Posted on 12/09/2018 7:28:32 AM PST by Kaslin
The United States spends an ungodly sum on colleges and universities. A lot of that money provides little to no benefit to the consumer (student) or to our society. Many students end their college careers steeped in debt. Yet we have a shortage of people in many critical areas. Here is an idea to solve that.
Colleges today offer degrees to people that provide them little opportunity for supporting themselves for the rest of their lives. The idea of a liberal arts education used to make a certain amount of sense. When the cost became enormous with the resulting disaster for the student’s finances, some decisions must be made as to whether there is rationale for this.
At the same time, we do not have enough students to meet our needs in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math).
The proposal is that colleges and universities provide no-tuition degrees that are critical for our country. Reading this some may think this idea aligns with the Bernie Sanders set, but it is radically different. The idea limits no-tuition education to certain degrees like doctors, scientists and engineers which are critical to our future as we are not producing enough home-grown talent and the no tuition degrees would be limited to American citizens. Under this plan, getting a degree in English literature, journalism or law is on your dime.
I have written previously that it is bothersome that our tech companies are always arguing for more visas to bring in foreigners with engineering degrees. Yet few ask why America is not producing enough individuals to get those degrees when there are lucrative careers available.
The National Association of Manufacturing and Deloitte predict the U.S. will need to fill about 3.5 million jobs by 2025; two million of those jobs may go unfilled, due to difficulty finding people with the skills in demand. Though more students in K-12 are focusing on courses like calculus that are needed to qualify for entering these programs in college. Yet a 2017 report from the National Foundation for American Policy found 81 percent of full-time graduate students in electrical and petroleum engineering programs at U.S. universities are international students, and 79 percent in computer science are also foreigners.
Or what about one of the most important positions in our society – doctors. The Association of American Medical Colleges is projecting a shortfall of between 34,600 and 88,000 doctors by 2025. A large reason is the financial commitment it takes to become a doctor. If you are a top tier brain where would you go -- to a hedge fund where you can start at up to $300,000 per year or a doctor where you start your career with up to $300,000 in debt?
This is not a farfetched idea as New York University (NYU) has committed to covering the education costs for its medical students. This is with special funding, but almost all private schools have the endowments to cover the cost of the students at their medical schools. Public schools could just allocate the funds. Here is an idea: Raise the tuition at their law schools which seem to be in high demand, and there is an extremely low need for additional lawyers in our country.
We already fund the education of a certain class of people – our military leaders. We do this because we want to attract the best and the brightest to lead our military. Each branch has an academy that provides a rigorous education to students. We already know the success rates as we have a long history of knowing how many drop out. If we charged for the real cost of West Point or Annapolis, how many great leaders would we lose? Better yet, how many would we get?
Why America would waste our national resources on funding degrees like Asian Studies, Jewish Studies, Black Studies or Hispanic Studies is beyond me. Degrees like that are superfluous and provide you an opportunity to get a job in the department at the university that minted that pointless degree and not much else other than being a bartender. If you want another one of these degrees or in the so-called social sciences where, when you can’t get a job anywhere else you become an IRS auditor, you can pay the tariff. A lot of these degrees are just a plain waste of national resources.
Just think if you were a poor kid from a first generation Hispanic family and your elementary school and your middle school educated you on the opportunity that you can work hard, take the right courses, and by the time you get to high school you are totally prepared and focused on getting a medical degree and without any affirmative action, you become an MD. Would that change things!
There are some programs that are already aimed toward this. Chevron has funded $400 million toward orienting students at a young age toward STEM degrees. The STEM Coalition is a non-profit that emphasizes getting support for more students focusing on a STEM education.
Our higher education system developed on its own for centuries. It is the marvel of the world as countries send their best students to our country to get the quality education we provide at hundreds of schools. It just is not educating American students for our needs.
The world has changed. Our students have accumulated over a trillion dollars in debt and we are not even producing enough skilled people to take care of the needs of our country. The program needs a revamp and this is a prime idea to start doing that.
We need more doctors and not more students with degrees in sports management where the only job they will ever get in sports is working the counter at a Footlocker. We need to stop wasting these key resources on nonsense and produce viable college graduates. Let’s fund the ones that are necessary to us as a society.
I was reading about a wealthy alumni of the University of Chicago who gave $150 to its economics department.
I thought - well, its your money, not mine. But that has got to be the biggest waste of money ever.
>>If you want another one of these degrees or in the so-called social sciences where, when you can’t get a job anywhere else you become an IRS auditor, you can pay the tariff.
My wife had IRS auditors who were afraid of her, she would show them up so badly.
Nurses as well as doctors. And Plumbers, Electricians, and HVAC guys.
Far more Free-Market and less Marxist than most.
The trouble is the left-wing people who run the universities consider the global warming agenda and the queer agenda to be most the critical, not STEM studies.
This is already the model for a few STEM majors in graduate school. 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.
