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Should “equal opportunity” mean free college?

Should “equal opportunity” = free (gov funded) college to those who can complete it?

  • Yes

    Votes: 13 29.5%
  • No

    Votes: 31 70.5%

  • Total voters
    44
Moderator's Warning:
One final time. Cease the baiting and flaming. If you get baited and you respond in kind, expect similar mod response to come in kind as well. Some thread bans have already been handed out, I suggest people get back on topic if they don't want to join those who have exited the thread
 
There is something to be said about having good vocational schools available at the public school level (yes I support public schools). Many people are not best served going to college. many are better served learning a skilled trade be it machinist, welder, millwright, PLUMBER, HVAC tech, automechanics (the guys who work on my lexus make more per hour than many associates at decent sized law firms in this area) etc.
 
That's not what I asked you about. I asked you why it was you didn't ask your children to aim higher than plumbers. It's not as if doctors and engineers will become obsolete within the next 40 years.

Plumbers can make more money than doctors and engineers.
What's so wrong with being a plumber?
 
Congratulations. You've gone from being a disgruntled blue collar employee to a boring blue collar employee in less than 3 pages.

You, however, have remained exactly the same.
 
If every person in the USA had the same per capita net worth as, say, the average Qatar citizen, then sure. Why not? The problem is that we don't. Our country is techically bankrupt, since it's debt... under every standard audit procedure in the country... is basically beyond our ability to repay.

This isn't just an American problem. Throughout Europe, in countries that have bestowed upon their heavily-taxed citizens both luxuries (huge annual vacations, shortened work weeks, high pay) and necessities (housing subsidies, free medical, subsidized food and utilities), the generous college stipends offered to their citizen students are beginning to erode, because they just can't afford it. Students throughout those countries, who have grown up believing it's their right to be educated at government expense, are angry. :shrug:

Bottom line, we already subsidize the education of too many college students and we use the wrong damned demographic to do it. University scholarships are now race-based rather than economically-based, which means the children of rich black and hispanic families will get financial assistance while the children of poor Asian and white families will not. Oh, and let us not forget sports scholarships, where the only consideration is whether or not the kid can punt, dunk or pitch. Don't even get me started on that crap.

I wish I lived in a country rich enough to provide every child in America a free college education. Unfortunately, I don't. Most people don't. So those who are determined to educate themselves are simply going to have to work for it, they way their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents did.
 
I guess we shouldn't pay attention to these comments.
Some people have a limited scope in life and don't understand that people can make bank doing all sorts of things.

More opportunity for us, less for them. :shrug:

Yeah, anyone who thinks plumbers are poor has never had to pay one.

And the real money for plumbers isn't fixing clogged toilets and stuff, it's new construction.
 
true. The real question is tax payer funded a better way to make sure we get more educated and functioning in soceity than we're doing now.

We already have about a 25% high school drop-out rate, and we have "free" public education. I wouldn't expect any significant differences if college were taxpayer-funded in full. Those who have the will, find a way. It's their motivation level over the affordability issue. If you're poor, Pell Grants are an option.
 
We already have about a 25% high school drop-out rate, and we have "free" public education.

But we also have 100% compulsory public education. So of course there are kids who are there who don't want to be, and drop out. That's not true for college. People going to college want to be there.
 
But we also have 100% compulsory public education. So of course there are kids who are there who don't want to be, and drop out. That's not true for college. People going to college want to be there.

My point is that making college "free" won't make that much difference overall. Those who want a good education will pursue that, and there are many options available. Pell grants, scholarships, student loans, community colleges, vocational schools. The opportunity is there- the motivation is lacking.
 
Frankly, if everyone had a college education, it wouldn't be worth much, lol.

well compared to the rest of the world it might
 
I believe educational funding and vocational funding should be available on a sliding fee scale based on income to students who maintain a decent GPA. I also believe that additional funding should be available to train students in professions that are needed so that students would have a financial motive to train in needed professions. A well-educated pool of workers is key to regaining the US's role as a world leader in research and development in both the sciences and medicine.
 
I also believe that additional funding should be available to train students in professions that are needed so that students would have a financial motive to train in needed professions.

They already have a financial incentive to be trained in needed professions. That natural incentive is what I like to call "being gainfully employed." Getting trained in an unneeded profession is more likely to lead to unemployment. There's only financial incentive in that if the liberals get their way and make unemployment benefits endless.

It is mind-boggling to me that more than a third of an almost-statistically-relevant number of respondents answered "yes" to this question.
 
