So, after a strange series of events that included Jesse Jackson kissing me on the forehead (twice!) and being in a press conference (airing this evening on Chicago stations) I’m apparently handling the viral marketing for Reduce The Rate. I’ll be pestering you all to plaster info all over creation about this movement to:
* Reduce the interest rate on all student loans to 1%.
If banks can borrow at 1% or less, then so should our students.
* Extend the grace period before loan repayment begins from 6 months to 18 months for students who graduate.
In these tough economic times, it takes a college graduate an average of 6 months to 1 year to find a job. The rules should reflect this reality.
* End the penalties assessed to schools for student loan defaults.
Schools should not be held accountable for students who don’t pay back their loans.
* Increase Pell Grants to cover the average yearly cost of a public
4 year institution instead of the amounts in the current stimulus package–$5,350 starting July 1 and $5,550 in 2010-2011
Also, if you’re in Chicago you should come out to the Town Hall meeting at Operation Push Headquarters at 6 pm this Friday. I’ll be there and you can meet all sorts of nifty folks.
I like the sound of these proposals but I’m a little anxious about them because in some ways I think we already over-incentivize going to college: we provide grants, government-backed loans, taxpayer-subsidized public colleges, etc. I’m troubled by the number of people who go to college and don’t graduate and never repay their student loans. I think many 18-year-olds aren’t ready for college and that we ought to provide more alternatives to another four-year stint in academia, instead of just dumping more money into pushing those kids into colleges. I’d want to see much better six-year graduation rates before I devoted more resources into getting more kids to start college; I think a better use for the money would be programs to support the students who are already there and struggling.
I kind of like the idea of having more people go to college. I know a lot of 18 year olds arent ready for it but there are other ways to deal with that problem. Lowering interest rates on student loans and increasing grants would really help those who otherwise couldn’t go And as someone who took a wee bit longer than six years to obtain an undergrad degree, I have to admit that I have never understood why that is such a big deal.
I think a better use for the money would be programs to support the students who are already there and struggling.
PG, since one of the biggest reasons those kids are struggling is because they have to work to get through school, I think providing more financial assistance is the key to helping them all.
I used to be academic advising coordinator at the computer/information science college of a big northeastern university. We only had about 600 students in a given year. My job was partly to help improve freshman-to-sophomore retention, which is usually the biggest indicator of college success; if you can get them past freshman year, they usually stay and finish (though not necessarily on time). One of the first things we did was a survey to figure out the characteristics of students who succeeded vs. those who failed, and one of the biggest stats that leapt out at me was the number of kids who were working 20, 30, even 40 hours per week to make ends meet. These were full-time students, note; we had no part-time program. Typically they were taking a courseload of 16-18 credits, which really means they were spending 32-34 hours/week on school in and out of class (studying, writing papers, homework, etc.). Imagine holding down a 40 hr/week job on top of 30+ hours/week of school. I was never surprised when those kids failed.
And these were kids who had been working, for years, to help the family make ends meet. Very often the characteristics that we flagged as “not prepared for college” dovetailed with “too poor to use free time for studying; working instead”.
I also think it’s unrealistic to push alternatives to college. The working world sets the bar for entry at college; you’re not going to get companies and agencies to change that at this point. The only thing that de-incentivizing college is going to do is enlarge the underclass of people who can’t find employment beyond minimum-wage hell jobs, or the military. (And even in the military, there’s only so far they can go without college.)
Reading these goals make me happy.
PG: To me it sounds like you’re equating 18 year olds fresh out of high school with the entire population of people that we want to encourage to go to college. It’s good to remember that colleges don’t exist solely for new high school graduates, and the incentives we offer aren’t solely meant for that population. There are also alternatives available to high school graduates in lieu of heading straight to college. (Volunteering and working are a couple options.) If alternatives to college are not being addressed by a high school, I suspect it’s not the fault of the money earmarked for student aid.
I’ve also seen this issue while working in the academic sector. I guess a better question is, how can we better ensure that the people who will be working 30-40 hour weeks through college can get funding? Are we doing a good job of it already, or is the aid not helping this population as much as it could be?
I’m totally for more overall funding. I’m also curious to see how the current funding situation is missing the folks who work full time, and whether we can better address their needs.
1. What does “college” mean? Some college? An Associates? Bachelors? Just degrees from universities? What about liberal arts degrees? Does vocational school or something like DeVry count? Does it only include schools that the feds offer aid for, just like on the tax forms?
2. Is your delineation of opportunities: working world [good jobs], minimum-wage hell, and the military? If so, is this really an accurate way to define our job opportunities? I’m asking because it’s hard for me to take the statement without question, as many members of my community (18-40) do not work for minimum wage, do not have a college degree, have some or no college education, and enjoy their jobs about as much as the degreed folks do. I don’t know where they intersect in your definition, if getting into the working world (anything besides minimum wage and military) requires a college degree.
(I’m not asking to be snarky, and I’m trying to avoid coming off that way. Rather, you’ve hit a point that my experience tells me isn’t entirely correct, and I’m trying to better understand where your experience is coming from.)
Plaid,
Generally they are getting funding. It’s the 18-25 year old population that I work with most often, though I do occasionally work with non-traditionally-aged students. Generally the NTAs don’t get funding because they’re only going to school part time, and most financial aid is aimed at full-time students (because it’s meant to keep them from working so much that they can’t be good students — it assumes that being a student is their job, which makes sense if they’re spending 35 hours/week on it). So it’s the fresh-out-of-high-school kids who are working, simply because the financial aid isn’t enough. Usually they get partial assistance, which still leaves them or their parents with a whopping huge bill to cover. Plus many kids kind of like having spending money, gas money (an absolute necessity if they live in a place that requires a car), etc. We’ve raised this generation of our children with a solid work ethic — and we’ve somehow sent them the message that working for a paycheck = work, but working on schoolwork is not. So they don’t even realize they’re working 40 hours + 35 hours, because they don’t think of the 35 as “work”.
1. What does “college” mean? Some college? An Associates? Bachelors? Just degrees from universities? What about liberal arts degrees? Does vocational school or something like DeVry count? Does it only include schools that the feds offer aid for, just like on the tax forms?
I’m counting it as a Bachelor’s degree. Enough college to get a person into an entry-level white collar job, which is generally regarded as the doorway to middle class status these days. Used to be you could get in with a good blue-collar job, but that’s kind of out, except in a few trades (e.g., plumbing; I think they’re still pulling six figures once they get past apprenticeship). I’ve also been a career counselor, and most corporate entry-level jobs require at least a Bachelor’s, or working towards a Bachelor’s, to get in.
No, my delineation is a little broader than that; I was speaking flippantly. I did note that the military also requires college for most advancement and good pay, so there’s a clear intersection. I also don’t think of the corporate world as “good jobs” — just that they tend to pay a living wage, which minimum wage jobs do not. But there’s a reason I work in academia. =) The pay sucks, but the benefits are good, and I get to help people for money, which makes me happy.
But there aren’t many options beyond that. Some communities have a more flexible economy than others, I know; the town where I grew up (small Southern town of about 300K people, with a thriving shipping and manufacturing industry) can still accommodate large numbers of people who don’t get college degrees. (But there are few opportunities to volunteer/serve for money there — no Americorps, no City Year, only one small college, few non-profit orgs beyond churches. There are few government jobs, few unfilled niches for entrepreneurship. So it’s six of one, half-dozen of another.) But the big northeastern cities I’ve lived in for the past 15 years don’t have much of a manufacturing sector, and there are a crapload of people here already who don’t have Bachelor’s degrees, so there’s fierce competition for decent-paying jobs that don’t require a degree. It’s worse now that the economy is shot. The main employer in my current hometown (New York) for people without degrees is the City of New York — which is cutting back due to budget shortfalls right now.
Most people without a Bachelor’s here are going to end up on welfare at some point. The young folks can do City Year (a version of Americorps), and there are many opportunities to work in the nonprofit sector. Also, in cities I think it’s a little easier for people without degrees to start their own businesses (if they can find capital) and do well if they’ve got the right drive and attitude. But it’s still a major struggle, and none of the opportunities I mentioned (except maybe entrepreneurship, if they’re lucky) can cover the cost of living in this city. So none of the above is a living wage.
What are the folks in your community doing that’s different?
nojojojo,
I also live in NYC, and there seem to be a lot of people who earn more than minimum wage by having skilled jobs — as plumbers, electricians, etc. So far as I can tell, these jobs don’t require any college at all and seem to pay quite well, especially when one advances to the “senior” stage. I was recently at the home in Queens of an electrician who had a beautiful house and supported his wife and three kids from owning his own service company.
A two pronged comment.
On the one hand, I stand up and applaud these measures. Partly for selfish reasons, I admit. But WOOT!
Second, I also think PG has a point. We do need to increase awareness in young people that the skilled trades are a strong and viable option. Too often I think we see two alternatives: Bachelor’s and McJobs. Meanwhile, the unions in Chicago at least are starting to panic a bit: they’re having difficulty recruiting apprentices now.
Anyone with the aptitude and the desire should be able to go to college: I absolutely believe that. But I don’t believe that college is the right place for everyone. I have had a lot of students who certainly had the intelligence for it, but were a bit miserable doing academic work when the trades may have made them truly happy.
I would be surprised if more than 30% of the population in our country have college degrees. Most people without them are able to get jobs that pay a living wage. I have known a lot of people who don’t have them who manage to not only earn a living wage but manage to earn quite a bit more (mostly doing programming or database administration or some other sort of technical job for which they have the skills).
Even so, I think advanced education is something to encourage. It enriches people’s lives even if they don’t go on to have high paying careers later in life. It certainly makes for more interesting cocktail party conversations when people have some kind of advanced education in the humanities. Education is valuable just for that reason alone.
If banks can borrow at 1% or less, then so should our students.
Why? Can you explain the logic in this statement?
Addressing the issue of the need for a college degree, I do computer network support, working with routers and switches and firewalls and load balancers and such. There are a few people working with this stuff with me that have no college degree, although most of them have had a year or two of college. They probably make more money than lots of people with college degrees. I also second the idea that there’s good money to be made in the trades and a shortage of people who will apprentice to them and who have the necessary aptitude and work ethic. My Scout Troop one of my fellow Assistant Scoutmasters is an elevator repairman and makes a six-figure income, and he only started out in the job about 5 years ago. He’d had a number of years of experience as a mechanic repairing semi-trailers, but he had to apprentice from scratch for the elevator job.
L,
Education is enriching, but some of the most interesting people I know are self-taught; they learned about art, music, literature, history, etc. on their own without a professor’s guidance. My dad, having been educated entirely in India, has learned about American history through his children’s textbooks, going to museums and sites (I think he prodded me toward the University of Virginia just because he was enamored of its history) and reading nonfiction on the subject. He’s not fit to teach it, but he certainly has an understanding that enriches his life.
Having taken a degree in English, I certainly think that a required course of reading and written analysis, lectures by someone who is an expert and the opportunity for classroom discussion are all valuable in deepening one’s understanding of literature. But they’re not essential for having literature enrich one’s life.
