someproteinguy wrote:
I'd argue more work has to be done to provide a useful education, and the apathy would dissolve if the education we were providing was more timely and applicable to their lives, but certainly the $$$ has to factor in somewhere.
This may sound trite, but I'd argue that people tend to place value on things based on how much it cost them to obtain. They also certainly take more care to get the most out of something when they're paying for it versus when it's free. What we're already seeing is a lot of kids going to college because that's what they're expected to do, and what they think they should do, but then having no clue what to do with it once there, and often little or no motivation to utilize the education system to provide useful skills that'll actually pay off for them in the long run. This can certainly happen when the parents are shelling out the cash, but it's also happening with our current student loan system. At that age, they just don't necessarily get the cost bit. It's just numbers on some piece of paper somewhere to them. And for many of them, they've never held a job, and really have no context for that number.
We're certainly not seeing a great return on secondary education dollars spent versus usefully skilled graduates today, and I suspect if the only change you make is to make it "free", that return will only get worse. There's a whole host of reforms we'd need to make to the system before we could even begin to talk about funding it directly/publicly.
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Also would point out that if a family is concerned about the monetary side they also probably have both parents working long hours and/or multiple jobs which greatly decreases the amount of time they can put into their child's education and would work counter to any improvement being made there.
Eh. You'd think that, but the opposite is what tends to happen. Parents who are working multiple jobs to provide for their kids may not have as much direct time with the kids, but they provide an example just by doing what they are doing. And IMO that's far more important in terms of motivation for the kids. When kids see their parents working hard to provide for them, they learn that this is what you have to do to succeed, and they will tend to emulate that behavior and thus work hard on their education. The kids who get "left behind" tend to come from families where the lesson they learn from their parents is that sitting on the couch and waiting for the welfare check to come to provide for them is the way to get through life.
The poor working class kids may not go to college, but they do tend to find gainful employment elsewhere via other paths. Paths, btw, which I happen to think are just as legitimate as the "4 year university or bust" path we push (too hard) on our kids today. In those reforms I'd include those other paths as well. But those paths don't involve funneling public money into the coffers of big universities, so it doesn't tend to get a whole lot of political traction.
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In simpler terms: harder to make a living -> more work for parents -> less time for educating children -> kid falls behind without parental support -> education system suffers as they have to put effort into making sure "no child is left behind" -> plans to help struggling education system put into place --> unfortunately plans can't succeed without parental support -> everyone's children end up with diminished success -> start over at beginning, and the downward spiral continues.
Again. I think that trying to make things "easy" for people doesn't usually generate the results you're looking for. I just don't think it's as simple as "make people more prosperous". There's no magic switch you can flip to make this work. And I'll also point out that most of what makes things "harder to make a living" is the gap between "very generalized high school education" and "4 year university education" that we have nearly eliminated in our society. For those who *don't* go to college, the opportunities for success have dwindled. And without that success, it's harder for them to help elevate their children to an even better life. The key IMO, is to put those stepping stones back in.
But again, it's pretty hard to get our primary educators to stop telling all their students they should go to college and get them to encourage (or even prepare them with alternative curriculum) for a more direct trade based path. We've filled our K-12 schools with people who steadfastly believe that the best and only route is the same one they took. Sadly, this just isn't true for most of the kids they're teaching, but it's what they want to be true, so it's what they teach. And so we get an alarmingly high number of kids who either think of themselves as abject failures for not going to college and have a steeper route to success than they should, or who beg and borrow to go to college, and maybe drop out (and see themselves as failures, but now with student loan debt), or who manage to struggle through and get a degree, but in something that doesn't really make them much more valuable to the job market than if they'd just spend the previous 4 years working.
I don't think it's really about just counting up the percentage who get college degrees. That seems like starting with the assumed definition of success (get a degree) and then measuring to that definition. A degree is not the only route to a successful life. We should be measuring actual success. Like maybe what percentage of each generation are able to gain employment that provides enough money for them to support a household. I'm a big fan of a classical education, and studying philosophy, and exposing yourself to all sorts of different ideas and concepts. And that's all great and all. I'm just not sure that the priority of our government should be paying for that. If we focus more on making sure people have sufficient education and skills to be valuable in our work force, then more of them in the next generation will have sufficient financial standing to allow them to choose to go that route if they want.
IMO, that's how you break that cycle. One step at a time.
Edited, Apr 20th 2016 5:23pm by gbaji