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Will College Become a Luxury for the Few?
San Francisco, California - Before the protests of tuition hikes last week, a colleague posted the following: "Need suggestions for protest songs. We have a DJ but need to give her a play list." The requests started coming in: Joan Baez, the Dixie Chicks, The Clash.
I wondered about the overlap between songs on a professor's play list and those on a student's. So I went to class and asked students to tell me what they wanted to hear. The list included Dead Prez, Lyrics Born, B-Side Players and Erykah Badu, among many others. This is the protest play list of a new generation.
My introduction to protest songs came through my mom.
As the daughter of a Chicano movement activist, I attended protests against wars in Central America and rallies in response to police repression.
Last week, I marched in solidarity with people across 17 states calling for well-funded, accessible public education.
While at the March 4 rally, I realized that California's public education system has had a great impact on who my mother and I are today.
As a 15-year-old immigrant newly arrived in Los Angeles, my mother was placed in remedial classes because she didn't speak English. She struggled with the language but excelled in math. Yet her high school counselor directed her to work at a local tortilla factory.
This was the early 1960s. Just a few years before, students responded to educational inequities through organized acts of civil disobedience that would later be referred to as the East Los Angeles blowouts.
It was only by chance, and without parental or institutional guidance, that my mom enrolled in East Los Angeles College. Like many other low-income and working students, community college was her entry into higher education.
It was not until her mid-30s that she enrolled in the California State University of Los Angeles while working full time. I was in elementary school and remember going to campus with her on days that my dad was working, even during an in-class exam. This was my first exposure to a university classroom.
Since then, I have taught at the California State University of Los Angeles and the University of California at San Diego. I am currently an assistant professor at San Francisco State University.
Watching preschool teachers and children participating in the recent marches reminded me that my education began at Head Start. My mom enrolled me in this program, which provided early reading and math skills and set a foundation for my educational development. I stand in solidarity with early childhood educators.
At the protest, I watched high school students confidently take the stage and list their demands and hopes for a better future. I wish that my mom, as a teenage immigrant, could have aired her own frustrations with the 1960s educational system. Today's high school students inspire me, and I am proud of today's teachers, who support their students.
I ran into some of my own students at the rally. One asked where she could hear the DJ playing her song request.
We searched through the sea of people and realized the turnout was much larger than we had imagined. The protest play lists of multiple generations filled the air with music.
Young fans of Dead Prez marched and chanted alongside older fans of Joan Baez. They all recognized the need for well-funded, accessible public education.
Rising student fees have placed barriers between thousands of eligible students and their dreams of higher education. In addition, budget cuts and the subsequent elimination of course offerings have extended the number of years necessary to graduate.
Many of my students have taken on multiple jobs to finance their education. I hear their stories and imagine my mom trying to attend Cal State L.A. today.
Younger generations in the U.S. have consistently achieved a higher level of education than the generation that came before.
But for the first time since World War II, we are in danger of reversing that trend. Students and educators view education as a public good available to all and will continue mobilizing to restore funding for public education.
Will they receive support or will education become a luxury available to fewer and fewer people?
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51 Comments so far
Show AllHey why not pass a plan to enforce a "CIP" or College Insurance prorgram ? Parents will be mandated to pay 1200 a year for every child under the age of 18 to an Education Health Insurance program run by private industry.
These companies would then foot the bill for a students higher education. Deductibles would be allowed of course and "High Risk Students" could be dropped at will.
This will increase GDP and lead to job growth in the Insurance industry.
It works for health Care.
Some folks would LOVE to have 1200 bucks (a year?) to pay for college. They do not.
Gary
"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
-~ Abraham Lincoln
I think Gw was displaying sarcasm--likening his education plan to Obama's healthcare plan.
Indeed it was sarcasm. I was trying to point out how the "Private Free market Approach" to things as fundamental as education and health care are failures.
school failure proceeds apace, and privatization looms, hungrily, on the near horizon, if other recent, related articles are accurate...
sadly, your humor may be foretelling...unless...