The only areas where I’d caution against self-teaching probably would be professional ones, e.g. medicine, accounting, law, where a little knowledge really can be a dangerous thing if one attempts to substitute it for the services of a trained MD, CPA or JD. This is to some extent true even at the cocktail party level as well; flipping through Gray’s Anatomy or skimming the Constitution will give just enough information for a person without formal education in the relevant subject to sound like an ass to those with it. But these aren’t really subjects most people take up for a liberal education in the humanities to enrich their lives, anyway. Maybe economics? It’s also an area where a superficial understanding can be quite obnoxious.
Plaid:
2. Is your delineation of opportunities: working world [good jobs], minimum-wage hell, and the military?
I realize you were asking this of someone else, but do you have a concept that the military is not a good job? Sure, there are risks and the pay is not high at the lower levels of the enlisted ranks. But you get training that is (if you play your cards right) transferable to the civilian world and good benefits once you get out.
Wow. Lots of good comments. I’ll just be cranky & disagree w/ a bunch of things…
This is just not true. Not having a college degree certainly limits your opportunities – there are moronic companies that require a degree to even get an interview – but, as L said, in no way bars you from the professional world. A lot of companies require either a degree or X number of years of experience, so there are still plenty of doors into the working world.
Well, yes and no. If you can, for example, pass the bar exam, why do you also need a JD? IME, most lawyers, accountants and doctors are really not very good at their jobs. Just like the most people suck at their jobs in the rest of the working world. Why not let somebody who can pass the required tests work in these professions?
If you can pass the medical boards without going to medical school, God bless you and go for it, though I’d still want you to do the internship and residency years before I became your patient. So far as I know, getting a CPA doesn’t require schooling in any particular subject; it is exam based.
The bar exam isn’t a good measure of preparedness to be a lawyer because it’s not skills-oriented, and even people who have been excellent lawyers have failed a particular bar. See, e.g., Kathleen Sullivan, who failed the CA bar after having been a practicing appellate attorney and dean of Stanford Law. Law school is certainly an imperfect means of training lawyers, but I’d take as a lawyer someone who did well in law school, particularly in the mandatory research and writing course, over someone who took a BarBri course and successfully memorized enough material to pass the bar.
PG,
I’m putting my response into the most recent Open Thread.
Thanks, nojojojo.
I’ve also seen a lot of this, and I guess the point on my mind was whether we can do better than the partial assistance they are receiving.
That is a really good point. I wasn’t raised on that assumption, and while I think I know the thought implicitly, I never think about it explicitly. I want to mull on that a bit. Thanks for bringing it up. :)
Ah, it sounds like our definitions of good jobs differ. That’s reasonable. And now I also see why you’re saying that the BA is the bar, and where you are coming from. And yes, it does sound like the BA is the bar where you are, and that makes the need to get people into college all the more important.
I don’t believe the insight I can say about my community will do your description of NY justice. You have NY; I’m just filled with the folks and I know and the anecdotes I can tell. I know the plural of anecdote isn’t data, but I’d be wrong if knowing these stories didn’t influence my thinking.
(btw, I define my community as the people I meet around the country, and so I tend to base my ideas on little pockets of people in places like Massachusetts or the Bay Area or Minneapolis. Pretty much those areas.)
One of the first things that I think differs in my community is networking. A few folks have jobs that, technically, are sent to Career Services at colleges and claim to require a BA. The non-degreed folks worked really hard to network, and they worked their way around HR and the BA requirement. A BA is not a policy set in stone in every company; rather, I’ve heard from some HR officers that the policy is mostly set to make HRs life easier (fewer job applications to sift through, and probably higher quality applications left over). As long as you can convince HR to look at you regardless of degree, you have some sort of shot.
Of course, if the BA is set in stone, the non-degreed folks are out of luck.
Second, a few folks I know who do purely IT work only have a semester or so of college, if any. A few just walked from high school into jobs or certification courses, and came out with a skill that people wanted to hire, BA or not. They’ve been paid as well or better as many of the BA degreed folks I know (but not as well as degreed folks who specialized in CS or engineering).
Third, vocations and blue-collar jobs go beyond plumbing. I know massage therapists, medical assistants, aviation technicians, electricians, accountants, the list could go on. I’ve even known a cowboy, whose job suited him just fine until he chose to settle and have a family. You don’t need a BA proper for a lot of vocational work, and not all vocational work is going going down the tubes. The folks I know seem to be just fine with where they are and where they’re going. But they are also not in New York, and simply never come across the need for the BA.
Thanks again, nojojojo. I have a lot to mull over from you. :)
RonF: I was trying to restate what I understood an argument to say, to see if I was reading it correctly. I was not trying to make the argument.
Yes. Yes, yes and yes. I was lucky in that I had a paid apprenticeship. Most non-degreed IT folks weren’t that lucky. A lot of the best IT people I have worked with don’t have a college degree. Others have totally unrelated degrees (JD, Theater). Networking has a lot to do w/ advancement in IT, with or without a degree. IT, IME, is all about gaining knowledge through experience. You can take a class, but if you don’t work with whatever the class taught you about it will be pretty useless.
All of which is, to me, besides the point of what we should do in terms of funding college for people who want to go but can’t afford it on their own. I’m in general agreement with the goal of reducing the rate. I don’t care if people who get those loans complete their degree in 2 or 4 or 6 years or even complete it at all. Sometimes you don’t know whether a degree is something you want or can complete until you give it a try. Sometimes you’ll need to stop in the middle and won’t be able to get back to it for years. As long as the loan is eventually paid back it shouldn’t matter. If the loan isn’t paid back you can try to recover it the same way any non-secured loan is recovered. We want to provide the opportunity to as many people as possible if we believe that more education makes for a better community/economy/country/whatever. If we believe that more education is better, one semester of college is better than none.
As long as the loan is eventually paid back it shouldn’t matter. If the loan isn’t paid back you can try to recover it the same way any non-secured loan is recovered.
Except it’s part of the nature of government-backed loans for students that people get loans when they have no underlying assets nor credit history, unlike how other loans (for cars, homes, credit) are given. If student loans were treated like any other loans, we wouldn’t be bothering to debate how the government ought to deal with them, because for the most part it wouldn’t be the government’s business except in broad regulatory strokes (e.g. ensuring that rates weren’t usury, fraudulent, etc.). The government steps in for student loans because the free market alone wouldn’t provide them in the quantity and quality that public policy finds desirable.
People who complete a degree have better rates of student loan repayment than people who don’t; therefore, it would be in the lender’s interest to minimize lending to the former group and maximize it to the latter. One of my classmates was exploring setting up a loan program specifically for people attending certain law schools. He figured he could do it at lower rates and with less red tape and still make a profit, because those schools had documented high rates of graduation and employment.
I wonder if some sort of scheme where interest rates stay low for people who have completed their degrees but go up for people who haven’t? It would have the added benefit of providing an incentive for people to finish their educations.
Yes and no. I think that part of the reason the government makes loans for education is because we believe that education is a social good. Therefore the government should be willing to take on riskier loans because it isn’t looking to make a direct profit on loans for education. That doesn’t preclude the government attempting to collect on delinquent loans the same way a private company would.
But that isn’t the goal of government loans for education. Are we not willing to spend money, rather than make money, to advance the education of the populace? Sure, we’re not making grants, but I still don’t see that (short term) profit is the driving force behind government student loans policy.
It would cut down on the number of people applying for loans. It goes against my assumption that we feel some college is better than none. It would also function to penalize those who are not able to complete their degree through no fault of their own. So I’m going to say that I’m strongly against that idea.
Some other considerations.
1. There are assumptions underlying this discussion, that I think are highly questionable, regarding the purposes of college education, the proper way to assess the value of a college education, and even who deserves a college education. From my standpoint (teaching in public universities the past 12 years), these issues are very complex, and the tacit assumptions about them in many comments here make it very difficult to avoid talking at cross-purposes. In short, I think to some degree y’all are comparing apples to butternut squashes. (That’s a critique, not a snipe.)
2. One thing that the discussion is pointing to is a need for understanding the economic and social context of higher education life-experience. The majority of my students work at least 20 hours a week, their bosses typically refuse to accommodate their class schedules when conflicts come up, and the general effort of juggling family, work, and school commitments is an ongoing, stressful struggle. A little analysis and an extreme example can be found in this excerpt (chapter 4 in fact) of Marc Bousquet’s book How the University Works: http://marcbousquet.net/Bousquet_4.pdf
On the idea of redirecting high school students towards skilled trades apprenticeship programs, is there any evidence that there is a shortage of skilled trades apprentices? If there isn’t, then directing students that way and away from college will end in a bunch of qualified but unemployed people.
It does seem like pushing computer programming in the direction of the skilled trades (apprenticeship based instead of college degree based) might be beneficial to everyone.
Charles S.,
Elizabeth Ann @ 7 said, “the unions in Chicago at least are starting to panic a bit: they’re having difficulty recruiting apprentices now.”
If I need something on my body fixed, I can go to a medical professional and get care within a few hours (either in doctor’s office, clinic or ER). If I need legal advice, there are plenty of lawyers who accept walk-in clients. If I need help from someone in a skilled trade, I have to make an appointment that’s usually at least three days away, take the day off from work and not know when she’ll show up. And it’s not because there are any artificial limits, so far as I know, trying to keep the number of skilled tradespeople low so their wages remain high.
That’s at least an anecdotal indication of a shortage.
Again, the comments on this thread, particularly RonF @ 9, indicates that lots of computer work already is in a kind of apprentice form and not requiring a degree.
I think that it’s becoming less and less that way. These days, even if you have a degree, many companies are requiring job applicants and employees to take and pass certification courses. It’s a booming industry that serves very little constructive purpose. Computer science degrees are being pushed more and more by colleges and universities because it’s very lucrative. The problem is that the certifications usually have little relevance to the actual job performed and computer science degrees leave the graduate with obsolete knowledge and skills. The state of IT will be very different 4 years from now and there’s no way an institution of higher learning can keep up w/ real world job requirements.
If I had my way, when it comes to IT, there would be a 2 year course of study for those who are unfamiliar w/ computers and a one to two year apprenticeship regardless of degree. I think we’d have a much better IT workforce were that put into place.
Very belated response to all, and incomplete because I don’t have time to address everything in this thread —
I think the bar to entry into the IT/tech field became a bachelor’s degree during the Dot-Com Blowout of 2001-3. I was career counseling/academic advising for a computer/info science college at that time, and throughout the Nineties we’d had a big problem with kids going off to do internships/co-ops with tech companies and quitting school, lured into permanent jobs by the big paychecks. At that time you could get in easily if you had the skills, whether through a certificate program or self-taught; the 4-year degree was unnecessary because employers were desperate.
But the Dot-Com bust changed all that. Suddenly we started seeing “returnees” — students who had quit school during the boom of the Nineties, coming back to finish their degrees because now they needed it to get/keep a job. As soon as the employers could be pickier, they immediately defaulted to people with Bachelors’ degrees.
Also, we started getting complaints from local employers about the self-taught/”hands-on”-taught workers; for things like programming, you really needed the theoretical framework, mathematical background, and a common method of getting projects done that a good 4-year program provides. The employers didn’t like blowing money on having a project rebuilt after some half-trained person they’d hired didn’t bother to comment their code, or wrote buggy code that ran on chewing gum and wishes.