Personally, I think that universities should be required to make full disclosure to prospective students on the employment prospects of their selected major. When the "Occupy Wall Street" protests took place, it seemed that many of the protestors were complaining that they had college degrees but could not get hired anywhere. However, few of them complained that their college degree was in a useless subject, and it is likely that most of them still have not figured that out. Instead of blaming Wall Street for not hiring them, they should have turned that anger and frustration against the colleges and universities that charged them thousands of dollars on worthless degrees.
So, he’s asking for the re-instatement of the old Defense Scholarship that we used to have in the 50s and 60s.
You do that and along with hurting all of the various and sundry social justice degrees (which my school has and nobody is majoring in) you will also destroy English majors and the arts, because these degrees will end up paying higher tuition and housing to offset the much larger number of engineering and medical degree majors.
If you want to lower costs and get more STEM majors work toward standardizing STEM courses which will increase competition and transferability. Make Federal funding contingent upon that transferability. That will break the whole bottleneck apart (and probably wreck a lot of havoc). You will end up with more qualified graduates if you do this right and you will also introduce much-needed competition.
1) the AMA is a cartel that restricts entry (output) of MDs to keep their prices (salaries) high.
2) teaching staff at universities are unionized; that means the prices universities must pay for good STEM faculty are equal to "art" and "polisci" faculty's pay, which causes shortages of good STEM teachers who can command higher compensation in the research/private sector and so don't bother teaching. That means STEM students can't be trained well, and cannot competitively pay a bit more to obtain the high-income degrees wanted like chemical engineering in adequate quantities with excellent instructors.
I'd correct these things first before cheerleading for EVEN MORE government subsidies to specific education sectors.
Undergrad degrees even in STEM fields typically include a heavy dose of PC madness in the form of non-credit but mandatory diversity training as well as degree-credit offerings in liberal arts and social sciences. For that matter, even physics has now been invaded by the social justice warriors. DO NOT SUBSIDIZE ‘HIGHER’ ED ANYMORE! That’s the only way to break the current system.
This suggestion isn’t bad, but it is cou ter to the biggest problem in higher education in that it doesn’t do much to control costs.
If government is to be on the hook for all this higher education (which is a whole problem in itself), it should have a quota system on what it’s paying for. Each year, have some administrative body publish a list of what majors and how many bullets are authorized for funding across the nation. Mechanical engineering majors have x number, maybe 10,000... theatrical dance? Maybe one or two. Publish the list and make it a political football.
Also, make it competitive, students reapply each year and if the GPAs aren’t meeting a threshold, no more funding for that year, either pay for it yourself or work until you can afford the next semester of credits. It wouldn’t close off the pursuit of higher education, students with the financial means to pay themselves, or be funded by the college or private donors would be allowed to do so, but it would tighten up the spigot of subsidies to majors that contribute nothing to the public good, and reduce the overall student debt.
This suggestion, in my mind, also allows the universities a say in their fates, say if Harvard feels like it’s women’s studies program is so important, it can fund scholarships out of its massive endowment. If they don’t want to pay for them outright, they have the means of backing private loans that could (unlike student loans today) be dissolved in bankruptcy or written off as bad debt.
I would recommend to Trump to add 100% free federal certified virtual online degree programs to his list of accomplishments.
This would accomplish:
a)free college degree for all (virtually online)
b)pressure on existing uni’s to lower prices as students opt for free alternatives
c)higher levels of education in general as more associates and bachelor degrees would leave funds for more masters and phds
d)less room for progressive teachings and more for on topic
I’ve read that many liberals are demanding that the term “STEM” no longer be used as it discriminates against the liberal arts (seriously). They want STEM to be replaced by STEMS, with the final S standing for the Social Sciences.
So the proposal by the author would get watered down, sooner or later. And the cost would balloon.
This was the case which established that tests which have "disparate impact"(fewer minorities pass) are unlawfully discriminatory. Prior to this, many companies would just hire people straight out of high school, give them tests, and those with higher IQ would be put on management training tracks.
With one decision, we could undercut the entire rationale for needing a college degree. Companies could go by independently administered tests of literacy and math ability. If you got through four years of college without acquiring the ability to understand what written instructions say, or write a coherent paragraph, you would not get hired regardless of degree. Meanwhile, a home-schooled 18 year old with no degree (but with objectively demonstrated ability) could apply and be hired.
I would also mandate that colleges supply the government with a list of graduates, their majors, and social security numbers. The IRS could then publish post-graduation statistics, by college and major, of average income a year after, and five years after, graduation. It would become painfully obvious which colleges were not worth their tuition costs.
The United States spends an ungodly sum on colleges and universities, we as tax payers are funding social engineering, hatred for America and American values, insurrection, anarchy and moral decline. Remove funding and instruct those at the Universities to come before a newly formed American education commission with their track record and future curriculum for approval.
I know, but what will $150 million do exactly? Economics is philosophy.
If he wanted to make real change, give $1 million to 150 high schools to start technical and entrepreneurship programs. He would literally reach hundreds of thousands of students
A STEM degree takes real work and many students just are lazy.
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