Free education is available everywhere in the US, the HE industry sells the idea that you need a teacher holding your hand, walking you like a child down the path to an education but that is just marketing. There is free information, textbooks, online video training and so much more. People are just lazy and don't apply themselves. Student loans are the fools choice not the only option.
I agree fully with your first point but not at all that the students paying for an education are lazy. Most students I know are working PT while going into debt for school FT. The intensity leaves them unable to take full advantage of what they're learning. By the time they graduate and find there's no jobs, they're burnt out and never want to see a book again. Unless they go into internships where they work like dogs for free so they can get into another school and more debt.
Everything you're talking about could be put into curricula, that are developed by teachers outside of the Carnegie-oligarchical system and recognized by employers and mentors in community economies that don't serve the oligarchy. It could include small inexpensive classes / learning groups that provide community (and potential sex partners, let's be real about what college is for ;-) and an international network of 'sibling cities' for lifelong edu-travel and edu-tourism.
It shouldn't have to be one or the other--corporate profit-driven university or taking on all the risk and isolation of uncredentialed, self-driven, self-organized, self-authorized learning. At least that's what I'd want if I was starting out.
Perhaps lazy was a bit bombastic, perhaps better to say they didn't investigate any alternatives. My sons have avoided student loans, taught themselves and are doing fine. As an engineer I have to study everyday, if I don't stay up to date with the latest studys I become dated and irrelevant. Saying they are burnt out after school is an excuse.
Like I said there are fully accredited on line colleges that provide a BA/BS level education for free they are just unaccredited. In the technical industry I work in we don't really look at transcripts, don't really care about your college. Almost exclusively we look at real time in person performance of the duties. Can you do the job ? Can you do the job while a group of your peers is watching ? If you succeed or fail at doing the job, where you went to school is truly irrelevant.
School should be free, the best way to make that happen is online. The barrier to a totally free accredited online bachelors degree is government accreditation not being granted to solutions outside the university system. Once again the problem is government not for profit industry.
Hi, notBob. My daughters have also managed to graduate without debt and succeed, so I don't have a personal pony in this race. But I don't take their success as a sign the system is working. As a former high tech Dir of HR, I know every technical position I advertised needed a BA/BS. These days degree checks are routine and automated. How does an uncredentialed person get that first technical job?
I'm guessing that you haven't read my Reinventing Education episode when you say the problem isn't for-profit 'industry' (have to put that word in quotes since it implies actual work being done other than raking in) but is gov't. I go into some depth but also just scratch the surface on how for-profit industry drives the degree factories we call college. They don't call it the Carnegie Curriculum because they like the alliteration.
I think it's a false dichotomy, however, between 'we and our kids did it so anyone who can't, it's their own fault' and Biden's blanket transfer of $20K in debt to taxpayers. I'd like to see a more nuanced discussion of the problem in the context of changing the economy from serving profits to serving people.
Let me try to understand your logic here: Government owns and operates many universities around the nation. Government controls the accreditation of which schools are valid and which are not. Government pays the salaries of the staff and administration of those schools. 75% of all university students attend a government run university. Government either guarantees or directly lends to students in the vast majority of cases.
Your claim is that the government is guiltless is the desecration of these schools and it is all the fault of the capitalist driven model of education ?
By government, do you mean specific people, specific roles, or the system itself?
If the system, I have plenty of criticism to go around for that, which I focus on in this episode: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/the-constitutional-convention-coup. It explains how our system was designed to serve bankers and merchants, now called corporations, by the framers of the Constitution.
If you mean specific roles, the Regents control the UC system here in California. My education episode goes into how they profit from construction loans, student loans and high tuition.
I would never claim that the system of gov't is guiltless because I'm all about changing systems. But your claim is that students who can't afford college just shouldn't go. Is that right?
Hello, Hubris! Thanks for responding, it's always great to hear from you. In the US what we have is the worst of both worlds. Our money is generated by bankers, who issue mortgages out of thin air that we repay with 30 (or 60 combined) years of labor. In the meantime they retain free ownership of the house and have no social obligation for how they use their profits, which are equal to the cost of the house (and 94% of all dollars issued). That's not just capitalism but feudalism.
But then, from the money we eke back from them with our labor, we pay taxes, from which we expect to socialize the costs of all the harms they've created: poor health, homelessness, need for corporate working papers (aka degree), aging useless eaters, etc.