I don’t know if this was universal. But I dealt with several hundred employers during that time, and there was definitely a sea change — well, a swift change — in the way that they regarded self-taught folks in the tech sector.
Elizabeth Ann @ 7 said, “the unions in Chicago at least are starting to panic a bit: they’re having difficulty recruiting apprentices now.”
and
If I need help from someone in a skilled trade, I have to make an appointment that’s usually at least three days away, take the day off from work and not know when she’ll show up. And it’s not because there are any artificial limits, so far as I know, trying to keep the number of skilled tradespeople low so their wages remain high.
Speaking as a tradesperson for twenty years, there is (and has been) some concern in the trades about the need for more apprentices when the Boomers retire en masse (most trades’ retirement plans involve working until a person is 60. when I entered twenty years ago, full pension was at age 62).
Since Chicago was mentioned earlier, let me just say that there are over 1500 Local electricians waiting to go to work, and even more travelers (people from other Locals who’ve traveled there in search of work. “Travelers” do what we call a “book signing tour”, which is basically getting in one’s car—with other local hands if possible to cut down on cost—and driving around signing hiring hall books. You’re called for work in the order in which you signed). My downstate Local has over 60 “on the book” (Local hands), which represents approximately 20% of the Inside branch (Inside meaning “from the service drop on”. It’s a jurisdictional category. My Local also represents Utility, Outside Lineman, 911, VDV, Residential, State electricians, school district electricians, hospital electricians, audio-visual techs—we have almost thirty contracts.)
Twenty percent unemployment. And that’s much better than four-five years ago, when our unemployment rate was officially at 70%, there was little luck for travelers, and those who were listed as “working” weren’t getting full work weeks, or even getting to work more than two weeks out of the month. Big contrast with the 90s, when there was all kinds of work available, and no one was unemployed who didn’t want to be (or…deserve to be).
That’s a big part of the problem in attracting apprentices. It’s a good gig measured over the course of a lifetime, but there will be tough times one has to weather. There is an illusion among a lot of younger folks that because tradeswork isn’t “permanent employment”, that they’re better off going into another line of work. I say “illusion”, because from my observation, many other areas of work are just as transitory as tradeswork—-yet we have a better infrastructure for getting people back to work. No resumes, no interviews, no hassle—-just sign the book and get hired.
Also, there are relatively few openings each year. There is an obligation on the part of the JATC to provide work for indentured apprentices, as the work is part of the training. In order to keep that obligation, the JATCs don’t take on more people than they are assured of keeping employed. I entered in 1988, and over 430 people took the aptitude test. Seven were chosen. On average, between 150-200 people take the test to get in, and around a quarter of those are interviewed. (In my Local, which is typical of smaller Rust Belt locals). This year, the JATC (Joint Apprenticeship Training Committee—contractors and union members sit on the committee) is very disappointed. They have a lot of good candidates, and very little hope of putting them out to work anytime soon.
Traveling is…..well, I loved traveling before I became a mother. Loved it! I really enjoyed “the road”, and I say that because not everyone does. I welcomed the opportunity to meet people and work in different areas; I’ve never really had a “hometown”, and if it wasn’t for the ties I have to my Local, I would be geographically rootless and fine with it. But my daughter is in school, and so the road is out for awhile as a feasible option for finding work. I managed to solve this by getting an “office puke” job (managerial position), which I loathe. Don’t loathe the regular paychecks, though. I spent eleven months unemployed between 2004-2005. Unemployment benefits run out after six. Banked hours for insurance do too.
PG is right; there isn’t any artificial mechanism for keeping the numbers of skilled labor low in order to keep wages higher. There are a limited number of people who want to do this kind of work. It’s hot. It’s cold. It’s dirty. It’s dangerous. You’re exposed to all kinds of substances that can reduce your lifespan. Over the course of a career, your body will break down. Yeah, we earn a decent wage, but it’s not as high as you think it is (in my Local, a journeyman wireman can expect to make $70,000 if zie gets to work year-round. Most folks could expect that last year with all the powerhouse work, but this year? Nahh.).
So, young people who think they have better options usually take them. We get a lot of apps from people who’ve been out in the workforce for awhile. Most women who enter the trades do so when they’re “older” and have kids (I was an exception to this).
I agree that tradeswork should be encouraged as a option for young people, and especially for women (in the trades, women are paid the same as the men—-that sure the hell doesn’t exist for most lines of work!). But there are realistic barriers to making this happen on a large scale, especially absent significant investment in our infrastructure (which doesn’t just mean “roads”, dammit! *#@X!! roads! Ahh, don’t get me started…..)
Oh, one last thing. PG, I believe you on the wait time. Simultaneously, there are unemployed tradespeople who could conceivably be there that day. The contractors aren’t being jerks, nor are they incompetant—they’re just trying to polish their crystal ball—balance the work coming in with the number of employees they have. One thing that can help (and yes, you can take this with a grain of salt since I’m a union member)—call a union shop! Seriously. Because we have the “book system”, our contractors can put out a “short call”, get a person for anywhere from one day to two weeks without that person losing their position on the book. Win-win-win, for contractor, worker, and customer. Nonunion contractors have to go the the whole rigamarole of interviewing and such to hire new people. It’s one of our stronger organizing tools as far as getting new signatory contractors—-finding skilled employees when they need them is a major headache for them.
La Lubu,
Thanks for the info — I didn’t know that about traveling. How applicable is this for small shops and people who appear to be direct employees of a company? For example, if I’ve moved into a new place and getting cable hooked up through Time Warner, are they likely to be contracting with someone or are the people who come in likely to be T-W employees themselves? (I guess if they are T-W employees, it’s more difficult to have the flexible labor supply.) Or if I’m getting a new stove installed and call the place that my super recommends, can that place get temporary workers through a union or is it another instance where they’ll only have people they hired and thus again the labor supply is inflexible?
I have concerns about the contractor system because I worry that, like temping, it promotes disregard by the employers. On the other hand, I suppose if the contractors belong to a union, they have a group negotiating on their behalf, and it certainly seems like it would make for much more flexible labor supply, which is important for meeting fluctuating demand with the greatest efficiency and minimal transaction costs (as you describe, minimizing the number of times someone has to go through the hiring process).
Oh, and I didn’t mean to imply that I thought the wait times were because anyone was being deliberately difficult; I was just taking them as a potential measure of whether a particular field is understaffed. I look at wait times at hospitals in countries with single payer (Canada, England) the same way: this is at least a possible indication that supply is not meeting demand.
Thanks also for the advice for looking for union shops — I have to admit that when I first got out of school housing and had to figure this stuff out for myself, I was just taking the suggestion of whoever was around and not checking the reputation of the place. After getting burned by all kinds of different vendors in the NY area (not just on plumbers/ electricians, but also tailors, wedding photographers, etc.), I’m trying to invest the time to know whether they’re unionized and do good work.
My late father-in-law was a Union carpenter in the Chicago area from after he got back from WW II until a few years before his death. I went on a few side jobs with him as his laborer ($100 in cash for a day’s work was a pretty good deal back in the ’70’s). I decided that it was all fine in June and July, but I was damned if I wanted to be up on a roof in August or January.
The work was seasonal – he’d have down time during the winter. He’d go on unemployment and then pick back up in the spring. Of course, he also worked a lot of side jobs that he was paid cash for and never reported. All word of mouth stuff, not from the union hall.
As far as the IT stuff goes – that being my world – what I’ve found is that I self-teach myself a lot of stuff, but what I learn focuses on the problems I’m trying to solve. I end up at some point or another getting my employer to send me out for a course (usually a week long) because that fills in the basic principles that I missed. And that’s why nojojo saw the phenomenon that he did. The completely self-taught guys tend to do just what it takes to patch or work around a problem, but don’t take care of the underlying issues because they don’t understand them. Nor do they document what they’ve done, but that’s another issue.
I note that “Batchelor’s Degree” seems to = “BA” for this thread’s commentors. Am I the only person on here with a BS? Of course, nobody I went to school with got a BA; even the one of my fraternity brothers who got a degree in Music got a BS.
Jake Squid said:
A lot of the best IT people I have worked with don’t have a college degree. Others have totally unrelated degrees (JD, Theater).
B.S. in Biology and an M.S. in Biochemistry, and I do network analysis and engineering for a living. Long story ….
Networking has a lot to do w/ advancement in IT, with or without a degree. IT, IME, is all about gaining knowledge through experience. You can take a class, but if you don’t work with whatever the class taught you about it will be pretty useless.
Training in IT has a short half-time if you don’t use it. The flip side is that there are people with training who had no experience in what they trained in before they took the training. They usually absorb less of the training and are much less able to apply it than people who were working with the particular subject in question and got some hands-on experience before they took the training. People with brand-new certifications that have no experience other than in the training course’s lab are generally not all that useful.
I am seriously not trying to sound snarky, but if there are no interviews and no resumes, and if jobs are assigned based on when you sign a sheet of paper… how does “skilled” become a guarantee?
When I hire contractors or refer my clients to them, I want people who select employees from the (large) pool of potential applicants. In theory, those will be better-qualified employees than if they selected randomly, or (like a union) selected based on who responded first.
I mean, there’s a minimum level of skill, sure. That’s what the trade is about. But there are some folks who are better than minimum, and my goal is to hire them over the minimum ones.
I’d be happy to use union shops more often. Is there a way to select based on skill, within a union system? How could one do it?
To the extent that more experience = more skill, I would think the seniority systems often used in unions would help ensure that you’re getting a more skilled worker.
Sailorman, in the system I work under, that pool of applicants has already been selected for, through the apprenticeship system. All journeylevel electricians have the necessary skills to do the job. If what you need are speciality skills, then there are different classifications for that (for example: journeyman/instrument tech, or journeyman/welder, to indicate that those people do more than just a little occasional instrumentation or welding).
Some Locals (I’m talking strictly IBEW Locals now) have a system where in order to receive full JW scale, one has to take a certain amount of continuing education classes. There are pros and cons to such a system; it’s actually more fought against by contractors, because we’re (tradespeople, that is) aren’t just paid for our labor, but for our knowledge. More knowledge means more pay. If we ask for more pay commensurate with our continuing education, reach an impasse at the bargaining table, and hence go to arbitration (all IBEW contracts have category 1 language that mandates arbitration), we (the union) are more likely to win—arbitration committees tend to be impressed with that system.
Other Locals, like mine, have somewhat lengthy referral sheets. Those referral sheets (referral to a job) have exit sections too, for when the worker is RIF’d (reduction in force—-laid off). That’s where the contractor can add commentary on whether or not that person is eligible for re-employment (contractors have the right to refusal, but have to have a valid reason, for example, “absenteeism”), special skills, etc. I’ve filled out pre-employment cards at different Locals that ask for what types of work you’re familiar with. My Local is fortunate in that we have a variety of work, so I’ve done a lot—other Locals focus more on one area (say, oil refinery work), so people from that Local will be very skilled at rigid conduit and control work but maybe less familiar with security systems or fire alarm.
