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."
Innovation and improvement (Score:2)
Re: Innovation and improvement (Score:3)
Perhaps they could finish fixing health care before they go into overdrive fixing colleges.
a college rating system that already works (Score:3)
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it's call the BCS. yeah, right.
The BCS works? Since WHEN?
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Government funding controls/warps the education system priorities and creates inflation.
Anything other than government getting out of the system and allowing the schools spending money unwisely to fail, and not subsidizing the useless degrees which mean nothing other than people taught to think like the government wants and wanting to support anything to pay back their student debt is idiocy,
On the realistic side though we are 3/4 of the way to the Idiocracy world, and the people who think they are the smartest are the biggest idiots or they people teaching people to be idiots to control them, so nothing will change.
Everything controls/warps the education system -- are you going to deny both government funding and corporate funding? Where is the university going to get its funding from then?
The reason I ask this is that universities are not technical institutes where you train for a job; they are designed as education and research centers, where the eventual gain is at some point decades off, NOT after someone completes a 4-year BA in basketweaving (unless they're partnered with an MBA and are going into artisan produ
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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,
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Some jobs require more education than analogous jobs a few decades back, but that's not the only reason an education is important in finding employment. In many (though not all) cases, the education is not really about *training* for the job. It's merely a gimmick for getting hired. The education gets you a job because it gives you an edge over your competition that doesn't have the diploma.
But there's no edge if *everyone* has an education. And it doesn't matter if it's because everyone really learned
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Sometimes it's about whether you know something, but often it's merely a device for choosing one job candidate over another, where both candidates are already overqualified for the work in question.
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This problem is two folded. What you say isn't necessarily not true but education has been used to replace competency testing of the past.
In the past when higher education wasn't always accredited or common, companies would administer competency tests to application candidates and only the ones who could pass it were considered. In some cases, the higher the passing score was, the more consideration you received. This is where you find the ancient stories of people starting off in the mail room and making t
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Interesting... So, the college diploma is being substitute for the high school diploma, because the high school diploma has lost any meaning.
gather and post data and provide a platform (Score:1)
Oh, so like, create a Website, like college.gov.
What a splendid idea! Another government Website!
"If you bite your current education plan, you can eat it."
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.
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That great, until you lose both legs and an arm invading some tiny country that you have never even heard of before.
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e) it really helps to have everyone in your country related to someone in the military, as far as a) goes.
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You forget that over 75% of age eligible people are not eligible due to other factors http://www.missionreadiness.org/2009/ready_willing/ [missionreadiness.org]
The biggest factor is physical, there are also major issues with education (not meeting standards), and criminality. The physical factor isn't even just the weight. As the report states, even if the overweight candidates were to loose the weight, there are still underlying physical factors that would leave them ineligible for enlistment.
The report I linked to is worth the
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France does not have an army service anymore (whether it was a desirable move is another debate), it is still a major military power, and the country spends one third of its state budget for education.
But your point is still valid, though. The problem is that USA spends 50% of world military expenses. And since NATO countires account for 80%, one can wonder where is the enemy that justify such a big military expense.
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Why on earth did people choose to moderate this off topic and troll???!?
Would it have been better if I'd direct quoted the bits about only rich people being able to afford higher education?
My point is that
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Sorry.. With income and sales tax, something close to $0.40 on the dollar goes to the state already, more for specific items due to punitive taxation. While I don't dislike your idea, I already pay too much in taxes to float the systemic deficit spending loan as it is. Enough is enough. I want my money and my rights/freedoms back please.
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If we could give up our obsession with blowing up brown people, we could probably afford education and a tax cut, especially if the taxes are shifted back to the people who already have enough money to support 3 or 4 generations of their family.
Especially if we get tough on both educational institutions and healthcare providers to stop gouging.
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Yeah but what about the existing debt? That has to be paid off before we can improve anything else. We also need a government in place that doesn't spend like a 16yo princess with her daddy's credit card.
