corporation) reimbursed my tutition (at 80% for an A or B grade, 75% for a C grade) and I was able to take college classes during the day.
 
Tigger said:
Diogenese, I agree. However there is another factor that you haven't taken into account.... Education versus Career.

I have an Associates Degree in Computer Aided Drafting. I quite commonly get asked why I didn't get a Bachelor's Degree. My answer.... "First of all the only place that had such a program at the time was in California and secondly because there's nothing a Bachelor's Degree in it would do for me than an Associates doesn't already do."
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Fair point. My degree is in a technical area and the degree provides the accreditation necessary to land a job. My liberal education started in high school because there was a library across the street where I could spend my lunch hours feeding my adolescent curiosity for free. (The library has since been replaced by a parking ramp, and the new library is far from any school. Such is "progress.") My subsequent liberal education has come from reading because I wanted to read them (for free) on my own time, not because I wanted to pay someone to cram it into my head. Thus I have no accreditation in Homer, Herodotus, Locke, Hobbes, Smith, Marx, et al, but then, what would a degree in gender studies, black studies, biblical literature, or comparative literature be worth to me anyway?
 
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