Our world is so small, that for the most part people know who is better than average. Because of the nature of that world though, average is usually good enough, and “better” is a relative term. When people in our work think “better”, they’re usually thinking “more well-rounded”. After all, the space-time continuum places a limit on how much conduit a person can run in a day under specific conditions! “Better” means “can do damn near anything”—not a one-trick pony. “Better” doesn’t always mean steadily employed though—another facet of the construction world in general, whether union or non—it’s heavily familial.
If, as a customer, and you are looking for a specific skill, or not just the general average, then ask. I always tell people who are looking for an electrician to rewire their home (especially if they have an older home with plaster walls), that they ask for someone familiar with that—ask if the contractor has done any historic remodel work, for example. That will minimize the holes in the wall and ceiling. If you want someone to install a home theater system, ask about that (and seriously—some contractors have sweet deals with equipment suppliers; they can get really good components at prices you wouldn’t be able to!). Security? Same thing. Some folks do it all, some are specialists. There’s a time and a place for both. If by “better”, you mean “faster”, ask for that. Specify a time frame. Don’t be shy! Contractors are like hairdressers; they overbook when they can. Demanding customers who are known to pay on time (hands down the contractors’ biggest headache—people who don’t pay!) really do get top priority.
If by “better”, you mean “someone who isn’t difficult to work with and listens to the customer”, don’t be afraid to mention that as a concern. The nature of our work means we spend a lot of time working alone, or as part of a two-person crew. If you call an electrician to work in your home, you’re getting what we call a “junk truck”—one person, one truck with practically everything in the warehouse in it. Service truck people tend to be very idiosyncratic. I ran a service truck for about a year—liked the variety and the challenge of troubleshooting, but it’s not my preferred cup of tea. I felt like an actor, like I had to be “on” all the time because of all the customer contact. Strangely enough, though service truck people tend to be better at troubleshooting than average, they don’t tend to improve their people skills despite all the opportunity. Contractors tend to assign the odd ducks in the shop to service work because of the almost universal tendency to love solving puzzles (essential to that area!). That trait isn’t often paired with excellent communication skills. But it doesn’t hurt to ask, and if you need something complicated, or want the work done in an exacting manner—-if you ask for someone who’s got people skills, the contractor will know exactly what you mean.
The IBEW is instituting a program called “Code of Excellence” nationwide; it’s designed to be a marketing tool for our people as being better than the average bear when it comes to the skillsets not taught in apprenticeship classes. Certain jobs are already being designated as “Code of Excellence” jobs, and in order to get a referral there, you have to have received that training (in much the same way you get an OSHA card).
PG, cable companies tend to do a lot of one-man-shop outsourcing. I don’t see that in Illinois anymore because of the heavier legal restrictions on companies that sub out work to independent contractors (it used to be common practice for some companies to avoid paying social security, workers’ comp, and unemployment by claiming that workers were “independent contractors”, even though they weren’t). That’s part of why you’re waiting for “the cable guy”. (I hate that too). That line of work is not union in most of the U.S.
RonF, I don’t do side work. If you’ve seen as many electrical nightmares in houses as I have, you wouldn’t either! The problem arises when someone wants say, a ceiling fan, and you put that in, and then their house catches on fire because their kitchen light (another section of the house entirely) was wired with lamp cord underneath the faux-wood paneling. Nope—-not taking any chances. I know contractors with all the proper paperwork that won’t do service calls like that unless they also have the right to fix firetraps.
Our world is so small, that for the most part people know who is better than average.
Acck! I meant, within that Local. You on the other hand, have to trust the contractor (but why wouldn’t you? You’re already trusting the contractor to perform the job that you either can’t or don’t want to do—I don’t think it’s any more of a leap to assume they’re going to send out a good person/crew. Especially for a new customer—-they’re the one’s being “auditioned”, after all).
Thanks, La Lubu. That is very clear (and good) advice.
I’ve joined your viral request but I have something else to add to the list of things to do.
It’s a long explanation so I put it in my own space rather than take over yours.
RonF, I don’t do side work. If you’ve seen as many electrical nightmares in houses as I have, you wouldn’t either!
I can see that.
I rented an old (~ 150 years) farm house for a few years. After living there for a couple of years I decided to mount a ceiling fan in the kitchen. So I crawled up into the attic over the kitchen. I found old armored cable with fiber insulation that looked to be about 14 gauge that was connected together in uncovered junction boxes by having been twisted together and wrapped with electrical tape that had seen better days. I think Nicolas Tesla wired the house. The junction box for the two circuits feeding the barn behind the house (fed by overhead wires) had a 30-amp and a 25-amp fuse, respectively, and believe me the wire was not of the requisite spec. I pulled those out and put 10 amp fuses in and kept my fingers crossed.
* Reduce the interest rate on all student loans to 1%.
If banks can borrow at 1% or less, then so should our students.
I’m still waiting to hear the logic for the above statement.
First, the funny answer:
Because students are less likely to default than banks.
Then the serious answer:
For the good of the country. The point of the loans, for both banks and students, is to improve our economy. Easy access to low cost money for banks makes it easier for them to lend. Having low cost money to lend makes it easier for both businesses & individuals to get the money they need to buy things. Individuals buying things like cars and homes, businesses buying things like inventory or expanding their business improves the economy. Likewise, easy access to low cost money allows people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford it to attend college. A better educated workforce is good for the economy. A good economy is good for the country.
Furthering the education level of the population is a public good. I’ll go along with that. But that doesn’t explain how it’s logical that a) if banks can borrow money at x% then b) students should be able to borrow money at x%. What’s the reason or justification to link these two?
RonF,
“What’s the reason or justification to link these two?”
I doubt they’re actually being linked — I haven’t seen anything saying that the student rates should rise when the federal funds rate does. (I don’t know what interest rates other folks have on loans, but government law school loans are pretty cheap, less than 3%. In 1990, the federal funds rate was 7-8%.) It’s just a rhetorical move: banks are getting money cheap right now, so should students … for the indefinite future.
If I’m wrong, though, and the idea is to have student loan rates fluctuate with the federal funds rate, I’m going to say it’s a very bad idea. Graduates need to have a stable amount they’re paying each month on their loans; not knowing if it’s going to be 1% or 8% in a given month will make financial planning impossible.
It’s just a rhetorical move: banks are getting money cheap right now, so should students … for the indefinite future.
I’ll buy the concept that if the banks are borrowing money cheaper they should lend it cheaper. That’s capitalism and market forces at work. But read the original statement again; they are explicitly calling for equivalency between what the banks are getting money at and what they would lend it to students at. There’s no way a bank can do that profitablly; they have to add to their own rate the cost of servicing the loan and a profit margin besides. Unless, of course, the taxpayer subsidizes the loans, but that’s not something they mention on the site. Instead, the commentary and the comments attack banks for being greedy for seeking to make a profit.
Oh, and right after I posted #37 I went on to that site and posted a comment asking why the two were logically linked and asking how the banks would be able to support making loans for free. I’ve gone back just now and it was deleted. I guess that PUSH isn’t into answering logical questions.
Oh, and Jake:
First, the funny answer:
Because students are less likely to default than banks.
Actually, during the recession in the 70’s that turned out not to be true (and yes, I know you meant this facetiously). Students were graduating and immediately declaring bankruptcy to erase their student loans. Then when they got jobs they were free and clear and the taxpayers had to fund the repayment of their loans. That’s why (as commented on in the cited blog) student loans are not wiped out by bankruptcy anymore; not due to collusion between greedy bankers and corrupt politicians, but to stop an actual problem.
And yep; I posted that as a reply to someone who asked why this should be on the blog and that got deleted as well.
Here’s another flaw in this proposal:
* End the penalties assessed to schools for student loan defaults. Schools should not be held accountable for students who don’t pay back their loans.
This was put in the law because fly-by-night schools were springing up that took the student loan money for tuition but provided a sub-standard education. When the student then attempted to enter the workforce they found that their “education” was actually worthless. That cheated the student, wasting years of their time and their money. This provision in the law means that the schools are held accountable for the quality of the education they provide. Get rid of this provision and you’ll see this come right back, ruining people’s lives. And it wastes your money too, as again if the person taking out the loan can’t pay it back, you and I have to.
FWIW, I would not mind the government picking up the tab in order to provide students with 1% interest loans (or better yet, interest free loans). I had assumed that was part of the proposal and not that banks should be required to loan out money to individual students for the same rates they loan each other money or for the same rates the Fed would charge them if they wanted to borrow money.
Having the government provide interest-free loans seems kind of crazy. I’d quite possibly have stayed in school as long as possible if that had been the option. I’d be PG with an English/economics/bioethics BA, a JD and be working on my MPH now. As it is, government loans are the last ones that people pay off because the interest rates are so low. Many people who work in big law firms don’t finish paying off their loans until they make partner, even as they’re buying homes and sending the kids to private kindergartens, because you can make a much better return on the money just putting it in a decent CD.
PG, I hadn’t even thought about those implications.
I will just say this. I was very fortunate and was able to get through school without any loans so I didn’t think much about the implications of a zero interest loan but of course, you are correct. Such loans would be last on the list although I imagine that there must be some sort of payment schedule attached to the loans.
I just feel badly for people who have to struggle so much more than I ever had to. It is like I always say, the best decision of my life was being born to my parents.
L,
I completely concur that those of us lucky enough to have parents who could fund even part of our educations should be aware of how much more other people are struggling. I’m just not sure that More Academia At A Lower Price is the way to deal with that struggle. A certain level of taxation will eventually affect the number of employees that a business can afford to hire, for example, and I’d much rather have someone be employed and without a BA from a four-year college than unemployed with the BA. Are we necessarily better off with a European style system in which the government pretty much pays for college, but a hyper rigorous standardized testing system keeps most people from going, and businesses aren’t dynamic enough to absorb all the graduates, much less those who didn’t qualify for college?
Since not all Euro countries have higher unemployment than us, PG, the claim that a European style system leads to higher unemployment isn’t obviously true.
From Krugman, employment/population ratio for adults age 25-54. The blue line is the US, the red the Euro 15, and the green line is France.
So unemployment here has been generally lower — but not THAT much lower. And the current difference is negliable.
Apparently, if these are the only variables to consider (and obviously they’re not), the US’s taxes could get a lot higher without doing much to our unemployment rate.
Given how horribly little support poor people get in the US, I’d rather be unemployed in the Netherlands than the US any day. Sure, my unemployment may last a few months longer — but at least I don’t have to worry about being homeless before I find a new job. Good social safety nets make recessions less painful.
More on topic, rather than mucking with the student loan interest rates, I’d choose to muck with the payback rates. There should be a cap on how much percent of income monthly student loans can take up, so low-income graduates will be less likely to default on them.
Amp,
In a recession, the U.S. will have significantly lower employment than in a stable or growth phase because we have fewer restrictions on firing people, whereas the employment figures can’t change quite as much in countries where firing someone is difficult. However, that also means that in good times, you have significantly higher employment in the U.S. because companies are eager to hire, whereas in much of Europe and especially France they have to consider the possibility that they might not want this person later. (Although temporary contracting has become legalized and acceptable in the last decade or so, which has helped with the increase in employment; with such contractors, there aren’t the same restraints on firing and so hiring becomes easier.)