As the value of college degrees continues to diminish, more young Americans will decide not to pursue college.
Until Obama restores New Deal financial industry reform and starts single-payer medical insurance, most college grads aspiring to get a (family wage with benefits) job will continue to find slim pickings in most fields.
Millions of baby boomers are delaying or cancelling retirement from their (family wage with benefits) jobs solely to keep relatively affordable employer-sponsored medical insurance. Extending Medicare to 55-64 year olds or enacting single-payer would allow millions of boomers to retire tomorrow and open those jobs for young Americans.
Obama's pandering to Wall Street and his corporate welfare program disguised as health care reform (Obamacare) are diminishing the value of college degrees.
Right on. But then it would be unjust to attach all the blame to O'Bamba. The responsibility belongs to the people, and the people failed by re-electing another elite agent to squat on the throne. We have to recognize the far-lefters who voted for REAL change. We have to recognize the vision, and platform, of the far-left.
"Will college become a luxury for the few?"
Become?
Exactly my sentiments.
In the 1970's I could attend Virginia Tech under the a co-op work plan on a pay-as-I went basis, plus extra spending money left over. Total cost for everything including room and board was just $2100 per year. It was the most care free time of my life. Never took out a single loan.
When I go to the Va. Tech campus today, or even more dramatically, the U. Pitt campus in Pittsburgh, the students are largely rich white kids. African-american enrollment is way down from the old days.
At adjoining, private, Carnagie Mellon U., nearly the entire student body are Indians from rich families, Chinese who are either rich or going very cheaply under a Chinese government program, and Europeans who as a Dutch student confided, are going with all tuition, fees and living expenses paid for by their governments.
I currently live in Indiana. The Universities are having their funding cut. The State is slashing education funding for Elementary and High School Corporations to help the appearance of Indiana's budget. The cuts won't actually make much of a difference to the State, but they make all the difference to the children. The class sizes are returning to 30 per teacher, with no Teacher's Aides. Special Education is being cut and the salaries of the teachers are being cut. Our Governor proposed eliminating Librarians and cutting Government and History classes.Our Governor, Mitch Daniels, (former budget director for Bush), is NOT cutting Charter Schools. Public Education is being undermined in Indiana and around the Country.
Colleges are partly to blame for lack of access on the part of the poor. Many universities have endowments in the billions, yet the aid they offer middle class students is paltry. How about cutting the athletic budgets, the overpaid administrators, the various bureaucracies that do not relate at all to the mission of a university? Lots of colleges have money to give to students--only they choose to give it to other causes.
Furthermore, there will always be enough graduates to fill positions required by the United States economy--companies will just hire those schooled in India or China. For every middle-class American student left behind, there will be a young person from another country waiting to step forward. Some countries, not ours, care enough about their youth to enable them to attend college through outright grants, not loans.
NEVER... ADMINISTRATORS NEED TO DEMAND MORE MONEY. Once people start to think colleges need to spend money on education then they'll have to justify there budgets
30 years ago, college was affordable, and jobs were far more numerous than they are now. One could go to a state college for next to nothing, and get a part time job to put yourself through it. Now, you'd have to be a white collar upper management type to be able to afford the tuition in the first place.
This is EXACTLY what the right wing wanted. They looked at the sixties and saw nothing but chaos. They didn't see that more people getting their rights as spelled out by the constitution as a good thing, they saw it as a diminution of their own power. They saw us wanting to get rid of Nixon for being a crook and getting it as proof that the "rabble" were getting too powerful. We were too ready to actually take part in our own governance, and they didn't like that.
So they set about to remove our comfort level, and make us fight each other for a few crumbs. They put Reagan into office, and started turning us against ourselves, our gov't and everyone else in the world. They took our jobs, our benefits, our freedoms, and our futures. Now, 30 years later, we owe $12 TRILLION, colleges of ALL kinds are out of bounds for the vast majority of our kids, and we don't even have secure enough jobs to go out one day and protest. Lose even a mediocre job and you may be out on your ass for years.