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If we had stayed on the course Clinton set and restrained the bankers from crashing the economy, we would be debt free right now. We don't have to pay it all off before we can do anything at all (that rarely makes fiscal sense), we just need to put it in the right direction.
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I would certainly support scaling free trade back, but that's entirely irrelevant to the national debt.
But you seriously need to check your facts. There is very little chip fab in the PRC compared to the U.S. and Taiwan. The U.S. produces plenty of food to keep us all fed. We actually have a lot of manufacturing, just not consumer goods. I would like to see more consumer goods made here though. I would also like to see at least standby steel capacity here for strategic reasons.
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Yeah but what about the existing debt? That has to be paid off before we can improve anything else.
Money and Debt is a (not so) simple zero sum game. Whenever a dollar is created, an equivalent debt/obligation is created. It always balances out to zero.
So who do you want to reduce their savings so that the US government can have less debt? Once you have decided on that, it is easy to discuss the actions the government should take to cause it to happen.
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Oddly enough, they will!
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When the government decides who is rich and who isn't, you end up finding people who would never consider themselves rich to be rather wealthy even when they are working and in the middle class.
If you taxed the truly wealthy, the 1% or even the 5% of top earners 100%, it wouldn't make much of an impact on our debt. It would be around 2.4 trillion dollars in total (about 1.9 trillion more then they are already paying) and it would drop as soon as the top 5% of earners stopped trying to make a paycheck they w
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Exactly. Janitor jobs have started asking for 'college degrees'. wtf?
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Forty years ago, only about 10% of Americans graduated with a college degree; today it's more than three times that. And your idea that European nations just give everybody a free college education is a fairy tale.
College has generally become more affordable,
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College has generally become more affordable, and far more people go to college now than 40 years ago. Furthermore, a college education costs about as much as a good mid-size car; if you can't afford paying that back, you picked the wrong major.
Most instate Universities with room and board are around $18,000/yr. So, a 4 year degree is in the neighborhood of $72,000. I don't know what mid-size cars you drive, but that's pretty steep. College has become anything but more affordable. If it had been, there would have been less need for student loans, not more.
It has nothing to do with the major one picks (although some majors do not gain one an advantage in employment). 40 years ago, a college degree in business allowed one to jump into middle managem
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Most instate Universities with room and board are around $18,000/yr. So, a 4 year degree is in the neighborhood of $72,000. I don't know what mid-size cars you drive, but that's pretty steep.
Well I am pretty sure that he meant the cost of tuition, since you have to spend money on room and board even if you don't go to school. But the amount of opportunity costs of an average student is likely around $8k per year since you can probably only work part time, so I still agree with your actual figures.
It has nothing to do with the major one picks (although some majors do not gain one an advantage in employment). 40 years ago, a college degree in business allowed one to jump into middle management. Today, it is pretty much standard for administrative assistants to have one. Yes, today's administrative assistatns do more than yesterday's secretaries and stenographers, but $72,000 worth of education more?
Well, if you compare that $72k with an investment paying out 8% over inflation (a very high ROR), you would need to make about $5500 per year more for the education to be worth it for the employee (if
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Average college debt is about $36k. That's because parents support their kids, people work to support themselves, and low income students get financial aid. I got financial aid and worked in coll
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Giving people four years of free room and board while getting an art history degree is not "forced education", it is allowing them to waste another four years of their lives.
You obviously don't know anything about art history.
I took art history courses.
I learned about the Bauhaus, industrial design, architecture. I learned about the history of the motion picture and the birth of video. I learned how people figured out how to apply a new technology.
I learned about Leonardo da Vinci and the study of anatomy. For many centuries the study of art anatomy was the same as the study of medical anatomy. I learned about art and technology.
I learned about why they had the art that they di
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In fact, I went to a liberal arts school and took plenty of art, music, literature, and foreign languages. But at the same time I learned what I needed to earn a living. In your case, your liberal arts education merely seems to have turned you into an ignorant jerk.
