The New Zealand system is some way between socialism and the capitalist system. The government subsidies around two thirds of university fees for NZ citizens (overseas students pay full prices which are around $12K per year depending on the degree). We can then get a student loan for the fees we pay. This loan is currently interest free, as long as you are living in NZ. It is paid back by compulsory deductions from your income (if you have a job) of 12% of your income above a certain level (I believe that level is around $19K currently). My payments are about $180 per fortnight and if nothing in my life changed I could pay off my total in around another 4 years.
If I end up taking maternity leave and not earning for a while I make no repayments and accrue no interest. If I die my debt is wiped clean. No-one else ever has to pay your personal student loan debt (except the tax payers of course!). If I moved out of the country Iâd have to pay around 7% interest and if I defaulted on paying I could have an unpleasant reception at the airport if I chose to return.
I feel privileged to be able to have an interest free student loan with reasonable repayment requirements. BTW, international PhD students at my university pay NZ student rates, not international rates (so around NZD$5-6K per year). It turns out to be a cheaper way to get a PhD than in many peopleâs home countries and our PhDs are research only without the need to complete course work or any exams other than thesis defense.
I wasnât thinking credit card companies would break the law, just that they would comply with the technicalities of the law and immediately create new âtricksâ that the law doesnât cover. Looking at the effects of the latest effort, the CARD Act, it seems to be effective at increasing transparency without price increases or other negative consequences to consumers. But it hasnât changed consumers credit behavior at all! Consumers are as addicted to debt as always.
I believe student loans would react the same way. It probably is a good idea to regulate the worst abuses and try to increase transparency. But thinking it will have big effects on behaviors is being way too optimistic.
The K-12 system in the USA is not a shining example of government success and efficiency. We spent huge amounts of money per student for very mediocre outcomes.
its insane that students graduating in âSTEMâ fields from top universities canât find good paying work. Wasnât it Obama himself who was pushing us to massively increase the number of STEM graduates when he was first elected? It kind of feels like the way Bush II was pushing everyone to go buy a house⌠these pushes by government cronies are benefiting someone, just not the people they say its benefiting.
And just recently Congress, in its infinite corruption, massively increased the H1-B program for IT workers so now we will have even more competition for jobs and salaries will continue to dwindle. The people running this country just donât care about it in any thoughtful and real way. Obama blaming Kim Kardashian and Kanye West for problems he has actively made worse is frankly disgusting.
Obama promised to cut out the gimmicks and lies in government but he refuses to be honest with us about anything. I am no Republican, but Iâm no democrat anymore either. Theyâve all sold us down the river. Its time for us to do something about it. OWS needs to be restarted, but with 1000 times as many people involved this time, and with concrete demands:
Publicly fund all federal elections
2 term limit for all federal elected positions
Eliminate revolving door by eliminating presidential appointment of top bureaucratic positions (all heads of bureaus must come from the general pool).
Completely revamp financial regulation and the SEC so that there is one regulator, and it is staffed with career regulators with advanced finance experience, hard-nosed prosecutors under Bill Black.
Eliminate the connection of the Fed with the large private banks that own it. The Fed should be a proper central bank, with no connection to the industry it regulates.
end the drug war
end the war on terror
end privatization of public resources and institutions
end NSA and other blanket surveillance of US citizens
outlaw lobbying completely
cut the war departmentâs budget by 50%
make prosecution of those lying to congress mandatory and punitive
public financing of all education, including higher ed
Any amount of money seems huge when itâs somebody elseâs kids. And if those kids are poor and foreign and unworthy, so much the worse.
As for mediocrity, you say that as if itâs a bad thing. But the word simply means âaverage.â Yes, the average American kid is average. I know we should strive to have all kids be above average, but that only happens in Lake Woebegone.
Right now, some very powerful people are working hard to take all of the dollars out of public schools and funnel them into for-profit corporate education. Regardless of the fact that those schools again and again prove to be inferior and corrupt, âthe marketâ is simply an article of faith. But it adds up to a true race to the bottom, as the most talented and experienced people are hounded out of the system and education is replaced with test-taking. And then we blame the schools and cut their funding some more. Itâs a brilliant plan if we want to become the worldâs biggest banana republic.