Also, limiting the number to 25-54 will make France and Europe look better because they have earlier retirements and their worst unemployment is among the youth.* If you look at more conventional unemployment statistics such as those used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. has an 8.5% unemployment rate while France’s is 8.8% — that after the U.S. lost 3.3% of all jobs from peak employment, while France has lost only 1.1% of its jobs.
* According to the OECD:
· From 1994 to 2003 unemployment among prime-age adults, from 25 to 54, averaged 9.9 percent; for those 15 to 25, the average was 24 percent.
· Among those 60 to 64, only about one in six have jobs. In the United States, the comparable figure is about one in two.
Part of the reason for the higher unemployment among older people is that in order to avoid the ordeal of justifying layoffs to a court, a French company will offer early retirements instead. But the youth unemployment seems like a major contributor to unhappiness among France’s Muslim population, further marginalizing them (the Muslim population on average is much younger than the non-Muslim population).
PG,
Student loans are deferred until you leave school. No interest accumulates during deferement, so your claim that if student loans were interest free, you would have stayed in school forever if simple false. Student loans were interest free while you stayed in school, but you left school to get a job that undoubtedly paid much higher wages than your student loans. The other possible reason you couldn’t do that (stay in school forever, accumulating more and more degrees) is that (I’m pretty sure) student loans aren’t available for an unlimited number of undergraduate degrees. I’m not sure if they are available for an unlimited number of years of undergrad any more (although I used them for 6 years of undergrad, so they were fairly unlimited in the early 90s).
Student loans can have a long fixed term, so they get paid off after a very long time. Making them 0 interest would not increase the fixed term (although it would decrease the payments), although it would increase the impetus to seek forebearances.
I think 0% (or even 1%) interest student loans should be viewed as a cheaper (for the government) equivalent to Pell grants. Most former students will pay the loans back, so most of the money disbursed eventually comes back into the system to be distributed as new loans.
Also, it shouldn’t be banks making student loans in any case. Bank issued student loans are a 18 billion a year hand-out to the banking industry that was almost done away with under Clinton and hopefully will be done away with under Obama (although the lobbying will be fierce to keep handing out free money to the banks, there is no excuse for the bank run student loan programs). As it currently stands, student loans have (for the banks) a zero risk of default (defaulted loans get paid off by the federal government), so if banks are going to stay in the loop, they should be charging no more than the cost of borrowing the money they are lending (that is higher than 0%, but much less than what they currently charge).
Last time I checked (8 years ago?), this was a standard option. You can could choose to pay 4% of you income (adjusted annually) instead of making a fixed payment. You can also choose to have a student loan foreborn due to low income (and you can do this over and over again, and then reconsolidate when you run out of forebearances – I have a friend who has not paid a penny on his student loans in at least a decade via this route, without ever defaulting. Eventually, he expects to inherit a ton of money, and he will pay the accumulated interest at that point). The problem with these options (without changing the interest rate) is that they mean that you will be paying nothing but the interest for the rest of your life, and your total debt will still be getting bigger and bigger.
As it currently stands, student loans have (for the banks) a zero risk of default (defaulted loans get paid off by the federal government), so if banks are going to stay in the loop, they should be charging no more than the cost of borrowing the money they are lending (that is higher than 0%, but much less than what they currently charge).
O.K. On that basis it’s legitimate to have banks remove that part of the rate margin that can be attributable to the risk of default. But you still have to pay people to write the loans, check out the information the borrowers provide, collect and process the payments and otherwise service the loan. So the rates cannot be equal.
Yeah but how much overhead do these banks have? Wouldnt a loan that provided for the overhead of the bank be pretty close to the 1% cost of borrowing from another bank?
Regarding the European digression, PG, you’ve switched your arguments — now it’s not high taxes causing higher unemployment, it’s the difficulty of firing European workers. In this case, I think you’re probably right.
(Does that mean that job security is a bad thing, and should be done away with? I don’t think so, and I doubt you do either. Workers rights are not an unmitigated evil, and most workers like having some security.)
In the end, I think security for the worst-off people is more important than getting the unemployment rate down that extra percentage point. When that fails — as it has for many young Muslims in France (for many reasons), and as it has for countless Americans lacking insurance, lacking jobs, in some cases lacking homes — that’s something that needs to be fixed.
BTW, difficulty firing workers isn’t a feature of every country with a decent social welfare system. Denmark, for instance, combines a very good social safety net with making it fairly easy for firms to let go of workers (and generally has had a low unemployment rate).
When we were applying for Peace Corps, we were told that we wouldn’t have to pay our student loans during the term of service. We thought it was part of the package of benefits of Peace Corps and probably necessary to recruit the recent college graduates who make up the majority of volunteers. When we were accepted and were sent the appropriate paper work, it turned out be a completely standard forebearance for low income, available to anyone. What I don’t know is how little you would have to earn to qualify. Our income was the equivalent of $120/month each, so I don’t have a good sense from a U.S. standpoint of how poor you would have to be to qualify here.
I’m also not sure how many people know about these options. I feel like they don’t exactly advertise these things, but I also don’t know what kind of outreach they do with someone who is on the verge of defaulting.
Does anyone know what the interest rates are running these days? My original student loans from the mid-90s were around 8 percent, which I thought was great at the time. We consolidated and refinanced for 3.2, which is just about the cheapest money I ever expect to get. My husband just consolidated his grad school loans at 4-something.
Charles, thanks for the better info regarding student loans. I do think that the options we’re talking about should have less of a financial penalty attached to them.
If you google student loans, you get the Sallie Mae page as your first choice, and then if you select repayment, you get descriptions of all of the different repayment options including income dependent, extended payment, and interest only. The side bar on the Sallie Mae site lists Postponing Payment as one of the options, and that page describes Forbearance and Deferment. You actually have to have a loan with SallieMae to do the Forbearance calculator, so I’m not sure from that one page what the cutoff is, but I know it is a lot less restrictive than $120/month.
But playing games with payment plans doesn’t get you anywhere unless you reduce interest rates. You couldn’t really get much more generous with payment plans than 4% of income plus the option of forbearance, but unless you also lower interest rates, that is just lifelong debt peonage.
The real problem is that Pell Grants have not quite kept pace with the consumer price index, while the cost of college has soared high above the CPI, so the dept load on students graduating from college is much much larger than it was 30 years ago. I think we need both lower interest student loans, so they can be paid off over a longer period without paying a huge penalty in compounded interest and we also need a huge expansion in the maximum size of Pell Grants. The adjustment of military education benefits, so that the actually pay for college for military veterans, rather than paying some small fraction of the costs of college, is a good step in the right direction.
Apprenticeship programs, both in the traditional skilled trades and in the high tech skilled trades, are a good thing and deserve expansion, but that does not mean that only the children of the upper class should be able to pursue a liberal arts education at a upper tier private college without having their backs broken by outrageous student loan debts. That is where we are now.
My husband’s grad school loans would have been 4% but we missed a payment, so they’re going up to 6.
…reconsolidation can help, she asked hopefully?
Amp,
Not entirely — my last post had two points in it,
1) about workers’ rights causing a certain degree of inflexibility in the European labor market vs. the American one (their employment never gets as high in the good times as ours does), and
2) about how Krugman’s graph picks the sweet spot of the European employment ages (25-54) and ignores the extremely high rates of unemployment among youth and seniors. The actual overall rate of unemployment never has been lower in France than in the U.S., and that might have partly to do with the tax burden on individual incomes when it comes to hiring workers for a non-corporatized business.
As you might recall from the presidential debates, the U.S. has the second highest rates of corporate taxation in the world — 2nd only to Japan — but does not have the highest top rates on individuals’ income. This can have a stronger impact on young workers who are not going into corporations but instead would be hired by small businesses — restaurants, etc. — that often are constituted as partnerships and other pass-through entities. (Pass-through entity means that the entity, e.g. a partnership, LLC 0r S corp, isn’t taxed itself; its profits are distributed to the owners and they pay taxes on them. In a corporation, the corporation has a distinct legal existence separate from its owners’ existence, and pays its own taxes.)
If you’re looking at a group that is most likely to be employed by a corporation, then corporate tax rates are what you should consider in determining whether corporations are being taxed too heavily to be able to afford workers they otherwise might hire on. If you’re looking at a group that is more likely to be employed by small businesses that haven’t become corporate entities — and this includes being employed by individuals — then you should consider individual income taxes more.
And then there’s also whatever taxes might be imposed based on each worker one hires rather than based on the business’s or individual’s income; in the U.S. we have FICA, but I don’t know if there’s an equivalent in Europe.
@ Mandolin,
Check out William D. Ford Federal Direct Loan Program.
They’ve been really cool with me.
I don’t really disagree with any of this, but what I’m wondering is how much difference a 1 percent vs. a 3 percent or 4 percent interest rate makes when people are graduating with $30,000 or $50,000 or more in student loan debt. I mean, yes, I understand the concept of compounding interest. I’m not that dense. But I’m wondering if the interest rate is the primary barrier to higher education.
I definitely want to see Pell Grants expanded, but a Pell Grant is never going to come close to covering the costs of a top tier private liberal arts college. And I’m not sure it should – mostly because I think we want to design these programs so public money does the most good for the most people, and that means public school education.
I don’t have a problem with government subsidizing the loans. I don’t think the 1 percent is a bad idea, and I don’t share PG’s concern about people staying in school indefinitely if you went even to no-interest because the thing is you still would be accumulating more debt for each degree. It really wouldn’t be like the European systems at all.
What I’m asking is: Is the real problem the total cost of higher education? And if it is, could anything be done about it?
Having gone to a state school for undergrad (after going to public schools for middle and high school), I don’t really see why the government should be putting a lot of resources into subsidizing private school educations. The implicit idea here seems to be that nobody should be prevented from going to Harvard et al. because they can’t afford it, but “can’t afford it” is a hazy concept. Most of these top tier schools have need-blind admissions and once they decide to offer admission, also offer a package of loans, grants and work-study to ensure the student can attend. A student might decide that she doesn’t want to graduate with debt and that she’s better off taking the full ride to a lower ranked private school or a state U, and that doesn’t strike me as a tragedy.
As for the problem of having all loans go through government at a zero percent interest rate, then the government will be lending money at a substantial discount. As it is, there’s already an incentive for students whose parents could afford to send them to grad school to take the loans instead because certain loans are so cheap. For example, one of my cousins who was going to medical school was being offered loans at very low rates, even though his parents (who were extremely proud and excited that he was going to med school) were willing to pay his way through, because for grad school parental income isn’t taken into account. Instead of having his parents pay for school, he took out the loans and his parents invested the money; they paid off the loans with the proceeds.
Maybe it’s worthwhile for the American taxpayer to subsidize all education in this manner (although I *really* don’t think we should be offering the same kinds of deals to lawyers as to medical professionals, considering that we’ve a shortage of the latter but not the former), but I can see better uses for the money, especially spending it on K-12. It is an expense to the government to lend money at 0%, but I’m afraid the cost isn’t obvious to people because it’s more of an opportunity cost/ time-value of money thing rather than a “here’s $10 we spent.”
