Posted on 02/17/2020 7:41:53 AM PST by SeekAndFind
All that does is point to the abject failure of public education, something that my kids aren’t even participating in (we homeschool), yet every one of these kids is expected to take on a significant amount of debt immediately upon entering college—because they “have to.”
Back up. Why is their product such a basic requirement to begin with? You can produce a good product or a crappy one, but if I'm required to buy it regardless, it puts all the power with them, not me or my kids or your kids or anyone else's kids (unless you're wealthy and can pay cash for their education).
Three points
Yes it’s not my problem
College costs have grown exponentially beyond inflation to the point of absurdity.
Not everyone has to go to college. It’s a waste and a vast majority quit.
When I was in college late 70s it was 600 a semester tuition plus books and room and board however you chose it
What has happened thru so many programs mostly tailored for non whites and women that many many students get assistance so those who have to pay full ticket require higher and higher base level tuition to cover those who get subsidized
Or it’s college employee benefits and freebies like Vanderbilt has where their employees get their tuition paid at Vandy if they qualify or their tuition elsewhere is subsidized by vandy
Stuff like that makes ordinary schlubs pay higher tuition
Plus college tenure staff is grossly over compensated
And colleges spend money on causes like foundations do
And on top of it they have enormous endowments
This is how fairly tale land leftists run things
Add to that many colleges have become resorts i.e.High Point. In their quest to attract students building luxury dorm housing, student centers, recreational facilities.
I hustled too...my dad paid tuition and gave me 35 a week
But today you’re making 250-300 a week working like you’re saying, it’ll pay room and board but not tuition too
While I may have sympathy for someone who has incurred large student debt, I simply cannot, and will not support the government bailing these people out with tax dollars, not even a single cent.
Yes, I went into the USN, got out and used the GI Bill, went to a state college for a STEM degree, lived at home with my parents while I commuted to school and held down jobs working a minimum of 20 hours a week (nursing home kitchen, even a UPS dockworker one year, and lab assistant) while working towards two degrees simultaneously.
My parents offered help, but it was clear to me they couldn’t afford it, so my living at home with free room and board was a huge help to me.
My point is, it was all by choice, every component of it, and I wasn’t very sharp, but I just made those choices as they came up. A lot of these people who are complaining I have no doubt are far more equipped than I was at their age to make the right choices. But they didn’t.
I feel sympathy for the graduates, and contempt for the colleges, but I refuse, on conservative principles, to allow that they should be bailed out with government money and rewarded for their conscious, and wrong choices, while those who made responsible choices have to suck up the fact that they paid more for their education than these people who wanted to go to a high end school and take useless courses.
I don’t care about predatory practices on the part of lenders. I managed to avoid signing up for credit cards while I was in college, even though they began to hand them out like popcorn with no credit checking. If you are 18 years old and are old enough to fight and die for your country, then you are old enough to put pen to paper in a legal contract. Nobody twisted your arm to do it, you did it yourself because you wanted to go to Harvard or Yale instead of Fitchburg State or Eastern Connecticut State University, live on campus, and enjoy that life. You signed it yourself if you were 18, or your parents co-signed for it, in which case they should be responsible.
This whole thing pisses me off, and if I had a kid who went through, worked, went to a lesser college for a STEM program, paid for everything and then saw some kid who went to Harvard for a Gender Studies degree get all their loans forgiven, I would be steaming mad.
As a first step, the government should be completely out of higher education. Anytime the government is involved, the costs go up, and are paid by taxpayers, not the institutions or professors themselves. Some may think as a recipient of the GI Bill, that it is hypocritical of me to take this stance, but I see no conflict. Anything we can do to assist veterans, given that we ask them to be prepared to lay down their lives or undergo great hardship, is worth the money and the right thing to do.
Its a good way to have the kid invested in their education.
If your area is 15;hr usual starting pay then your costs are high there too
I’m in Nashville metro
I asked a Publix kid last nite carrying my groceries his pay...in Smyrna TN on Lee Parkway....I was passing thru....Rutherford county from Willson to Williamson
Nice young man goes to MTSU and told me he ...makes 10.30 an hour
A co-worker is lamenting that her daughter dropped out of college because she is making too much working as a waitress at a three-star restaurant in their quaint little toney town.
She routinely makes over $500 in tips on each of Friday and Saturday nights and another $200 during the non-peak hours leading up to dinner.
She got a couple other waitressing gigs at other places M-Th after quitting school and makes about a thousand a week in tips from those.
She’s looking to buy a townhouse, marry her boyfriend, who is in college full-time, and then scale back on waitressing and get some sort of applied science associate’s degree when he graduates and gets a job.
The co-worker thinks this is crazy. I tell her I would be proud of such of a kid.
I’d love to know what the age cohorts of these kids who developed skills in the military or apprenticed or went to trade school, think about this subject. They don’t strike me as suckers.
I’m all ears regarding any good ideas anyone might have.
Cut out all the unnecessary programs and focus on educating the students.
My neighbor, a Prof at a Great Midwestern Land Grant Uni. teaches one class a semester, if that.
The federal student loans are not income or credit based. They could start by lowering the maximum amount allowed.
Perhaps college costs like medical costs are kept artificially high because of the two things they share: 1. No real exposure of what they really cost in terms of exchanging money for services or goods. and 2. Massive government involvement which practically begs for inflating those costs.
Cut out non academic electives. A semester is only 16 weeks. And all these winter, spring and summer breaks for the teachers benefit. It could be done in 3 years
Thanks for pointing this out.
Big Oil = Evil
Big Pharma = Evil
Big College = Wait, what?
My university doesn't have sabbaticals (although a few faculty each year get one semester off as "faculty development leave").
First tell me how good their football team is.
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