What's interesting is that people like to throw money at education without thinking about what are the issues causing the inflation in prices? If the government pays off all student loans what do you think will happen to tuition?? It will go up again in anticipation of the next bailout. University tuition has skyrocketed as government has expanded into providing significant loans for students. So the debt translates to huge profits for the Universities. Tenured professors as an example teach so few classes and yet get paid significant salaries as do the multitude of university administrators. Combine that with billions in endowment funds that don't get taxed.
If Biden and the DEM do this without proper messaging, they are going to lose the House in 2022. All the great progressive agendas go completely poof afterward. Supporters of this give so much explanation but they don't realize how people can handle only about 128 characters of messaging, if even that.
You are correct, the money taps being endlessly open are a huge factor in the inflation of education costs. We are stuck between two worlds where education is mostly privatized (best quality, better prices, worse access) or mostly socialized (best access, better prices, worse quality) so we're getting a weird **** sandwich of both. It's a lot like the problem with healthcare, honestly. For conservatives worried about these commodities not functioning properly, you're going to have to swallow the inevitable bitter pill that the free market is not the answer. Not unless you want to live in a wildly stratified and unstable society.
If the Dems do their typical thing, which is next to nothing for anyone not in the donor or highly educated class, even with excellent, very expensive pr firm messaging they will continually lose the first midterm like when represented by the well spoken presentable Obama. The solution is to do something tangible for other Americans who may not have student loans. I know it will piss off the donor/highly educated class, worried only about their taxes but tough hsit, that is they actually want to assemble a coalition like they had from the 30's to the 70's which cleaned the GOP's clocks.
There are so many projects they could do to help people who are really suffering. One thing they could do would be fully fund section 8 housing. I know many people who qualify for the program but cannot get vouchers because of the lengthy (like many years) waitlist or lottery-like process of receiving assistance. That would be way in front of student loan forgiveness, to me. (But funding an existing program generates fewer headlines than a flashy new plan).
I would be in favor of limiting what STATE schools can charge.....they are getting out of hand..... DD
I don't want to pay for people to study bullshit and make poor decisions like majoring in gender studies and get brainwashed into a cult that pushes hypotheses that lack proof and aren't even really theories because they ARE NOT accepted widely. No way is this a good idea. We should encourage the next gen to study STEM and that's about all. Defund all the useless degrees at state schools and we can set this straight..
People in gender studies undergrad read really dry and dense mateiesomfor four years and write a lot about what they read. This trains the brain to be patient and less prone to click bait propaganda. Those lib arts degree holders are far likely to read an entire long article rather than read a headline and start commenting and making many assumptions. The typical American doesn't read or write unless they are in some classroom environment. So if your education stopped at high school where you pretty much ceased all extracurricular reading and writing, you are going to be the prime targets of social media disinformation such as yourself. People don't get brainwashed by reading a lot. They get brainwashed by reading clickbait and filling in the gaps with their preconceived bias. As someone who has an engineering degree and did two years of political science I also can see a blind spot in engineering education that allows for people with engineering education only to be more susceptible to click bait skim reading rather than reading nuanced articles. When I was doing my poli sci major before I switched to engineering, reading material was much longer. We weren't told to skim text but to do deap dives into our reading. In engineering class, proffesors' demands for reading were light. As long as you practice the homework problems and study the notes, you could successfully do well in a class while skimming assigned reading in texts. The problem solving questions in engineering were much more difficult than poli sci exams but it didn't require immense amounts of reading but rather practicing problems. It generates a habit of engaging news media through only reading headlines and maybe the first paragraph of news articles. You also have less patience to read the long nuanced articles published in outlets like the Atlantic and NYT. In social science education, you are trained to read and write a lot. This better trains you to have the patience to read long dry articles which makes you less prone to being brainwashed by click bait. Social science and liberal art education in general prepares people better for not being brainwashed by online content than engineering education from my experience. Obviously the technical skills in math and science from an engineering education is extremely valuable in their own right also. Hence why I think general education courses shouldn't be laughed at so much. Engineering students need some nuanced difficult humanities courses that pushed them to read and write a lot. I think as a society we need to train our youth to be better patient readers of media content from news sources to social media sources.
Learning to read articles all the way through and detect bullshit can be accomplished without spending 4 years in college.