Think of it this way: we can lend $500 million a year at 0%, which means it’s not even keeping up with inflation much less average returns from savings accounts (I put 10% of my paycheck plus any large sum that I receive as a gift in an account that gets a guaranteed 4% annually, and that’s pretty much my only investment because I’m scared of the stock market), or we could stick it in a savings account and use the annual interest received to pay for recruiting the best teachers to work in public schools.
ALSO: An article about private banks trying to stay in the student loan racket — I can’t believe they’re claiming that marketing is a *benefit* to the system. And didn’t we just learn from the securitized debt debacle that repurchase of loans is a bad idea because it destroys the original lender’s incentive to loan to good prospects?
Yes. The interest rate, when applied to am amortized loan, significantly increases the monthly payment on the loan.
That $30,000 loan amortized over 20 years (typical for consolidated loans) is a $137/month payment at 1% APR. that same $30,000 winds up being a $215/month payment at 6% APR. If we’re going on the assumption that $137 is a real burden then it is probably safe to assume that the extra $80 makes matters much worse.
Now, imagine that you want a low paying job where you defer payment (but not necessarily interest) on the loan. no big deal at 1%. Yeah, it costs you an extra $300 a year–chump change–so you still have incentive to do something which will increase your total lifetime earnings. At 6%, you’re paying 1800/year just to maintain the loan without even touching the principal.
College has multiple roles in society but I think the three main ones are Research Centers, Making Better People, and Trade School for Professionals. Most of the conversation so far has focused on TSFP and that’s honestly where I think it should be. I just don’t see a huge societal benefit in helping lots of people study things that aren’t likely to help other’s that much. To be clear, I can see the value in paying for 100% of the cost of a nurse but not 100% of the cost of a philosophy major. (just for a crude example at the extremes)
To that end one thing I’d like to see is a *greater* burden on the school to cover the cost of student debt that can’t be paid back. Sure it’s not the schools fault if you can’t find a job. But if the school knew that after some reasonable time, say 10 years. If you went belly up they’d be liable for your college loans it would probably help the school focus a little bit better on whether there really is a limitless job market for professors of evergreen disciplines.
I think a lot of the conversation so far has focused on red herrings and strawmen. There are not a bunch of philosophy majors hanging out in universities for 30 years while getting 100 different degrees on the taxpayers’ dime. It’s just not happening.
First, knowledge benefits society just by existing and increasing the body of knowledge of the human race. There is no way to know what break-through in thought, spirituality or science will come from which piece of knowledge–yes, even philosophy. It was the Enlightenment philosophers’ work that this country was founded upon, after all.
Second, having an educated workforce is something that companies have been screaming at the US about for years. They need educated workers and it’s the reason they are importing workers from Asia–there aren’t enough HERE.
Third, education is a goal in and of itself–people cannot participate in a democracy without being educated and competent in their own culture, history and government.
All of these reasons mean that it is in the state’s interest to see that the population is educated and educated in such a way that we are competitive on the world market. As of right now, we are not. These changes in the way we fund higher education are a start.
Sailorman, is that what the average student loan is running? 6 percent?
ChristinaM33,
“Third, education is a goal in and of itself–people cannot participate in a democracy without being educated and competent in their own culture, history and government.”
So people weren’t participating in a democracy for the bulk of American history in which only a small minority had liberal arts degrees?
Sufficient education and competence in one’s culture, history and government is supposed to be provided by public schools that teach things like, y’know, civics. It sounds like some of the college loan boosters have effectively given up on primary and secondary education as conduits for making Americans into competent citizens and now see college as the cure-all. This certainly would help explain why flagship state schools like UT-Austin have to keep adding remedial classes — instead of trying to educate kids in high school, we’re shuttling them off to college and insisting that professors do the work that 10th grade teachers should have.
But that’s not what college is supposed to do. College is supposed to provide higher education in a chosen field of study. I don’t think philosophy majors are inherently bad (I more-or-less majored in bioethics and was strongly encouraged to go into the honors philosophy major), but the idea that people learn philosophy — even political philosophy, which is where I focused — to become better citizens is mildly absurd. Reading Rawls and Habermas helped me understand policy proposals better because it revealed the (often unconscious) philosophical underpinnings better. It didn’t make me an activist or even encourage me to vote. The more “pure” forms of philosophy like epistemology are even more useless at creating a citizenry engaged in the polis.
Why is UT-Austin admitting people who don’t have the skills needed? Isn’t that what standardized tests are supposed to catch?
That is seriously unfair. The issue with loans and just general affordability of higher education is whether we’re actually going to live in something resembling a meritocracy or whether higher education will be only for the upper classes. Just on the issue of whether everyone should go to college, I’m with you. Not everyone should. But the situation we have now is that plenty of people who shouldn’t go, do, just because their families can afford it and it’s the thing to do. And plenty of people who should go, don’t, because they can’t afford it.
L,
In the wake of Hopwood v. Texas, 78 F.3d 932 (5th Cir. 1996), which forbade all consideration of race in college admissions, the Texas legislature instituted a program to try to preserve racial diversity. The program is known as the “top 10%” program, in which any student who graduates from a Texas high school in the top 10% of her class is automatically guaranteed admission to the state school of her choice, regardless of her performance on any standardized test.
This works to guarantee diversity because the high schools themselves are often racially segregated; public high schools in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and along the Mexican border will be 75+% black and Latino, so the top 10% at those schools will include many students who are black and Latino. Because there’s no racial consideration in the admissions process itself, the program is fairly impervious to lawsuits. However, because Texas has some really crappy high schools that are most often inflicted on poor black and Latino students, graduating in the top 10% of such a high school is no guarantor of being ready for college.
UT in particular has been inundated with students who are unprepared and has had to add a ton of remedial classes since the program was instituted. It has tried since Bollinger (the 2003 Supreme Court decision allowing holistic race-conscious affirmative action programs) to end the top 10% and go back to its old methods of ensuring a diverse class, but the legislature is reluctant both for its own conservative politics and also because any race-conscious policy is a magnet for lawsuits.
Top 10% is not a great way of ensuring that the best students are admitted. For example, a Latina scholarship student at St. John’s or Episcopal (good private high schools in Houston) might not make it into the tiny, cutthroat top 10% at such schools, yet have an overall record of AP scores, SAT, taking advanced classes, etc. that would get her admitted if the schools weren’t getting filled up so quickly with top 10% kids. The top 10% program effectively lets the Texas legislature ignore how under-served the kids at majority-minority schools often are, and dumps the problem in the laps of the state schools.
And plenty of people who should go, don’t, because they can’t afford it.
But that’s an argument in favor of expanding merit-based grants and loans — in particular, of having all schools that receive federal aid be required to be need-blind and to provide a sufficient package for each admitted student to allow her to attend. The comment @ 68 is the first mention I’ve seen in this discussion of merit.
Maybe because everyone else was taking it as a given that we’re talking about opening up opportunities for people who are qualified to go to college?
Many colleges already have supposedly need-blind admission, but a lot of families find the assumptions about how much money they can afford to pay annually really unrealistic. Also, if you secure any merit-based scholarships or grants, the college usually will reduce your financial aid by the amount of the scholarship.
chingona,
How do you determine who is qualified to go to college? Is graduating in the top 10% of your class sufficient? I think you’re underestimating the extent to which people are going to college who aren’t qualified — who are under-prepared academically; immature in their ability to self-regulate class attendance and study; uninterested in higher education. None of which is to say that such people wouldn’t benefit from college at a later time: after remedial courses; after some time in the workforce; after gaining enough life experience that a liberal education seems worthwhile.
I think the Mormon expectation of having young men do two years of work or service before college is a good one, although I wouldn’t restrict it by sex and wouldn’t make it religious. I did decently in college because I was academically prepared and really enjoyed learning, but I still would have profited from more maturity in order to get the most out of it (e.g. gotten into good habits on my own instead of going straight from having my parents wake me up in the morning to having to get myself up for 8am classes).
To La Lubu,
May I just say how much I value your contributions? I come from a union family: dad was a union carpenter for a good part of his life, and my brother is finishing his hours to qualify for the journeyman test as an electrician. Also my best friend worked for a long time as an organizer and, well… you often speak for me and mine. You are so eloquent and FWIW it means a lot.
To L and others, please do not forget that people getting 2 year degrees, to qualify for things like trade work, massage therapy, medical assistantships (ed: I mean medical assistant jobs), etc. also get student loans to pay for their school. Lots and lots of community college students take out loans *and* to support their families at the same time (so do a whole lot of 4-year students, but The Way the University Works, which was already mentioned, does a good job of talking about them).
And as far as returning adult students go, I can say that in my part of the Rust Belt area right now there are a lot of people who have jobs that are desperately finishing their 2 or 4 year degrees to try to hang on to them as the market looks to be tightening. Many folks of my acquaintance have been getting a nudge from their HR departments about that. So people in this conversation have been talking about folks who already have jobs without degrees, but anecdotally I can say that they may not be keeping them for much longer without degrees, at least not in areas that have already been hit hard and where people are now having to compete against their peers for what may be left. Just my 2 cents.
PG,
And again, I agree with you. But the problem of people who are unprepared emotionally or intellectually for college is distributed across all races and classes. And yet, those upper and upper middle class kids go anyway, because they can. There really isn’t any way to police that, and part of their class privilege is to piss away their parents’ money. Dicking with the interest rate isn’t going to change the decision making process for those people.
The problem I’m talking about – and I had assumed it was the problem this drive from PUSH is aimed at addressing – is kids from less well-off families who can get into college and want to go but cannot afford it. I don’t really see how telling these kids “you can always go to trade school” is a fair or just solution. I have all the respect in the world for the trades. My father works in the trades. I would encourage my children to consider the trades. But I don’t think a system that says poor kids go to trade school, whether that’s what they want to do or that’s what they’re suited for, and rich kids go to college, whether that’s what they want to do or that’s what they’re suited for, is either just or really optimal for society at large. How many biographies of exceptional people from working class backgrounds include some version of a conversation with a teacher or a guidance counselor in which the kid expresses some great dream and gets told “why don’t you look at the trades?” or “why don’t you consider the military?”
Fix the problem in Texas by improving primary and secondary education, not by making it harder for kids from low-income families to go to college.
chingona,
1) Lots of kids from low-income families already go to college with the existing system we have. I mentored kids in Harlem who were identified as high achievers and they went to Ivy League and Seven Sisters schools. You don’t need to reduce student loan rates to ensure that those kids can go to college; you need to reduce student loan rates to ensure that college graduates aren’t carrying significant debt. Those are two interrelated but distinct concerns. One is a “can’t”: I can’t go to college because there isn’t the money for it. The other is a “better not”: I better not go to college because I’m not sure I can pay back the money it will cost.
2)
I don’t see why we would want to police that. If someone’s parents have the money to pay full freight for their kid to attend college, regardless of whether the kid should be in college, then that’s more money for the college to be able to spend on aid to poorer kids — yay! Harvard runs a “summer school” program that lets wealthy parents bask in the thought that their high school senior is “going to Harvard” for the summer. Attending the program costs way more than the program does to administer, so it’s a great windfall for Harvard (that also allows it to make profitable use during the summer of its dorms, dining halls and classrooms). Out-of-state tuition at my alma mater actually subsidizes the educations of in-state and scholarship students. If rich people are either going to send their wastrel offspring to college, OR buy a new yacht, I vote for sending the kids to college so long as I didn’t have to room with them.
