Student Debt

[lektrode]

Re: Student Debt

many threads in the past have pointed out that education, housing and healthcare were not goods that could be easily imported. [h1 visas to the contrary] thus, those were the pieces of the economy that inflated while the rest of the economy, and its workforce, was arbitraged against overseas manufacturing and remotely delivered services [back office, call centers, and so on]

it's interesting to me that the idea of "liberal education" - education for critical faculties, i suppose - has totally fallen by the wayside. now education tends to be viewed as strictly vocational - right up through the post-doc level. i guess that's a function of a squeezed economy as well as the democratization of higher education - when it was only the elites going to college, they didn't need to prepare themselves for jobs. they would benefit from their connections and supporters.

so is liberal education just an elite luxury? i'm tempted to think about the philosophers of greece and rome, but of course they had slaves to do their dirty work. kind of like many of america's founding fathers.

well... eye was and to some extent am STILL aboard with all this - right up til the last sentence, jk.
very critical-thinking here, must add - have never seen as effective and concise/accurate of a distillation of just whats happened over the past 30years or so.

but i do take issue with the social norms of the 16-1700's being viewed thru the lens of present day USA.

the founders did NOT start the slavery trade, but since it was made available to them - by THEIR OWN former countrymen and within the 'social norms' of that particular country - what, with their social caste - or pardon me, 'class' structures based upon lineage, indentured servitude, aka LEGALIZED SLAVERY

never mind the fact that virtually every 'advanced' society that ever existed practiced same - up UNTIL The Great Experiment known as the USA was created - by those same founders - some of whom at least attempted to make their 'laborers' lives better than which they had before being KIDNAPPED AND SOLD BY THEIR VERY OWN PEOPLE - and brought to the new world by the very 'classy' types who considered themselves ENTITLED to practice the same in their own country?

and with all due respect, jk - but... esp during this particular month of the year - i just think its disrespectful of everything WE, The People have endured over the past going-on 400 years - and never mind the past 30 - to tar the founders with that brush.

is all i'm trying to say...

[jk]

Re: Student Debt

they were men of their time. good thinkers and leaders, and made a big difference. but they were not supermen, nor were they perfect. we do them no disrespect to see them as men [no women], and don't have to see them in black and white [or just white]. they papered over the slavery issue to try to get something done, and they did. it took many years before that paper was fully unglued.

[lektrode]

Re: Student Debt

i'll agree with that - nicely put, jk

[Polish_Silver]

Re: Student Debt

many threads in the past have pointed out that education, housing and healthcare were not goods that could be easily imported. [h1 visas to the contrary] thus, those were the pieces of the economy that inflated while the rest of the economy, and its workforce, was arbitraged against overseas manufacturing and remotely delivered services [back office, call centers, and so on]

it's interesting to me that the idea of "liberal education" - education for critical faculties, i suppose - has totally fallen by the wayside. now education tends to be viewed as strictly vocational - right up through the post-doc level. i guess that's a function of a squeezed economy as well as the democratization of higher education - when it was only the elites going to college, they didn't need to prepare themselves for jobs. they would benefit from their connections and supporters.

so is liberal education just an elite luxury? i'm tempted to think about the philosophers of greece and rome, but of course they had slaves to do their dirty work. kind of like many of america's founding fathers.

I think something like that has to be right. Higher education is justified because of it's alleged economic benefits. But I suspect, in the long run, the more pragmatic approach will totally backfire. It is the people who got a broad education and learned to think deeply that will have the real advantage. The more pragmatically educated ones will become obsolete. That was the opinion of Jim Williams, who pondered these questions deeply, being self taught but employed by an elite institution.

[flintlock]

Re: Student Debt

many threads in the past have pointed out that education, housing and healthcare were not goods that could be easily imported. [h1 visas to the contrary] thus, those were the pieces of the economy that inflated while the rest of the economy, and its workforce, was arbitraged against overseas manufacturing and remotely delivered services [back office, call centers, and so on]

it's interesting to me that the idea of "liberal education" - education for critical faculties, i suppose - has totally fallen by the wayside. now education tends to be viewed as strictly vocational - right up through the post-doc level. i guess that's a function of a squeezed economy as well as the democratization of higher education - when it was only the elites going to college, they didn't need to prepare themselves for jobs. they would benefit from their connections and supporters.

so is liberal education just an elite luxury? i'm tempted to think about the philosophers of greece and rome, but of course they had slaves to do their dirty work. kind of like many of america's founding fathers.

