So things are getting really fucking real in Montreal.

[waldojeffers1]

anyone with average to below average intelligence can complete post-secondary school

you have never been to a bad school.

[genghis sean]

i'm not gonna read that but if you're pro-students on this you're a retard

well, so are nobel prize winning economists joesph stiglitz, paul krugman and very respected economists like dean baker, robert reich, richard wolff etc. then because all i'm doing is parroting what they've told me. so yeah i'm sure you're the one with the qualifications cooly to be adjudicating levels of retardation.

[cooly]

yes, i am, thank you

[cooly]

as someone who dated the niece of a nobel prize winning economist and spent a fair amount of time with him, those guys can be pretty dumb

[waldojeffers1]

cooly can we just have you admit that you're the 1%

[cooly]

i'm probably one of the least financially well-off boarders because i'm a phd student living off a meager stipend

[cooly]

wait a sec... maybe i SHOULD be really rich tho?... think i can get 100 grand a year if i throw some rocks and make a sign?

[waldojeffers1]

didn't you go to like a fancy boarding school though

or am I misunderstanding something I remember roy said to you

I'm not bitter or anything, I'm just sayin

[genghis sean]

tell us about where your stipend comes from cooly

[cooly]

my school?

[genghis sean]

oh yeah

[waldojeffers1]

I mean it's not really relevant

just because of what oroku said about anyone with below-average intelligence not having an excuse for not finishing secondary school

I live in a town now where less than half of people graduate high school because the schools are bad and the job market isn't good enough for people to want to bother

and what _chimp said about free post-secondary benefiting the middle- and upper-classes disproportionately because they're the ones who go to college, but that's because they get the well-funded high schools, which poor neighborhoods do not have

I don't think anyone who went to a private school or a fairly well-off public school can really go all pulled-up-by-bootstraps in this debate (and I include myself in that, I was in private school through 8th grade and had a very good public high school, and I know I benefited a ton from it)

[sleigh]

things are getting real in the things are getting real in montreal thread

[waldojeffers1]

like I think a lot of the arguments people have in this thread would no longer make any sense if the secondary school system was more equitable and efficient

[genghis sean]

Iand what _chimp said about free post-secondary benefiting the middle- and upper-classes disproportionately because they're the ones who go to college, but that's because they get the well-funded high schools, which poor neighborhoods do not have

keep in mind that this is a fairly distinctly american phenomenon. it doesn't have to be like this. basing school funding on immediate property taxes is a deeply flawed if not unethical system. canada has the second highest high school test results in the world for simple reason that it pays the same dollar amount to every student in the country and it pays teachers enough that it professionalizes the job, attracts good candidates. its actually a very simple fix and its well implemented throughout the world but I fear notions of "how things are now" as being "how they aught to be" are so deeply engrained into american society. think of the social and economic burden off society it is for parents not to have to scramble geographically and pay absorbent private school fees just to get a decent education. i think american liberals should finally come to the realization that this system has largely failed.

[cooly]

btw waldo, i feel live i've responded in a way that might be interpreted as negatively to some of your posts recently (like in the bug thread); i hope you haven't interpreted it that way. i just like posting about ideas and usually your posts provoke some thoughts from me and im interested in your responses. obviously in this thread im just fucking around and not doing that though.

[waldojeffers1]

I think most have realized that, it's just a lot of political problems in fixing it

[genghis sean]

no doubt

[genghis sean]

also, nothing is "getting really fucking real" in montreal at all. the amount of property destruction is in total over many weeks a fraction of one night of looting after the canadiens knocked off the penguins two years ago. just a reflection of the complete lack of perspective in the media and so on.

[waldojeffers1]

bro hugs cooly, no worries. I hadn't noticed any real negativity but I'm not the type to notice that anyway.

I really think the first thing we need in america is for proportional representation to replace the majoritarian electoral system, because diversifying the parties is the only way we'll ever enfranchise these more radical viewpoints and get a feel for how much public support they actually have. with the democrats and republicans all we can really hope for is band aids, treating the symptoms rather than the disease, etc.

[cooly]

just gonna ask a question here that i don't mean to be offensive, because i don't understand a lot of the motivations of this stuff:

i think the reason there is a lot of hostility to this sort of stuff is that not every job that needs to be done requires a college education, and there's no real need for the government to pay for people to get degrees that aren't going to translate into higher utility for the country as a whole. in particular this worry extends to people pursuing degrees in things like english and art history, most of whom are not going to become professors or researchers in those fields. that sort o thing also extends to things like physics, mathematics, linguistics, and philosophy. why isn't the best option to allow the cost of tuition to raise significantly and using a chunk of that money to provide full scholarships either to people who are pursuing degrees in fields that will more directly serve the populace (engineering, pre-med, etc.) or are particularly talented in their field and could not otherwise afford school reasonably?

