The strategy is terrible though. He can absolutely do both simultaneously. Keep up meeting the people with these Town Halls while making mainstream media appearances.
The weird thing is...he's actually good at Town Halls.
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2020 Democratic Presidential Primary | OT2 | Warren's college tuition plan includes cancelling college debt
- Thread starter pigeon
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The weird thing is...he's actually good at Town Halls.
RE: Warren's loan thing. I think it's great that she's proposed that, but I'm not sure it goes far enough. I'm partially speaking out of self interest here, because I have around 95k of student loans. However, the larger problem that I'm not seeing discussed are predatory interest rates. My grad loans that I took out through the government have 6.8 and 7.8% interest rates. They've contributed significantly to the amount of debt that I'm in, and I haven't seen any discussions on reducing federal loan interest rates.
If it's a field you're passionate about, a degree is never worthless.
At the same time, you can't act surprised if you can't find a high paying job and you have 6 figures of debt to obtain said degree.
I'm interested in the student plan, but I'm a little skeptical about it. Why hasn't anyone else come out with a plan so simple?
Imagine not being the change you hope to see. And then acting churlish about it. I agree however the thread should not have been closed.
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Which degrees do you throw into the "worthless" bin?
Lots of people would care (I would). He's made a lot of positive contributions to political discussion.
Which is the whole problem, right? The market dictates that we have to direct our activities towards pursuits that it has dictated are valuable if we want to survive. Imagine how much creative energy would be freed up if we were instead allowed to pursue our passions without that market imperative.
I would say that degrees that no one is willing to pay you for, cost 6 figures, and that you do not end up using in any capacity for the rest of your life is not a valuable degree.
What you value may be different than what I value and that is fine. I suppose the litmus test would be to ask "Would you get your same degree again?" I know many people who would say "NO. WAY."
I also hate the student loan/university system with its massively inflated loans, adjunct teacher abuse, high administrative pay, and boondoggle stadium projects.
I also think a lot of these degree programs are highly exploitative, and a lot of my peers were fleeced by these fun degrees. Universities chewed them up and spit them out, it is disgusting.
I honestly love education and would go back in a heartbeat if I could afford it.
Surfinn this addresses your question as well.
speak for yourself, he'd be greatly missed... why feel the need to be the voice of others...
No. If you want to post in a thread, post in it. The forum exists for that purpose.
But if a thread peeves you to the point where you have to announce that you're "tolerating" it, then just... stop posting in it. Announcing that you're annoyed by it is less conducive to discussion than anything mentioned on the last page. Don't assume that your or anyone else's contribution is integral. It will continue without you.
Numbers are obviously very changeable at this point, but the one real takeaway I'd have from this is that it's very bad for Warren, as New Hampshire is right in her backyard and there's traditionally a lot of crossover between media markets, etc. If she isn't gaining much traction here, that speaks to a bigger problem.
Of course, which is why we all try to make a choice in our lives that give the best balance possible. But if you choose an expensive degree in a field that doesn't yield high economic value, should we have to subsidize that decision?
I hate to be the 'personal responsibility' guy here, but we all made choices in our lives in regards to our career so we could make a living while doing something that we enjoy more often than not. Some of us are lucky enough to succeed in that field, others are not.
I'd love to live in a world where the clarinet player makes a considerable salary but we simply don't, and anyone who wishes to be a clarinet player has to understand that before making the commitment.
to be fair to Warren the same can be said of New Hampshire and Vermont and Bernie is coming off a better than expected presidential run and has become essentially the leader of the democratic party in terms of its platform
I think you're conflating worth with market dictated value. Those two things are almost never aligned (one possible exception being doctors, but I'd say in America at least they are actually being overpaid). Take something like child-rearing. That is a vital part of a functioning society, and yet as it stands we don't value, as in monetarily reward, it in a way that reflects how vital it is.
If even liberal people on this forum feel they'd be slighted by loan forgiveness, how do you make the legislation appeal to the masses who won't think more than 10 seconds about it?