Don't kid yourselves, this is what happens when those with more money than brains get what they want. They would rather see the country go down the toilet, at this point, because they see themselves as the winners here. It doesn't matter to them, they are international, now, and they are doing the same GD thing to the rest of the world, too. They have no love of anything but money. They want ALL of yours, too.
This is EXACTLY what they wanted. It's time to take it ALL away from them.
Boy, you are RIGHT ON THE MONEY with that comment. During the 70s, the conservatives established dozens of think tanks and prepared to take over the air waves to indoctrinate the population. In the 80s, they started implementing it with the installation of Ronald Reagan as pres.....then GHW Bush, (Clinton was Republican Lite), then Junior Bush, and from 2001 to 2008, they raped the country and sold us out to multinational corporations, with the cherry on top---5 CONservative activist judges on the Supreme Court, who have now conferred personhood on Corporations, who will now control the election cycles, and we are now THE UNITED CORPORATIONS OF AMERICA. Welcome to the future.....no jobs or college for you.
I have held similar beliefs for a number of years. The protests of the '60s suggested to the elite fiends that they needed to find better ways to dominate the globe than to provide university educations to the majority of US youth.
A few days ago I saw an article in a business section discussing the merits of a college education, with the analysis based on the assumption that the only possible value of the education would be in greater earning potential. There was no consideration of the benefits of possessing a greater understanding of the society, the economy, or the political system, or of gaining better understanding of human nature which could allow for the development of more rewarding relationships or better childrearing practices. And certainly there was no acknowledgement that the sophistication that normally follows from a university education allows one to better participate in discussions regarding the ever ongoing evolution of societal and political rules. No, the assumption is that such participation is only for members of the overlord class.
College has been a luxury for a relative few for decades already.
When I graduated from high school in 1955. college was out of the question. As one of 8 kids, my parents told me that college was for the rich kids. It still is. I do have a PhD from the University of Hard knocks, and have learned throughout my life.
You situation seemed to be more cultural than economic.
In the 1960's and 1970's, as one of 10 kids, my parents simply told me that if I wanted to go to college I had to get a paper route and a part time job after school and pay my own way through. My paper route and odd job savings easily paid my first year at Virginia Tech. In-state tuition was only a few hundred dolars per quarter, room and board a few hundred more. A co-op job paid for the rest.
Admittedly it helped to be a resident of Virginia. Even in-state tution in northeast states was always a lot higher than in the south. The U. of Texas syatem was free for in-state students, as was the UC syatem in California.
I agree. I grew up in Missouri in the 50s and graduated HS in 1960. There was a regional state college in my little town, and tuition was $75 a semester with $10 a semester book fee. Even that was a stretch for my folks. I worked, got a small scholarship, and borrowed about $800 in student loans over the next 3 1/2 years, and graduated in 1964 with a Bachelors in Secondary Education. None of my children were able to graduate from college because of a divorce at the 20 year mark, but even in the 80s, it was pretty much beyond the reach of most lower middle class kids. Higher education in this country IS now for the rich and well-connected. It's too bad we aren't like many European countries that have free college education and subsidize students so that they will graduate. Thanks to the Almighty Buck and the American religion, All-Encompassing Capitalism, fewer and fewer ordinary Americans can afford college any more.
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Education (in all forms) of the masses is the only shot the US has of meeting its challenges. We need an educated society to maintain ourselves, advance and make good decisions (including at the ballot booth). Unfortunately, US policies are more and more oriented to survival of the fittest.
"Unfortunately, US policies are more and more oriented to survival of the fittest."
Survival of the fittest or survival of the well connected?
The latter rather than the former, unfortunately.
