Excuse Me For a Moment As I Wipe Off the Uneducated Cynicism That’s Dripping From My Chin
There. All tidy.
Now.
Screw the Pell Grants. Since when did college join the living, breathing “necessity/GODGIVENRIGHTTOS” for life itself, like water, food, shelter, elementary/secondary education and wine?
I’m heartily sick of this emphasis on the miracle that is a degree, especially when it’s come to be regarded as a natural course of progression, vice a goal to be worked towards: the icing on the cupcake of your completed and adequate foundational education, as it were. That gooey, delicious topping shouldn’t really depend on my tax dollars funding it in any sense that individuals are HANDED tuition monies, in addition to state institutions in order to keep their roofs from leaking or the lights on. (And no. I have no sympathy for either your intellectual or civic prowess, or ethnic/social class. You should study hard and be a good person, regardless.)
Get a job. Work while you go to school. It might even take years to graduate. How appalling.
A higher education is a worthy pursuit, of course. I wish I had had the opportunity and, quite frankly, the drive to WORK my ass off to pay for one. But I didn’t, hence the Marine Corps and a different sort of adventure. But those were the circumstances of my life and “the breaks”, as well as the genesis of my distaste for the whole grant/scholarship/student loan/you-owe-me-college state of mind.
No, I don’t.
With Ebola’s entire college tuition having been paid for by the fruit of major dad’s labor, we’ve also lived the philosophy we espouse.
Dreams shrivel and die all the time. Get over it. (No one ever mentions how many of those opportunities were squandered, or doomed to begin with.) (Yes, I r a H8R.) With the average American just looking to keep the food and shelter God Given Right thing afloat over the course of the next year ~ hell, even the next week for how many millions of us ~ screw the Pell Grants.
Makes Ya Barf, Nanny State, Politics | tree hugging sister | 
February 15, 2011 9:43 am
Subscribe
I am a knuckledragger sans degree myself (and, incidentally, a H8R a well).
I R A H8R 2!!!!
Oh, and got the glass!!! WHEEE!!!!
I now need another glass to compliment it, you know. I like the other one with the gold and swirls in the header picture. Email me!!!
I needs my preciiiiious…..
I have a college degree, but I see wwaaaaaaayyyyy too many people with degrees working menial jobs. People who would have done better to learn a trade. But they didn’t because getting college paid for is way too eary. Not too mention, college is more “glamorous” than mere vocational schools.
College is becoming the new high school.
Agreed. My parents paid for my first 3 year (I tested out of a year) degree. I went back to school (for another B.S.) and worked 2nd shift in a factory and did student loans for the difference.
Took me about 3 years to pay them back. At ~$30 per month (I didn’t borrow all THAT much…).
Of course, my second school wasn’t Haavahd or Yale, it was UNC Charlotte. And I didn’t live in a dorm with a gym and other amenities (not sure they even had dorms at all there back then).
Yeah, no student loans for me either. My parents helped and I worked. The thought of some government loan was a foreign concept back then, you did it on your own.
I must admit, that I had a partial scholarship for the first two years of college, with the parental units kicking in half of what that didn’t cover. I paid the other half myself — by working.
Then I got a 2 year ROTC scholarship. That’s kinda sorta like a government loan. God knows I paid it back.
The more the government becomes involved in the funding of higher education, the more expensive it becomes. If we cut the Pell grants and, more significantly, the Stafford and Plus loans, colleges would be forced to drop their tuitions to a more reasonable level. Colleges build the extra amount from these federal programs into the tuition. It’s gotten to the point where everyone is expected to take out 30K of debt for an undergraduate degree as a matter of course. Why not cut the loan programs and just drop the tuition 30K? Most of the increased costs go for student support services and campus lifestyle amenities anyway (not to mention the raft of compliance officers the modern university requires in order to be au fait with federal regulations re use of government money).
Come on. If they don’t go to college, where are they going to learn basic math and English?
Touche` Skyler. It is ridiculous and totally socialist to think that everyone should go to college. They shouldn’t and graduation rates prove that which is also an indicator of how lousy our High Schools are at prepping them for higher education. Aside from the premium programs how many kids have four years of math, english? How many of them have even read Twain, Steinbeck let alone Chaucer or Shakespeare? High School is a joke now.
I read a couple years back that a high school diploma in 1964 is worth two years of college today. Maybe that’s why old farts can be forgiven a bit of jaundice when they hear the dumbed down demanding college as a “right.”
This is an easy fix: Explain to Precious that college is earned and that they’re gonna spend the next 20 years paying back that loan with a job whose real salary hasn’t risen since 1978. If they can find one.
Maybe then they’ll understand that this “entitlement” is one of the seeds of a cultural revolution in which the H8trs are demanding justifications to continue a corrupt socialist system for another 40 years.
I’ve been favorably impressed with the commercial/trade apprenticeship programs that exist in Switzerland, Germany, Austria etc. Certainly the U.S. would be well-served to foster similarly competitive and respected vocational training paths for our young people. Scary statistics show about 50% of U.S. students who start a traditional four-year degree program don’t finish. Must those students who accept Pell grants but don’t earn their degrees repay that money, or do I hear a flushing sound?
There’s another reason to emphasize community schools, associate degrees, and trade schools – they’re usually much cheaper. A person can get the learning they require or wish for without starting their professional careers under crushing debt loads – or by killing themselves with two jobs and a full course load. Better for them, better for the lenders, better for the long-term economy overall.
If you see:
A – 2 or 3 years, $20,000 total cost;
or
B – 5 years, $75,000 total cost;
and you KNOW that you will be just as good a teacher or lawyer… or at the very least, that you will not be four times as good by spending four times the money… what would you choose? Which is better?
And yet the increasing insistance by The Powers That Be is to REQUIRE choice B. Like many other pyramid schemes, this one is on the verge of collapse. It’s simply not “sustainable,” to toss out a word the left ought to be familiar with.