Who Will Pay for Free 2 & 4 Year Degrees?

Good for you. I work for the State, and they have zero tuition reimbursement. I had to "pay as you go".

 

BA
2 Masters
Professional Doctorate
PhD

Zero reimbursement, student loans (all paid), 10% scholarships, 90% paid out of pocket. All completed after I was married and had one child, so please know, I understand pursuing one's academic goals can be extremely difficult.

 

I used to be a fan of compulsory public service. Now, I think I'd call it "heavily incentivized public service."

If you sign up and do a hitch in the military, the benefits last a lifetime. For the rest of your days, you are a veteran. That comes with a certain amount of status on its own. Then throw in GI Bill, TA while on active duty, the opportunity to travel, training, salary, other benefits and you have a very strong incentive to at least consider enlisting.

What do you get when you join AmeriCorps? An education award. In 2008, that was around $4,725 (compare to the Montgomery GI Bill I signed up for totaling $24,400). You also get a very small stipend and can apply for Medicaid for healthcare. Tricare has its annoyances but it's 1000% times better than Medicaid.

There are countless reasons why a person may want to enlist but may not be able to enlist. Right now, their next best public service option offers crap.

There are other ways to work for the government, mind you. But none follow the same model as the military where you can just show up at an office, sign up and go. AmeriCorps comes close, but it's still not a guarantee you'll even get in.

A proper civilian corps with adequate incentives to join could provide youth with a very good learning experience while helping to get some critical work done (without farming it out to private contractors). You're 17 and don't know what you want to be when you "grow up?" well, clearing brush with the Department of the Interior might help you out much more than the 2 years of wasted study at a university as you constantly change your major and build up a cache of useless electives as you shift your career goals based on very little actual information.

 

Well I guess I'll say two things. The first is that I don't know why you're so angry about this. It's just an internet discussion board. Second, You're right, I was never in the military or any other form of national service. I may have gone that route if the people around me had leaned in that direction but they did not. Besides, I don't think it's required to have had that experience in order to have an opinion about it. Any number of examples come to mind.

 

I think it was former Florida Congressman Allen West who tweaked Derek Bok's quote of "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" when he said;

"If you think education is expensive, wait until it's free".

 

I have personal experience with "free education".

It becomes clear to the State very quickly that not everyone can or should get to higher education. Primarily there is not enough money left, but also some lack the aptitude.

So, who should go? The burden of selection was "entrusted" to the State. The State decided who gets to go to college (and even high school).

Of course, if you were not a party official it was unlikely to gain entry to school. Even with "favors" it was very hard. The real intelligentsia fled, was killed off, or simply went silent.

I know this family where one of the boys was slated to machine hammer heads. With good behavior, he would have been promoted to make glass parts for some equipment. His brothers had similar fate. Here in the US, he was invited to join Mensa, his brothers all have various doctorates with high honors and he is working on his degrees.

 

We already have free high school, and we're not choosing who gets to go. However, if we did have a system where the government got to choose who goes to college for free, those with low high school grades who still want to go to college can simply pay their own way.

 

You have way more faith in humanity changing suddenly for the better, despite all of history.

 

The history already exists to support my position. We've had free high school in the U.S. for decades. Several European countries have free college.

 

Well, like you said, anyone can have an opinion. Your kids might too, if you haven't already planned their lives for them.onder:

 

I served in the military, and I can ascribe a lot of descriptions to it, but "waste" isn't one of them.

If you know how to work the system, you can finish an enlistment in any branch with a Bachelor's degree for near-free, then use the GI Bill for graduate school when you're discharged. In addition, you can travel the world, save some serious money (provided you live in the barracks and don't drink it away), and come out with a marketable skill. I don't know any other place that will pay you to learn to be an aircraft mechanic, truck driver, or nuclear engineer.

I'm starting to get my son to think about the military, although I'm steering him towards the Air Force instead of the Army. He can benefit and learn from my mistakes. :smirk:

 

A powerful voice in Canada is asking for free post secondary education. There is a progressive government in Canada and it may just happen. Hopefully, like healthcare, education could be enshrined in the charter of rights and freedom.
Student group wants Liberals to spend $3.3B annually on free college, university - Politics - CBC News

 

You are disagreeing with a claim I never made. I never said that getting a college degree was the only means of social mobility, I said instead that most people who got a college degree prior to the mid-1970s justified their behavior on the grounds of social mobility. Indeed, that was part of the initial justification for the original GI Bill--to reward servicemen with a leg up for their efforts.