[genghis sean]

enter the marxian dialectic

[sleigh]

who would you put on the council to determine each major's social utility

[sleigh]

what if a bunch of lobbies get stooges on the council and all of a sudden you're subsidizing cosmetology certifcates and nothing else

[waldojeffers1]

just gonna ask a question here that i don't mean to be offensive, because i don't understand a lot of the motivations of this stuff:

i think the reason there is a lot of hostility to this sort of stuff is that not every job that needs to be done requires a college education, and there's no real need for the government to pay for people to get degrees that aren't going to translate into higher utility for the country as a whole. in particular this worry extends to people pursuing degrees in things like english and art history, most of whom are not going to become professors or researchers in those fields. that sort o thing also extends to things like physics, mathematics, linguistics, and philosophy. why isn't the best option to allow the cost of tuition to raise significantly and using a chunk of that money to provide full scholarships either to people who are pursuing degrees in fields that will more directly serve the populace (engineering, pre-med, etc.) or are particularly talented in their field and could not otherwise afford school reasonably?

I think a free-college program would have to go hand-in-hand with more government funding to those departments that are considered useful, so that we're producing more capable/competent educated people instead of just depressed hipsters like most of us are. and I also think entrance to university should probably be stricter and the standards higher (but again, before we can enact that the secondary schools need to be improved to the extent that everyone has a fair shot, otherwise we're on some "if I were a poor black kid" shit)

so in effect I think I'm pretty close to agreeing with you, except that I don't think rising tuition and universities acting as businesses is the best way to accomplish this, I think our education program can be handled better than that through actual planning

I do also think there's a benefit to having a populace educated in stuff like history, english, linguistics though.

[genghis sean]

just gonna ask a question here that i don't mean to be offensive, because i don't understand a lot of the motivations of this stuff:

i think the reason there is a lot of hostility to this sort of stuff is that not every job that needs to be done requires a college education, and there's no real need for the government to pay for people to get degrees that aren't going to translate into higher utility for the country as a whole. in particular this worry extends to people pursuing degrees in things like english and art history, most of whom are not going to become professors or researchers in those fields. that sort o thing also extends to things like physics and philosophy. why isn't the best option to allow the cost of tuition to raise significantly and using a chunk of that money to provide full scholarships either to people who are pursuing degrees in fields that will more directly serve the populace (engineering, pre-med, etc.) or are particularly talented in their field and could not otherwise afford school reasonably?

there doesn't seem to be any lack of people taking "practical degrees" though. the percentage of people taking liberal arts degrees in the 50s and 60s was typically around the high twenties/low thirties percentage wise. now it's closer to 20%. i think the percentage of people who graduate with a degree make up around 25% of the population, meaning only about 5% of the total population is walking around with a liberal arts degree.

you can see a degree as only the direct economic utility of it, which obviously a large number of people do, but there's something to be said for what society as a whole gains by having an informed population with well-developed faculties for critical thought. obviously business naturally wouldn't really give a shit about that. so we basically have societies where like a grand total of probably around ~7%-15% has ever taken an Intro to Political Science or intro to an economics or sociology class. I think this lack of the very basic concepts and mechanics of ideas ends up having a very pernicious effect on society itself. you have people working on their engineering masters who couldn't tell you the difference between classical liberalism and social democracy, and i think that's a problem.

really the education system should probably do away with some of its 13th century structural leanings. grades 11 and 12 should be combined with the first year of university that gives everyone some basic overview of government, politics, sociology, psychology, history and so on. I think high school is generally wholly insufficient on this front. at that point the population goes on to technical/vocational training.

the real world economic incentive for 'practical degrees' will always be overwhelmingly powerful.

[cooly]

edit: this is to waldo

we probably agree totally about the ideal situation then (i was struggling to write my question in a way that didn't sound like i was saying that studying history/english etc on its own right is not valuable.)

i think what we (might) disagree about is that i don't see giving the students what they want here to be an effective way of getting closer to that end point. what they seem to want is "everything like it is now, but cheaper." i think using the universities as a business is a more effective way of getting closer to that situation because it has the capacity to incentivize certain (more practical etc.) courses of study and disincentivize others using cost as a bargaining chip. so you could start to change ingrained mentalities about what college is for and what you'e supposed to get out of it, which seems to be a big part of the problem. giving the students what they want here seems like it reaffirms the idea that yeah, it's chill to become a depressed hipster on the backs of society.

[iambic]

Ireland has free post-secondary for your first degree, but in our current climate of austerity they've gotten around that by raising the annual student contribution/registration fee by a couple of grand

we do have a problem with too many arts students and not enough engineering/science undergrads and iirc they try to rig this somewhat with grants and incentives

[Paul Simon]

[waldojeffers1]

I don't know if running the universities as businesses really makes more people choose practical/financially rewarding fields of study though. most of the students are choosing their universities and majors before they've really grasped the magnitude of their debt or the implications of opportunity cost yet. their financial choices are likely to be motivated by either what their parents can afford and demand of them, or how much credit they can get from banks that really don't care what they study. so I don't think higher tuition translates into more responsible student behavior. in fact I think that's a big part of the problem.

also a lot of the universities in that environment are likely to invest more money on their advertising / merchandising / building a big football stadium rather than improving their academics

that's why I think we would benefit from having more planning, of more government investment in the universities (with the provision that a certain amount of it is spent in certain ways), of encouraging more activism and responsibility in the students from their first year rather than letting them get cynical and disillusioned in their sophomore/junior years (I may be projecting here)