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Let's face it... Most largish Universities are just Billion dollar hotels
with no "checkout time". Stay until you run out of money, whether it's your
money or money that comes from someone else. They REALLY don't care.
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Furthermore, a college education costs about as much as a good mid-size car; if you can't afford paying that back, you picked the wrong major.
Even if I grant you that statement, if typical 18 year-olds were decently equipped to make such rest-of-your-life decisions they wouldn't be such attractive targets for military recruiters.
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If they pick the wrong career, paying back a student loan is the least of their worries. And the typical teenager has parents to help them make decisions.
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If they pick the wrong career, paying back a student loan is the least of their worries. And the typical teenager has parents to help them make decisions.
Well, let's look at the facts.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/education/poor-students-struggle-as-class-plays-a-greater-role-in-success.html [nytimes.com]
For Poor Strivers, Leap to College Often Ends in a Hard Fall
By JASON DePARLE
Published: December 22, 2012
3 students from Galveston, TX, graduated 2008 at top of their class in low-ranked Ball High, were in Upward Bound, a college-prep program for low-income teenagers. All 3 got into college, but 4 years later, none has a 4 year degree. “Their story seems less lik
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I'm not sure what "fact" you think those three stories are supposed to provide. You have three students who failed out of college and obviously made bad financial decisions, since they ended up owing more than average and not even getting a degree out of it. Statistically, more
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I'm not sure what "fact" you think those three stories are supposed to provide. You have three students who failed out of college and obviously made bad financial decisions, since they ended up owing more than average and not even getting a degree out of it.
The point of the story was that these are students who came from low-income families, and because of that they and their families didn't know how to make "good" financial decisions. Students from upper-income families know how to make "good" financial decisions because their families have been handling money all their lives. It demonstrates the advantages of upper-income families.
college graduation rates are not that dissimilar: about 60-70% for kids from families making $70k+, and about 45-55% for kids from families making less than $25k.
That looks dissimilar to me.
Suppose you had a deadly disease, and you could take one of two drugs. One drug had a survival rate o
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And I can see where your error is. You think that, given the same environment, you'll get the same outcomes, so if you observe different outcomes, someone must have been unfairly disadvantaged. But kids aren't a tabula rasa. Academic achievement (strongly correlated with income) is passed on through the generations just like strength, height, and athleti
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Diane Ravitch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_Ravitch [wikipedia.org] was assistant secretary of education in the G.H.W. Bush Administration and the Clinton Administration. She started out as a neocon, and writes for the Wall Street Journal editoral page. One of her responsibilities was collecting data on educational accomplishment.
After looking at the data, she realized that the major factor associated with educational achievement was family income. The higher the income, the higher the educational achievement. This i
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Yes, that's clear: there is a modest correlation.
A much simpler explanation (that happens to agree with the data) is that smart parents both make a lot of money and also produce smart kids.
You keep using the te
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Incidentally, the US already has one of the highest university completion rates in the world:
http://www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/details/education/university-completion.aspx [conferenceboard.ca]
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A much simpler explanation (that happens to agree with the data) is that smart parents both make a lot of money and also produce smart kids.
I would like to see that data, in a peer-reviewed science journal (and not an economics journal).
The best evidence I've seen, generally in Science magazine (sorry, I don't have the citation handy) is that about 50% of intelligence, as measured in standard tests, is genetic, as inferred by twin studies, and 50% is due to the environment.
The psychologists say that in a society with strong economic equality, and equal opportunity in education, like Finland, you can safely hypothesize that most of the variation
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Yes, where "environment" mostly is epigenetic and very early childhood. Hence, you proved my point: given what we know about nature and nurture, you would predict significant differences in college attendance by class.
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You say that as if no one would join the military if they magically knew something. The fact of the matter is that most who join at that age have been talked into it by means other than a recruiter. In some cases, this is family like parents or other relatives who served, in some it might be to pay for college that they see no other way of getting, in some it might be to escape some reality in their hometown or life (lack of jobs, gang culture, the middle of nowhere and so on), in some it might simply be be
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Spot on. The only thing a ratings system would accomplish would be handing out salaries to a handful of cronies tasked with compiling a worthless metric. Unless you are born into privilege (money, athletic, or scholarly ability) and you are going to college, its going to be the local state university. Hopefully one that caters do your chosen discipline without extreme financial burden.