As to your other point, I don't see where we disagree. I did say there were exceptions and I freely admit that nursing is one of the those exceptions where a degree can reward a middle class life style with a robust degree of certainty. I'd also include tech jobs in that exception as well. But there are many more degrees that outweigh these exceptions and I stand by my point that taken overall a college degree does not mean entry to the middle class they way it did 40 years ago.

 

We do disagree. It may not be a guarantee, but not having a degree means a much lower chance of getting a good-paying job. I see a bachelor's (an associate's in some cases) as almost necessary to enter the middle class these days. That's where its value lies. It had less value in the past because it was not needed by most people to enter the middle class.

It's not just nursing and tech jobs that require a degree. You need a bachelor's to become a parole or probation officer (this can vary slightly by jurisdiction), a social worker (master's preferred), a child protective services caseworker, to work many insurance jobs, many other business jobs require a bachelor's degree, and the list goes on and on. When I was looking at corporate security management jobs, most companies wanted a degree.

If you trust Payscale, there are only a handful of majors where over 50% of the graduates get stuck in jobs that don't require a degree.

 

I passed the 10 minute edit limit. Most jobs will require an associate's degree or higher in the future. I think it would be safe to assume that most jobs that will afford a middle class lifestyle will require a degree if that isn't already the case. If you have no degree, you will have an extremely hard time landing a good-paying job. Having a degree is not a 100% guarantee that you will land a job that will afford a middle class lifestyle, but that has never been the case. Of course, there is more competition now since more people have degrees, but more jobs also require degrees. If you don't meet the educational requirement for a job, then you have zero chance of getting hired for it. If most jobs are requiring a degree and you don't have one, you have a very small chance of moving to the middle class or maintaining middle class status. This means that a bachelor's degree is becoming as valuable as a high school diploma. In other words, it is becoming an essential minimum requirement to stay in or move up to the middle class.

 

Like you I was in the army. With the benefit of hindsight I would also suggest considering the Coast Guard, sometimes called the 'other' branch of the military. Besides the normal military benefits they have plenty of opportunity to be stationed in Alaska and that looks like a great deal to me!

 

I do believe that those in the skilled trades might disagree with you on this point.

 

Well, if the report says that 65% will require additional schooling/training following high school that means 35% will not. In some cases those are the skilled professions. I'll tell you though, I've known more than a few welders who had to take some classes in order to learn new techniques, etc. in order to keep up with the demands of their job. If you've been burning MIG wire for 10 years and your company gets a contract doing TIG welding and you don't know how to TIG weld then you're in trouble. You get the picture.

 

Well, there are a few issues;

1. How do we define "middle class?"
2. Where do we draw the line on "additional schooling/training following high school?"

The first is important because "the middle class" is often used as this abstract notion that seems to be ever-elusive. Is it just income? Is it income versus the living expenses of an area? Does the amount of discretionary income come into play? Should we factor in debt?

I've seen websites that offer their own measures. But, like trying to neatly divide all people into generational buckets, it just doesn't work so neatly.

If folks are willing to consider me as being a member of the "Middle Class" then I could, I suppose, look around me in my neighborhood. There's a chiropractor who lives across the street. I have an accountant/lawyer couple nearby. And there is a dermatologist within earshot. But there is also a locksmith, a mechanic and a lovely ultrasound technician couple.

All of our houses are more or less the same. We drive similar cars. The ultrasound technicians, I would estimate, make around $110 - $120k combined. That's far less than what the dermatologist likely makes though he does crack student loan jokes, so I assume he has more expenses than those two, and his wife doesn't work outside the home. So, at the end of the day, they might have a similar amount of discretionary income.

But wait, most of this is also only possible because we live in Syracuse where the cost of living is comparatively low. If you dropped us all in NYC we might very well be scattered across the five boroughs and into Long Island and Northern NJ. If we all have similar looking houses but in different areas, did we switch classes?

It gets kind of weird when you really get into the nitty gritty.

Second, while we think of postsecondary schooling in terms of "college" (used here in the U.S. sense where it means a degree granting institution), the skilled trades can often be entered into with a year or less of schooling.

Of our present welders, I think only one came to us directly from high school. Most graduated and then attended a certificate program and came to us afterward.

A quick search tells me that a locksmithing program takes about 10 - 13 months.

But these vocational programs, even if they approach 1 year of post-high school training, are not academic in nature. Those 10 months on locksmithing school don't involve a liberal arts core. Heck, they likely don't even involve receiving academic credit for your work.

But these programs are putting people into jobs where the starting salaries are significantly higher than many newly minted college graduates.