What is this, I don’t even.
Oh, so that drone didn’t kill a 16 year old child, then, on American soil? I went back and did some research on my facts and I was, indeed, correct: We hardly spend any money on anything but fancy-pants schools and rich students. Almost no money goes to lower-class students. As per usual the rich get richer and “smarter”, and the poor struggle. While drones kill teenagers!
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This is a great article. Why we are reading this in 2013 going “oh my goodness!” is puzzling- I went to school in the early to mid-90’s and all of this was already obvious. Schools everywhere were building building building lots of useless stadiums, gyms, etc. They kept hiring and hiring more VP’s and other useless admin people that had nothing to do with our classes or resources for our programs. I went to a state school because it made a hell of a lot more sense than blowing $30k a year on Big Name School. That was the obvious way around student loans. Today, they’re all a rip off.
However, while we wait for Washington to get their act together (as if) here’s an alternate solution: fuck college. I’m an educated, intelligent person. I went to college, but probably didn’t have to, if someone had told me how the world actually works, which is- there are plenty of careers to be had in ways that don’t care about what degree you have. Many of my friends, intelligent, vibrant, clever friends, never graduated from (or event went to) college. You could work in film, television or many other arts / entertainment fields and never be asked to show your degree. You can work in the food industry, I don’t mean McDonald’s, without needing a degree. People are always coming up with creative new ways to feed each other, and plenty of folks have earned a living carving out a niche in this eternal market. Hell, you could start farming- a tough but fulfilling job at a time in our nation when demand for high-quality, local organic food is rising. There is a ton of opportunity there right now, there is a ton of unused land, there are a ton of unhealthy Americans weighing down our health care system. It’s kind of a no-brainer.
Those are just fields that I am very familiar with. I’m sure there are many others. I’m not shitting on being educated- I’m saying educate yourself, but there’s more than one way to do that. I’m still reading and learning new things every day, yet haven’t been in a classroom in almost 20 years. Yes, vote, protest, and try to change this stupid system. But in the meantime, as your kids hit 17 and have no prospects in sight, show them the myriad opportunities this world offers if you choose to think creatively. When I was 17, I had no clue about anything. My parents believed in hard work and a good education, for obvious reasons. These values are still useful, but defining them in the narrow way society tells us to, well, this article makes it very clear where that leads. Fuck college.
Everything Taibbi says is probably true. But he is missing one thing. State support for public higher education has been in a tail spin. Dollar for dollar, tuition at most public schools hasn’t risen as dramatically as it seems. What has changed is who is paying the dollars. Pulling state money out of public higher ed shifted the burden to families. Basically, we saw a shift from higher ed as a public good to a private one.
Once the publics had to raise tuition to stay stable, everyone else was free to do so as well.
And while $100k of debt is insane, and undergrad degree for $27,000 isn’t much different than graduating and buying a new car to celebrate. Presumably the degree will take you further than a new Honda.
- My source? Sure you don’t want to ask the frothing mad “military spending=murder” wingnut I was responding to to provide a source first? No? Here you go:
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2013USbn_13bs2n_20#usgs302
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I’m not sure how you can say I was ignoring “how little gets spent per child in areas where residential property values are low” considering it doesn’t exactly have anything to do with what I was saying which was simply that the U.S. expenditure on the military does not actually exceed educational spending. Per student spending is pretty non-sequitir there.
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But to hell with it, you seem more reasonable than that other guy so we’ll go with this conversation. While it is deeply troubling and problematic that the amount given to education does vary so widely by region, you will find if you investigate the per child expenditures of various states and municipalities on education some fairly interesting things. Chief among them? That per child expense correlates poorly to any measure of student or school performance. Areas with deeply troubled educational systems do not, in fact, generally have less money to spend per student. Places like New York and New Jersey spend some of the most per student on student instruction and pay teachers quite well without seeing a much more successful result. Whatever the New York City school system’s reputation, it is not actually poorly funded at all. Part of the reason the political opposition to teacher’s unions can be so persuasive is that the teacher’s unions actually can’t really demonstrate that increased teacher salary has any positive effect on educational performance at all.
This is a complicated problem more hurt than helped by the tendency of people not to engage with the whole mess and instead to devolve into pigheaded sloganeering.
The problem of student loan debt is being so long discussed. It is good that finally the lawmakers managed to decide it by lowering interest rates. But the debt is not gone and there are a lot of students who work much to have possibilities to pay for tuition. I know that most everyone applies to lending companies for additional money assistance. Online services also help. Let us take for example this website that provide students with cash. There are a lot of such websites. Everyone fights with debt. But it still wins at this moment.
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