Quote (Skinned @ Oct 11 2017 03:38pm)
You get what you put in with education. A piece of paper gets an interview...you have to learn how to do things while you're there.
Quote (excellence @ Oct 11 2017 03:55pm)
tell that to the hordes protesting for student loan forgiveness. say i took a loan out for my tertiary education, completed my education, and paid it back - do i get that money i paid plus interest back too? maybe just the interest? or is it nah fuck you, you're good to go you rich racist reich-wing whitey :lol:
I'm quoting both of you in this because there are some parts of this rant that are applicable to each, and because I'm pretty sure you both have a near polar opposite idea of how we need to address this shit.
Here's my perspective on this: You cannot reasonably expect someone to accept tens of thousands of dollars of debt just to get the education that lets them MAYBE get an interview for a job, IF they can find an entry level opening somewhere. No shit the average person is going to look at that and have some serious doubts about their ability to improve their lot in life by choosing the college path, and every year the cost / reward ratio continues to become increasingly more unattractive. It's clear that we need to do something to better incentivize these high school graduates to pursue higher education (especially STEM fields), because our future technological advances and opportunities for growth as a society depend on us having engineers, scientists, programmers, architects, you name it. It would also be of great benefit to us as a nation if our voting populace was better educated and could more easily grasp the important nuances on the issues. The cost of private education is fucking insane and it's not something we can just do without as a society, so something has to change.
On the other hand, it's also clear that there is an unhealthy culture of ideological insulation running amok American universities which manifests itself in many different, dangerous ways, and it's perfectly understandable why people would be reluctant to allow these institutions to teach these kids on the public's dime. When you see things like Mizzou and Berkley not only allowing people to stifle speech they don't like but outright condoning that behavior, the ridiculously biased campus court systems that effectively treat students as guilty until proven innocent, or radically ideological professors trying to insert political agendas into their classrooms, can you really blame people for being hesitant to further support these campuses? Obviously not every college is at fault for these things, but it'd be pretty fucking dishonest to pretend that there is nothing worth worrying about when it comes to the institutions that shape these kid's knowledge base and belief systems.
This shouldn't be some hyper partisan shit slinging fest over whether higher education and/or funding it publically is good or bad, because every day we spend bitching instead of actually DOING something to fix ALL these issues is going to further fuck over the current generation of students and the future of our country as a whole.