dagblog - Comments for "Fear and Loathing of Public Policy: Shrinking Access to Post Secondary Education = Permanent Underclass"

?It is not enough to succeed.

LarryH — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 15:32:44 +0000

In reply to Fear and Loathing of Public Policy: Shrinking Access to Post Secondary Education = Permanent Underclass

“It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.” Gore Vidal

Sometimes it seems that this dark realism from Vidal has become the mantra of modern America. Think of the tea party; or of the bitter and misdirected efforts toward “welfare reform”; or the very nature of success on Wall Street itself.

I remember the energy and optimism of post –WW II America. Everyone could dream of a better life and post-high school education and training was a big part of the opportunity to realize that dream. No more. Now opportunity is a zero sum game and while much of this is due to the inherent fallacy of continued economic expansion and resource utilization, it has also become the spirit of our times. Life and all its potentialities are more and more being caste as a zero sum game. As George Carlin put it “Today you can believe in the American dream but you have to be asleep.” It is time to rethink our “realisms” and to forge a new wisdom, one that we can pass on to our young as they enter the world.

P.S. Pay no attention to the commentator named Richard Day. I have it on good authority that he made his fortune driving an ice cream truck in Arkansas. He only vacations in Minnesota and his law degree was earned while he was serving time in Federal prison for tax evasion.

You said it, Richard. Wise

cmaukonen — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 14:21:28 +0000

In reply to As usual, I am going to go

You said it, Richard. Wise blogger, you are...yes.

To play devil's advocate -

Verified Atheist — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 11:50:14 +0000

In reply to Only the second of those

To play devil's advocate - not that I'm accusing you of being the devil - one thing hurting those with only a high school diploma is the surplus of those with a college degree. For example, there's no reason why a college degree is required to be a movie theater manager, but if a district manager is hiring and s/he's got two choices, one with a college degree and one without, s/he'll be more likely to hire the one with a college degree. Thus, it helps (on average) the individual, but not necessarily society.

I happen to think that, up to a point, it also helps society, but the employment/wage numbers I cite are not germane to that argument.

Only the second of those

Verified Atheist — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 10:48:44 +0000

In reply to This for one. Despite

Only the second of those addresses the cost of a college education (in the part you didn't highlight), and its citations for that claim are dubious (the Cato institute?), as they neglect the fact that costs have gone up for public colleges as well. The other two address the value of a college education. They also neglect to include the following statistics:

For 2010 (when that data was taken from), unemployment is significantly lower for those with a bachelor's degree (5.4%) than for those with only a high school degree (10.3%). Those without a high school degree did significantly worse (14.9%) and those with a doctoral degree did significantly better (1.9%). Similarly, the median pay for those with a bachelor's degree was $1,038/week, whereas for those with only a high school degree it was $626/week. Again, those without a high school degree did significantly worse ($444/week) and those with a doctoral degree did significantly better ($1,550).

And that's focusing only on the monetary value of a college education. No, I agree with you that a college education isn't for everyone. But, on average, it definitely imparts value.

As usual, I am going to go

Richard Day — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 04:39:35 +0000

In reply to Fear and Loathing of Public Policy: Shrinking Access to Post Secondary Education = Permanent Underclass

As usual, I am going to go outside the bounds and skip the arguments....well maybe not as unusal.

The secrets of the universe are present on the web already.

We do not need Universities at all!

Oh there are secrets kept from the universal web based upon corporate copyright and all.

But all could be made available with a few key strokes on a pc in elite heaven somewheres.

You do not need a university to present sermons on Twain, or Socrates, or Lincoln...

Or anybody else for that matter.

The latest in physics or medicine or biology or chemistry or a hundred other sciences are locked in corporate oblivion.

But anything written up to the 1920's or so is available on line.

Education and education and education! ha

Oh I got a degree from ITT crapola.

Big frickin deal.

Smaller colleges pay to have some of the new secrets unveiled.

But smaller colleges do not charge the student with 100,000 bucks a year to get a slogan attached to their degrees.

The university system in this country is bullshite.

There is no other way to describe it.

Fraternities and elite customs have nothing to do with knowledge.

That is all I got right now!

Add to that all the

cmaukonen — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:20:18 +0000

In reply to The costs are rising because

Add to that all the information that is available over the internet. Ferreting out the good stuff from the bad is a challenge, I will grant you. But an easily learned skill. With the information necessary to accomplish most technical and non-technical endeavors.

From baking brownies to writing DSP routines. Which is why the hackers are generally 10 steps ahead of all those highly paid programmers.

This for one. Despite

cmaukonen — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:09:21 +0000

In reply to The costs are rising because

This for one.

