3 ms·

>How about we fix childcare and K-12 first? Well, you already know that the answer to that. Desirable employers don't screen job applicants based on which chi

by jasode 10y ago

>How about we fix childcare and K-12 first? Well, you already know that the answer to that. Desirable employers don't screen job applicants based on which childcare facility and high school they attended. It's always college that's the focal point. Seems inevitable that the reactionary conversation then gravitates towards fixing college access rather than K-12 quality. (Therefore, it doesn't matter if K-12 is actually the more important thing to fix.) As an example, James Clark of Netscape dropped out of high school[1] but his future employers didn't care because he had a college degree. The college degree overshadows the stigma of being a high school dropout. If McKinsey Consulting, Goldman Sachs, Google Inc, etc filtered out candidates based on what kind of public libraries the candidate had access to while he grew up, I suppose we'd be having political conversations about "building better public libraries!" so children can compete for jobs. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_H._Clark#Early_life_and_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_H._Clark#Early_life_and_...

tptacek 10y ago
You're missing my point. I'm saying, if you want to universalize college education to equalize opportunity between children raised in low-income families and children raised in high-income families --- a coherent cause, and one I happen to support --- you need to fix the systemic problems that keep low-income students from attending college, or free tuition will simply be another giveaway the government gives to people who don't need the help. I'm not arguing against college (I think there are arguments against college as an opportunity equalizer, but I'm not making them). I'm arguing against free tuition for everyone as a vector for getting more low-income people into college. If you want more low-income people to attend college, fix childcare first, so high-school age students aren't sacrificing class rank to take care of younger siblings and graduating high school into circumstances that demand they immediately find a wage. Or, if you're dead set on applying pressure at college itself: means-test the benefit, so at least you're not giving billions of dollars away to families making six-figure incomes while families making less than $40,000 are sending their 17-18 year olds to 5 years of sporadic dead-end service industry employment. Because: "college is too expensive" is not the only reason that happens. There are plenty of extremely inexpensive community colleges that are vast improvements over 9 months working at the Sprint Cell Phone Store. But that's where low-income teenagers often end up.

by jasode 10y ago

tptacek 10y ago

You're missing my point. I'm saying, if you want to universalize college education to equalize opportunity between children raised in low-income families and children raised in high-income families --- a coherent cause, and one I happen to support --- you need to fix the systemic problems that keep low-income students from attending college, or free tuition will simply be another giveaway the government gives to people who don't need the help. I'm not arguing against college (I think there are arguments against college as an opportunity equalizer, but I'm not making them). I'm arguing against free tuition for everyone as a vector for getting more low-income people into college. If you want more low-income people to attend college, fix childcare first, so high-school age students aren't sacrificing class rank to take care of younger siblings and graduating high school into circumstances that demand they immediately find a wage. Or, if you're dead set on applying pressure at college itself: means-test the benefit, so at least you're not giving billions of dollars away to families making six-figure incomes while families making less than $40,000 are sending their 17-18 year olds to 5 years of sporadic dead-end service industry employment. Because: "college is too expensive" is not the only reason that happens. There are plenty of extremely inexpensive community colleges that are vast improvements over 9 months working at the Sprint Cell Phone Store. But that's where low-income teenagers often end up.