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You know how when people in South Korea, with their practically unlimited internet bandwidth, look at home internet usage caps in the US and laugh at such a sil
by supernova87a 6y ago
You know how when people in South Korea, with their practically unlimited internet bandwidth, look at home internet usage caps in the US and laugh at such a silly problem? Someday when our fiber internet arrives, we'll also look back and wonder why did we ever need to debate net neutrality.
Well it's kind of the same thing with university admissions. The problem that we've encountered is that the number of elite schools and admissions spots (established largely for the population of the post war growth economy) has not grown in proportion to the population. 1600 kids per freshman class has been the same for 30 years. And therefore the question of who gets in has gotten worse and worse as the number of kids competing has grown, and we're bickering over people's belief in different weighting schemes.
What the US needs is more good schools. Not tinkering around the edges and theoretical arguments of whether rich kids deserve good schooling more than poor kids. That will get us nowhere in the big picture.
- marmaduke 6y agoWhat would happen if the US invested as much in education as it did in military?
- _qulr 6y agoWell, it's possible that South Korea would be under the rule of Kim Jong-un right now. ;-)
- xapata 6y agoSo long as our fiction keeps us imagining ourselves as secretly royalty, we'll prefer dynasties to democracy. (And thus we prefer military.)
- harryh 6y agoThe US invests more in education than it does in the military. In 2019 the US spent roughly 720 billion on the military. Public spending on elementary and secondary (high schools) was about 740 billion. That doesn't count all spending on public colleges or any spending on private schools both of which are substantial.
- kasey_junk 6y agoThat’s a pretty unfair comparison given you are comparing Department of Defense federal discretionary dollars to _all estimated expenses at all levels of government_. Even if you just add the VA into the mix your numbers come out upside down. Add any segment of Homeland security and it gets really obvious fast.
- harryh 6y agoThe VA budget is ~200B/yr right? Maybe a bit more? Homeland Security is ~50B? If we include all of both of those (and I would contend that "all" isn't really appropriate if we're just talking about the "military") we're around a trillion or so on the military. Let's take the 740B on government spending on primary + secondary education and add the 175B or so spent by various levels of governments on college. That gets you to 915B. Is there 100B of private spending a year on education? I'm willing to bet there is. At the end of the day, the numbers are probably pretty close. My overall point is that there is this idea that US military spending dwarfs US education spending. However you do the math, this is clearly not the case.
- simonsarris 6y agoInvestment per se is not the reason the US does not have enough good schools. The US spends more on K-12 education than almost any nation, including South Korea. The reasons are more complicated and (probably) far less politically pleasing. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp
- foogazi 6y agoPeople forget that a military is one of the few legitimate reasons for a state to exist
- Fellshard 6y agoWe have a much, much larger country, with far sparser populations, and a major 'last mile' problem when it comes to our infrastructure. That fractalline, capillary spread of cable is the killer for nation-wide one-size-fits-all access and data plans. We /do/ have major problems with offering alternatives to a given location, though.