I don't believe so. It is easier for students to get loans than it was for MLK or Gandhi to make a change.
yeah, maybe but if you graduate with $50,000.00 in debt, payable immediatly upon graduation and you land in this job market with something like 11 unemployed for every job opening, with rents so absurdly high that you have to share not just an apartment but a room in an apartment to be within 20 miles of any potential job or you move back home with mom and dad, but dad gets laid off and loses his health benefits, so now they can't afford you, so you have to pay rent...you get the idea...I hope.
Beck - why do you think it should be just as hard to go to college as it was for MLK or Gandhi to do what they did? You're way off the point and you need to stop making tortured excuses for a criminally dysfunctional education system. Going to school should be a matter of keeping your grades up - period. Somebody else should worry about the money. If the nations of Europe can do it, if Canada can do at least cheaper than we do, if even Mexico can find a way to educate at least some of its population at a relatively low tuition cost, surely the USA can do the same.
Maybe if we weren't sending $180 billion a year to Af-Pak and Iraq - in addition to $680 billion a year to the Pentagon...Obama's "hope" and "change" spending plan.
I'm of two minds, I'm sure that quality education, but only for the rich, is every bit as bad as quality medicine, but only for the rich.
On the other hand, am I wrong in wishing that students would get motivated to demand something more than tuition freezes? If students can only get out in the street, to defend their own pocket book, then do we expect many other groups to struggle for democracy, good education, healthcare, peace, jobs etc?
These is not an either|or but neither|possibly-both scenario. The process works something like this.
- Student effortlessly recognizes damage made by tuition hike.
- Student tries to convince meatheaded compatriots of the obvious
- Student investigates nature of struggle, nature of opposition, contextual dynamic of tuition hikes
- Student recognizes propaganda patterns in opposing arguments, possibly even in friendly arguments.
- With luck, students meets nonstudents who admirably demonstrate solidarity.
- Student recognizes that his or her own problems extend far beyond the price tag at one or another school.
- Student discovers commonality of interest between various demographics as part of the underlying dynamic of oppression and resistance.
Voila: solidarity arises, and not just by spontaneous generation.
Of course the African-Americans protested for African-American rights. Of course the young people dominated protests of the Vietnam War, much as they did Woodrow Wilson's pet war and Abraham Lincoln's draft of the poor.
Of course we want to swing the whole axe head into the tree. But it will enter a lot better if the sharp edge goes in first.
I'm assuming that all the politicians,ceo's,bankers,etc;all these folks had a collage education?Did they have special courses for how to screw the "other" peoples?It seems that what is being taught and what is being left out is as important as that piece of paper one gets at the end.Maybe that is why the haves have been systematically making it harder and harder for the riff-raff to get into collage.It can make for a more focused learning.Tony
See courses in "business management" and in "ethics."
In my day they primarily did it in Government A and B.
bardamu;thanks for the reply but as it was an obsrvation for younger folks to ponder since my school days are over at 74,always learning and loving it,but no formal school for me and how to screw people was really taught?On another thread I hope that the help for student loans does not get put in with the insurance scam because the student loan push might be enough to push the scam over the top.Tony
Yes, Head Start.
I was once a Head Start Teacher, in San Francisco, mid-1960s, where I spent twelve months being taught by children!
Later, became an Area Director in this Program. The dedication of the Parents, memorable.
And almost every Teacher was getting college credits by going to school in the afternoons.
And Excellent Program.
"will education become a luxury available to fewer and fewer people?"
Yes. This has been the aim of Republicans for the last 30 years...dumb down the American public so they won't understand that when they vote Republican they are voting against their own best interests. Fill them up with rage against social problems--guns, gays, god--and keep them stupid and ruled by their emotions. And it looks like they are succeeding.
In answer to the headline... It already has.
"Just a week after Senate Republican Jim Bunning's infamous obstruction of an unemployment benefits extension, the GOP is taking another stand that pits deficit reduction against aid to the poor and jobless.