The reason that having poor kids go to college when they’re not ready is that their doing so costs the college/public money, instead of adding money to educational resources. So it’s reasonable for the college/public to weigh how much this is worth to them and whether there are better ways to spend the money.
E.g. should there be more aid to a smaller and more select group of low-income students? This is how some governments do it; my dad got a full scholarship to high school and medical college (if you wanted to be a doctor, you went straight to learning medicine at the age of 16, but spent more than 4 years because you had to learn the basic sciences that American pre-meds get in college) and even eked out enough to send money home to his parents, albeit mostly by scrimping on food so now he’s probably shorter than he should have been. He then was part of the infamous ’70s “brain drain” by immigrating, but he’s probably been able to do more good, in remittances, charity and investments, than he would have if he’d stayed.
You’re the one who’s so concerned that too many people are going to college.
No, I’m concerned that too many people are going to college who are unprepared AND who are asking other people to help pay their way. It’s the same reason I donate time and money to preventing homelessness and politically support welfare programs, but don’t give money to people on the street: if I am giving you money, I want to be sure it is used wisely. If you have your own money, it’s not my job to police what you do with it.
Sadly, things will never be equal. Rich kids are always going to find college easier than poor kids. Even giving free rides based on need wont change that.
Actually, no, they weren’t. Participation has *always* been restricted to the educated elite–either outright (as in the beginning of this nation–white, male landowners) or by buying the votes of uneducated people who didn’t know any different (Tammany Hall days).
High school was *never* a place where people gained an education sophisticated enough to counter this. I learned more in high school about these issues than my parents did. My kids are learning things in high school that we never went into when I was there. Yet still we’re screaming that high schools aren’t doing enough. How far are we going to go? Are we going to start expecting 3rd graders to do physics and then scream that k-12 isn’t doing enough for our kids when the 8 year olds fail General Relativity? Perhaps we can throw a few more standardized tests on ’em.
No knowledge is “useless”. All of it furthers the species and the body of human knowledge. Believe it or not, some things have value that cannot be codified into dollars and cents.
Tammany Hall and similar “machines” were peculiar to a few big cities. Their mechanism of gaining votes, which was to distribute government jobs and services to particular communities, would be useless in rural and small-government areas where government’s role as job and service provider was minimal. Also, the property requirement for voting no longer existed in any state by 1850.
Moreover, neither machine politics nor property requirements have anything to do with a college education — as was true at the Founding and continues to be true today, land ownership in a primarily agricultural society, and especially where land is essentially free for the taking, has precious little correlation with formal education. I know lots of people in Texas who don’t have college degrees but do own a bit of land. George Washington was educated entirely at home by his father and older brother and never attended college. James Monroe dropped out of college during the Revolution and never finished his degree. Andrew Jackson had almost no formal education at all.
BTW, it would be rather difficult to “codify” anything into dollars and cents.
Whatever, PG. You know what I meant.
So, you’re trying to argue here that the Founders were not educated white landowning rich men who were the elite of their time? Really? Because they were “home schooled”? All the rich white boys were “home schooled” back then! Daddy hired a live-in tutor if he didn’t want to send you to boarding school. That’s just what you did. Only the poor kids went to school. And you are also arguing that since the political machines only worked in urban population centers, somehow that makes my point invalid? I’m not seeing it, sorry.
Education has *always* been something that was restricted to those in power–deliberately. That is why African-Americans place(d) so much emphasis on being educated, such that they began their own college system. That’s why the Taliban is attempting to restrict access to education to men only. Education is power, access and privilege. Restricting access to education, yes higher education also, to only those who come from families who can afford it, will make sure that only those childrens’ children will be able to afford it, ad infinitum. It will exacerbate the class distinctions we already have and put the last nail in the coffin of the American Myth. This is why the public university system and financial aid was started; middle class families wanted the opportunity to get their children a better life than they had. Now we’ve made those children of the middle class into debt slaves, forced into majors that will make a buck regardless of personal aptitude or liking for that discipline and forced into corporate jobs due to student loan payments–rather than non-profit work or other social needs.
Seriously, where are these folks with a high school diploma, in the trades or with a 2yr degree supposed to work, anyway, in our high-tech society? India?
It truly concerns me the picture of college students that I’m seeing play out here in this thread. All the stereotypes of lazy, immature, privileged kids in stupid majors that will “never land a job in the Real World(tm) wasting *my* tax money” are all here and accepted as reality. I deal with these young adults every single day and I don’t recognize any of what you’re describing here.
What I see are a bunch of kids who are stressed out with their courses, full time jobs (many of them), thoughts of how the heck they’re going to pay for next semester & their textbooks, get a job after graduation making enough money to pay the loan payments and do so before their loans come due doing the best they can.
I see your point here. But I have to make a comment about “being forced into majors that will make a buck…” I think in an ideal world, any one who wanted to go to college should not have to worry about money, either the money they’ll likely make after they have the degree or the money it costs them to be in school. However, we don’t live in such a world. Which means that if we subsidize students in the higher levels, we do have to ask difficult questions like “What if everyone wants to be an English major?”
PG:
Their mechanism of gaining votes, which was to distribute government jobs and services to particular communities,
A mechanism that is still dominant in Chicago, Cook County, and Illinois, the incubator for our President’s political career.
would be useless in rural and small-government areas where government’s role as job and service provider was minimal.
Which I often suspect is the basis for the desire on conservatives to minimize the government’s role as job and service provider and the desire of liberals to increase it.
PG said:
To which ChristinaM33 replied:
At the beginning of this country the franchise was restricted. It wasn’t just landowners – men who owned businesses but not land also had the franchise. But that restriction hasn’t applied for a very long time. And as PG pointed out, vote purchasing only had application in a very few urban centers, at a time period when a far smaller percentage of our population lived in urban centers than do now.
As PG also pointed out, high school does (or should) easily provide sufficient education in civics, etc., for people to understand how government is structured and how it functions. Here in Illinois all students have to take courses and pass specific tests on the Federal and Illinois Constitutions before they graduate high school. They also learn to read and comprehend English at a level sufficient to understand newspaper and TV news stories about what’s going on. I have two degrees in the biological sciences. With the exception of certain issues such as abortion, stem cell research, etc. my possession of those degrees has nothing to do with my ability to participate in American democracy. I learned that in high school.
I see no basis in fact for this assertion. Especially after perusing the American history and civics and English textbooks that my wife’s immigrant grandparents and my parents used in 8th grade and high school (two different sets of books).
And in any case, what has to be countered is not the long-dead issue of the franchise once having been limited to men with a certain amount of property. No, what’s killing democracy in the United States in the current age is a cultural issue that has the bulk of people convinced that they are entitled to good government while devoting the bulk of their free time doing research on who’s most likely to win American Idol or whether A-Rod’s been sleeping with Madonna as opposed to investing both time and effort in informing themselves on the issues and candidates of the day, thinking about them, and then voting accordingly. Alexis de Toqueville (IIRC) once said that in a democracy you get the government you deserve, and from what I can tell he was dead right.
I do agree with you, however, that the issue of buying votes has relevance and that it needs to stop. What has happened is that it has spread beyond the urban areas and has become far more sophisticated. An increasingly larger fraction of the population has become convinced through constant rhetoric that they are entitled to have the necessities of life provided to them by the taxpayers if they are unable to provide such for themselves, regardless of whether or not they are putting forward their best effort to so self-provide. In some cases this is by outright grants from tax money. In other cases this is through non-competitive employment by the government instead of by private industry. Those people’s votes are being purchased by the government far more surely than they were in the days of the old Daley machine when homeless people were simply scooped up, dumped off at the polling booths and given $5 or a bottle of Thunderbird wine if they voted the Machine’s candidate. They are the strongest supporters of continuing the expansion of government and of government-directed redistribution of income from more productive people to less productive ones.
ChristinaM33,
You’re moving the goalposts. First, you argued that a college education has always been necessary to full participation as a citizen in the American political system. I pointed out that not merely participants but the leaders of that system have included people without such degrees. Now you’re arguing that home-schooling by family members (who was the live-in tutor hired by George Washington’s father?) is equivalent to a college education. Which still doesn’t do much for Andrew Jackson, who saw his entire, mostly illiterate family die before he was 14. You’re also moving from an argument about the capacity to participate as a citizen in American politics, to the capacity to participate as a worker in the American economy. These are not the same thing; indeed, much of the argument for campaign finance reform is that power in the economic sphere should not buy influence in the political sphere.
ZOMG, India! Isn’t it all, like, a giant slum?
La Lubu and others have described the opportunities available in the trades. “High-tech” doesn’t solve problems that require hands-on work that can’t be outsourced: construction, electricity, plumbing, computer repair (distinct from programming), nursing, etc. One can get a job in any of these fields without a four year degree. There are 18 year olds who have a better grip on what jobs are available than you’re displaying here.
If your attitude toward writing is “Whatever, you know what I meant,” I sincerely hope you’re not working in a teaching role. I worked as a debate coach for low-income, non-white kids, nearly all of whom were either first or second generation immigrants, and they were extremely conscious of writing and speaking well — a tendency that we encouraged because we knew how important it would be for their futures. Every kid in that program has gone to college.
I think in an ideal world, any one who wanted to go to college should not have to worry about money, either the money they’ll likely make after they have the degree or the money it costs them to be in school.
In an ideal world people will understand what the value of an education (or anything else) is independently of the amount of effort or money they put forward to attain it. We do not live in an ideal world. While there are outliers, most people tend to think that something free is worthless, and act accordingly. If you want even more students to act as though college is high school with more sex and drugs and less adult supervision, don’t make anyone pay for it.
ChristinaM33 said:
Now we’ve made those children of the middle class into debt slaves, forced into majors that will make a buck regardless of personal aptitude or liking for that discipline and forced into corporate jobs due to student loan payments–rather than non-profit work or other social needs.
People have always taken jobs in large part on the basis of what fit their financial needs more than what fit their desires, regardless of whether or not they are college graduates or stop their education at high school. The concept that people should be free to get a college degree based on their aptitudes and desires and independent of what the market is for the skills they acquire seems likely to produce a group of highly educated graduates that will be less productive than their parents. A drop in productivity will mean less money to fund entitlements, etc.
It seems to me that people are ignoring the core issue here. Rather than try to get the government to pay out even more in educational support than it does now (and it spends a lot), why aren’t we focusing on why students have to pay the colleges so much money in the first place? If a college education didn’t cost so much then students wouldn’t need to borrow as much and pay as much money back in loan payments? Why does a college education cost what it does in the first place? The more such costs are reduced the less of a problem student loans become.
Let’s take the country’s richest university as an example. Harvard had 28.8G$ in their endowment in 2008. They have a little over 6700 undergraduate students and tuition plus room and board in university housing and dining halls goes for $48,400 a student. Do the math and it comes out that free tuition and room and board is 1.1% of their endowment. Why is tuition at Harvard so high? Why do they charge it at all?
