It’s not the students having to pay more taxes that will concern them, it’s the students giving up and going home, which will hit them where it hurts. It is in their own interests to fight this.
Interesting relevant article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2017/11/25/elitists-crybabies-and-junky-degrees/?utm_term=.fb257bebd31a
Helps explain the desire to deconstruct the US university system.
As I’ve said before, no matter how dumb the position, there will be people who support it.
Unthinkable?
I saw the article this morning. Antenori knows what the media has been reporting the last few years about colleges, which is a pretty biased view, imho. How can he know anything else? His kids didn’t go to college so I wonder if he has any first hand information about what is happening on various campuses. If all your college news is negative, his reaction seems reasonable. I spend time on campuses, and see something very different. But I’m resigned to the inevitable. I’m not blaming Antenori. He isn’t really the problem. imho.
What a soul-crushing start to the day.
@alh, on the one hand, I understand what you are saying. But it’s very discouraging. It’s like people who are against gay rights until their daughter comes out as gay. People who don’t think there is a sexual harassment problem until someone in their family is harassed. Isn’t human empathy and logical reasoning enough rather first-hand personal experience?
Usually, education and exposing yourself to other ideas and really grappling with them is how you fix this. But now education is part of the problem?
“I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” - Samuel Beckett.
(For the record, I didn’t want to read The Unnamable. Had to for one of my useless humanities classes; it seems I’ve wasted my time.)
The article, aimed at liberal readers, casts him as a villain. He reads news that tells him we are the villains. Who benefits from all this? Let’s fuss at those folks.
There’s an assumption in your question that someone is intentionally benefitting off all this. I think a bleaker but sadly more accurate hypothesis is that political parties themselves (not even the specific ones, just the general system) emphasize division and what results are issues decided by politics and haphazard groupings over substance or debate.
Not trying to make a political statement here so to go back to the thread topic, the widening perception of education in the country I think is tied to arbitrary partisan dynamics as much as anything else.
Other countries find other ways to control costs. Germany has a much more aggressive educational tracking system than the US.
I saw that article yesterday. Found it too depressing to even post. I do plan to attend the local rally for education impacts of the bill this Wednesday in my area. Mulling over sign texts now…
UMich’s GEO is having a call-in to reps (our Senators are already against this) on Tuesday if anyone else would like to participate in their own home community.
Actually, in Germany, most students are PAID to study, since the co-op system is the most common form of post-high school education. For the others, access to higher eduation is no more limited than access to 4-year colleges in the US - things aren’t as they were in the 20th century.
This system of co-ops and apprenticeships also exists in France although people lament it’s not as developed as in Germany, which is mostly an issue for the 10th-12th graders who’d want to be apprentices since their being in apprenticeship means they have incured so much trouble at school that their would-be apprenticeship masters don’t want them either (and pretty much 80% students can go to college if they wish, most of them for free, and lower income students get a stipend which is added to their apprenticeship pay if they’re in a co-op program).
In Sweden, tuition is free and students get government loans for daily expenses; access to higher education is similar to US access to 4-year colleges.
In Portugal, tuition is $1,000 at public universities to $5,000 at tops private universities, with a maximum of $6,000 in yearly grants given to the neediest students, as well as a “family of a college student tax break” since students live at home and commute.
In other words, they have ways to control costs which may affect quality of delivery (the $2,000 programs have better facilities and smaller class sizes than the free tuition ones which dont have any enough seats and basically count on attrition and discouraging the least motivated with their spartan conditions) but it’s absolutely not by limiting the number of grad students. They know full-well that if a university system were to implement a similar scheme as what the US is planning, most grad students (especially the best ones, with funding) would move to a nearby country.
In Germany only 27% of young people go to a university. That percentage is way lower than in the US. Germany can afford its university system because it enrolls so few students.
For Thanksgiving, I had two German students over who are spending a semester in the US. The system described by MYOS is exactly what they described to me.
^An apprenticeship isn’t a university.
As I explained above, most students are enrolled in a variety of higher education programs that aren’t called “university” but are higher education nevertheless, “colleges” with co-ops: nurses, engineers, etc. Same thing in France, where Higher Education has “université” and everything else (BTS, IUT, Manaa, Ecole postbac, grande ecole, CFA…)
Colleges, which grant doctorates, would generally be considered Universitäten in Germany, although some Fachhochschule may also have doctoral students in partnership with a university. Those 3-year apprenticeships in Germany don’t resemble US research universities in either name or substance or cost, and the original topic was about PhD granting institutions.
^yes, but your point was that costs were controlled by limiting access to higher education (someone else mentioned early tracking). While that was true in the 20th century, it’s no longer the case today. Access is not strictly controled and there are many pathways to higher education in Germany (U, TU, Applied Science, even the new Liberal Arts Colleges…) I understood your point as being: no need to control costs at the graduate level when you severely control access for undergrads and thus have a very limited number of grads; the US has a much higher percentage of college students and must thus control costs differently, especially at the grad level. My point was: Costs aren’t controlled by limiting number of students in Europe and thus can’t justify taxing grad students in the US.
I think this is a dangerous couple of days – they are scrambling in the Senate to find more revenue to give to corporations. I could see how they might add the components in the House bill that hurt education into the Senate bill in the next couple of days. Reduces their reconciliation work, too. 
Today is the day our grad union is holding a call-in to senators to try and convince them not to slaughter higher ed.
Tomorrow there are protests across the country at 1 pm ET, too.
Please enlighten me I’m not hearing any senators object to the higher ed cuts.
I’ve heard a couple object to the teacher credit but nothing else.