Gut Homeland Security (by extension TSA), cut military spending, stop spending money on the militarization of local police.
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We are left with the value of the education. Free or not, the value dropped as prevalence increased. If everyone gets university, and need not pay, what is the advantage?
Why not extend mandatory schooling 4 years, free?
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The job of government is to pay for education.
That's part of why higher education in the US is so expensive now. That same reasoning above led to subsidized education loans which in turn led to vast demand increases and above average price increases at universities for the last 40 years. Talk about counterproductive activities.
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.
And the US spends something like two thirds of all spending on the military and a couple of rather harmful entitlements (Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid).
The economically ignorant complain about how "we have the money",
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I spent two years at a private university and left with a general education associates degree and thousands of dollars in debt. Yet I had a full-tuition scholarship. Why did I leave?
Free school is great, if you can afford it. Despite the free tuition, the cost of books, housing, food, the mandatory health insurance plan, and all the other expenses and fees involved, the tuition was the smallest piece of the pie.
Quit loaning people money to go to college (Score:1)
Stop all student lending. If somebody is smart but can't afford to go, the government should give them a full ride. Not a lot of people should be getting that ride. Many colleges should simply shut their doors. Some community colleges should remain open to fix the damage that public high schools have done. Those students should sue their local school boards for educational malpractice. If the local school boards don't want to be sued, they shouldn't give high school diplomas to people who are function
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Actually, community colleges are far more cost effective than the major universities. Probably because they have to live within their means.
As for ditch diggers, just remember that the next time you need a sewer line put in, or cable or electric or anything else underground, that ditch diggers, usually make far above the minimum wage that many college graduates are making.
don't worry (Score:3)
Obama is going to revolutionize and rationalize education, just like he has revolutionized and rationalized health care.
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Obama is going to revolutionize and rationalize education, just like he has revolutionized and rationalized health care.
Well, if he would just undo the damage created by no child left behind, it would be a great start.
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It would be. Unfortunately, he is obviously incapable of pulling something like that off and would make things worse instead.
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Actually, Obama was and is a supporter of no child left behind. His ACES program is nothing but a few tweaks to it.
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As I was saying...
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Oh, I didn't notice the sarcasm... My bad.
I have a habit of missing things like that.
what about drop the old 4 year idea and moving to (Score:3)
what about drop the old 4 year idea and moving to an smaller and more skill based badges system?
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what about drop the old 4 year idea and moving to an smaller and more skill based badges system?
Don't we have that already with IT certifications? The rest of the working world may benefit from something similar, flawed as certifications are.
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what about drop the old 4 year idea and moving to an smaller and more skill based badges system?
Don't we have that already with IT certifications? The rest of the working world may benefit from something similar, flawed as certifications are.
Technically, a college diploma is a certification. The difference is that it is offered by the educational institution whereas IT certs usually are from the vendor of a specific product they ultimately want you to buy.
Hell I'd love it if they had something so (Score:4, Insightful)
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Actually I think you're right (Score:2)
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No (Score:2)
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
How do you think the Department gets the information? Search warrants? Waterboarding?
The information gathered from colleges is provided to the Department voluntarily, with the understanding that much of it will be held in confidence and only published in aggregate. If you insist on all the data be made public, you'll find a lot less data to work with to begin with, particularly from private institutions that have a competitive edge to maintain.
Dumb idea (Score:2)
It's not discriminatory enough.
The cost of every degree at any particular college is the same even though each degree has a different value in the marketplace.
The value of a liberal arts degree from Harvard might be more than the value of a liberal arts degree from local state college, but the Harvard degree will not be more valuable than a degree in nuclear physics from local state college.
You wo
One Accreditation For All (Score:1)