Questions Raised By Education Dept's Road Show On College Value 95
lpress writes "Department of Education officials, led by Under Secretary of Education Martha Kanter, were on our campus last week, soliciting input on The President's College Value and Affordability plan. The discussion focused primarily on the design of a system for rating colleges and to a lesser extent on innovation and improvement. While the feedback was constructive, many attendees pointed out difficulties and limitations of any college rating system. One solution is to open the process by having the Department of Education gather and post data and provide a platform and tools for all interested parties to analyze, visualize and discuss it. Similarly, open innovation should be encouraged, for example, by providing a hosted version of the open source education platform MOOC.ORG."
Education con game (Score:5, Insightful)
These people got their education at schools like Harvard, where they spent full-time in an environment designed to educate them, challenge their ideas, let them relax and think, and experiment -- and make the social contacts that helped their careers more than the course content they were ostensibly learning.
Now they're trying to tell us that it's just as good (and cheaper) to get a college class online. If we can only be wise consumers in the free market, we'll find a deal online that we can afford. Nobody walks.
This is a con job. It's like saying Internet porn is just as good as sex. It's like saying that you can find affordable health insurance online.
40 years ago the U.S. had a system of free college education (like most of Europe has today). It worked.
City College has a wall of pictures with the Nobel laureates who graduated CCNY, most of whom said in their Nobel biographies that they couldn't have afforded to go to college if they had to pay for it.
The University of California turned out graduates who gave us the revolutions in digital electronics and medicine. Then Ronald Reagan decided to cut the budget by attacking the liberals he didn't like anyway. If you charge people for college, only the rich can go to college. For the rest of us, the other choice is to go into debt that you may never repay.
The job of government is to pay for education.
We've got the money. We pay for wars, the military, police departments outfitted into SWAT teams, prisons filled with drug offenders spending long terms. We have the wealthiest billionaires in the world, who don't pay taxes. We pay college presidents salaries on parity with Fortune 500 executives.
Let's do what works. Bring back free university education. Pay for it out of taxes.
Re:Government is the problem. (Score:3, Insightful)
are not technical institutes where you train for a job
Yes, they are. Maybe once ago, in a land far, far, away, where only the old money went, that was true, but not any longer. At this point the people with the wealth are not spending it to create new work for people to live off of. College is only increasingly enrolled in because with a shiny piece of shitpaper in hand, you might be slightly more able to support a family. College degrees are not needed for thier merit, but as a way of attempting to leverage yourself into an ever growing labour pool. Trust me, this economic system is going to collapse sooner or later, if the wealthy don't start paying people doing unskilled labour enough to live comfortably on. Either all the poor will starve, and the labour pool will shrink, or the old money will be sodomized with salad forks and sub machine guns, forcibly redistributing their ill gotten wealth to the poorer.
Hell I'd love it if they had something so (Score:4, Insightful)