Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
A colleague at work is reliably liberal. I can depend on him for the latest liberal spin on any issue.
The reason people are upset about the high cost of education is: students are greedy. They expect to retire too early, which makes the cost of education seem like a bad investment. If they were willing to work until 70 or later, then the education investment would pay off.
In completely unrelated news, William Mitchell Gay College of Law is offering buy-out packages to tenured law professors. Not because the school is bloated and has lost sight of its core mission in a time of declining enrollments when most of its graduates can’t find work, but purely as an altruistic measure out of the goodness of their hearts. No word on whether they’re cutting diversity administrators. But they did change the school mission from teaching law to offering a degree in practical wisdom, no doubt to defend against false advertising claims.
In Wonderland, the White Queen advised Alice to practice believing impossible things. Some people don’t need practice, they’re Minnesota liberals.
Joe Doakes
Como Park
Devaluation: whether currency, society, the individual, it’s all part and parcel of “progressive” government.
“Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.” -Socrates
Complaining about the youth is pointless, we were the youth before and everyone hated us too.
Is it not interesting that a couple decades after making acadamia more businesslike, it has become a bloated bureaucratic mess?
Commenter “Emery”/Doug Grow wrote…
“Is it not interesting that a couple decades after making acadamia more businesslike, it has become a bloated bureaucratic mess?”
If only. Most businesses have spent the last couple decades ridding themselves of bureaucratic mess. Some large businesses could afford to load up on administrators to deal with the increased regulation coming from an ever expanding government. Higher Ed has gotten bloated and expensive – because it could. Government is all too happy to guarantee student loans because… Middle Class (“Middle Class” now joining “Racism” when they don’t have the facts on their side to back up their argument for even more government). Tuitions rise to suck up all that available cash via Deans of Diversity and day spas.
According to this Boston Herald opinion column –
http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/columnists/margery_eagan/2013/05/hammer_away_at_real_college_excess
– “Experts also blame bloated administrative staffs and skyrocketing professor salaries for why college costs are up 1,000 percent in 30 years.”
Please tell me what business has raised their price 1,000 percent over the past 30 years? The only ones that possibly could are ones that get their funding from the bottomless pot of money called government.
Just as in the discussion last week when you could not comprehend the idea that government guarantees helped exacerbate the home loan implosion, “Emery”/Doug Grow, I don’t expect you to understand the governments role in causing tuitions to skyrocket either.
Emery is one of the Minnesota liberals that Joe Doakes was talking about. He does say he thinks he’s a conservative.
@Troy
“Torture of nature” is an important part of learning, as with good debate to flesh out hidden assumptions, epistemologies, or presumptions.
The important part is participants need to have a willingness to have an open mind to others views, including the times when it undermines their own agenda or views.
Too often, I see on blog discussions where there is no interest in their own agenda being questioned. Problem is, there are not enough commenters here, a problem that needs to be addressed by SiTD management for this blog to gain readership.
@Seflores
In my alma mater’s staff council, composed of senior administrators and tenured professors/professors emeritus, there are now more members who never have any interaction with students than those who do. There was also the recent UC Berkeley study which tallied the number of senior administrators and found it approximately equal to the number of professors. I completely agree on the administrative bloat that Joe Doakes points to.
Student median loan level is $13K. That may seem like a lot when you’re 22, but relative to the house you want to buy by the time you’re 30-35 ($150K-$300K, depending on where you live), the student loans are not important. If you’re 30 and your loan load is more like $100K because you paid for your own PhD in something that doesn’t yield a decent salary, then you may well have backed yourself into a fiscal cul-de-sac. If that is a surprise to you, you’re not the sort of person who should be having kids anyway. Lots of people have degrees and kids. My wife and I had 2 PhDs and 2 kids. Sacrifices were made. It was worth it.
Good for you commenter “Emery”/Doug Grow!! I commend you and your spouse’ commitment to your field(s) and pursuit of education at great sacrifice. That said – what percentage of people are cut out intellectually, mentally, and even physically, for a PhD or a graduate degree? How many people, young and otherwise, have been encouraged by a school recruiter or mentor or guidance counselor to go to college or on to a graduate school in pursuit of a degree when their prospects for success – defined by a career that allows them to live on their own and pay back their loans are limited and were known to be limted at the time they borrowed all the money for schooling?
I am blessed to have a gifted child who excels in mathematics and has a personal interest in science and engineering. Undergraduate degrees in her field of interest pay more starting salary than the average college graduate makes much less starts out at. My other child is a gifted artist. Just as talented in her field of interest, but we know from family (three of this childs cousins have PhD’s in the field) that a PhD will be required to make a living. Too may kids are graduating with few prospects – and like our discussion last week regarding easy home loans, were encouraged to load up on debt on the often false promise of career reward after their schooling was complete.
Further – what does the median loan level say about the students who drop out, still required to pay back the debt while not reaping the reward of their financial investment?
PS: “Emery”/Doug Grow? I’m not certain where “Student median loan level is $13K” figure came from and given your history of saying “Not Sure” when asked for citation, I don’t expect you to be forthcoming with a cite here. Here is some information I found: Two thirds of students ‘who graduate’ have debt and the average borrower owes $26,600. The average here in Minnesota being $29,800, but then as the movie ‘Fargo’ noted we are rubes who pay full sticker then get nicked for rust coating. Granted, you noted median and in a quick look, I don’t see that information at this site. http://projectonstudentdebt.org/state_by_state-data.php
PPS: “Problem is, there are not enough commenters here, a problem that needs to be addressed by SiTD management for this blog to gain readership.”