I'd prefer that money go to paid parental leave.
Saving money on college is far easier than saving money on childcare. You can go to a local/community school for your first two years, attend a state university, commute from home instead of dorming, etc.
Saving money on college is far easier than saving money on childcare. You can go to a local/community school for your first two years, attend a state university, commute from home instead of dorming, etc.
If we're using that argument you can just not have kids. Problem solved.
I want to interject here. Those expensive degrees that don't yield a high economic value, say, Dramatic Literature at NYU Tisch (49k if my Google-fu is correct), are only expensive because they're inflated to high hell by money-grubbing administrations.
For one, why would a degree cost that much if it had no expected payoff. It's clearly not market demand for Dramatic Literature graduates driving that cost, but likely the fact that it's in NYU, which is in NYC, and they use the dual branding of NYU and NYC to sell it at as high as they can get.
A way I could reword your question is "should we pay already rich colleges whatever they want when the degrees they give out don't provide that much employment opportunities to make it worth the cost?"
And my answer to that would be, no, we should address degree costs alongside college subsidization. The same reasoning applies to healthcare and health insurance. I want the government to pay for health care. I don't want a hand X-ray to cost $1000.
Yes, leaving it up to personal responsibility is exactly the problem in a society where personal choices are limited through structural inequalities. No amount of personal action is going to change that system. This is what is meant by wage slavery. But we can strive, together through class struggle, to set up a society where that sort of slavery is no longer a thing. We know this is an attainable goal because society wasn't always set up this way. Its a relatively recent phenomenon in the course of human history.
That's not equivalent at all.
My argument was not "Don't go to college," but instead "Find a school/plan that is affordable for you." I commuted to a SUNY and got the exact same degree for under $10,000 that my friends spent $50,000+ on in private universities.
Let's say, for example, somebody got a degree they were interested in and gained knowledge that launched them into the political/activist sphere and they are now actively helping/educating within their community, but their degree didn't make them a dime more. Is it still worthless? Or does it have to hit all the qualifiers you listed here?
I think it's fucked up that we expect teenagers to predict which degrees are going to be in demand years in advance and going into debt for it
It's hard not to be pessimistic about society's valuation of a liberal arts degree. STEM fetishization and "learn to code" attitudes will only make our society colder and more impersonal, while at the same time driving labor costs down for the capitalists.
This is a huge point that people overlook. Kids are told that education is the only way forward and are given little to no direction or practical advice about how their education will function once they enter the workforce.
This is a huge point that people overlook. Kids are told that education is the only way forward and are given little to no direction or practical advice about how their education will function once they enter the workforce.
The decision of taking out 30k+ of debt shouldn't be made by a 17-18 year old whose entire support system (teachers, counselors, parents) are pushing them into the "best" college.
Well... Yeah, that's part of the problem.
Forget selling something like this to middle America. Even the dreaded 'centrists'.
I would need to see more information before signing on board.
Agree completely (and your post, samoyed, is spot on as well) but you're talking about something *much* more challenging: fundamentally changing the way our society values education.
Yes, this too. Especially when there's a sub-industry devoted into advertising degrees to kids to convince them to take out loans for college, regardless of how in-demand those degrees really are.
I don't know about you guys but when I was going through the college process I couldn't escape the shadow of these dudes: https://www.usnews.com/rankings
Agreed, we also shouldn't have Medicare for all because people have been bankrupted by medical expenses in the past
That doesn't really have anything to do with what I said
Ultimately, policy proposals have to be sold to the public, and there's going to be heavy resistance if people feel like they're getting a bad deal out it, whether they actually are or not
Yep. My high school kept on pushing super prestige schools despite the financial aid being garbage. Switching from a private university out of state to a public one was probably the best financial decision I made (although my depression made that choice for me lol).
Community colleges are still looked down on, and while the quality of education there usually is worse, it's not worth going into debt to avoid it for 2 years.
