San Francisco Considers Making College Free

Discussion in 'General Distance Learning Discussions' started by sanantone, Jul 28, 2016.

Loading...
  1. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

  2. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

    an interesting experiment. the cost of living in that city is so high that not many people will move in order to take advantage. maybe
     
  3. Phdtobe

    Phdtobe Well-Known Member

  4. Bruce

    Bruce Moderator

    Nothing is free, someone has to pay for it.
     
    Maniac Craniac and newsongs like this.
  5. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    The article discusses how they're trying to figure out how they're going to pay for it. Do you have anything else to add?
     
  6. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    Given CCSF's reputation, it shouldn't be free to attend, they should pay people to go there.
     
    Maniac Craniac likes this.
  7. Phdtobe

    Phdtobe Well-Known Member

    Apparently, "Quality is free", Philip Crosby
     
    Vonnegut likes this.
  8. Bruce

    Bruce Moderator

    No, I think that quick shot of reality pretty much sums it up.
     
    Maniac Craniac likes this.
  9. heirophant

    heirophant Well-Known Member

    CCSF would be best advised to try to satisfy WASC's accreditation standards (which I don't believe that it currently does) before its rulers start imagining grand new educational entitlements.

    Of course when WASC tried to strip CCSF of its regional accreditation, they were met with a blizzard of lawsuits, some apparently taxpayer funded, others the work of the teacher's unions (also publicly funded, though less directly). Eventually a judge in one of the cases ordered WASC not to revoke CCSF's accreditation, despite the school not meeting accreditation standards. Nice, when you can get it.

    The US Dept of Education also weighed in by threatening to de-recognize WASC's community college commission.

    I think that this local, state and federal political interference simply undermines the credibility and integrity of the whole accreditation process and of American higher education generally.

    Bottom line: It really helps when you are politically connected and have allies in influential places.
     
  10. heirophant

    heirophant Well-Known Member

    CCSF is back in the news, and not in a good way. (Front page story in today's San Francisco Chronicle Jan 22, 2020).

    It's auditor has generated a report that says, "Does not meet minimum fund balance requirements" and there is "substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern".

    The proximate problem seems to be the end of state "stability funding" that the college received from 2014-2017. This constituted an extra $39 million/year approximately. For the last three years, CCSF has been operating deeply in the red.

    The deeper problems include the rising cost of payroll and benefits, enrollment declines, and the fact the the college operates 10 expensive locations, all with administrative and operating costs.

    There have already been campus demonstrations by both faculty and students over cuts in classes and programs. And many of the campus locations are special campuses that serve favored political constituencies. (A black campus, a Latino campus, a gay campus, a Chinatown campus etc.) Closing any one of them will have political costs.

    The last time this happened, WASC put CCSF on probation, then show-cause, then announced that its accreditation was being revoked. That triggered multiple lawsuits against WASC by the faculty unions, the city of San Francisco and the state government. Then the Obama administration US Dept of Education told WASC to back off or else WASC would lose its Dept of Education recognition.

    Totally corrupt, but there it is. So CCSF technically remained "fully accredited" despite not meeting accreditation requirements, simply because it was politically connected.

    Now CCSF seems to be spiraling down the toilet again. While WASC hasn't said anything that I know of about its ostensible "accreditation" being in danger, I'm doubtful that the Trump administration would be so quick as the Obama administration was to madly dance when Nancy Pelosi demands they do so.
     
  11. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    Auditors are fallible. Auditors can be biased. I'm not sure why you feel that WASC was obviously right here and CCSF was obviously not meeting very important standards. It is very rare for a judge to intervene in an accreditation revocation. It's even more rare for the DOE to threaten to strip a regional accreditor of recognition because of its handling of a case like this.

    You call it "totally corrupt." Based on what? Had it occurred to you that maybe WASC was in the wrong? Two separate branches of the federal government seemed to feel that was the case. This was, what? Bribery? Intimidation? Or are you going to claim that the people of San Francisco have the political clout to tip the scales of the federal government on a whim?

    Because this wasn't a decision DOE came to based on the merits of the auditor report. It was based on fundamental flaws with WASC's internal structure for review including:


    1. Those issues, for a regional accreditor, should be very troubling to any reader.

    1. Also, unless I've completely lost my mind here, WASC was told to shape up in 2013 but did not fully resolve their issues with accreditation until 2017. So, what, is this an example of how the government of San Francisco is just so cozy with the Trump administration that they can sway major decisions?
    The school is facing financial issues and is likely going to close some campus locations that are not actually serving students. That's how this is playing out.

    It's important to remember, however, that when an accreditor looks at a school's finances they are treating it as an independent entity. Can this entity continue to survive on its own based on the numbers. That measurement goes wonky for public schools since a state can subsidize the school (or not) on a whim. The government can just say that, like the fire department, expenditures are just going to have to exceed income because we want that service.

    It seems like a lot of folks here are allowing their politics to cloud their judgment of the educational standards of a school that they have never attended.
     
  12. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    It's interesting. We always seem to find trillions to start and maintain another war but when it comes to providing basic services to the people of a community people get oddly cheap all of the sudden.

    Of course, your argument is also the same one that people use to privatize police departments. After all, think of all of the money the taxpayers can save if we stop paying for retirement benefits and decent health coverage for officers. Make the pay about $3-5 more per hour than a security guard and even more money saved, right? Those salaries, after all, are paid for by someone and since we're getting all fiscalling conservative here it seems like the next logical step...
     
