If you think that the only value in an education is the financial, and not the enriching of lives and the intellectual growth that comes with it… that the only point of a diploma is that it makes you more marketable… If you think that scare quotes around the word “educated” smacks of anything other than reactionary anti-intellectualism…
Then you’re exactly the sort of person who views an education as a scarce resource that must be rationed and priced out of reach of everybody, rather than the right of humans everywhere that is needed for them to reach their potentials.
And you have the gall to call yourselves “Libertarians.”
Nothing in this proposal suggests increasing the number of available slots at existing campuses.
This is already a problem with tuition. Perhaps some funds could be applied to on-campus housing, but most students at California’s public schools have to live off campus starting in junior year at least.
The cheaper in-state tuition only applies to existing California residents, while out-of-state residents pay private-level bucks to go to Berkeley or UCLA; I’m sure the same rules would be applied if the tuition was free.
@d_r addressed some of the value above, but why shouldn’t a young person who’s motivated (and not just from an affluent family) get an education in an area that interests her?
Getting a job does not have to be the end goal of getting an education (as opposed to a credential). For example, the field I studied in helped get me my first job, but was not directly related to it. My field of study also comes in handy in my current career. I’m far from alone.
This is a reflection of the tightening full-time job market, not the value added to an applicant by an education.
What dilutes the value of academic credentials are 25 years’ worth of demands of employers and HR departments that a baccalaureate degree is needed to pour an espresso or unclog a toilet. If corporations went back to placing value on vocational education and apprenticeships you’d see a drop in demand for expensive B.A. degrees.
You’ve given no evidence for that. I myself think that this ballot proposition needs to be refined before it’s sent out for the vote, and hope that vocational schools will be included under the general category of post-secondary education, but my criticisms can support themselves without a wall of Libertarian and anti-intellectual rhetoric and fallacies.
I do not believe that the only value of an education is financial but if you want me to pay for it for your kids then it should at the very least make them capable of sustaining themselves so that I am not held at gunpoint for more money to support them later.
My intention for the quotes was to illustrate that “education” is used for many things that are far from what I would call education. I have been educating myself and through others my entire life and plan to do so until I die. I have three degrees from three different institutions of “higher learning” and have a tremendous amount of personal and anecdotal experience to back up my quotes. As a self proclaimed intellectual, I take great offense at the claim that I am anti-intellectual.
I am the kind of person that believes that education is an imperative that should be pursued by everyone, always. I believe that at least 50% of the perceived (and therefore real) value of a diploma is in the way it differentiates you from those who do not have one at the hiring process. I believe this because I have experienced it from both sides of the hiring process. This fact means that the more there are the less they are worth. Simple economics. I am not the kind of person that believes that it is my responsibility to pay for the education of others. I paid for my own education, when I could not afford a book that held knowledge that I needed then I went to the library and read it little by little until I had learned it. If the book was not at the library I would save up to buy it. I did not demand that others give me an education or anything else for that matter.
I am not a Libertarian, I am a libertarian. Maybe if those kids had the amount of gall that I poses they would find a way to pay for their own education like I did, instead of demanding that others engage in grave robbing to do so.
The arguments against free higher education are like the arguments against single-payer national health care. They seem really obvious until you take off the blinkers, look at the rest of the civilized world and see that it is being done very successfully in several countries.
They resemble nothing so much as the arguments that the Earth is flat.
I’m guessing you meant blinders instead of blinkers so my comments are based on that guess. I can’t speak to the arguments of others but my arguments are not obvious to me, they are thought out and based on the empirical process. You are right that there are other countries where they have tax funded education for everyone. I’m not sure what you mean by civilized as I’m sure the Haitians certainly count themselves as a civilization even though I’m guessing you don’t. That said, the Swiss and a few Scandinavian countries certainly have found a way to tax themselves and give everyone an education. The US, however, is so much larger, more socially complex, and culturally diverse than them that their model has a very high chance of failing here.
I strongly believe that everyone should be able to get an education. I don’t believe that we should double tax people to give it to her for free.
My personal experience refutes this. I have clients that are offering $60,000 starting salary for welders and can not find applicants and other HR departments that need people for management positions that receive relatively the same amount of applications as they decades ago but the makeup of them is considerably tilted toward the degreed side.
The labor department killed apprenticeship during Obama and I had to let all my interns go. I was not about to train kids to code and not have them do some work in the mean time. This just recently changed so hopefully internships and apprenticeships will be back in style: Unpaid internships are back, with the Labor Department's blessing.
My evidence is the hundreds of ways in which educated people of means are able to move their wealth away from schemes such as this one. Who is “anti intellectual”? That reminds me of the time I defended the right of the Palestinians to have a peaceful life and was called an anti Semite.
And mine is based on having had the responsibility of crafting budget models for a US public research university. (Though I’l grant that our $1billion budget is small by UC standards.) Also of having been on the faculty of universities in two countries where higher education is free. I’ve been to space and seen firsthand that the Earth is round.
Everyone should be educated… but not everybody. Just the ones that can afford it. And if they can’t afford it, tough nuggies, you’ve got yours and the devil take the hindmost, they should have been smart enough to be born to better families that could afford tuition, or been born in an era when schooling was more affordable. They should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps–and if they can’t, well, that just means that your education is that much more valuable. But, hey, you took advantage of a public library, paid for with tax dollars that were “taken at the point of a gun”. But now that you have money, you’d like to deny that same advantage to anyone else.
