Posted on 04/10/2017 5:30:37 AM PDT by Puppage
“This could work if there could be a very high academic and behavior standard for those granted free tuition. Another aspect would have to be that it would include very high demands for the students to meet.
That won’t happen. With affirmative action and legislators constantly trolling for votes, schools will become impossible for decent students who want an excellent education. Those schools will be over-run by drug dealers, prostitutes and other thugs and thugettes who will hang around and disrupt everything while they collect government benefits.”
This is already happening to a degree. You are correct. How can any young person NOT take advantage of free college? This removes productive young people from the economy for years and ensures the average student in a public college classroom is less capable of performing at a college level.
Also, in NYS, the private colleges have a lot of influence. NYU, Cornell, and Columbia are among those colleges whose grads are prominent in the state.
Will they check immigrant status?
How about criminal records?
If its only going to cost $163 million its not much of a benefit and will apply to few. SUNY undergrad tuition is low anyway, under $7K annual. Its in the ballpark of the Cal State system, but not the UC system.
With 400-500,000 undergrad enrollment (nearly all of whom are “middle class”) at $6K each I figure tuitionless undergrad college would cost more like $3 Billion.
Back in the 70’s they had Regent’s scholarships. It was all merit based and competitive. That was actually a pretty good system. It also made you take more difficult versions of the courses. Helped me validate several classes in college. But now merit is a bad word with the liberals. Just give it to anyone.
Yeah that is a big driver - companies look to bring in cheaper labor. FedGov should amend the H1b requirements so that such foreign specialists would be paid 2x the highest paid American worker in the same job. The companies should have no problem paying the premium for a crucial labor fix.
Public colleges in NY and elsewhere, like CA, are already massively cheaper than private.
Cal State undergrad tuition runs about $7K annual, vs private ones at 40-70K. And UC at 25K.
Can-o-worms there. It won’t be long before current students and recent graduates from state colleges start to lobby for reimbursement of tuition paid within the last 5 years of so - on a “fairness” argument.
“Do you really think it’ll be easy for these schools to deny “misunderstood” students or those with “cultural differences” the right to their free education?”
When I was teaching, the resources for assistance were endless. There was absolutely no excuse to not learn, save for abject unreadiness or incompetence. There were tutors available every night. The library was large. Google et al was available everywhere. I made clear “if completely confused, just submit a file saying ‘I don’t know what to do’ and I’ll walk you thru the whole process personally.” I let every single deadline slip to end-of-semester, every submission was prolifically commented with details about how to make it perfect, every submission could be re-submitted innumerable times. I had students of every cultural difference. The subject was absolutely objective; there was no room for “micro aggression” or some such. I didn’t care if you showed up or not, so long as enough work was submitted well enough to garner a paltry 65%. I literally told students to _sleep_in_class_ if staying awake was a problem.
In my ~5 years of teaching part-time (3 programming courses), I only had ONE student who truly was incapable. He literally had just come from Africa, obviously had a seriously lacking background in mathematics, and had likely signed up for the C++ programming course when he expected something like “Introduction to Microsoft Word” (akin to taking “Internal Combustion Engine Design & Manufacture” when expecting “Driver’s Ed”).
You can provide all the remedial courses you like. We can dumb that $#!^ down to oatmeal. Comes a point where the student is past all excuses. When you finish my 3-course series, you MUST be able to write a simple “fizz buzz” (industry lingo for bare minimal competence) program with unlimited resources handy. If you can’t do something that simple, after all that help, then all the blathering about “cultural differences” and “right to free education” is moot - at some point, to graduate, a college student must show a basic ability to PRODUCE SOMETHING, on their own, as an independent competent adult.
Show up to class.
Use the learning resources prolifically available.
Pass the simple requirements.
Produce something.
That’s it.
All this “free tuition” etc scrapes away all the excuses, and will ultimately reveal the painful truth: some subcultures are productivity-averse and/or fundamentally incompetent, and will self-destruct for refusal to put pencil to paper, or shovel to earth, to produce something of value - something either nutritious or protective directly from the Earth itself, or exchangeable for that sustenance.
Just.
Do.
It.
Do or starve. That’s the objective reality of life. Sorry if the most succinct expression of that objective unbiased reality happens to be legally owned by a corporation.
I had to work 3 jobs at the same time while attending a SUNY college in order to pay for my education without racking up a huge college loan debt.
So, whose back are they going to put this burden on?
True. Tuition rates for SUNY schools are cheap. I paid cash up-front for my wife’s degree from there (and no, I’m not “rich”), around $9K/yr IIRC.
...and she worked her butt off there, finished it in one year flat, got a 4.0, and subsequently was _paid_ by a university to get her MBA (actually, two were fighting over who would pay her more).
And there’s the real secret about “free tuition”: there’s a HUGE amount of free money available to anyone willing to work hard, leverage their features, and move. M’lady got perfect grades at an affordable & not-hard school, hunted around for someplace interested in someone with credentials (foreign, female, 4.0) valuable to the school, and relocated 1000 miles to do it. If you’re going to just C- your way thru, decide “what you want” without serious research, choose a location out of desire and not $$$, heck yeah when it comes to “sign on the dotted line” you’re going to get stuck with a big bill for list price.
You think tuition was high before. Just wait until the price gouging really starts.
That may be true for some. But half the fun of college was being away from home. At least for me.
This is going to work swimmingly like “Start Up NY” ...oh wait.
That ship has already sailed. When I took some college courses in the nineties, there was a whole group of “professional students” who were on welfare and received endless grants for remedial grade school classes.
Never passing, always switching majors, but a whole new customer base to sell drugs to each semester.
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