Youâre right about the Latin root of the word, but according to Meriam-Webster mediocre means:
mediocre: of moderate or low quality, value, ability, or performance : ordinary, so-so
I would be happy if the average student in the USA performed at an average level and was educated in an inexpensive, effective way. But weâre not there.
The USA has the second highest cost in the world per pupil for K-12 education, second only to Switzerland. And the results are not âaverageâ, theyâre shockingly bad.
We voted? I donât remember that, but then again, Iâm grad student. I can end up ignoring the rest of the world way too much. I would not have voted for the football team most likely. But people like that kind of thing.
My fees have gone up dramatically in the years Iâve been here as a grad student, while my stipend has been static (according to folks who have been around here longer than me, weâve been getting the same for the last 10 years⌠faculty has not had a raise in 5 years). That being said, not all grad students get the same stipend. Some of us get the minimum (us lowly scum in the humanities), other get much more (STEM folks). GSU was a commuter school for much of itâs history. Itâs just in the past decade and a half becoming more like a âproper research universityâ.
I do believe that more students live on campus at GSU, because weâve only rather recently had university housing, in the post-olympics period. Iâm not sure we had ANY housing prior to this. Does KSU have student housing⌠all I know about Kennesaw is that half my friends adjunct there.
In our modern, post cold war world, profit is the only thing that matters. If it doesnât turn a profit, fuck it. You want to know where you came from, what the world means, and how we construct a meaningful culture⌠does it make money? No? Then fuck it. âGreed is good.â
As someone who loves the production of knowledge for itâs own sake, I find this highly depressing, but I think itâs nonetheless becoming true⌠though of course, I use a bit of hyperbole. The hard right has been hammering on public education for decades now (despite the fact that a fair number of them went to these same elite institutions they endlessly rail against). The privatization of everything has consequences, this is one of them. I maybe be able to tell you what the recording industry did during the cold war and what that means at the end of my PhD, but since that wonât turn a buck for anyone, my prospects are kind of bleak as far as the job market goes. I think Iâm making decisions that will put me in a good position for the job market, but my field is still flooded with other phdsâŚ
This isnât actually true. The U.S. spent $70 billion more on education than on the military in 2013.
While the portion of the federal budget representing military spending does dramatically dwarf that spent on education, that is because the American education system isnât funded primarily by the federal government and is overwhelmingly supported by taxes collected at the state and local levels. Military spending is outlandishly high, but reading the budget sheet wrong helps precisely no one.
I canât help feeling that there is too much emphasis placed on everyone going to university, and that this is creating both a dearth of skilled workers and a demand great enough to ensure that the usurers want a slice.
Probably someone who wanted to educate students and didnât have the luxury of being independently wealthy or access to the confiscatory power of government. Interestingly, education in the western world developed as a function of religious organizations much of whose staff was acting out of devotion to God and not private profit.
Treating students like customers: thatâs what the for-profit online schools do. The one I work at? Full of functionally illiterate adults working toward graduate degrees that will never get them work, because theyâll never be able to pass the required licensing exams once they graduate. And paying Harvard prices to do so.
A colleague recently told me that at the school where he works, the plagiarism-detection software has gotten so good that the rate of students being failed out of classes shot up. The universityâs solution? Get rid of the plagiarism software. The tuition dollars are too valuable to actually hold students to an academic standard.
âStudents as customersâ promotes the attitude âI paid my tuition, now give me my A.â Everyoneâs got a reason why they should pass, and not just pass, but get full marks - this one had a personal crisis, that one had trouble with her supervisor at work, this other one was never told that you shouldnât copy material directly from the text without quote marks. Harvard prices for Walmart educations.
To his credit, Cory has been speculating about the future of education and the failure built into the current situation in the US since âDown and Out In the Magic Kingdomâ.
Doesnât this way of putting it ignore how very little gets spent per child in areas where residential property values are low? And thus, in areas where too many kids are crammed into classrooms where teachers are paid too little to do too much with too few resources?
The U.S. may spend more on ed than on the military (whatâs your source for that?), but in many places, itâs not spending nearly enough. Including for most teachersâ salaries.