But half of the “value” of a diploma is the dollar sign that you can attach to it during the hiring process–which means that if they’re not hiring, it’s worthless (toodles to the arts and humanities without government grants or rich patrons looking for vanity projects!), and yet you have the gall to describe yourself as an intellectual, when the only value you concretely describe a diploma or education as having is during the “hiring process”.
And you also like to use scary terms so beloved of Libertarians. “Hold a gun to my head” “grave robbing.” Well, it’s good to know that my extensive personal and anecdotal experience of Libertarians being greedy sociopaths who want to live in a structured society without contributing to that society’s upkeep hasn’t been challenged–just reinforced.
He always pictured himself a libertarian, which to my way of thinking means “I want the liberty to grow rich and you can have the liberty to starve.” It’s easy to believe that no one should depend on society for help when you yourself happen not to need such help.- Isaac Asimov on Robert A. Heinlein and libertarian ethics
Where’s the double-taxing? One person isn’t being taxed here: two are. That it might be the same dollar that’s being taxed doesn’t matter.
That goes to the unfortunate and ultimately costly devaluation of vocational training and skilled trades in the U.S., a separate but related issue. America’s HR Culture is now reaping what it sowed.
Apprenticeships and unpaid internships are not the same thing. If someone works then, one way or another, he should get paid (and no, school credit isn’t enough). Unpaid internships do nothing but preserve class privilege and limit economic and social mobility.
All too many years ago I did two college internships, one unpaid and one with a small stipend. I’m aware now as I was aware then that, unlike many of my fellow students, I had the privilege to devote 20 hours of my week with no or nominal pay to developing skills and making valuable connections and putting some impressive brand names on my CV.
My first job after graduating was with the company that offered the stipend, the kind of thing that tends to happen when an employer gets accustomed to paying one for one’s work. If one can’t afford to work for free in the first place (because, for example, they have to work retail to make tuition) then one doesn’t get those opportunities.
I’ll agree with you on that, as I noted in my initial comment in this thread.
Someone who sees a college education primarily as a means of securing a job and defines it mainly in terms of dollars, which does seem to be your main focus. It’s Wilde’s definition of cynicism.
Paying taxes that go toward public education is a duty in a civilized society. I am so god damn tired of this bullshit “I made it on my own with no help from anyone!” nonsense. You had help. You had parents. Teachers. Librarians. Policemen. Firemen. Construction workers. Urban planners. Lawyers. Coaches. Designers. Health inspectors. Textbook writers. Book binders. Doctors. Nurses. Dentists. Retail workers. Truck drivers. People who directly impacted you, and whose work you have benefitted from throughout your life. All of those people had educations, almost certainly paid for or subsidized by tax dollars. All of those people contributed to a functioning society in which there is an understanding that we have an obligation to work together to accomplish our goals. No man is self-made.
Taxes. Are. Not. Theft.
If you don’t want to pay taxes, why not move to a developed world that doesn’t require them, where everyone can be self-made and rely only on the sweat of their own brow.
The way tuition works at at CCSF is that city residents don’t have to pay the tuition unless they drop the class, which discourages people from just flaking out halfway through the semester.
That was not so much a summary of my position as an excellent example of the Appeal to Extremes logical Fallacy.
I want to be able to keep as much of the fruit of my labor. You want the government to take more of my money away from me and give it to other people and I’m the greedy sociopath? What an interesting self delusion.
I would like to point out the fact that there is no law that says you can not donate %100 of your income to educate other people. I’m certain that you will run down to the local university and hand your cash to students walking into admissions. I wonder, does Bill Gates and his wife have your permission to decide who to donate their money to or do you get to decide that as well?
Except that in this scenario, you’re dead. You don’t have any money, and the government can never take anything from you ever again - really, death is the Randian utopia!
Why is it my duty? It can be your duty. You don’t get to decide what my duty is.
When did I say that I made it on my own without help from anyone else? I said that I did not demand that anyone else pay for my education. Those are actually different statements.
I pay taxes, I don’t agree with everything that is done with that money but I pay taxes. If you paid attention to my argument, it was not that taxes are theft but rather that this tax constituted a double taxation and therefore wrong in my opinion. Or is there no such thing as a bad tax? You were just too busy labeling me and then being prejudiced and “so god damn tired of this bullshit” to actually read what I wrote.
As far as “self made man” is concerned, A self made man does not mean someone that did everyone up in a mountain without any interaction with anyone else. It means someone that does not make their fortune through the wit of others as a cog in their machine but rather decides to set out and build something themselves. If that is too complicated a distinction then I can certainly understand your confusion. Or was that just you breaking out the old appeal to extremes logical fallacy to try to win an argument?
How is any of that an argument for taxing inheritance to pay for other people’s education? And for the record, the earth is spherical, I don’t think there is a square earth society.
you know we’re talking about inheritance taxes here though, right? You know, that money that the children of people with money get to have so that they - unlike the children of poor folks - aren’t obliged to be self-made. A self-made man, arguing for the right of his heirs not to be self-made… you ever do punch-up for Alanis Morrisette?
Straw man that doesn’t address anything in my post.
Just to be clear, are you raising a question about my understanding of proper usage of the word “round”? (For that matter, you might want to look up the word “blinkers,” my use of which you “corrected” above.)
If they stop attending the class the professor is supposed to mark them as a withdrawl. If the professor was found to be falsifying attendance reports they would be subject to discipline or termination.