On Tuesday, Senate Republicans -- along with some Democrats -- defeated a measure to provide $1.3 billion for summer jobs for young people this year and a $1.3 billion extension of enhanced subsidies for poor families with children."
What to do? Boycott RED States!
College. The last bastion of liberalism!
Around three years ago the newspaper in the college town where I grew up published the incomes of all the people on the local public payrolls, including the university faculty and staff above a certain cutoff point. It was a real eye-opener, which may be why they haven't published it since.
Professors teach maybe one day a week; their grad assistants do that for peanuts. The carpet-bagging college president gets a six-figure salary not for what he knows but for who he knows, plus free housing, free transportation, a groundskeeper for his mansion. A cook, a housekeeper, free catering for his lavish parties...and this is a PUBLIC university.
When I was growing up there, the college president lived a few houses up the street and the "liberal arts" dominated on campus. Today it is the business school, underwritten by multi-million-dollar gifts (tax-deductible of course) from multi-millionaires who get buildings named for them while they are still alive when it used to be only dead notables got such honors.
Today, college has become a lucrative racket. A couple of years ago when the staff union sought a "living wage," Mr. President rejected the idea outright, saying the school couldn't afford it. More than half the staff can't afford to live in the college town, where rents are twice that of neighboring more rural towns.
One of the biggest college rackets is the textbook biz.
There are the $150 books that are obsolete when you buy them and you may get $10 when you try to sell them back, and the $75 "publish-on-demand" books created by the professors themselves to aggrandize the works of their connected friends.
Instead of college, get your kid a passport and a ticket on a cargo ship and send them around the world for a couple of years. A helluva lot cheaper and far more educational.
-30-
This is the best post on here.
Colleges don't train us for jobs, its now just a 20,000 a year mixer.
And while thats great, most schools waste money on useless things( giant outdoor water foutains, ect).
I do belive its great to send kids to another nation, ohh and not just anouther western cossumeristic one ether
One of the problems I have with education in the U.S. today is specifically because the main focus is to train students to be employees (corporate) rather than entrepreneurs. And it seems to me that when it comes to the sciences, like chemistry or engineering, any resulting research is already the property of the defense dept. and/or some corporation or other specifically because this is where the funding is primarily coming from.
The kind of uncertainties we have coming, trusting in a college degree shows a lot of faith in the status quo. Some other options of what young people could do to think about their future security are here:
http://radicalrelocalization.com/the-new-security.php
GLOGRRI put it exactly right in his comment.
"Yes. This has been the aim of Republicans for the last 30 years...dumb down the American public so they won't understand that when they vote Republican they are voting against their own best interests. Fill them up with rage against social problems--guns, gays, god--and keep them stupid and ruled by their emotions. And it looks like they are succeeding."
I would only change one thing, to say that they HAVE SUCCEEDED.
Jim Shea
And just what jobs will we be training for? Perhaps a college education could be justified in the past, but what is the point of going deep in debt for it now? Better to go to a technical school or a community college and work up from there. Kids also have to be realistic in their expectations, and settle for local schools where they can live at home. From what I hear, you cannot wipe out college loans by declaring bankruptcy.
Universal single payer education.
In this system, I never regretted not finishing college. I'd be in even more debt than I'm already in.
Higher education can be wonderful IF you can afford it. Instead it's a sort of elitist rite of passage.
"The list included Dead Prez, Lyrics Born, B-Side Players and Erykah Badu, among many others."
There's also Hammers of Misfortune, Shadows Fall, Lamb of God, but we're not allowed to like that music.
When I started college in 1960 the tuition was about (if I remember correctly) about $75 a quarter and you could earn about $1000 in a summer of construction or factory work. So if you lived at home with your parents (not the most hip/fun thing to do), you could get through the year quite nicely with substantial spare change for extras.
In those days many students where still concerned with getting a all round education rather then just a higher paying job. It was some 20 years later that college became all about making more money and the classic MBA degrees started to spread like a greedy virus in a weakened host. Remember GWBush was the first of the MBA's to become president and he succeeded in branding $$$ signs on just about everything that exists, thereby making us all poorer.