Is there anything better than a commenter like “Emery”/Doug Grow, with a history of cut & paste plagiarism taking a shot at this regionally and sometimes nationally significant blog?
You should be proud of the job you and your wife have done in promoting the value of intellectual curiosity and education in your children. Well done!
As an aside:
When I use the phrase: /”Actually I find I’m not sure is usually the intelligent opinion. But that makes for boring rhetoric.”/ I am referring to those of you speculating on who my alter ego might be. > I hope this helps clear that up. ;^)
Re: “cheap shot”
Really? I am not casting aspersions on the quality of SiTD. Just making note of the low number of commenters. It’s a niche demographic that being catered to, which leads to fewer eyes on the page…
The cost of college isn’t just student loan debt on graduation, it’s also wages forgone while going to school. If an unfortunate person with an undergrad degree in the humanities makes $10/hr after college doing the same job he or she could have done w/o a degree, you have to add the lost wages to get the true cost of college.
That kicks the cost of a degree up to around $100k. Not a good deal if it doesn’t put you on a good career path.
Seflores, the nice thing about Doug’s comments is cut-and-paste is easy to back-trace. In this case, the $26,000 figure comes from Huffington Post, which links to NBC News, which cites (but does not link to) a study from the Institute for College Access and Success, which reports on a study called Project on Student Debt which has the full report and a nice interactive site here: http://projectonstudentdebt.org/state_by_state-data.php
Oh, and that figure is national; California’s average is considerably lower because they subsidize college so heavily, Minnesota’s is 3rd highest at nearly $30,000. And the editorializing about what a pittance it is comes from a Federal Reserve Bank paper called Student Loans Overviews and Updates, which concludes that although student loan debt has tripled in the last 7 years and is crushing to some students, high student loan debt and its associated default rate do not necessarily pose a substantial burden on society at large because students can get deferments while they’re in school and also for hardship later but can never escape the loans so assuming the students eventually find jobs, the government eventually should recover its principal, interest and penalties. Which, by the way, go to fund Obamacare, so student loan debt relief ideas will cut off a funding stream and are therefore bad.
Doug’s personal experience with student loan debt and probability of repayment is out of date and does not accord with reality in Obama’s New Economy.
It strikes me that a drug dealer might similarly conclude the cost of a daily fix is a substantial burden to some individual addicts, but is not a substantial burden to society at large. And programs to help addicts kick the habit reduce drug dealer revenues and are therefore bad. But that doesn’t mean we must accept his analysis at face value. His underlying premise is it’s good people take drugs and student loan lenders underlying premise is it’s good people borrow money for college, both in ever-increasing amounts with no escape in sight. Reject the premise and possibilities for change blossom.
Well Joe, as I noted last night, I didn’t expect “Emery”/Doug Grow to respond with a cite for his “Student median loan level is $13K”, and Doug / his alter ego “Emery” did not disappoint. The figure you cite from the Puffington Host is different than the one Doug / his alter ego “Emery” cited, but in line with what I posted above. (Still doesn’t account for drop outs.)
I don’t know what Doug / alter ego “Emery’s” PhD is related to, but lack of citation and cut-&-paste plagiarism has been a growing problem in the liberal arts. My guess is that his PhD is in something other than the so-called hard sciences where proof of knowledge is quite a bit more difficult than in the liberal arts world.
I’ll defer to the ever so humble proprietor of SitD to cite his stats on how many “eyes are on” this page. But look at it this way – Instapundit is probably one of the highest trafficed blogs in the sphere and doesn’t have comments at all. Does this make it a ‘niche’ site? Daily Kos allows comments and on the occasion of Conservatives dying becomes a repository of the Left’s 2-minutes hate. I imagine today as the Bachmann news breaks, Lefty sites that allow comments will be filled with mysoginistic tributes to hate-f******. Who would want commenters like that?
“You should be proud of the job you and your wife have done in promoting the value of intellectual curiosity and education in your children.” If only I could inspire the same in you Doug / alter ego “Emery”.
I am not casting aspersions on the quality of SiTD. Just making note of the low number of commenters. It’s a niche demographic that being catered to, which leads to fewer eyes on the page…
Commenters are to blogs what calls are to talk shows; they’re nice to have, but they’re really not the program.
Commenters are also very cyclical. Part of it is a slow political season. Part of it is that between home and work life, my blogging has suffered in the past few months. That, too, is cyclical; I’ve been doing this long enough to know the cycle pretty well.
I write this for me. That I have an audience is a blessing. If I didn’t have one, I’d still write. If people show up to talk, it’s another blessing. Not a metric.
I suggest more illustrated posts about topless broads.
But keep it classy.
Second. Call the question. All in favor of more topless broads (but classy), say “Aye.”
The big benefit of this blog is that there is some degree of control over participants, and concern over the quality of the content on the comment area as distinct from other sites where there is little or no concern.
Do we have enough for a quorum? Aye