College should be free

I support this wholeheartedly. I had to drop out of community college because (aside from my general academic aimlessness) the tuition increases year on year made it impossible for me to balance taking enough units to be able to transfer to a proper university in a reasonable amount of time, and working enough hours in the week to make enough money to pay for those units (plus parking, books, gas to and from school/work, the meagre rent my mother was charging me to live at home, food, etc). And that was about seven years ago. This summer the fees go up to $46/unit, twenty dollars higher than when I dropped out.

 

Looking back on it now, it doesn't seem like it was all that much per semester, but at the time I was working around 15 to 25 hours a week average at around 8 bucks an hour, so having to pay out six hundred odd dollars every three months was a pretty big deal (and if my car crapped out again and needed six to seven hundred dollars in repairs, I was pretty well fucked).

 

And when you consider that the California Community College system was free when it was created, and the law against public colleges charging tuition in California is still on the books (they get around it by calling them 'enrollment fees' instead of 'tuition'), it's all pretty fucked up.

I more or less agree, but I'd be more interested in a societal shift such that not every decent-paying job requires a BA or AA + experience. It's just completely out of hand; if you spent time in college but didn't graduate (as I did) you're damn near completely fucked. If you got an AA, you're going to spend a whole hell of a lot of time looking for the entry-levelest of entry-level jobs in your field so that you can finally satisfy the "AA + experience" criteria for the less entry-level jobs - and you'll still probably be fucked until you go back for a BA. Even if college were free, that's still years of life that you'll never get back.

The problem is that the vast majority of people in the non-McDonalds job market all have a degree, or two, or three, and businesses use that as a shorthand qualifier so that they don't have to bother actually investigating the candidates thoroughly, so if you don't have one you basically just get to sit around hoping to finally get lucky.

I spent years studying programming at college, but I didn't actually complete my degree; consequently, I was unemployed for eight months straight after leaving, got in two months as part of an upgrade project, and was unemployed for another fourteen months after that, because nobody was even remotely interested in a candidate who didn't have a degree or more than a couple months' professional experience, even if I knew what I was talking about, even if I had work history outside the field. I now work a backend development job at a call center; did I get this on the strength of the degree I hadn't completed? No - I got it on the strength of a little spaceship demo I wrote in a week of my unemployment free time. That's shit I could've done before even starting college; so is my current job. I could've saved years of time and effort and tens of thousands of dollars in debt, if I'd only known to show up at Y place and X time with a little spaceship demo.

The whole college + business world system is a fucking Ouroboros.
Edited by commodorejohn - 4/28/12 at 9:25am

 

 

I would say this encapsulate the problem more than having to pay $x for college. Or at least as much as. 

 

 

Say someone has a liberal arts degree (we'll call this person "Chavez") - other than going on to get a grad degree and then either teach or do research, your degree basically indicates that you are maybe slightly above average in intelligence, can show up on time fairly regularly, and can retain info for 14 weeks or so. 

 

For a piece of paper that indicates this not-so-impressive skill set, you have spent upwards of $15000 ( I went to school 15 yrs ago, and Wisconsin has (had?) one of the cheapest state university systems out there at the time), either out of pocket or incurring debt in that amount.

 

 

...and anyway, after spending the money and time getting this piece of paper, you then (hopefully) get hired by a company which proceeds to train you for everything you need to know in your job. 

 

 

Aside from college costs going nuts, one of the main problems is that the system is fucked. 

Ive never been the biggest fan of Rahm Emanuel, but I attended the Chicago Investor Conference this past Wednesday and he was the keynote speaker (the whole thing is basically to convince people to invest in Chicago municipal bonds.  Tours were given afterwards of O'Hare, the CTA headquarters, etc).  Gotta say - hombre impressed me, especially when he spoke about his overhaul of the community college system in Chicago.

 

Back on topic: as someone who student loaned their way through college and still has $67k and change to pay off, plus the fact that my wife is going to shit out a kid in 3 months, I wholeheartedly support this idea.  Much like a gas tax used to support highway infrastructure, a minor/modest education tax should fund state college tuition for all.

 

An interesting company worth following on this front is Coursera: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/technology/coursera-plans-to-announce-university-partners-for-online-classes.html along with University of the People: http://www.uopeople.org/

 

 

 

 

 

 

I agree but with some reservations. My parents paid for my undegrad degree, and looking back I think that was a mistake. Had I had to make those tuition payments myself, or even just my housing, I'd have been a damn sight more responsible and would have learned some basic skills in budgeting. When i went back to school for my MA, I paid for everything, and it made me focus on my studies, take my work seriously, and work my ass off in shitty jobs to get that degree. Result? a 4.0 GPA and 18 months unemployment once I got my degree! (that was my decision making and graduating into a shit economy though).

 

So I think that yes, A BA should be very affordable but there should be strict guidelines for staying in school (no jackoffs coasting through classes. Yes I mean like me). It's important to give kids a basic understanding of a core curriculum to make them citizens. Of course, I also think a lot of that education should already have taken place in High School, which IS free....

Basically, not investing in education in North America (Canada has just as bad a problem with this, all tied up in our economic system just like in the US) is going to disenfranchise the college-aged people even more than they already are. There's no plan for this, least of all an economically sustainable one, though I still know people in my demo who are naive enough to think its all gonna work out pretty much like it did for their parents.

 

People think the uncertainty is bad now?

 

 

I certainly think you have a point - in college, to quote Jeff Daniels, I basically "majored in beer." 

 

 

But I think that may have less to do with having to pay necessarily than realizing you have to max out opportunities that you are given - let's face it, how many people here really pushed the envelope in high school, which if you're at any halfway-decent one, you can act in plays, learn to play an instrument, get free singing lessons, learn to fix cars, learn a language, etc etc. It isn't because it was FREE so much as it was because you were a head-up-your ass 20 yr old punk (as was I, not throwing stones here). 

 

Most people who have anywhere near the means or ability generally go to college because that's just what you do. I think maybe there should be compulsory service of some sort (military, forest service, peace corps - basically, whatever floats your boat and gets a person off their sedentary middle/upper class ass and out into the world) to even attend college - but once you complete the service, college is "free." Or, in other words, you have to "earn" your free education, no matter who you are.  

The days when you could make a living "doing what you love" are dead. Shit's not gonna fly in this service economy. And Flying Spaghetti Monster help those poor bastards who sunk tens of thousands of dollars into a liberal arts degree. How do they ever pay that shit off?

 

 

Ha! Tell me more. Like some Flash thing? HTML5?

Feh! Nothing so trendy; C++ and SDL. (And "vector" in the sense of old-ass arcade games, not your modern SVG stuff. Even mimicked the high-persistence phosphor, in a cheap sort of way.) You can see what there is of it here; I really should pick it up again sometime.

I agree that College should be free....but only if you graduate. If you're some jerkoff that takes a bird course and decides to drop out then you should pay back every penny.

 

Sweet. You're me from the alternate universe where I didn't get a degree.