To days ago they had one of those talking $ signs on Yahoo's Tech Ticker and he was advising that college doesn't really pay for itself anymore, therefor it should be passed over. It has gotten to expensive and there are not enough jobs available when you get out. Tell that to my sister-in-law who decided to go back back to medical school in her late 30's to prove something to herself and is still $250,000 in debt. I guess she would have to become an healthcare CEO to pay that off anytime soon.
Now we're faced with the american dream where you will not own your own home, not have health insurance, your children or you will not be college educated, you will not be able to retire...ever, and your social security will have probably been gambled away by some wall street wizard. I had a dream..... but it fizzled!
Not really sure there's that much education left in any off these institutions even if you could afford them. They have more and more become private gentlemen's clubs for the rich or else you become some type of idiot servant in some micro specific area which shields out any real light or knowledge from confusing your small brain. With computers, the internet and networking we can all educated ourselves quicker and more effectively and this is what most of us are already doing. Maybe we as the newly educated can buy some of those old useless degrees from unemployed and starving others, just as the new merchant rich used to buy titles from cashless aristocracy.
Really, the best thing for the young and old is to find a compatible peer group of friends and learn to live together sanely on the land growing things, cooperating, sharing, speaking out and teaching others to do the same. It will be hard at first because we all have become so isolated, independent, and willful but eventually the blessings of this type of real family will payoff and the world and society will begin to transform.
Cutting education sounds like a great idea since it is too much of a burden on the tax-payers, and too many students who go to college don't benefit from it anyway(we currently have around a 50% college drop out rate). I believe too many people are going to college in the U.S. We also have to stop pretending that a sociology degree(or liberal arts degrees) is equivalent to an engineering or hard science degree, when it comes to the value that is produced from an engineering degree.
Indeed, college is sort of like a scam to too many people who may or may not graduate, yet end up with over $50,000 in debt, and yet can't find a job(http://townhall.com/columnists/JohnStossel/2009/01/28/the_college_scam). Or, even if they do get their degree, they all-too-often end up with a job they could have gotten with just a high school diploma. This doesn't apply of course to those students who pursue a medical education and become doctors, or those who major in engineering and become engineers, or who study law, etc...
According to recent surveys, about 40% of college graduates regret going to college; if they could do it over again, they wouldn't.
For the best students, a college education should always be free. We need to reintroduce tracking in our high schools, which they still use in much of Europe and Asia, to sort out those who are ready and qualified for a university education from those who are not. Everyone else can go to trade school, or community college, or the military, or go into an apprenticeship. This "everyone to college" mantra is unrealistic and self-defeating. We need to cut education(at the college level) drastically. At best, only 10% to 15% of the population should be going to college. It may sound "harsh", it may even sound "elitist" to say this, but only those students who are smart enough and hard working enough have the right to a college education, not "everyone". Don't fall for the propaganda put out by self-interested educrats.
Charles Murray's book "Real Education" has a lot of helpful ideas for reforming American education, in my opinion. Marty Nemko also has a lot of helpful advice and interesting statistics about college education in the U.S: http://www.martynemko.com/articles/we-send-too-many-students-college_id1543
I agree 100% with your last paragraph, but as an unemployed engineer, I am compelled to correct to your second paragraph.
I majored in electrical engineering and minored in computer science because, I erroneously thought, "everything runs on electricity and almost everything has a computer chip in it, so if I study electrical engineering and computer science how can I possibly go wrong?"
Boy, did I back the wrong fucking horse: in 2005, the #1 and #2 professions with the worst job losses were electrical engineering and computer science, respectively. The percentage of jobs lost is staggering: what took the auto industry decades to contract happened in just a couple of years!