That's awesome. Good to hear. But unfortunately I live in the real world and the vast majority of Americans will not learn that skill on their own accord. My point is that kids who successfully complete these programs are better suited to detect said bullshit. I'm not starting that the four year liberal arts education is the only way to learn the patience and reading comprehension skills to sit through long nuanced articles. I'm stating that in reality, the vast majority of Americans don't have those basic skills. The kids who have a liberal arts education most likely do have them and there for are less susceptible to social media brainwashing.
Brainwashing is what is happening. Gender studies is a joke, despite any length of what they read. Reading a lot of garbage doesn't make you smarter if you're not thinking for yourself. School also isn't about being trained to read and indoctrinate your brain. A real liberal arts education teaches you to think for yourself. You'd know that if you got that far in the liberal arts realm.
In liberal arts education, they teach you to write in a introspective manner about what you read. This allows for creative freedom to express your opinions on what you read. The reality is the number one disseminator of modern propaganda is click bait. It allows for reductive arguments to pass that require little intellectual skepticism. It's much difficult to "brainwash" people when you make them read exhaustively long reading material and wrote 20 page analytical appears. Not much room for reductive arguments to be spoon fed to you.
I think you have a very limited understanding of the purpose of education. Especially a liberal arts one. It's purpose is to get you to think for yourself. It's not about merely training you to read long texts or write even. You're oddly obsessed with clickbait. I think you honestly think that anyone who disagrees with you is just the victim of clickbait. Interesting... Now what if the really advanced click bait was so well written that university educated people like yourself didn't even realize it was propaganda. Now that would be something wouldn't it. Perhaps you haven't even noticed it because someone has a more advanced level of understanding when it comes to persuasion and they are taking you for a ride. I know who is using it, including Trump and left and right outlets... and other high up people. Do you notice both sides using it?
I'm not really seeing a good argument from you here as to why "gender studies" (and its kin, not all liberal arts) are worth the time/cost, especially socialized out to us. Saying that skills like reading comprehension and critical thinking often come along for the ride is a weak defense, IMO, especially when those two things are (or can be, in my case) acquired without being appended to underwater basketweaving. Just because the average Joe sucks at these things does not mean Gender Studies is suddenly a worthwhile pursuit.
You are making an entirely different argument. @dachuda86 is claiming that people who take liberal arts education are more prone to brainwashing. I'm stating the opposite with what I type. That doesn't mean I believe a liberal arts education is worth 80 grand. And I'm tired of people ******** on curriculums they have zero experience with and **** on it just because they think their field is better.
Reading and writing is the ticket to thinking for yourself. That's how people do it. When you read and then do introspective deep dives into what you read with writing, that's how you learn to think for yourself. Liberal arts education doesn't have a singular purpose like you suggest also. Can a long form article with deep nuance be propaganda? Yup. But ask yourself what is easier. Spamming reductive arguments understanding the target audience doesn't have the education or training to be intellectually skeptical and do deep dive reads into the reductive claims or brainwashing people who have that patience and practice?
I'd like to see some data on this. The humanities are undeniably a liberal echo chamber. I know plenty of really smart liberal arts grads who have huge blindspots for liberal lies. Their critical thinking muscle is strong, but quite fickle and one-sided.
And what group of people are you comparing them to? The gen pop who are less likely to read and write a lot? We are making relative comparisons right? So you stating that "liberal echo chambers" exist doesn't say much. Ya I know there are bubbled liberals. I think people don't automatically learn the patience to absorb boring dry articles. I think there has to be some practice to achieve that. I don't see any normal activity your average American blue collar worker does in their regular routine that would make me believe that they get that practice in. There are many people who read novels as a hobby but that still is a small part of the population. So yes, I think the people who were forced to read and write a lot in a classroom setting are better trained than the gen pop. And what type of "data" would you like to see? IQ scores? Who's more likely to subscribe to newspapers? What are you specifically looking for? What I'm stating is my intuition. It could be wrong but I don't know how to quantify this intuition into a empirical test that accounts for all confounding factors.
While Obama is a moderate (he’s an American hating Muslim), he has the same messaging problem - he's elegant and explains thing in details with good knowledge of what he's talking about. Meanwhile, the general public see bits and pieces of how dangerous he and the Dem are. The Dem needs to do what they think is right and figure out a way to message it.
