Posted on 12/09/2018 7:28:32 AM PST by Kaslin
The problem is an easy fix; make colleges and universities responsible for the debt students take on for their education.
Its called “having skin in the game “.
That statement is more truth than poetry. If you really think about it, socialism is reactionary against “the progress of science and useful arts.” First thing they want to do is fix wages and prices . . . which is the assumption that no new products (which don’t have historical prices) are brought online - and no improvements to existing products will justify higher prices to such products. The things that STEM are about, are things which socialism can’t account for in central planning.Why socialists need capitalism
- The longer socialists wait to take over the power, the more technologically advanced society they will get to conserve.
- It is more beneficial for the people of all classes, including socialists, to delay the socialist revolution indefinitely.
- To delay the socialist takeover is also better for the environment because only capitalism has the power of innovation and the resources to create less polluting technologies, materials, and alternative energy sources. To impose socialism right away would mean to put the planet at risk of never resolving the environmental problems we face today.
- Since capitalism generates goods and services that socialists later designate as "human rights," it is also in the interest of human rights to keep capitalism around indefinitely.
For all my adult life, controlled fusion power has been “just ten years away” - and it still is. But Scott Adams, knowing that history, says that people believes tell him that fusion power is no longer a science problem but an engineering problem. That is, that fusion power might actually be only ten years down the road.
Commercial fusion power would/will be a game changer requiring the flexibility of capitalism to exploit fully.
Make student loans discharged in bankruptcy, do not have government guarantee, but instead have the school cosign. Overnight, schools will stop admitting unqualified students, and offering worthless majors.
Each year, have some administrative body publish a list of what majors and how many bullets are authorized for funding across the nation. <<<<
Do you realize you’ve slid 1/2 down the “slippery slope” with that statement?
Solution..just make the college math and science classes easier and let them be taken on-line with open book tests.
Just to be clear, that was a mistype of ‘billets’, or slots for people to fill.
I don’t believe any ideologically pure solution exists or can exist, and I’m not treating this forum like a fantasy league. There are many many years of societal change that would have to occur to get government out of higher education, it took many years to get this intertwined.
Re: “We do not have enough students to meet our needs in STEM.”
Total bunk!
Only elite American students can make a good living in science and technology occupations.
“Average” American scientists and engineers have to compete against hundreds of thousands of foreign students and legal foreign workers.
We have a “shortage” of American STEM students only because they know America has a massive oversupply of cheap foreign STEM laborers.
Re: “My tuition and a stipend were covered when I was in graduate school, while those getting PhDs in English or Sociology had to pay their own way. This has been the case for decades.”
Another little known fact....
Foreign PhD STEM students almost always get the same tuition and stipend that Americans get!
Hilldale has set up their own group of lenders. If colleges are either unable or unwilling to do the same, then loan interest rates from commerical lenders and credit unions can be based on their marketability. You want to major in nursing or mechanical engineering, your rate is 2.5%. Political science (Al Gore), then your rate is 18%. Victimology, then 30%.
Employability and academic progress will drive the rates.
Another alternative is to do what the public university system in North Dakota does. They have a state owned bank which students in the university system can opt in to. They also have a surplus of universities relative to their population so they can service nearby states with the opposite problem (Wyoming). This combination of competition and capital (as well as a shortage of fluff courses and diversity officers) makes them some of the lowest price universities in the nation.
A student who opts in and gets their loans through the Bank of North Dakota gets a lower rate than the federal system in most cases but, in turn, is restricted in what they can borrow. The borrowing ceiling is gradually increased as a student progesses in their field or goes into a field with better employment prospects.
They use borrowing maximums rather than interest rates as suggested in my post #69. Since the cost of attending college in North Dakota is so much lower than the national average, the borrowing limits usually aren't a problem, particularly since most students are expected to work part-time. The default rate on student loans underwritten by the Bank of North Dakota is also typically just above zero.
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