What my system does, which could be called anarchy, federalism, libertarianism, community self-governance or small-scale sovereignty, is take back mortgages and money creation as THE exclusive and essential privilege of gov't, and decentralizes it. Then it allows communities to generate a local credit into the community that can't exceed the debts, taxes and cash reserves.
How a community uses that credit is up to them but I recommend modeling the plan before implementing it because the goal is to maximize the times your credit circulates before getting sucked out. The education episode talks about some of my ideas for my community but this one on The Economics of Anarchy, talks more about the whole plan: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/the-economics-of-anarchy
Oh, please! You've fallen for the "money is created by bankers" myth, completely overlooking the US Constitution: Article 1, Section 8, which states "Only Congress has the right to mint coin [create the currency - they used coins in 1783]."
Learn Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and get your facts straight.
Susan, we already had a very long conversation about this on another thread, where I talked about how that's been interpreted literally by the Supreme Court as only coins and we talked at length about MMT. But the question under discussion is whether students are at fault for getting a college education at all, whether government is at fault, or whether a for-profit economic system is at fault. What do you (and MMT) say about that, and how would education be (or is already) funded under MMT?
"Under MMT": Since MMT Is an empirical description of the current monetary system, whatever way college is being funded at this time is the way it's being funded "under MMT."
However long our former discussion may have been, it seems that I need to give you some more time or information to understand that MMT isn't something you "do." It's a description of what already IS.
"An empirical description" means that MMT economists look at the monetary system the way another scientist would look at a microorganism through a microscope. It's not something that you implement, any more than a microscope is something that you implement.
It's just looking and describing.
This is a different approach than classical economics, in which a Great Man would describe his theory of how the economy works, or how it SHOULD work, and then subsequent scholars would argue for or against the theory, until another Great Man came along and offered a new theory.
MMT scholars stick to What Is.
Does this help to explain why asking how college would be funded "under MMT" is not a question? It simply doesn't apply.
P.S. The Supreme Court is now into a very literal interpretation of the Constitution in many areas.
Free education anyone?
I got my free education back in Eastern Europe, where we also had free healthcare...
What MONSTERS those commies were!
Free education is available everywhere in the US, the HE industry sells the idea that you need a teacher holding your hand, walking you like a child down the path to an education but that is just marketing. There is free information, textbooks, online video training and so much more. People are just lazy and don't apply themselves. Student loans are the fools choice not the only option.
I agree fully with your first point but not at all that the students paying for an education are lazy. Most students I know are working PT while going into debt for school FT. The intensity leaves them unable to take full advantage of what they're learning. By the time they graduate and find there's no jobs, they're burnt out and never want to see a book again. Unless they go into internships where they work like dogs for free so they can get into another school and more debt.
Everything you're talking about could be put into curricula, that are developed by teachers outside of the Carnegie-oligarchical system and recognized by employers and mentors in community economies that don't serve the oligarchy. It could include small inexpensive classes / learning groups that provide community (and potential sex partners, let's be real about what college is for ;-) and an international network of 'sibling cities' for lifelong edu-travel and edu-tourism.
It shouldn't have to be one or the other--corporate profit-driven university or taking on all the risk and isolation of uncredentialed, self-driven, self-organized, self-authorized learning. At least that's what I'd want if I was starting out.
Perhaps lazy was a bit bombastic, perhaps better to say they didn't investigate any alternatives. My sons have avoided student loans, taught themselves and are doing fine. As an engineer I have to study everyday, if I don't stay up to date with the latest studys I become dated and irrelevant. Saying they are burnt out after school is an excuse.
Like I said there are fully accredited on line colleges that provide a BA/BS level education for free they are just unaccredited. In the technical industry I work in we don't really look at transcripts, don't really care about your college. Almost exclusively we look at real time in person performance of the duties. Can you do the job ? Can you do the job while a group of your peers is watching ? If you succeed or fail at doing the job, where you went to school is truly irrelevant.
School should be free, the best way to make that happen is online. The barrier to a totally free accredited online bachelors degree is government accreditation not being granted to solutions outside the university system. Once again the problem is government not for profit industry.
