Posted on 10/10/2007 1:48:25 PM PDT by bs9021
When you pay dearly for a room at a luxury hotel or a meal at a five-star restaurant, the price tag may sting but at least you can see, feel, taste, touch and smell what you are getting. The same is not the case in higher education.
“We don’t have answers to parents who ask us if spending one-third of their income on a college education is worth it,” Sarah Martinez Tucker of the U. S. Department of Education said last month at the American Enterprise Institute. Statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that the U. S. ranks:
• First in government spending on education;
• 18th in high school graduation rates;
• 10th among countries in 25-35 year-olds who have college degrees; and
• First among countries with 55-65 year-olds who have college degrees.
“This is the first generation in our history that isn’t doing as well as the last,” Tucker, the former CEO of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, observes. Nor, as we have seen, does the problem seem to be a niggardly federal government.
“In the last decade we have tripled aid,” Tucker said at AEI. “We have 55 percent more students and are giving three times as much aid.”
(Excerpt) Read more at campusreportonline.net ...
We should tripple spending on _____________________.
That will bring costs down.
The cost to send a student to a private college equates to a $250 / night hotel for two semesters. It is out of control and people need to start talking about it.
LMBO!!
When hiring, I look primarily to see if a graduate worked while in school. I give greater credence to candidates who worked their way through college as opposed to getting a free ride from mom and dad.
I consider work experience to be far greater an asset than the “pedigree” of the school they attended.
I agree.
You can’t compare going to college to spending nights in a five-star hotel.
I mean, five-star hotels don’t make you listen to some bitter ex-hippies drone on about how they hate the United States. Please be more respectful of the hotel business!
(Just joking around.)
Genetics being genetics, if the parents can’t figure this out without Government help, sending their children to college is probably not a good investment.
There is a world of difference between a college student who has worked through school and one who has not.
My kid went to college on a merit scholarship. He did work a very part-time job (16 or less hours per week), but in order to maintain his scholarship he had to keep a high GPA. It's hard to juggle 18 credit hours, a job, and maintain a high GPA. So our advice to him was if the job interfers with the education, quit the job (he was able to maintain the GPA with the low work hours)...the education was the primary goal at this point in his life. And it paid off in the end because his high GPA and GMAT scores are allowing him to attend grad school, tuition free.
If there had been a World Wide Web in those days, I'm not sure I would have graduated.
-ccm
What about a college student that didn't work while at school, but worked vacations + summers.
That's what I did. Got a job co-ordinating conventions during the summer, and doing prep work for the next summer during winter break. Basically worked 80 hour weeks...didn't pick up the whole tab for college, picked up about 1/2-2/3 of it.
Over the short term, I should have gotten an internship - would have helped me find a job in my field faster. Long term....the summer position was invaluable, as it taught me how to work with people, how to work with people that I didn't particularly like, and how to work *for* customers (conventioners). Good stuff, all of it.
That's rather misleading. This country is full of smart people who went to high school and college elsewhere, then came here to seek their fortune. It's not like our elders went to college in greater numbers than we in our 30's and 40's did, and certainly not more than kids do nowadays.
To the contrary, there are more people in college than ever before, including many who manifestly have no business being there.
-ccm
A new approach is needed but I am not sure who will take the risk and provide startup capital. Everyone seems married to the current approach. Here are some ideas to reduce costs and improve quality:
- Commoditize the knowledge
- Unbundle services
- Use computing and communication technology to provide interaction
- Provide standardized outcomes assessments to ensure quality
HATE CRIME!
Someone just did a study - that if you borrow for college, you only break even rather than going to work straight after high school. The loss of 4 years of work time, plus payment on debt, plus less bang for the buck in social security and higher taxes = break even.
That’s an average, of course. Doctors make a killing, and a profit. German polka majors lose big time.
There are only two kinds of votes that count on this topic: the government's and the public's wallet. As a conservative, I do not consider the former to be an option, but the latter...
Why does the government give Harvard 300 million dollars a year? The endowment is in the billions.
And going into debt for college; that's just crazy.
Ol' Slick said --All who want should be able to attend college
They are ATTENDING! Learning? Solly Cholly....
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