The job losses are mostly due to work visa abuse and outsourcing. I cannot compete with an engineer from Bangalore who has more education and can live quite comfortably on $3 an hour [That's not an exaggeration. An Indian with a MS in EE is paid about $7K USD/year.] Also, the starting salaries for engineers has not kept pace with inflation at all: when I started college in 1992, the average starting wage for an EE with a BS was just under $50K. 18 years later, it's only $64K. Since the costs of college increase at multiples of the CPI every year, it's clear why no one is interested in studying engineering: if you've got the math skills to be an engineer, you've got the math skills to figure out it won't pay the bills. Why work your ass off when you can party as a business major and come out of school making 10x as much? An engineer builds something that collapses and they get fired. A business major collapses the entire economy and you get a bonus. In fact, you get fucking indignant about how you deserve a bonus!
Nor are medical doctors immune to outsourcing either. If you have an x-ray, very likely the x-ray was digitized and e-mailed to a radiologist in PRC or India for a fraction of what an American doctor charges. (It's all legal as long as an American doctor signs the report.) For the last 10 years at least, radiologists are competing with folks with a two year degree from any community college to work as an x-ray tech making $20 an hour. One can imagine how difficult it is to pay off >$100G of student loans on $20 an hour?
I crunched the numbers 10 years ago and we'd already crossed the point of diminished returns before then. Projections based on the yearly linear growth in the cost of college clearly showed that if we (my woman and I) banked her gross salary every year - at interest - after 18 years we would have enough money to send ONE child to college. So I submit that for most of us college is already a distant possibility.
"Freedumb" doesn't work for the masses, but it's just what the financial elite want. I highly recommend the book "The Underground History of US Education" written by John T. Gatto http://mhkeehn.tripod.com/ughoae.pdf or George Carlin's brilliant bit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q&feature=related
"when I started college in 1992, the average starting wage for an EE with a BS was just under $50K. 18 years later, it's only $64K."
So EE's with a BS start at "only" $64K/year?
"Why work your ass off when you can party as a business major and come out of school making 10x as much?"
And business majors start at $640K/year?
I don't even know where to begin. Maybe I should go back to school and get a business degree. I could pretty well squeak by on $640K/year.
What's wrong with 64K a year? A lot of people would be happy making that.
Engineering was pushed as "the career of the future" back when I was in high school in the late 80's-early 90's. As soon as I got into college I changed my major to English. It didn't matter though since I didn't finish.
During the outsourcing frenzy, we were supposed to send away the menial jobs and keep the high tech stuff here. People that were laid off were encouraged to go [back] to school to train for a 'better' job? What happened? They outsourced and insourced those jobs to, then claimed that Americans were not qualified to do those jobs they supposedly made available! Great scam, eh?
"They all recognized the need for well-funded, accessible public education"
Did they? Well, what did they do about it? Im afraid that if one asked this author if she voted for Pelosi or Sheehan she might say Pelosi. I also wonder about the 60 million USans who elected O'Bamba after he spent years in the Sennate writing blank checks for imperial expansion. It's great that young people are being introduced to the imperial side-destruction, but most certainly the rational conclusion will be to oust the elites from power, and you can't accomplish this by handing them power in the voting both, or in the marketplace.
The purpose of public schooling has not been to educate since the beginning of the industrial revolution. The real purpose of public schooling is to actually dumb down the majority and television has become the weapon of choice in creating a populace of “consumers” who’ve been brainwashed from birth to feed their addiction to “stuff” and to have a “blind respect for authority." If you read the book, “Weapons of Mass Instruction” by John Taylor Gatto, you would learn the truth of our educational system.
Woodrow Wilson said back in 1909: “We want one class to have a liberal education; we want another class, a much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific, difficult manual tasks.”
As in the book, “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley, The demands of society with such an over-population of humans requires that the majority engage in employment that consists primarily of menial chores. We can see the reality of this already in today’s world. The vast majority already fall into Huxley's category of epsilons. Unfortunately, many of them work in high places within our government.