Yes it is an elite luxury when you are deep in student debt and have mouths to feed. Liberal education grew out of a time when, like you mention, wealthy people sent their children to school to make them more educated, and hence more likely to attract even wealthier mates to join fortunes with. The goal was not learning a vocation, but rather making one more acceptable to those with the connections, be it for political, social, or economic reasons. In fact the heavy lifting like engineering, accounting ,etc, was done by the tiny middle class. Women attended higher learning institutions in a time when their was almost no consideration that they would ever work, so yes, it wasn't all about vocation. But times change and colleges need to change with them. I'm not against all liberal education, just keep the focus on something productive, at least if they are going to charge a ridiculous amount of money and then get the govt to guarantee they get paid. I consider myself better off for taking classes like art appreciation, philosophy, and the psychology of sex in college. I just don't think I could justify it today if it meant debt peonage.

[flintlock]

Re: Student Debt

I think something like that has to be right. Higher education is justified because of it's alleged economic benefits. But I suspect, in the long run, the more pragmatic approach will totally backfire. It is the people who got a broad education and learned to think deeply that will have the real advantage. The more pragmatically educated ones will become obsolete. That was the opinion of Jim Williams, who pondered these questions deeply, being self taught but employed by an elite institution.

With the internet, smart people can learn most of the "broad education" on their own, and you don't necessarily need college to teach you to think deeply. You probably still do need college to be a good engineer though. In our changing world today it is the specialists who are doing best, not the generalists. And this is from someone who considers himself a first rate generalist!

[vinoveri]

Re: Student Debt

With the internet, smart people can learn most of the "broad education" on their own, and you don't necessarily need college to teach you to think deeply. You probably still do need college to be a good engineer though.

No, but you may need some guidance in where to get this information and which books to read, given the amount of crap spewing forth from the "great thinkers" of the day.

In our changing world today it is the specialists who are doing best, not the generalists. And this is from someone who considers himself a first rate generalist!

Not only are the specialists doing the best, they are ruling (and degrading and threatening the destruction of imo) the civilization and culture.

Many of José Ortega y Gasset's observations in 'Revolt of the Masses' are spot on IMO

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Revolt_of_the_Masses

Ortega is throughout quite critical of both the masses and the mass-men of which they are made up, contrasting "noble life and common life" and excoriating the barbarism and primitivism he sees in the mass-man. He does not, however, refer to specific social classes, as has been so commonly misunderstood in the English-speaking world. Ortega states that the mass-man could be from any social background, but his specific target is the bourgeois educated man, the señorito satisfecho (satisfied young man or Mr. Satisfied), the specialist who believes he has it all and extends the command he has of his subject to others, contemptuous of his ignorance in all of them. Ortega's summary of what he attempted in the book exemplifies this quite well, while simultaneously providing the author's own views on his work: "In this essay an attempt has been made to sketch a certain type of European, mainly by analyzing his behaviour as regards the very civilization into which he was born". This had to be done because that individual "does not represent a new civilisation struggling with a previous one, but a mere negation ..."

[Ghent12]

Re: Student Debt

they were men of their time. good thinkers and leaders, and made a big difference. but they were not supermen, nor were they perfect. we do them no disrespect to see them as men [no women], and don't have to see them in black and white [or just white]. they papered over the slavery issue to try to get something done, and they did. it took many years before that paper was fully unglued.

Papered over the issue? You liken a compromise which allowed the very union of the states to actually take place to ignoring a glaring hole or flaw in the structure of a building? You are entirely wrong to think of it as such.

They, being at least a great many of the architects if not all the signatories in any case, knowingly sowed the seeds for ultimately undoing the institution of slavery. They rightly chose priorities, and the alternative would have been two or more nations to arise from the thirteen former colonies and slavery might still legally exist today on this continent. They didn't paper over anything--they used paper to built what is, empirically (evidenced by migration statistics), still the greatest place to live, generally, in the world for any person in the world.

