Re: Curbing college costs--a three step approach

AZDuffman wrote
Rod Speed <rod.speed....@xxxxxxxxx> wrote
AZDuffman wrote

There is always talk of rising college costs and no doubt Obama will
just propose more spending. To me, anyways, that is the total wrong

1. No grants or loans your freshman year. ZIP!

The voters wont buy it.

True, it would take some leadership.

'leadership' wont fix what the voters wont buy.

But why not,

Because the voters wont buy it.

after all we keep hearing from the left that "we are not asked to sacrifice enough."

Who cares what the left say ? No one much in the US.

I remember when I was in college how much money was wasted
on party animals just going to "13th Grade." If students had more
skin in the game they would be more serious.

Using that mindless line, the correct approach would be no funding at all.

Makes a hell of a lot more sense to fund only those that get adequate grades etc.

But you need to avoid yet more grade inflation.

That isnt even possible with any approach to funding.

That's why I'd just put it at "satisfactory academic progress"

Impossible to quantify. Particularly when those party animals you dont
want to fund have always been able to cram and get thru anyway.

and leave the GPA to the schools. Sooner or later if everyone keeps
getting 4.0s the value of the school in the public mind should go down.

Nope, the real world doesnt work like that. We always see a
progression to more and more requiring college degrees for stuff
like realtors etc who dont need a college degree to do their job.

Meanwhile, those who shouldn't go anyways
will be less liklely to go, reducing demand.

In practice most of those would be funded by their parents anyway.

Fine, at least I am not paying for it.

Trouble is that those whose parent cant pay for it and who arent
just party animals and who need the qualifications like engineers and
doctors etc dont get qualified because their parents cant pay for it.

Its never desirable that only the kids of the rich get qualified,
essentially because those are much less likely to need to work etc.

The last thing we need is for the doctors etc to
be kids of the rich and kids of rich foreigners etc.

3. Change from "expected contribution" to "max contribution." At
least when I was in, and I doubt it has changed, you filled out a form
and were told your "expected family contribution." Grants covered
the rest. So a big incentive to pick an expensive school. Change all
that to keep what you are expected to kick in, but a max. Say $10K/
yr. After that, you want to go to MIT you gotta find the cash elsewhere.

That would see the rich kids get a big advantage over the kids who arent rich kids.

You are going to have that anyways.

Nope, some countrys have a system of college funding where the rich get no advantage at all.

Again, the goal is to get a more cost-effective post-secondary system.

Thats just one of the real goals. The main goal is
to qualify those who will be most useful to society.

Why send someone unprepared to Cornell when a state school will serve them better?

Using that line, there should be no tax incentives for operations like Cornell at all.

They should have to prove that they can deliver more than a state school can.

And by definition that wont be possible.

This would have the added benefit of getting us out of the mentality
of "pretending everyone needs to go to an Ivy League School."

Bet it wouldnt.

Somehting has to sooner or later.

Nope, there will always be that sort of variation in the opinion of
the great mass of those unqualified to judge the quality of schools.

It isnt even possible to rationally quantify the results schools get.

I'd like a politician to show how it would be better for young people to take up a trade.

No politician can ever do something like that. What drives it is societal attitudes and while
ever a brain surgeon is considered to be better than a plumber, you have a problem.

Its just as true even when comparing pilots and bus drivers.
There is a real sense in which more is required of a bus driver
than a pilot, but that is irrelevant to societal attitudes and even
what the passengers feel the respective driver should be paid etc.

In spades with crap like hot shot lawyers etc.

More people with skills as welders, plumbers, and electricians would lower unemployment

No it wouldnt. The unemployment rate is determined by who chooses to pay to get that work done.

and maybe help get some manufacturing base back in the USA.

Nope, wont help worth a damn on that either. The VERY fundamental
problem is that while ever the cost of even minimum wage work is ten
or a hundred times more than work in a chinese factory, you're fucked.

It didnt matter while china was stupid enough to believe that communism was
their salvation, but once they woke up and smelt the coffee and decided that
capitalism works much better, you're fucked with manufacturing.

All the US can actually do is concentate on work that cant be exported
in enough volume to matter, like most medical services, many services
like realtors etc where most dont want to deal with someone in india etc.

Hardly anyone will be interested in shipping their geriatric
relatives off to india or china to a nursing home there etc.

There's still plenty of those sort of work once people get out of their current funk about the economy.

We did after all see the unemployment rate bottom at 4.x% with an immense rate of legal and illegal immigration.

The US economy aint dead yet.


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