I switched my major after 5 semesters so I had to switch universities mid-career and start from scratch
Thank god i dont live in the US
My greater point was that this thread is basically its' own community with it's own regulars and such. Which means that naturally there are others are going to feel excluded from discussion, even if we're doing we can in here to prevent that. There's 6000+ posts in here and that's gonna intimidate someone that just wants to talk about whether or not they like Warren's student loan plan.
And thanks y'all. I care about you too ❤️
And thanks y'all. I care about you too ❤️
It's actually a really close parallel to what you said. I think we should wait for polling on free college and student loan forgiveness rather than the consensus of the upper middle class white population of this forum.
I don't recall why they do this, do they get something out of it?
Yeah, the push for STEM was/is one of the worst aspects of normative views on education in America, and this board, primarily deriving from video game tech enthusiasts, I think largely reflects that.
Dont have kids then? As someone who has a child, college cost are a much bigger issue for our society going forward.
I imagine it looks good if you can say your school had people go to harvard and princeton etc.
At least in my case, I went to a private school that bragged about having 99% of their students go to college and they'd list out the prestigious colleges people were going to, to drum up donations.
Just going to second this.
Stiff competition in "high yield degrees" benefits employers and capital, and only serves to depress the outlooks of those "high yield degrees" (by driving up supply), making competition more fierce.
It's a s c a m.
Right, I forgot about that.
Basically the modern high school system is kind of complicit in perpetuating the poor reputation community colleges have.
I certainly agree that Bernie has similar geographic advantages, but then that just makes New Hampshire identical to the rest of the country, and if Bernie decisively gobbles up the most Warren-friendly constituencies in NH, there's no reason to think he won't do that everywhere else.
That's not exactly a good faith argument. Again, that's no different from saying "Don't go to college."
When you say "College is too expensive."
I say "Then why not mitigate the costs by attending a reasonably-priced community and/or state university, and by commuting instead of dorming?"
But when I say "Childcare is too expensive and mothers/fathers deserve time off with their children."
You say "Don't have kids."
Let's find real solutions to the problem, not simply dismiss the issue altogether. If you're going to argue that childcare isn't a bigger issue, then provide some strategies for how to mitigate the cost of food, clothing/diapers, preschool, etc without sacrificing the child's wellbeing.
I just want to stress how true this is. Even taking education classes where I was talking with principals, teachers and education admins all they could talk about was college (even though I was doing a presentation on culturally responsive pedagogy, where you have to acknowledge college is not always the end goal). I had to remind them that other paths exist.
Edit: also why personalized learning is so risky, as it takes the assumption of college being the ultimate goal and cranks it up to 11
Its also misleading, because, for example, English majors have lower unemployment than econ majors: 8.8% vs. 9.8% (setting aside for the moment that econ should have no relation to STEM fields as its a social science...). Econ majors do have a higher median pay than English majors: $47k vs. $32k. But that gap eventually closes as one progresses in a career. So what exactly is the "value" of an econ major? Only higher initial pay? Most of the top percentage earners do have econ or other "practical" degrees, but the chances of getting there are pretty small.
I also think, though this is a claim that would have to be backed up by a much longer poster that I don't feel like typing out right now, that a liberal arts degree sets you up to be a better person in the long run, makes you critical of normative assumptions more than any "STEM" degree ever would. I say this as someone with a STEM degree, albeit from a university with a very strong liberal arts core curriculum.
Not only does it make our society more impersonal, but it means that liberal arts fields will be dominated by the wealthy, as they don't care about ROI. The end result is that these fields become skewed by that perspective, fields like economics, sociology, journalism, etc.
That's a sobering prospect.
Childcare costs exist for a year, maybe two. It's also not done via loans. It's also for adults who usually have a full time job and have decided they are ready for the responsibility. Student loans are usually taken out by 18 year olds who have no concept or understanding of debt and the long term consequences and impact. It also gets into the 50+ thousand dollar number easily. Many in the hundreds.
The two are not the same nor do they have as much of a long term impact on the buying and spending power of individuals
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