[jk]

Re: Student Debt

Papered over the issue? You liken a compromise which allowed the very union of the states to actually take place to ignoring a glaring hole or flaw in the structure of a building? You are entirely wrong to think of it as such.

They, being at least a great many of the architects if not all the signatories in any case, knowingly sowed the seeds for ultimately undoing the institution of slavery. They rightly chose priorities, and the alternative would have been two or more nations to arise from the thirteen former colonies and slavery might still legally exist today on this continent. They didn't paper over anything--they used paper to built what is, empirically (evidenced by migration statistics), still the greatest place to live, generally, in the world for any person in the world.

i doubt very much that all the signers "knowingly sowed the seeds for ultimately undoing the institution of slavery." do you really think that not a one of them thought slavery was just fine and should exist indefinitely? and do you really believe that they "knowingly" thought those seeds would sprout into a civil war in which the slave states would be defeated? there are a lot of compromises that went into the constitution, and most people who are doing deals don't think that they are sowing the seeds of the end of the culture that they live in and represent.

[vinoveri]

Re: Student Debt

most people who are doing deals don't think that they are sowing the seeds of the end of the culture that they live in and represent.

moreover, most people who are doing deals don't think much beyond how it will benefit themselves and their own; in fact most people are oblivious to the "seeds they sow" (accept perhaps wrt contraception )

[Ghent12]

Re: Student Debt

As I said, not all of them, but a sufficient number knew the issue was unresolved. Can't you read? Obviously the signatories from the southern states sought a retention of strong states' rights largely because they wanted to maintain slavery as a legal institution. However, save for the "three-fifths compromise" (which is so often misquoted and misinterpreted) which allowed for the creation of the union with the southern states, the language of the Constitution almost pleads for the resolution of the devilish institution of slavery in the only moral way it can be resolved.

[jk]

Re: Student Debt

unresolved = papered over

[Ghent12]

Re: Student Debt

unresolved = papered over

You = wrong. I can do it too.

[metalman]

Re: Student Debt

The athletic and cultural facilities, as well as the College of Superfluous Studies which is in many universities, are the ornate tokens the universities have collected. They are measures of largess, but not the cause of the increased tuition price.

The huge increase in the price of a college education is a function of supply and demand and all of the various relationships formed because of that friction. There's only one Harvard. There are only a few Ivy League schools. There are only several dozen state universities. According to http://www.statisticbrain.com/colleg...nt-statistics/, there are 4,140 total institutions of higher learning in the U.S. but over 17 million people enrolled among them, for an average of 4224 enrollees per institution. Put another way, there are millions and millions of people seeking seats at thousands of schools. It's no wonder prices are so high and can easily go higher. Parking spots are at a premium except during the Summer semester. Better enroll as soon as you are able, or your required classes will fill up. Good thing upperclassmen have their enrollment window open up sooner than freshmen and sophomores, or that four-year degree would often take longer than the allotted six years the students are expected to complete it in.

Unless and until "alternative" avenues for accreditation like the University of Phoenix Online gain and build their reputations as reliable sources of educated degree-holders, the situation strongly favors universities applying minimal effort to accommodate additional students and instead building ornate new facilities that are striking both in their appearance and their low useful-size-to-actual-volume ratio. While I attended the College of Engineering at one of my state's schools, I couldn't get over the newest engineering building which was five stories tall and nearly half of it was empty space in the form of an open four-story atrium. It was great to fly capstone projects in, but always seemed like a vast squandering of real estate. Why water down a university's reputation by focusing on education and substantially increasing your degree-holder output, when the alternative is to build really pretty buildings and statues and landscaping and do all the other things to truly impress a slowly-growing, highly-"charged" student body instead?

thank you. highly informative.

son attends ivy league on scholarship & must keep up 3.5+ gpa.

[jk]

Re: Student Debt

You = wrong. I can do it too.

what's the difference between "unresolved" [in the context of an agreement reached without really addressing an issue of great contention] and "papered over"? no difference for me, but maybe there is for you. why don't you explain?