Despite frequent claims, it is simply untrue that we have seen a three-decades-long radical increase in employers’ demand for four-year college graduates. The widespread (even before the recession) utilization of college students and graduates working as unpaid (many unlawfully so) “interns” is evidence enough—if employers desperately needed these workers, they would pay them.

In fact, the trends of the last 10 years contradict this story. The wages and benefits received by young college graduates fell over the 2000-2007 business cycle and in this recession. Moreover, the wages of all college graduates have been flat over the last 10 years, with those for men having markedly declined. This should not be surprising as the relative demand for college graduates, according to Harvard’s Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz, grew more slowly in the 2000s than in any postwar decade, following relatively slow growth in the 1990s. A major increase in the supply of college graduates would further erode the wages and benefits new college graduates obtain and drive down the wages of all college graduates, especially among men.

And this. {A PDF}

Because governments pay a large portion of the cost of a college education, students and their families do not bear its true cost. For that reason, they tend to make poorer choices – both with their dollars and the amount of effort they put into college. Furthermore, students and their families often have an exaggerated or inaccurate view of the benefits that can be expected from a college education. The belief that obtaining a college degree is the only way for young people to find good employment and enjoy a prosperous life is widespread, but mistaken. Having a college degree is neither necessary nor sufficient for success.

Oh and this to.

The fact is that since 1990 or so the U.S. job market has been characterized not by a general rise in the demand for skill, but by “hollowing out”: both high-wage and low-wage employment have grown rapidly, but medium-wage jobs — the kinds of jobs we count on to support a strong middle class — have lagged behind. And the hole in the middle has been getting wider: many of the high-wage occupations that grew rapidly in the 1990s have seen much slower growth recently, even as growth in low-wage employment has accelerated.

Why is this happening? The belief that education is becoming ever more important rests on the plausible-sounding notion that advances in technology increase job opportunities for those who work with information — loosely speaking, that computers help those who work with their minds, while hurting those who work with their hands.

Some years ago, however, the economists David Autor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane argued that this was the wrong way to think about it. Computers, they pointed out, excel at routine tasks, “cognitive and manual tasks that can be accomplished by following explicit rules.” Therefore, any routine task — a category that includes many white-collar, nonmanual jobs — is in the firing line. Conversely, jobs that can’t be carried out by following explicit rules — a category that includes many kinds of manual labor, from truck drivers to janitors — will tend to grow even in the face of technological progress.

And here’s the thing: Most of the manual labor still being done in our economy seems to be of the kind that’s hard to automate. Notably, with production workers in manufacturing down to about 6 percent of U.S. employment, there aren’t many assembly-line jobs left to lose. Meanwhile, quite a lot of white-collar work currently carried out by well-educated, relatively well-paid workers may soon be computerized. Roombas are cute, but robot janitors are a long way off; computerized legal research and computer-aided medical diagnosis are already here.

For starters.

Donal... What happened was my

trkingmomoe — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 20:12:32 +0000

In reply to My little aspy says she

Donal... What happened was my grandson saw her sitting in his AP English class last year and thought she was cute. She didn't want anything to do with him. He won her over because they had the same interests. I think all the steam punk jewlery he was making for her helped. With in a few months she had a after school job and was planning to follow him. She hated the high school they were in and skipped a lot and was living for the day that she could quit until she met him. All he did before he met her was sit at home with the internet, video games and go to steam punk and comicon events. I just never expected him to find someone so well suited for him. So you just never know.

The costs are rising because

Verified Atheist — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 16:42:36 +0000

In reply to The costs are rising because

The costs are rising because it's being over sold as some great guarantee to a perfect life.

I've seen lots of analysis on the reasons that costs are rising (some of it posted here), but no one seems to have reached the conclusion you have. What do you base that conclusion on?

Wrong, factually incorrect,

tmccarthy0 — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 16:04:23 +0000

In reply to The costs are rising because

Wrong, factually incorrect, and off base. The costs are rising because vocational, technical, colleges and universities are receiving less funding from the state and federal governments. I mentioned above I believe that the states used to fund those programs at an 88% level, and now we are down to 61% and falling. What a sloppy analysis, one that show you don't have a grasp of the facts.

It is about a pattern of refusing to fund our institutions to benefit all of society. This began in the 70's of course, and has continued full bore today. One of the results of the feds and many states continually cutting taxes during these years, because of the insistence of citizens who had been convinced by Republicans and conservative and people like Grover Norquist, that we don't need to pay for anything and all our money is ours and ours alone and taxes have no benefit to society, and that meme has held on. Now people are seeing the results of those laissez fair policies. One of the results is that people are being priced out of post-secondary education which includes vocational and technical education.

You will have to attempt to prove the "costs rising correlates to overselling education because it is a guarantee for a perfect life" but somehow I don't think you will have the ability to prove that statement, ever.