Whew!
Yeah, we had to have that talk with our daughter as well. Like, listen, we love you, but if you choose a school that’s outrageously more expensive without a full ride, then you can figure out your own finances.
The problem with approaching it this way is, you end up with the same shitty schools in the states that aren’t willing to invest in their educational system. Which leads to more migration out by students. There’s a reason students flock to schools like UMichigan and UCLA and Virginia and a few others. If you don’t put the money into the schools, rather than into the students, you are going to just make the inequality worse.
MikeJ
4240
As I understand it, Scott’s preferred solution is to put money into the schools (“the answer has to be the federal government will partner with each state to fund state universities and community colleges”).
Okay, but my point is, if the feds are funding the education anyway, through the school, then there is no longer a reason for in-state vs. out-state tuition rates. You just adjust the selectivity of your incoming class every year, and part of that could certainly be an in-state vs out-of-state ratio, but the cost should in theory be the same for both.
I know at UMich, the faculty LOVED the out-of-state students, because the quality of student tended to be much higher, since the selectivity was significantly higher (due to the volume of applications versus the number of applicants).
It should be a matching-funds game, where the state has to provide more funding to get more fed funding. Sure it’s possible that some states will say ‘fuck our citizens we don’t need no education money’, but they won’t say it for very long, because they’ll take a beating from the exodus of families and students.
That aside, are there actually states with nothing but shitty state universities? I confess I have no idea.
There may well be some truth to that, but I’m guessing UMich and faculty also loved those students because they were funding the school by paying much higher tuitions.
Don’t land grant universities have a mandate to serve in-state students first? Even if tuition is $0, can’t public universities still have stringent academic requirements for out of state students?
Faculty don’t give a damn how much a student pays. They mostly have no idea what it costs to attend. Administration certainly cares, not faculty. And yes, as state appropriations for higher ed went diwn, the percentage of the student body from out of state went up, as the school tries to leverage the higher tuition rates to offset.
Also yes, there are plenty of states with no high quality schools. Try to find one in Oklahoma, for example. It was a wasteland when I grew up there, and it is still a wasteland 40 years later.
Is that why? I thought it was because state funding for University has been drastically cut over the last few decades.
I mean, Alaska is facing a giant increase in cost because if state budget cuts.
States are certainly cutting funding, but students can borrow almost as much as they want, at negligible interest rates, so one offsets the other. Except in this case, I think the easy money policies have done more than offset it. You can see the inflationary spiral across higher education, just look at textbook prices. If money was in shorter supply, prices would drop.
Universities have also expanded in unfortunate ways, creating large and generally unnecessary bureaucracies. They’re also investing in very nice infrastructure, which is nice, but it comes at the cost of making college affordable.
As perverse as this sounds, and I know it sounds perverse, cutting funding, and eliminating this easy money policy would force universities to trim costs, and deliver affordable educations again.
The problem with approaching it this way is, you end up with the same shitty schools in the states that aren’t willing to invest in their educational system.
UVa isn’t good because we spent a lot of money on it.
There would need to be limits and controls, though, and it’s something that I think progressives could have good discussions and compromises with real fiscal conservatives, if they still existed today.
There are ways you can do that to make it affordable. Free college could even work, for example, but only if you strictly limit the number of seats available.
While the electorate might be more amenable to more progressive policies, it’s abundantly clear that corporate media is not. We’ve been trained as a nation into corporate group think: “What’s good for business is good from Americans.” For anyone that might challenge that status quo it’s not just Republicans pulling the “but radical far left!” Kewpie doll string.
Some Democratic operatives at least aren’t shying away from trying to buck the trend as this piece covering Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg illustrates.
Democrats are veering left. It might just work
To be sure, wearing a socialism label from Republicans is not an experiment that most Democrats are ready to run. But if the focus groups are correct it may reflect a broader truth about the cycles of American politics: When the ideological tides are moving in their favor, presidential candidates may not have to worry so much about their language, or pay an especially high cost for laying it on too thick.
The best illustration may come from an earlier swing of the cycle, when Ronald Reagan in 1980 dethroned a half-century of New Deal and Great Society dominance of American politics with a brand of free-market, pro-military conservatism that seemed radical at the time. Reagan, many analysts thought, would be doomed by such provocations as launching his general election campaign in Mississippi with favorable references to “states rights,” doubts about his commitment to Social Security, or disparaging environmental laws by saying trees and the Mt. Saint Helens volcano were causing more pollution than anything man-made. Instead, Reagan was seen as right on big questions about realigning the role of government and won 44 states against incumbent President Jimmy Carter.
Alstein
4250
Universities do get kickbacks from the textbook companies, and that limits what profs can do- they are often forced to mandate the books.
Though you do spend a lot of money on it…
With the field so large this time, should the Democrats consolidate to 3-4 candidates and tell everyone else to drop out?
This would help them concentrate their funding/support to the best candidates.
rowe33
4254
I’d prefer that we merge candidates instead of just having them drop out.
Combine the best parts of Sanders, Warren, Harris, Beto, and Buttigieg into a super woman… Mix Biden and all the others together into her chief rival. Let them debate it out in a trio of 1v1 matches, winner take all.
Who, exactly, would you empower to tell people that they have to drop out of presidential races? Strikes me as disastrous on two levels. Short term, the eventual candidate can be attacked as hand picked by some power broker. Long term, we see some insider group eliminating competition that they do not like for very “insider” sorts of reasons.
I think they have gone far enough, setting up qualifications for the third debate, which will be mighty tough for all but the upper tier to meet. And that is not so many weeks down the road now.
Can we actually do stuff like that now? I know that there’s been a lot of breakthroughs in gene-therapy and transplant science, but I thought we were still decades away from that type of thing.
(Context, since this isn’t in #games)