Hi, notBob. My daughters have also managed to graduate without debt and succeed, so I don't have a personal pony in this race. But I don't take their success as a sign the system is working. As a former high tech Dir of HR, I know every technical position I advertised needed a BA/BS. These days degree checks are routine and automated. How does an uncredentialed person get that first technical job?
I'm guessing that you haven't read my Reinventing Education episode when you say the problem isn't for-profit 'industry' (have to put that word in quotes since it implies actual work being done other than raking in) but is gov't. I go into some depth but also just scratch the surface on how for-profit industry drives the degree factories we call college. They don't call it the Carnegie Curriculum because they like the alliteration.
I think it's a false dichotomy, however, between 'we and our kids did it so anyone who can't, it's their own fault' and Biden's blanket transfer of $20K in debt to taxpayers. I'd like to see a more nuanced discussion of the problem in the context of changing the economy from serving profits to serving people.
Let me try to understand your logic here: Government owns and operates many universities around the nation. Government controls the accreditation of which schools are valid and which are not. Government pays the salaries of the staff and administration of those schools. 75% of all university students attend a government run university. Government either guarantees or directly lends to students in the vast majority of cases.
Your claim is that the government is guiltless is the desecration of these schools and it is all the fault of the capitalist driven model of education ?
By government, do you mean specific people, specific roles, or the system itself?
If the system, I have plenty of criticism to go around for that, which I focus on in this episode: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/the-constitutional-convention-coup. It explains how our system was designed to serve bankers and merchants, now called corporations, by the framers of the Constitution.
If you mean specific roles, the Regents control the UC system here in California. My education episode goes into how they profit from construction loans, student loans and high tuition.
I would never claim that the system of gov't is guiltless because I'm all about changing systems. But your claim is that students who can't afford college just shouldn't go. Is that right?
Hello, Hubris! Thanks for responding, it's always great to hear from you. In the US what we have is the worst of both worlds. Our money is generated by bankers, who issue mortgages out of thin air that we repay with 30 (or 60 combined) years of labor. In the meantime they retain free ownership of the house and have no social obligation for how they use their profits, which are equal to the cost of the house (and 94% of all dollars issued). That's not just capitalism but feudalism.
But then, from the money we eke back from them with our labor, we pay taxes, from which we expect to socialize the costs of all the harms they've created: poor health, homelessness, need for corporate working papers (aka degree), aging useless eaters, etc.
What my system does, which could be called anarchy, federalism, libertarianism, community self-governance or small-scale sovereignty, is take back mortgages and money creation as THE exclusive and essential privilege of gov't, and decentralizes it. Then it allows communities to generate a local credit into the community that can't exceed the debts, taxes and cash reserves.
How a community uses that credit is up to them but I recommend modeling the plan before implementing it because the goal is to maximize the times your credit circulates before getting sucked out. The education episode talks about some of my ideas for my community but this one on The Economics of Anarchy, talks more about the whole plan: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/the-economics-of-anarchy
Oh, please! You've fallen for the "money is created by bankers" myth, completely overlooking the US Constitution: Article 1, Section 8, which states "Only Congress has the right to mint coin [create the currency - they used coins in 1783]."
Learn Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and get your facts straight.
Susan, we already had a very long conversation about this on another thread, where I talked about how that's been interpreted literally by the Supreme Court as only coins and we talked at length about MMT. But the question under discussion is whether students are at fault for getting a college education at all, whether government is at fault, or whether a for-profit economic system is at fault. What do you (and MMT) say about that, and how would education be (or is already) funded under MMT?
"Under MMT": Since MMT Is an empirical description of the current monetary system, whatever way college is being funded at this time is the way it's being funded "under MMT."
However long our former discussion may have been, it seems that I need to give you some more time or information to understand that MMT isn't something you "do." It's a description of what already IS.
"An empirical description" means that MMT economists look at the monetary system the way another scientist would look at a microorganism through a microscope. It's not something that you implement, any more than a microscope is something that you implement.
It's just looking and describing.
This is a different approach than classical economics, in which a Great Man would describe his theory of how the economy works, or how it SHOULD work, and then subsequent scholars would argue for or against the theory, until another Great Man came along and offered a new theory.
MMT scholars stick to What Is.
Does this help to explain why asking how college would be funded "under MMT" is not a question? It simply doesn't apply.
P.S. The Supreme Court is now into a very literal interpretation of the Constitution in many areas.