Now, sure – lots of other schools don’t have that kind of endowment. That takes me back to asking schools where the money they are getting in is going. Want me to put more money in to fund college educations? I’m willing – but let’s see some accountability on the part of the people it’s going to.
It takes more than a knowledge of specifics on an issue or knowledge of general civics to participate in a democracy. It takes the ability to think critically and apply logic and we aren’t teaching that at the high school or any level. We’re teaching them facts in order to pass a multiple “guess” test. Critical thinking, if taught at all, is taught at a college level these days and logic is a thing of the past–hence the popularity of certain conservative talk show hosts.
@ PG, you are completely misrepresenting my argument. You are arguing that education is only valuable when it serves capitalism. I’m saying that education serves democracy, independent of any capitalistic value and that it has always been so. Andrew Jackson was not an uneducated man–or he wouldn’t have made POTUS. Period. You can’t be POTUS, never have been able to be POTUS, and be uneducated.
And I’ve got news for those 18 yr olds–they get to live a nearly-subsistence level life with such wonderful “trade” jobs, with the constant worry that some technology will come about or some economic necessity will come up that will find them downsized and/or obsolete. I come from a working class family, I know a lot about this.
On an internet comment thread? Get real. I hope you also teach those low-income, non-white students about venue and when to worry about such things while you are teaching them all about the privileged white world of formal debate.
They charge that much because they can.
Programs like guaranteed student loans give many people who otherwise could not have afforded college the ability to pay the tuition which has increased demand in a general sense. Schools like Harvard have really good reputations so the specific demand for places like Harvard is greater than the demand for say my neighborhood 4 year public university which is why it is both more difficult to get admitted to Harvard and why it costs more than double.
@Ron F
Well, there’s salaries, of course, but that’s not even a drop in what a university spends. Infrastructure, landscaping, energy costs, facilities, new technology for research, lab equipment/parts, travel, PR, recruitment…for example, here at this university we have a clean room for nanotech–one room that cost us $3000 sq ft.
Well, that’s expensive but it allowed us to recruit and keep top notch professors which allows us to do top notch research which allows us to recruit top notch students which allows us to produce patents which make a bunch of money which gets reinvested into expensive research facilities and so on…
Without state funding to subsidize a student’s education, our tuition and fees would be in line with Harvard or Yale. The thing about research money and patent money is that it trickles in over decades, but the construction companies want their $10m now and the recruited students want to come now so the university grows at a faster pace than the research and patents would pay for–and that would also be of benefit only to those disciplines that have that source of income. Lots of disciplines don’t have that option.
RonF and PG,
You are both simply wrong about the possibilities of corruption and vote buying in small towns and rural communities. There is a long history of corruption and vote buying in rural and small town America (and in rural areas elsewhere in the world). Even a government with very little power to do good still has plenty of money and favors and coercion to sway votes, and a government that does little systematic good is actually better positioned to buy votes by doing unsystematic good for people. The big city machines largely fell when the safety net moved from local government control to federal and state government control.
If you can’t give city jobs, you can still give cash or shots of whiskey (seriously, selling drinks is banned on election day in some predominantly rural states as a response to the practice of buying votes with shots of whiskey).
PG,
Indeed, La Lubu described how there are a very small number of slots available for a large number of applicants, and she also described how the availability of training opportunities in the skill trades is highly cyclical, which higher education is not. If you come out of high school in a recession, there are no apprenticeship slots in the building trades, while colleges are far more stable.
RonF,
Maybe your analysis of Harvard’s ability to cover tuition is why Harvard is free to anyone whose family income is less than $60,000 /year.
Of course, I’m sure that this will lead to the tragic result that Harvard students will no longer bother to get an education while they are there.
PG — way, way out of line. Shame on you.
Do you not find it a little odd that after you accuse me of misrepresenting your argument, you misrepresent my argument? Where in this thread have I said anything like “education is only valuable when it serves capitalism”? It would be lunatic for me to be arguing in favor of increased funding to primary and secondary education if the only goal were to serve capitalism; I’d be arguing for a return to child labor and sending adolescents away to be apprentices instead. I also never claimed that Jackson was wholly uneducated — only that he lacked the college degree that you’ve claimed crucial to full participation in our democracy.
Now, how did I misrepresent your arguments? I said, “First, you argued that a college education has always been necessary to full participation as a citizen in the American political system.” This argument was made @ 64 and @ 79. You then changed your argument @ 81 to say that home-schooling constituted enough education but that college was necessary to participate in the economy.
I won’t speak for her, but I suspect La Lubu would disagree that trade jobs necessarily involve subsistence level life, especially if one is well trained and belongs to a union.
And instability is a fact of life for people with fancy, expensive educations as well. Have you seen how economic necessity has downsized thousands of lawyers whose degrees are from top tier schools? Technological change, allowing for documents to be moved easily between the U.S. and other countries, already had started cutting into the market for staff attorneys who do the first pass on flagging documents for review. I have a friend who’s a radiologist and can do his “on call” from home by looking at images on his computer (you might have seen the commercial about the iPhone app for this too). I remarked several years ago that that looked like something that could be outsourced, and he gave me a dirty look and said, “Yeah, it can.”
Lawyers: 7 years of higher education, with law school alone costing $150k.
Radiologists: 8 years of higher ed, plus residency and fellowship.
I’m not saying anyone should feel particularly sorry for these folks, but the idea that any kind of higher education will shield people from recession and changes in technology is laughable. We all take the hits.
Nope, I teach them that it’s a good idea to practice writing in complete sentences and using the most accurate words they can, because it will then become habitual and they won’t have to slow down to speak or write that way to a professor or boss. People from non-English speaking, minority or low-income backgrounds often have two voices/ styles, one for communicating within the family and community and one for the “mainstream” world, and I wouldn’t tell these kids to lose their home voice. But if the “mainstream” voice doesn’t become second nature, something they can switch into easily and without a lot of thought, it’s always going to be obvious and hold them back. People will take their ideas more seriously if it’s clear that they care enough about their ideas to express them well.
I’m much happier seeing my kids succeed than being their buddy who says it’s cool to be ungrammatical and imprecise. My mentor took a strict attitude with me on these matters, and I owe him a lifelong debt because of it. I also didn’t have the temptation to get into a poor writing style because I grew up before internet IMs and cellphone texting. I just had to learn correct grammar and vocabulary, which, because my parents were immigrants for whom English was a third language, and I grew up in a rural area where most people didn’t speak Standard English, would have been difficult without my mentor’s help.
I don’t know, Mandolin. That was kind of my analysis of the remark as well, although I forbore commenting. Answering “You know what I meant” when the meaning wasn’t at all clear (PG has not shown himself/herself to be particularly obtuse up to this moment) is not constructive.
Charles S., Harvard’s change to their tuition policies is something quite recent and is a reaction to other people with more power than I asking the same question I did. It also doesn’t answer why they should charge anybody tuition at all.
Which, yes, seems a conflict with the comments on value I put forward earlier. My answer would be that not charging tuition – which is generally paid by parents, especially at the amounts that Harvard, MIT, etc. charge – is not the same as not requiring students to give value for what they get. There’s still plenty of room for making students render effort for what they get. You could assign students to clean their dorm rooms and common areas (e.g., bathrooms). They could work in the food service areas busing tables and cleaning pots and pans and serving food. They could pick up trash, mow grass, shovel snow, and otherwise maintain the grounds – and wouldn’t the grounds be cleaner and the common areas better kept if you didn’t know if the person walking next to you was the person who was going to have to pick up your trash a couple of hours from now. I worked jobs like this while I was at MIT. I worked in food service and learned how to make a great Reuben sandwich that garners great acclaim throughout my family (I think my wife thinks it’s the only useful thing I learned there). I also worked in a microbiology lab preparing and disposing of growth media. You wouldn’t believe how foul a stainless steel tub full of week old plastic petri dishes that have had God knows what growing on them can smell after you’ve run it through a autoclave to sterilize them before disposing of them. I also drove a cab and checked groceries in Cambridge.
The necessity and techniques of having to do such things would be a revelation and an education in itself to a lot of the middle and upper income students. There actually are some small liberal arts schools that do this already. Don’t show (or slack off) and you flunk your job and can get expelled. The point is that you can’t buy your way out of it by having money. Everyone does it.
Mandolin,
You’re right, that was unnecessary and verging on ad hominem. Whatever ChristinaM33 does for work is none of my business and has no bearing on the merit of her arguments here. I got frustrated because one reason I like commenting here is that the posters and most of the commenters seem to put thought and effort into their writing, even though it’s “just the internet.” People who don’t seem to be trying give the impression that they don’t think one is worthy of their effort.
RonF,
Actually, Charles S was slightly imprecise in saying Harvard was free for a student from a family making $60k or less; the program says the *family* doesn’t have to pay anything. The real situation is closer to what you describe, in which students are expected to contribute a bit.
http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k51861&pageid=icb.page246751
Sample financial aid packages (class of 2012):
Cost of attendance $50,250
Parent contribution -0
Student contribution – 1,500
Need 48,750
Self-help* – 2,500
Total scholarship 46,250
* job and/or loan
Note that the self-help is only 5% — a drop in the bucket compared to the scholarship. This may indicate that Harvard takes a similar “if you work for it you will value it more” attitude.
ChristinaM33, that’s not a bad analysis for research institutions like MIT and the Ivys, but there are plenty of schools that don’t do such work and don’t have to build nanotech labs that also charge large amounts of money.
I’ve been reading stories about people who have borrowed $100K+ and wonder why and what they spent the money on. People who would have to borrow that kind of money are going to be able to get some aid. I am just finishing my 9th year of helping one or the other of my kids through engineering schools (more expensive than the usual curricula) and I have to wonder at the veracity of these stories.
Usually those $100K+ totals are a total for undergraduate and graduate schools of some sort. At “my” university, it’s about $3,000 per sem for undergraduate work (plus books and living expenses and board if one lives on campus. IOW, only the tuition and fees) and $6,000 for graduate work per sem. So, a bachelor’s degree would cost upwards of $24,000 and a Master’s would cost another $24,000 just in tuition and fees alone–at a state school. In this discipline, which is an engineering one but the same cost as any other discipline, it would be close to $50,000 plus room, board and textbooks and a Master’s is pretty much a requirement these days to get anything approaching a good paying position. “Good paying position” is, of course, relative as the students graduating make double or triple what I do–but have a $50,000+ debt that I do not.
State legislatures simply are not funding state higher education in the amounts they used to or need to and so we are in direct competition with private schools for funding from private sources. State school alums don’t seem to be as generous as private school alums for whatever reason and we’re always hurting for money. In order to secure that funding, we do need things like state of the art research centers for the reasons I stated above.
Perhaps the difference in the view of the trades and vocational training is a function of region? I know that the tradesmen/women in New York, when I lived there, made a lot more than they do here in the South. Right to Work is a misnomer, IMO. It’s much more accurate to say “Right to Exploit”. Here in the South, unions are pretty rare and fairly toothless.
On the other hand, from what I saw in New York, you more or less had to know someone in the union in order to secure a place in that union. It was pretty rare for someone to get into the electrician’s union, to pull a name out of a hat, unless that person was related to/might as well be related to someone in the electrician’s union.