  13. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

    This made me laugh.
     
  14. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

    Next up . . . Robocop

    upload_2020-1-23_9-39-15.jpeg
     
  15. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    You realize that not everyone who's concerned about one kind of spending favors the other, right?
     
    Maniac Craniac likes this.
  16. Vonnegut

    Vonnegut Well-Known Member

    Love Crosby and all of our ex-pats who flew to Japan back than... sigh... we missed out on some great wisdom...
     
  17. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    Of course, and my point is that basic services should not really be up for debate. No one should be arguing that fire protection is a waste of money since their house never burned down or that since they put out their own grill fire once, everyone should be as self sufficient when it comes to putting out fires.

    These things don't exist in a vacuum. They have consequences because the systems are interrelated. If you strip a police department of funding then crime is likely to go up. If you make education inaccessible then you have a far greater likelihood of driving reliance on government programs. So, again, it's penny wise and pound foolish. You say you can't afford to make a community college tuition free. Then the complaint is that there are too many people who refuse to get the sort of jobs that enable one to actually live in SF.

    Decimate mental health programs? Hey, homelessness surged.

    You can oppose all of the spending you want. But then you better be prepared to live with the consequences of cutting that spending.
     
    Graves likes this.
  18. Maniac Craniac

    Maniac Craniac Moderator Staff Member

    How should we define what a "basic service" is? Is higher education a basic service? If not, then I'd have to wonder what the line is between what is and isn't. If we do define higher education as a basic service, then I have some concerns with the ramifications.

    Education is a personal investment of time, money and energy with the aim of acquiring a better quality of life upon completion. If we need so much public subsidy, then it calls into question whether the investment is actually paying off. If students can't pay down their own loans as a fruit of their own increased earning potential, was it really worth the cost of attendance? If public funds have to be used to make up for the disparity between the input and the output, then are the schools benefitting from the subsidy really up to the task of the social directive?

    This is fundamentally different from fire and police departments. It doesn't matter at all if we never see a return on the investment, because that's not the point. The point is, life would be unbearable without them. I don't think life would be unbearable without free community college.
     
    SteveFoerster likes this.
  19. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    It is for societies to determine what are essential and non-essential services. Come on now, you've served. Surely you've seen countries where fire protection is NOT an essential service. You value and you prioritize accordingly. If the people of San Francisco desire to make this an essential service within their society then there is really no one from the outside who should be telling them otherwise.

    This is circular logic. I should be able to pay off a loan because I earn X dollars more because of my education. However, without subsidy, the amount of the loan is significantly higher. If I go into the hole $200k to earn a degree then I need to make a lot of money. However, if we can get that cost down than I can still earn more than I would have without the education while still earning less than I would need to service a $200k debt. And that's where we are right now.

    You can easily rack up $100k+ becoming an RN today. RNs can only make so much while still practicing nursing. And we have a nursing shortage on top of it all. Some states throw loan forgiveness into the mix just to try to sweeten the deal. Ironic given the fact that nursing is incredibly popular as a major and have long lines of willing applicants vying for very few positions, but I digress. Why is it so much more bearable that we use my tax dollars to forgive the student loans of a nurse who racked up mega debt at NYU or Columbia rather than just subsidizing the cost of a public education in the first place?

    Two things; 1. It's really tragic if you think that the benchmark of a community service is "life would be unbearable without it." I mean, devastatingly sad. By your logic public parks are a waste of money. The fact that my county has a Zoo is fiscal irresponsibility. That they offer free admission to veterans is travesty. One of the benefits of living in a developed nation is that we should be able to look for a quality of life beyond bare bones survival. That means looking at our public services as being one or two notches up on Maslow's hierarchy compared to where you have them focused.

    2. Doing things the way they are now, the poor get poorer. That's really all that happens. You used to be able to go to a hospital and become an RN with a diploma. That's becoming a rarity today. Then it was more common to earn an associates from a community college to get your RN. Those programs are not only highly competitive but many of them take 3-4 years for an associates degree because of course sequencing.

    If the surest path to becoming an RN is to bypass community college and go to a place like NYU, then people of lesser means are far less likely to follow that path. Becoming an RN, something that a person historically could have done with just a little elbow grease, now becomes something reserved for the children of middle and upper middle class parents only.

    Look at how many people came out of the CUNY system. Look at how many famous people came out of the CUNY system. Then look at how many of those people were children of poor immigrants or uneducated parents working physically menial jobs. These are people who only got to go to school because the government subsidized the school.

    It would be a lot cheaper, and probably more effective, to subsidize the school for everyone rather than just pump financial aid dollars into every school everywhere. That just drives up tuition dollars and leads to the problem we have right now.
     
  20. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    "Societies" don't have motivations and goals, individuals do. In cases where nearly everyone in an area has an interest in a particular service being available and agrees that they have that interest, public provision of that service might make sense, and firefighters are a possible example.

    You're making the mistaken assumption that if something currently provided by government no longer is, that it will no longer exist, and worse, you're obnoxiously putting words in MC's mouth. In the postwar period government has taken over much of what civil society once did, and perhaps that makes it too easy to forget that libraries, museums, parks, and yes, even fire stations, have all existing privately. If enough people want those things, and I generally agree with you that they do, then they'd keep existing.

    That said, I agree with you that credential inflation harms the poor the most, especially since it needlessly raises the costs of healthcare, but simply throwing taxpayer money at that problem doesn't actually solve it.
     

Share This Page