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The more I hear from professors and those they have educated, the less value I place in a liberal arts education. The only differences I see between those with advanced degrees, and those who didn't complete high school, is how well-spoken they are and what they do for a living.

For the product they turn out, universities should be investigated for price gouging.

EDIT: So yes. If the idea is to indoctrinate statist goals, those who accept it should not have to pay.
 
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I like the British and Australian systems where you have to pay on loan, but it is a loan with very lenient conditions.

"Free" college doesn't create equal opportunity. Education deficits exist long before students reach college age, first of all. Secondly, as long as we have majors with little guarantee of broad-ranging success (i.e. women's studies, dance) we shouldn't be requiring tax payers to subsidize the whims of any college-age person in this country.
As a proud humanities graduate, and just using your post of one of several, may I object to the idea that humanities and similar degrees are not 'broad-ranging'. Now today many are taught poorly, but I feel that you probably get a broader education if you read (in the British university sense of taking a course; I don't mean private reading) Classics or History than you do if you study engineering or even natural sciences. The former aim, or should do, to give you a broad grounding in human existence and hopefully in wisdom, the latter do not, they teach you only specialised and technical knowledge.

Of course this is not how it usually is today, as I'm well aware.
 
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I didn't vote in the poll because neither answer expresses my view. I think college should be affordable, but not free. I think students in countries where it's 100 percent provided by the government tend to take it for granted. When you're paying for your education, you'll take it seriously and apply yourself. That said, I don't think a person should have to go 200K or more into debt in order to get a university education. I'm glad there are public universities, and I think it's extremely important to keep their tuitions affordable.
 
The government shouldn't be paying for anything. Those with the appropriate GPA should be allowed to get loans so that they can pay off their loans after they graduate and have a three month grace period to start their career.
 
My point is that making college "free" won't make that much difference overall. Those who want a good education will pursue that, and there are many options available. Pell grants, scholarships, student loans, community colleges, vocational schools. The opportunity is there- the motivation is lacking.

So there's plenty of money and it's just that people are lazy? It's that again?
 
They already have a financial incentive to be trained in needed professions. That natural incentive is what I like to call "being gainfully employed." Getting trained in an unneeded profession is more likely to lead to unemployment.

If it were an unneeded profession, it wouldn't be a profession.

You talk as if it's easy to predict the job market, or what others will do. But if everyone is expected to get trained in the most in-demand professions, lots will cluster to them, and then there will be too many candidates for too few jobs, and vice versa. So your idea is self-defeating. And then there's external forces that change the job market, and your own skills and opportunities.
 
If a capable child/young person who has the capabilities to make a college degree is kept from doing so, because of his/her financial situation, that would not just be unworthy of a humane society and degrading for the individual, but also a massive waste of resources for society as a whole. Imagine if an Einstein had ended as burger cook, just because his family could not afford college -- and even if it's just a decent engineer among many, that's bad enough. I don't think we (in the West) can afford to waste this intellectual potential.
 
Luna Tick said:
I didn't vote in the poll because neither answer expresses my view. I think college should be affordable, but not free.

Actually, college is affordable. First of all, you won't be spending a six figure amount on an undergraduate unless a) you get absolutely no grant/scholarship money (a rare instance, given the correlation between income and intelligence), or b) go to a private/Ivy-league caliber institution. I got a Pell grant through four years. My first two years at community college, it covered tuition and then some. In essence, it was basically gub-mint paying me to go to college. For my undergrads at Michigan, it paid a very significant portion of my tuition. Couple that with the overall lifelong expected incomes of college grads vs. those with just a high school education, and it's not that bad.

Furthermore, college shouldn't be free because it devalues the scarcity value of a degree. We don't need a more "enlightened" society because college would not teach them anything they really wouldn't be taught in high school. A senior in high school is more than capable of running a cash register or basic memorization of remedial items in a retail store. When someone can show me that the local pump jack at the gas station can gain advantage over the ability to quote Nietzche, I'll argue the overall value of "free" education.
 
Actually, college is affordable. First of all, you won't be spending a six figure amount on an undergraduate unless a) you get absolutely no grant/scholarship money (a rare instance, given the correlation between income and intelligence), or b) go to a private/Ivy-league caliber institution. I got a Pell grant through four years. My first two years at community college, it covered tuition and then some. In essence, it was basically gub-mint paying me to go to college. For my undergrads at Michigan, it paid a very significant portion of my tuition. Couple that with the overall lifelong expected incomes of college grads vs. those with just a high school education, and it's not that bad..

Well, yeah, bolded part.
 
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