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College and University Discussion
Shouldn't university be free for some students?
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Anonymous
I suspect 50% of this thread IS the troll. |
Anonymous
We’re not talking about expensive private colleges. Lots of kids have to take out significant loans to go to the instate public. |
Anonymous
Which is wrong. Why is an adult supposed to pay for another adults' stuff |
Anonymous
+1 |
Anonymous
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Anonymous
The discrimination and institutional racism pointed at white immigrant groups stopped. The discrimination and institutional racism pointed at people of color continues. We're not making reparations for slavery. We're trying to correct the current systematic racism in our society. |
Anonymous
So we can agree that college is part of the class system. We live in an oligarchy, not meritocracy |
Anonymous
Sure however everyone here should know this before having kids. |
Anonymous
You don't have to. You can tell your kid to pay for it themselves. They can borrow the money, or work and go to school part time, or go in the military,. It's a choice that UMC parents make. |
Anonymous
Even in cases where state college was not free to instate residents, it was often possible for a person to pay for college on their own through summer jobs and part-time work. Especially at a commuter college where many students lived at home with parents for free or inexpensive room & board, and just had to pay for tuition and books/supplies. Example: In 1980, the average tuition at a 4-year, in-state institution was $1,679, and a dorm room would run you another $975 (https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_320.asp). Minimum wage in 1980 was 3.10. If you could get a 40 hr/wk job in the summer, that would get you about $1000-1200 after taxes. You could probably earn closer to $1500 if you waited tables at a popular restaurant for tips, or took a job making slightly better than minimum wage doing hard labor like working on a construction crew. You could also boost with income from babysitting and other odd jobs -- you're 18/19/20, so you have the time. Combine that with a part time job during the school year for an extra $50 a week or so, and you could cover your tuition, room & board. If you lived at home and had free housing, you could even save some money, or spend the excess on a car. If you were an excellent high school student, you could likely get a merit scholarship for all or part of your tuition, reducing how much you needed to work and increasing how much you could save (or enable you to take unpaid internships in your field of study)/ So a person from a working class or middle class family could do well in high school and go to an in-state school and receive a 4-year degree without going into debt or having to rely on parents to pay or borrow. This was very, very common in the 70s and 80s and how most of the country's teachers, nurses, accountants, low-level office workers, government employees, and other middle class workers were educated. They did not carry thousands of dollars of debt into their 30s and 40s. It enabled upward mobility and also rewarded both good grades and diligence. Now the average cost of in-state tuition is $9,377, and housing costs have skyrocketed to around $15,000 (the average amount an in-state student spends per year at a 4-year institution is $25,707, https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college). Minimum wage has not risen at a similar rate. While in-state tuition alone is more than 4.5x what it was in 1980, the minimum wage is only 1.3x higher than it was over 40 years ago (federal minimum wage is now 7.25). Even in places where the minimum wage has been raised to $15/hr, that's still only 3.8x what it was in 1980. And none of this accounts for housing costs, with on-campus housing now costing an average of 14.4x what it cost in 1980. Merit aid and grants have also been severely reduced, so even a straight A high school student will receive far less tuition assistance from even an in-state college than they did 40 years ago. And all of this assumes that the student can get into college. Many in-state colleges, even non-flagships, that once had a 100% admission rate for in-state students (basically if you could graduate from high school, you could attend an in-state college if you wished) are now competitive for entry and take larger percentages of out of state students, who pay higher tuition. At the same time, many middle class jobs that once required no degree or an associates degree, no require a 4 year college degree or even a masters. Lots of corporate jobs where you used to be able to get an entry level job out of high school and work your way into middle management with a good salary and benefits, now require a college degree. Even many menial jobs. The system is deeply broken, and not just for the dependents of slaves or Native people. It's broken for everyone, across the board, and it no longer serves the needs of society. We are not properly training a workforce and facilitating moving people from dependence on parents to independence. Instead, we are feeding a system that enriches financial institutions and their investors, college administrators, consultants, and other middle men who help to drive up the cost of college without making any effort to make it affordable or accessible to the average student. It's not tenable and if it doesn't change, we will see college attendance and graduation rates plummet, a massive fall in the birth rate, and entire industries struggling to find qualified applicants. It's already started. |
Anonymous
| To poor whites, that will be the straw that broke the camel's back. University should be mostly free to everyone. But hey, we live in a capitalist society so we don't get things like security or opportunity unless you get incredibly lucky with your circumstances. |
Anonymous
I would prioritize paying for students who cannot afford to attend otherwise (like many states are now doing; for students in families with less than 100K or 150K family income) before deciding it should be free to everyone. It's a decision whether we want to do this by economic criteria or if we would want to say we'll pay for poor/middle class White/Asian/Hispanic students but all Black/Native American students? |
Anonymous
Millions of blacks in this country have no ties to slavery. They immigrated here from the Caribbean or recently from Africa. Why do we owe them money exactly? |
Anonymous
Wrong system should be fixed and evolved. |
Anonymous
Uh that doesn't change the fact that the system is wrong. |